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, New Zealand’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 the 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 COVID), 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 (or a large investment in post-it notes), 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. However, unlike many traditional market research studies, agile research does not always have a discrete start and finish to the project – but more of an ‘always on’ approach.

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’.

Another key example of customer-centred Agile transformation is Australia Post. According to a recent study by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government, the focus of the turnaround was the customer and they were at the centre of all the decisions.

“There was a relentless desire to put customer experience at the centre of their products. To measure this, new products were constantly tested with customers using their feedback to shape further iterations.”

The 3 key areas for success included:

• Hearing from the customer to create clarity on a decision. Get to the customer early.
• Fail fast – close down an idea and communicate why it didn’t work can save a lot of time.
• Get buy-in across the organisation.

There is also the case of learning a different language. In the Market Research world, we use passive words and phrases with roots in the bureaucratic, hierarchical organization such as statistical significance, robust, respondents, and n=. In Agile it’s a more active turn of phrase suggesting a physical coming together and faster pace including scrum*, huddle, and sprint. This reinforces why market research needs to evolve in its methodology and pace to adjust to the needs of flatter, less siloed, digital-first organisations.

*It’s also hard being a Kiwi and not immediately thinking of an All Blacks rugby scrum!

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

We in the market research industry can learn a lot from the Agile approach to product and service development. However, sometimes there is a need to slow down, take a more measured response and reflect on the results. Each side has benefits but together we can build stronger organisations and brands with the customer clearly at the centre!

 

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