The Next Growth Opportunity: Customer Insights in the Age of Agile

“Change before you have to… Control your own destiny or someone else will. An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” 

—Jack Welch, former CEO, GENERAL ELECTRIC

When The Warehouse Group, NZ’s largest retailer, recently announced they were transforming their business model to Agile, there were widespread debates as to its potential for success and impact on speed of outputs and customers.

But they’re not alone as some of Australia and NZ’s largest organisations including IAG, NAB, ANZ, Telstra, Suncorp, Air NZ, Spark NZ, Australia Post, Westpac have undergone their own shift to Agile.

While it’s encouraging to see these large organisations make the switch, it’s actually startups and rapid-growth companies that have the most to gain—or lose—based on their adoption of Agile methods. It’s an opportunity to keep up with market changes (particularly in light of 2020), customer needs and competitor updates, producing products and services that grab market share.

Also, for savvy teams, Agile is no longer just a project management tool or organisational function, it’s a key lever for growth!

So what is an Agile Enterprise—and how does it impact growth?

“Agile” gets thrown around enough these days that you can be forgiven for not knowing exactly what it means. So, to define it more precisely, this is what you need to know about what makes a company an Agile organization:

“Fast moving, flexible and robust enterprise capable of rapid response to unexpected challenges, events, and opportunities. Built on policies and processes that facilitate speed and change, it aims to achieve continuous competitive advantage in serving its customers.” ( Businessdictionary.com)

Instead of being reactive or, worse yet, behind… an Agile enterprise builds its product/service around quick, decisive action while being responsive to changes in the market, their customers, competitors and other factors.

Instead of waiting for the next software or feature release, they leverage customer reviews or surveys to inform an early update. Instead of lengthy processes and meetings, decisions are made in punctual meetings.

In terms of customer data, Agile organisations rely on Customer Insight experts and some co-creation methods to deliver valuable, actionable information that focuses on growth and improvements.

A recent PWC case study highlights how this is put into action – NAB Health acting general manager Paul Littleton says ‘PwC helped redesign the Health Bank experience by building NAB E-Health – an interactive portal co-created with healthcare customers (practitioners) to deliver health and financial insights to customers in a different way’.

A new frontier for growing businesses?

While large organisations will spend years, no doubt, navigating this new approach, smaller enterprises are well-positioned to either implement Agile or double down and ensure their methods are as accurate as they are beneficial.

Given the whole point of Agile is to ‘constantly update and improve products and services to enhance the customer experience’, is this a competitive advantage for small players against large, established organisations?

Absolutely! But there’s a caveat.

To take full advantage, teams will need to ensure they’re working from real customer data, not gut feel or insights driven simply by ‘the need for speed’. When major decisions and resources are driven by the voice of the end user or consumer, having actionable insights becomes even more important.

For those I spoke with in teams that are using Agile already, including Marketing and Customer Experience managers, the key for them is having this data ‘when they need it’, to solve a problem they are working on at that moment.

In Agile, tribes/squads typically work in 2-week sprints and staff adopt an ‘always on’ mentality. To enable the success of these sprints, insights have to be highly focused, timely and cost-effective. On the point of cost-effectiveness, this often means that a full-time team member is not an option—but more on that later.

Here are 6 ways that business can utilise customer insights to make inspired decisions at speed

1. Customer insights need to be embedded into the sprint timetable with objectives, question areas and target audience identified early in the planning phase of Days 2-3 and findings delivered around Day 10 to allow for review, reflection, discussion and validation.
2. For larger, more long term strategy pieces, why not consider going deeper with an upfront ‘Discovery’ sprint where the team is taken through an expert facilitated insights scoping session where we unpack what you already know, audit the data you already have and build out an approach that fills in the gaps.
3. Target audiences or “user personas” must be clearly defined and narrowed to foster more focused questions, faster analysis and reflect the problem being solved.
4. The research approach needs to be cost effective, timely, interactive and highly focused on the target customer/end user.
5. Insights specialists work directly with the Sprint Team/Scrum Master, rather than go through the customer insights department (if there is still one) to expedite the process and cut out the ‘middle man’.
6. Presentations and reports are short, sharp and delivered in 30mins with the goal to validate the sprint objectives or not, inform the next sprint/scrum and close the feedback loop quickly. These can be delivered through an interactive workshop style with the key stakeholders and wider cross-functional team, making it interactive and ensuring clear actions/next steps are defined.

For organisations committed to Agile, having a customer expert on their team gives them a greater sense of accuracy, relevance and confidence with arguably greater ROI—even if they don’t have the budget for a full-time hire.

After working with high-growth organisations focused on Agile, our team realised that many companies are not maximising the full value because the customer insights they use were either incomplete, rough estimates or provided by someone without proper customer insight expertise.

Because these growing organisations’ success is defined by how they cater to their customers in a rapidly changing market, it became clear to us that Insights Exchange could close this gap and provide organisations with a dedicated bench of Customer Insights experts, specifically chosen to match the most frequent needs and research topics of that organization.

Now, teams can build an on-demand dream team of experts, underlining the cost-effectiveness of customer insights while rolling out updates and products that become revenue boosts and sales hits.

If your enterprise is fully Agile or hoping to become Agile, this service is for you. Check out Insights Exchange or contact Nichola directly nichola@insights-exchange.com for more information.