7 tell-tale signs that your Connected Experience initiative is leveraging agile practices

As you’re starting to embrace agile approaches to deliver Connected Experiences to your customers, here are some key indicators that might help you determine if you’re leveraging the full potential of agile practices:

An excellent place to start in defining problems is by focusing on your user’s needs. As your customers evolve, their needs change, and your services must evolve in tandem to provide the best experience.
This is why you really need to understand your customers and how they are using your services. In June, we took a look at a  car insurance claim scenario. In this case, users are on the road having survived a car accident. By delving into the user persona , the team was able to explore options that might work best for the user, helping them devise a hypothesis to test. 

When exploring different options, be mindful of the company’s overarching True North (North Star) so that the solution your team is coming up with serves the same purpose as all other priorities. 

Don’t underestimate your customers—many of them will notice the disjointness if your brand promises aren’t kept consistent. Take a recent example—Tesla’s customers were angry about Elon Musk’s decision to transact using cryptocurrency, as its production has serious environmental consequences that contradict Tesla’s mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” It’s important to keep your actions aligned with your vision.

To keep up with changing customer demands, companies need to understand their users and the context in which they’re using their services. By analyzing customer data, they can make an informed hypothesis and then build a quick pilot (MVP) to test with the user.

Suppose that in our insurance claims case, the hypothesis is: if a customer called the service number to report an accident and is given a choice to self-service with the help of a chat app they’re already using, the customer will most likely pick this option.

To test that hypothesis, the insurance company would quickly build a prototype for a customer sample, focusing on a particular area during a specific timeframe,  and offer customers the option to choose self-service when they call in (IVR)—for example, picking option 3 for WhatsApp.

Tapping into the agile practice of iteration is critical for delivering the right solution to the right people. Teams need to test hypotheses with users, monitor how they are using your products/features, refine their assumptions, and develop an experiment to validate them.

Let’s say that, in the insurance claim scenario, after testing, the team realized only 5% of people are choosing the self-service option through WhatsApp. The solution is to go back to the sprint and hypothesize why that’s the case.

Next, that hypothesis needs to be tested again on the same sample of customers, which may result in different findings—for example, moving the WhatsApp Option to number 1 rather than no 3 on the IVR may significantly increase its selection with your customers who are often in a hurry and need a quick response. 

Every time the team tests their hypothesis, they make results visible to internal stakeholders using their collaboration tools. The initial results from the MVP can be qualitative or quantitative—or both. Regardless of the particular analytics tool you choose to use, it’s essential to see the changes in the metrics to gauge your progress.

It’s equally important to celebrate small successes, for example, if your team moved the needle from 5% to 15%, prominently showing this win. And if all of a sudden results went down, make that visible too. While failure as an outcome sounds counter-intuitive, with small iterations, failure is no longer a catastrophic conclusion but an opportunity to evaluate and adapt.

It’s essential to map your success indicator—is it 50% user adoption? Is it the speed of completion? Or perhaps customer NPS (Net Promoter Score)?

Whatever is meaningful for you, set the milestones and constantly monitor and celebrate when you achieve them, but go back to the scrum when results are not meeting the mark. A hypothesis is proven false if you don’t meet the minimum success criteria in a specified time frame.

Before defining and testing a hypothesis, your team needs to clearly define learning objectives related to the business's goals. A learning objective starts with defining an observable goal, for example: “The user will complete an accident report in a single session.” Then your team should define what the users need to know to meet this observable goal; for example, for them to complete the form without abandoning it midstream, they need simple questions to answer without having to look for other information they may not have with them.

Make sure all the indicators are part of learning—and when learning is gained, feed that into the iteration process. Remember, learning hasn't happened until the process changes.

Focusing on the areas that we touched on will enable you to create a connected experience that feels personal to your customer—this is a powerful catalyst that fuels growth and sets you apart from competitors. The agile mindset shows that your business cares about its customers—and only regards revenue as a consequence of positive actions. In the context of your CE initiative, it is about being agile as much as doing agile.