Adapt or Lose: Practical Business Agility

Contents

• CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

• TEAM COMMS

• DOMAINS AND CAPABILITIES

• MEASURE AND ADAPT

• IN CONCLUSION

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Teams that actively seek and respond to customer feedback ultimately thrive, as they know who their target audience is, what they want and even what they are going to want.

Seeking and listening to customer feedback are crucial, but organising your team, department or organisation so that it can respond quickly to customer insight is also critical. If your team is not set up with right people available when you need to pivot, ask yourself what changes are needed for this to happen.

Here is what happened to seemingly untouchable businesses that failed to “read the room” when it came to customer feedback…

New Coke Explosion

In 1985, Coca-Cola changed its tried and tested formula, launching “New Coke” without properly checking customer appetite for such changes.

They ignored the entrenched emotional connection customers had with the classic coke flavour and were met with huge resistance from consumers who ultimately felt the original coke was just fine as it was. Coca-Cola eventually had to undo their changes and revert back to the original classic coke flavour less than 80 days later. They also admitted their error in not listening to their customers.

I can only imagine the unnecessary cost to their business in researching, releasing and backing out this change.

Electronic Arts Empire Strikes

Electronics Arts (EA) faced upheaval in 2017 after creating micro-transaction and loot box systems for the game Star Wars Battlefront II. The players felt this system was unfair as it helped players willing to spend more money to get further in the games. EA initially ignored the concerns, thinking it would disappear, but they completely underestimated the level of resistance, displayed on social media channels such as Reddit, where it received the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.

EA suffered negative press coverage, disruption to the microtransaction feature and attracted unwanted government interest in their microtransaction practices.

Starbucks Riches to Rags

Starbucks built a solid reputation on it’s customer engagement through prioritising feedback channels including on line chats and surveys. They launched successful menu items based on customer ideas. Starbucks eventually built a strong customer base who were loyal to the brand in part due to it’s improved customer relationship and experience.

In recent months it has since started to go wrong, as Starbucks started moving away from the business models that led to it’s success. The company started transitioning away from creating welcoming environments for customers to enjoy their coffee experience, socialise or even work, by:

• Increasing focus on mobile ordering and drive-thru services

• Introducing collection only and drive-thru only locations

• Shifting menu items to cold drinks, which are considered more on-the-go beverages compared to hot drinks.

This change led to a loss of the brand’s unique personality and appeal, with some individuals stating that Starbucks now feels more like a fast food restaurant. This is not a good response, as it also puts to question the price for what you get. Is it just me, or does everyone I know seem to now complain about the price of Starbucks?

Starbucks have also faced a number of operational challenges and brand impacts due to political stances, however their lack of recent customer centricity has led them to have to replace their CEO in an effort to bring back the magic the brand once held.

I love how tech can improve our lives, however Starbucks’ reliance on tech above user experience has caused them to suffer financially, which goes to show that creating efficiencies might be cost-effective, but efficiency is worthless if you have a reducing client-base.

What would I do?

I often create a fictional businesses to illustrate examples. Here is another one to show how a team delivering for their users might prioritise customer feedback:

Scenario: My fictional project management SaaS platform implements a comprehensive and proactive feedback approach.

How:

• They integrate a feedback button directly into their user interface, so that users can share their problems or ideas real-time.

• Send quarterly surveys to all customers seeking feedback on specific features, such as new or experimental features.

• Conduct regular user testing with varied group of customers, keeping a close eye on how they use the features. We think we know how a user will interact with our products but we never truly know until we see this in action.

• The product and delivery teams review feedback regularly, prioritise the most impactful changes required, then plan and deliver in future sprints in line with priority.

• The process starts again.

Effective team comms is obvious, but how has that worked for you? I can honestly say that most of the teams I’ve worked in have had issues in this space, even the high performing teams.

No team or organisaition is perfect at comms, but these are some examples of teams that are doing great work we can learn from.

Hubspot

CRM provider Hubspot emphasises transparency and open dialogue between leadership and the wider teams. Their CTO holds “Ask Me Anything” sessions where employees can ask any question. This creates a more level playing field between leaders and the rest of the team, whilst also holding management to account.

A step further in my opinion would be for the CTO to show that they actually listen to anything that needs action and updates the wider team following these AMA’s.

It’s important to know that the real ideas come from the users and the team who are closest to users, therefore leaders should pay close attention to their team’s ideas and suggestions.

PlayStation Europe

Gaming giant PlayStation encountered issues with legacy intranet systems that reduced cross-team communications. Realising this was slowing their innovation and ability to respond to change early, they launched a new centralised virtual location called “The Hub“, which held significant company updates and allowed messaging between employees across Europe. This change readily improved their internal comms structure and allowed ideas and action to generate more freely.

One of the biggest issues I see when working in large organisations is the lack of sharing of innovation between departments and teams. This causes people to have to solve problems that have already been solved by their colleagues elsewhere, causing impact to the speed of change and overall efficiency.

Deutsche Telekom

Ironically, telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom itself suffered communications problems internally by failing to keep remote and on-site teams connected and on the same page.

They resolved this challenge by implementing an employee app for daily updates giving team leaders the ability to record videos that employees can watch in their own time.

Whilst this feature seems obvious today when we have such capable comms platforms available to us, this wasn’t always the case. Personally, I wonder if Deutsche Telekom missed a trick as they could have developed the platform further and become a challenger for messaging apps we know and use today.

So, how would my fictional SaaS company do it, I hear you ask?

Scenario: Prioritise an open communication culture across all departments

How:

• Implement daily 15 minute stand ups for each delivery team and team of teams.

• Ensure relationships between departments are prioritised and that there is no reward for protecting your own department over the wider business need.

• Monthly retrospectives are held, where teams discuss what went well, what failed and what will be done to improve. There is a no blame culture and people are encouraged to talk about failures and share with as many as possible, so lessons are used as insight.

• Create dedicated comms channels in various formats to align with most popular comms approaches, e.g. internal newsletter, 2-way messaging via Sack or Teams,

• Organise innovation days or half-days where team members can work on projects or ideas they care about but would otherwise not have the chance to explore. This increases creativity, problem solving and raises the level of team engagement.

  Use the outputs of these projects to see what can be extended to a broader proof of concept and even released in the hands of users.

It’s all well and good listening to feedback and making changes, but how do you know if those changes were the right moves and are effective?

This is where measure and adapt comes in to play. Here are some examples of where it worked, and some examples of what not to do.

Amazon

There are few businesses the size of Amazon, yet they manage to apply business agility principles regularly, with their renowned “customer obsessed” culture at the heart of what they do. So how does Amazon apply business agility?

They focus on thorough data analytics to measure performance across their various operations, many of which are in entirely different business verticals. It must help that Amazon provide their own data analytics software, however this shows how importance making sense of actionable data is to how organisations prioritise their change backlogs and deliver for their customers.

They quickly introduce and scale new features and services based on customer feedback. So if something is implemented and doesn’t work, they’ll know about it and pivot or adapt as needed.

ASOS

Innovative fast-fashion retailer ASOS have had to be agile in order to stay ahead of ever-changing fashion needs in a low margin sector, but ow do they adapt stay ahead?

• They seek opportunities to unlock value by changing their operating model if it requires.

• Also leverage data-driven decision making enabling them to identify trends and get to market faster than their competitors.

Being a mobile app-based business has enabled ASOS to collect user data and adapt with the right products much more quickly than traditional in-person based fashion retailers, allowing them to stay ahead and grow when competitors are shrinking.

Blockbuster

You may have heard their story before, but did you know that Blockbuster had multiple opportunities to acquire a smaller upstart called Netflix in it’s early days and passed up on it, because they were unable to consider evolving customer behaviours and the changes to internet infrastructure?

Once the global leader in movie rentals, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2013 amidst the streaming revolution. They failed to adapt to a changing landscape by ignoring early signs of the shift towards streaming and by maintaining a focus on physical stores, even as business was declining. The evidence was clear but the lack of conviction and boldness to adapt led to their demise.

What would I do?

To save my fake SaaS company from making the same mistakes as Blockbuster, here’s what we would do:

Scenario: Implement a data-driven approach to measure performance and inform decision-making.

How:

• Use analytics tools to track the metrics that matter, which can be different to each business, but in this case metrics such as feature adoption, customer churn and engagement are key.

• Continued focus on the development lifecycle and its efficiency, especially if seeking to release regular new features and adjust previous releases to adapt to usage trends

• Assign Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) across the business with specific owners from the most relevant departments. Bring departments together to review key metrics and work together to resolve with a common interest (easier said than done in reality, but very necessary).

• Adjust the product roadmap to fit results from metrics and align the most appropriate people to tackle the highest priority areas based on the biggest impact to users. Whoever is necessary to deliver the change should be on the team, even if they are across many departments.

There is more that can be done, but this is a good start.