Delivering an excellent customer experience is essential for any organization. The better experience your customers get, the more positive reviews you’ll earn while reducing the number of complaints. Whether it’s finance, banking, IT, or healthcare, all kinds of organizations can benefit from improving the customer experience. It is the best way to build loyalty, secure a customer, and to provide exceptional services.
There is no single or result-driven checklist to follow to assure an excellent customer experience: your organization is unique, and so are your customers. However, we are sharing some practical tips that will help you make your customer’s workflow seamless while improving customer experience:
Planning & Risk Identification
This is the phase of brainstorming when the team members understand the requirements and examine all the aspects of the software they are going to make. Every team member needs to understand the requirements of customers, and the roadblocks (risk) that can occur in the development process. Before starting the development, we conduct risk identification and evaluation sessions with customers and team members. This allows you to create a list of the possible risks in a risk register. The Risk Register includes qualitative and quantitative analysis, and several action plans to prevent things from going wrong.
Project Roadmap and Release Plan
Better planning means smoother execution. Our next step involves working with our customers to create a detailed project roadmap and release plan. The project roadmap serves as a guide throughout the duration of the project. At this stage, the team explains the entire project in detail and checks its feasibility. Then, the team divides the workflow into small assignments so that project managers, developers, designers, and testers can evaluate their tasks. The team members also determine whether the project is feasible in terms of cost, time, reliability, functionality, etc.
Adopt Agile Methodologies
The Agile Methodology is an effective project management framework that allows you to change the priorities of each task based on your client’s requirements & goals. You don’t need to plan the iteration of a product in advance while using the Agile Methodology. Instead, you work in short duration called sprints with specific deadlines, and every team member has to finish a set of tasks allotted to them. We use the Scrum Master, which is known for its high flexibility, productivity, and innovation. It allows you to divide the tasks into three groups: analysis, development, and testing. In the Agile Methodology, every process emerges in self-nurturing & iterative cycles.
Smooth Iteration Process
As a software development team, you are not supposed to ignore the customers during development. Your customer wants to get updates on a regular basis, and involving them in the process throughout each iteration is a great solution. Each time you make progress, you inform the customer providing transparency about what you’re working on. The Iteration works as a frequent check-up for your product while allowing you to know how you’re working. No matter how large the organization, or how long the project, iteration is one of the vital processes of building the particular software your customer wants.
Adding New Features
It’s most likely that the customer will come up with additional features to add to the software, and those new features might affect your deadline. However, you need to figure out a way to work these into your development. First of all, you should estimate how long each of the additional features is going to take. You must prioritize each task and set the order while keeping your overall schedule and iteration length in mind.
Installation and Maintenance
Finally, the software is delivered to the customer to be installed on their devices. After the installation, if the customer demands any modification, the software comes under the maintenance process. Revisions are part of the development process, and they should not be avoided. Instead, they need to be done purposefully by keeping in mind the customer’s objectives. Sometimes, you may have to educate your client about the real purpose of the revision. Revisions should be done with the motive of moving closer to the best result for your customer’s project and its audience.
Storytelling to Improve Customer Relationships
It’s essential to share meaningful content with your current and potential customers. Stories allow you to represent any information in a way that creates a connection with the audience. The most compelling stories engage, educate, and offer value to customers. A good story will always reinforce positive interactions with customers, resulting in increased conversion and loyalty. Moreover, it’s vital to ask your customers to leave feedback talking about how your product has been a success for them.
We at Eminent IT use agile methodologies that provide a more substantial amount of flexibility and cross-functional teams. Agile methodology helps us achieve customer’s goals and objectives in the best way possible. With a reliable CRM strategy, you can easily define how you will progress with each task, what steps to take at each implementation stage, and how you’re going to measure customer goals.
