Insights · Software Engineering
Ensuring customer centricity
Customer satisfaction is a core agile principle, yet sprint teams can drift away from customers. Adroitent builds customer empathy into how teams work through Integrated Agile Delivery.
Key takeaways
- A key agile principle is customer satisfaction, but sprint teams can fixate on bug-free code and drift away from customers.
- Adroitent builds an environment that nurtures customer empathy across the whole organization.
- Practices include continuous feedback, responsiveness, storyboarding customer use cases, sharing customer insights, and direct communication.
- Staying adaptable, responsive, and always listening ensures Adroitent delivers to the customer’s promise.
The challengeWhy sprints can drift away from the customer
One of key agile principles is customer satisfaction. In practice, it is quite common for agile teams to be focused on their sprint that their complete attention is on delivering the code without any bugs. This leads to an ever-widening gap between the application development team and customers or end-users with every sprint.
The approachBuilding an environment of customer empathy
At Adroitent, we strive to continuously build an environment that nurtures customer empathy. To ensure that we achieve the focus on customer, we encourage:
- Continuous feedback, not just at the end of the sprint but on a regular basis. The feedback from users are recorded and agile coaches ensure that the best practices are captured, and gaps identified, and corrective measures are taken.
- Being responsive to our customers. We believe in being responsive not just in acknowledging a message, but ensuring that the customers needs are acknowledged, needs are analyzed, and appropriate solutions are suggested for confirmation and feedback.
- Our focus on customer empathy permeates across the organization, beginning with recruiting the people with the right orientation. We encourage the teams to outline the customer use cases and storyboard each interaction. These in turn help us in feedback to all strategic groups to ensure that we get the right person for the right customer.
- All the customer insights are captured, and agile coaches ensure that these experiences are shared and provide insights on the impact of these customer insights to customer satisfaction and empathy.
- All employees are encouraged to directly communicate with the customer team either during daily standup calls or through usage of collaborative tools like email etc. These direct communication channels encourage the team to develop a sense of ownership.
The outcomeCustomer centricity in Integrated Agile Delivery
Customer Centricity is a critical focus area in integrated agile delivery. The tenets of staying adaptable, being responsive, always listening, encouraging continuous feedback ensures that Adroitent delivers to the customer’s promise. It is the same discipline that runs through Adroitent’s software engineering practice.
Staying adaptable, responsive, and always listening — delivering to the customer’s promise.
Good to knowFrequently asked questions
Why do agile sprints sometimes lose customer focus?
How does Adroitent ensure customer centricity?
How is customer feedback handled?
What does being responsive to customers mean?
How does customer empathy spread across the organization?
Why is customer centricity important in Integrated Agile Delivery?
See how Adroitent delivers software engineering and AgileSourcing.
Put the customer at the center of every sprint.
Adroitent’s Integrated Agile Delivery builds customer empathy into how teams work.