Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.
Jeff Bezos In the agile business, the customer is the guiding beacon for the organiza-tional mission, vision and strategy, but also the operaorganiza-tional priorities, tactics and execution. Every company believes that they place the customer at the heart of their business, yet so often the orientation and prioritization is derived from what is easier and more efficient for the company, rather than
better and more effective for the customer. Businesses are frequently organ-ized in ways that make little sense for the customer (ever had a customer service representative need to transfer you to another department because they cannot action your query?). In resourcing prioritization, too much emphasis is placed on business efficiency over customer satisfaction. Too much customer-facing resource is focused on dealing with a failure of the organization to do something or do it well (failure demand), rather than helping to create more value (value demand). Poor application of automa-tion, use of scripts or inflexible rules and systems make for bad customer service (many businesses still bury contact details on their website or even worse, charge their customers to talk to them).12 Too many customer experi-ences are not joined up, resulting in duplication of effort for the customer and missed opportunity for the company.
We have already discussed how digital-native processes such as agile and lean are naturally customer-centric, involving the customer along the devel-opment process. Yet real customer-centricity stretches into every aspect of the business, from process and strategy to culture, measures and even struc-ture (we will discuss more about customer-centric strucstruc-tures in Part Four).
Earlier we showed how Amazon takes the long view on innovation. But they are also an exceptional exemplar for what true customer-centricity really means (remember that the Amazon mission is: ‘We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company for four primary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators’). This is brought to life throughout the operating model, measures and culture. As Jeff Bezos puts it:
We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.
Early in Amazon’s life, Jeff Bezos would famously bring an empty chair, which represented the customer (or the most important person in the room) into meetings. Each year thousands of Amazon managers (including the founder) spend time in the call-centres to help ensure a culture of not just listening to, but understanding, customers. Team objectives and metrics are aligned to customer experience, and data-driven decision-making used to continuously improve against those measures. Performance at Amazon is tracked via 500 measurable goals, with almost 80 per cent of them relating to customer objectives.13 Its highly tuned algorithms create an unparal-leled degree of content personalization across a customer base of hundreds of millions of users. Customer experience is taken so seriously that even the tiniest delays in web page loading time become a significant focus to
improve (they believe that a 0.1 second delay in page rendering can result in a 1 per cent drop in customer activity). The Amazon obsession with effi-ciency is driven by the desire to deliver better prices for customers, Bezos waging war on ‘muda’ (the Japanese word for waste). Everything Amazon do as a business is oriented towards the customer. The point is that saying you are something doesn’t make it so. And customers can see that.
Customer-centricity can be a central driving force for digital transfor-mation. The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) are a small team of people sitting at the centre of multiple government departments but who have brought an unprecedented level of agility to what would typically be a distinctly un-agile environment. From the beginning their approach has been characterized by transparency, user-centricity, and solid service design practice, as exhibited by their 10 design principles14 which read like a mani-festo for not just exceptional digital design, but a truly digital-native way of working. To summarize:
1 Start with needs – user needs, of course, not government needs.
2 Do less – only do what you can do and concentrate on the ‘irreducible core’. Make what works shareable and reusable to minimize duplication of effort. Build platforms that others can build on, develop APIs, link to the work of others.
3 Design with data – use data to demonstrate real behaviour, to learn, to reduce assumption, to drive decision-making. Continuous iteration using data to prototype, test and improve services. Analytics should be embedded, always on and easy to understand.
4 Do the hard work to make it simple – work hard to make complex systems easy for people to use, challenge toxic assumptions.
5 Iterate. Then iterate again – ‘start small and iterate wildly’. Test mini-mum viable products and prototypes with real users. Make constant improvements using customer feedback. Don’t be afraid to remove or move on from what doesn’t work: ‘Iteration reduces risk. It makes big failures unlikely and turns small failures into lessons’.
6 This is for everyone – services should be accessible, inclusive, legible.
7 Understand context – design for people, not screens. Consider the context in which services might be used.
8 Build digital services, not websites – connect the digital world to the real world, consider all aspects of a service, make no assumptions about platform.
9 Be consistent, not uniform – consistency in language and design patterns, but respect shifting circumstances.
10 Make things open: it makes things better – the sharing of knowledge, code, ideas, failures brings unforeseen benefit.
The traditional approach to service design was government-centric: start with the government policy, then consider the process needed to fulfil the policy, and then the systems needed to support that. User need came far down the list, but this method led to overly detailed input, ‘digital versions’ of existing practices, poor customer journeys, lengthy and complex procurement procedures and inflexible solutions based on tradi-tional thinking.
The new approach turned that on its head: user needs provided the foun-dation, services are designed around those needs, the systems needed to support those services then considered, and then a check that the service is delivering to government policy. GDS do the research, they analyse the data, they talk to and observe users to make sure that they make no assumptions, and are focusing on real needs (combining claimed behaviour, or traditional forms of research such as surveys, polls and focus groups, with real behaviour, assessed through observation or analytics, leads to a more three-dimensional understanding of customer need). This fundamen-tal shift in approach not only ensures that service design is grounded in a solid empathy with, and understanding of, user need (thereby leading to better services), but catalyses a much broader philosophical and organiza-tional shift towards orienting processes, culture and resourcing towards the customer. Executive Director at GDS Stephen Foreshew-Cain describes this transformation thus:
The upshot will be services that shape government, not the other way round.
Because we’re putting users first, and because we’re working in an agile way, and because we’re making data easier to use, government itself will have to change.
(Foreshew-Cain, 2016)15 This ‘organizing idea’, he says, is not about incrementally making existing things a little better; it is about completely rethinking the way that they work. Combining service design methodologies with small, multidiscipli-nary teams working in short, iterative sprints can bring a new breadth and depth of customer-centricity to an organization, which can in turn lead to real transformation.