Customer experience (CX) is defined by the Harvard Business Review as “the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company.” “Contact”, in this context, may refer to interactions that occur during onboarding, purchase, use, or service of a product. It could also refer to advertisements, word-of-mouth reviews, news reports, and other unplanned encounters that customers may have with the product or company.
According to experts, superior customer experience is not really so much about what features are offered as much as how they are offered. Ultimately, it all boils down to providing users with a seamless, integrated experience that is open to flexibility and growth based on changing customer needs and expectations. In other words: deliver, deliver differently, and deliver without delay!
The Delivery Distress
You have a great idea for a feature that can enhance your existing onboarding process, but you struggle to bring it to fruition within the constraints of your current setup and capabilities. By the time you manage to deliver the change, customer expectations have changed and the feature itself has become obsolete. Does this sound familiar?
Timely release of products and programs can indeed be a challenge, especially when your current setup isn’t optimized for efficient internal releases and automated testing. However, allowing yourself to slow down can lead to problems. Customers expect you to respond quickly to their needs, which they may have expressed through complaints, requests, and suggestions. If you don’t respond fast enough, they will seek (and find!) other organizations that are better suited to their needs.
What you need, therefore, is a solution that will ensure continuous testing and delivery, and guarantee a shorter time to market. And that solution can be found in DevOps!
Deliver with DevOps
DevOps plays a critical role in making sure you deliver updates and improvements to customer experience – efficiently, reliably, safely, and without delay. With DevOps, the priority is on breaking down barriers between teams and roles to drive results and sustainably minimize the lead time to business impact.
If development challenges, team capacity, skillset and process delay are affecting the smooth delivery of your customer experience, you need to consider an agile development methodology with a DevOps approach.
“DevOps for Customer Experience”, as this is called, combines DevOps practices with the needs of the CX process, improving speed and quality. This will include:
- CX Automation or the automated execution of CX tests
- CX Testing or functional, regression, performance tests that are focused on the customer’s perspective
- CX Monitoring or ongoing checks to ensure that design and functionality go hand-in-hand without issues
Today, industry leaders are organizations that offer the best in terms of customer experience. These are the same organizations that have reinvented themselves to adopt DevOps and meet the real-time demands of customers with agile processes.
CloudNow’s DevOps Solution for Superior CX
CloudNow developed a DevOps-based solution for a leading global bank to resolve its time-to-market challenges in the merchant onboarding process by:
- Using a JIRA board for communication
- Identifying an agile scrum method as the most ideal
- Deploying sprints with reviews every two weeks
- Scheduling 10-12 releases in every cycle
- Continuously implementing feedback in every release
In this way, our solution not only improved the bank’s overall onboarding process but delivered it within a matter of four months. Read the full case study here for more information or get in touch with us to plan timely and quality releases for your business!
