Agile businesses put the customer at the heart of everything – new or updated products and services, systems implementations, business process improvements and strategic transformation initiatives.
Especially when the catalyst event is internal in nature (acquisition, disposition, cost-out restructuring, merging business entities etc), the customer is very often forgotten about during the planning and execution phases, resulting in a serious disconnect between the business and its customers once the dust has settled. This is the easiest way to quickly destroy the shareholder value painstakingly built-up over many years in the overall business or new venture, even though the internal project goals might have been achieved on paper.
Understanding how the customer views your organisation, its products and services, and its people is fundamental to being able to truly embed an agile mindset and culture into your organisation.
LUXIT employs two discrete but interconnected approaches to help organisations to plan to become business agile:
Establish The Vision For Change
Too many change initiatives fail before they even get established because the business leadership fail to construct a shared vision of what the change is attempting to deliver. A vision for change should clearly articulate what the purpose of the change is, focusing on the “why” rather than the “how”. It should motivate everyone in the organisation and give them the compelling reason or reasons to make the change. It should drive alignment across all stakeholders from investors down to the lowest levels in the organisation, ensuring that people see the clear benefits of working collectively and are empowered to take the individual and group actions necessary to achieve the vision. LUXIT can help organisations’ leadership teams to collaboratively explore, analyse, and validate the challenges facing the organisation and, often by challenging their own assumptions and beliefs, establish a new collective vision, based on demonstrable data, which will be the foundation for the agile business going forward.
“In a rapidly moving world, individuals and weak committees rarely have all the information needed to make good non-routine decisions. Nor do they seem to have the credibility or the time required to convince others to make the personal sacrifices called for in implementing changes. Only teams with the right composition and sufficient trust among members can be highly effective under these circumstances.”
(John Kotter, ‘Leading Change’, 2012)
Build World-Class Customer Journeys
The customer journey is the combination of all the many individual customer touch-points your organisation has had and will have over the lifetime of your relationship with that customer. It starts from the impression you make when you first acquire the customer and will continue, hopefully through multiple successful order or service delivery cycles, until you and the customer part ways, for better or worse. Attempting to draw conclusions about your customers’ views of your entire organisation, products, people and service proposition based on one single customer survey question every year has long ago ceased to have any actionable meaning. Sometimes you can draw on direct customer feedback (either solicited or unsolicited) but more often than not, you will need to rely on your own organisation’s knowledge and understanding of your internal and external processes to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the customer journey – and that is difficult to do from the inside looking out.