by Hardy Sidhu

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Digital Maturity is not simply running processes but the ability to break processes to be more effective and efficient with our teams and outputs.

Too often than not, the product process becomes its own siloed team within an organization that consists of product owners, designers, developers (and, if you are lucky, researchers) making decisions on behalf of customers through lean research and testing methods.

We have observed a need for more input from customer support teams within the process, from the individuals who speak to the customers daily. Missing key insights that could help us design and build better products for the customer, leading to prolonged discovery phases and unvalidated opportunities.

80% of opportunities are communicated by 10% of our customers.

This got us curious...

What if organizations supercharge their product processes by utilizing customer feedback via integrating customer support teams into the product team to drive innovation? The coming together from an internal structure is what we call CXT - Customer Experience Teams, Putting the customer at the core of our focus and a part of the journey while working on established products and organizations.

The triple diamond process adopted by product teams still holds its worth. Still, with our discovery, we found reoccurring patterns of flaws that must be addressed by integrating the customer support team into the process.

These flaws would also cause the churn to be higher in repeating customers, directly resulting in a lack of growth for an organization.

Putting our thoughts into practice, we began dissecting the current relationship between customer support and product teams to truly understand the disconnect and how they can work together.

Our strategy was to transform our customer support team from cost centres into profit centres by aiding the team in building the products customers want and transforming our product team from assumers into knowers who hear the voice of the customer at every decision.

We took the triple diamond and adapted it for our CXT squads.

Frame = Hear
Concept = Include
Pilot = Serve

A team that comes together to serve a common purpose has gigantic rewards as a collective and as individual disciplines.

Having tried and tested this model with various organizations, we have seen and measured the benefits that cross disciplines.

Customer Service

• Stronger Relationships Between Brand & Customer
• Retained Customers and Drop in Churn
• Empowered Motivated Team = Higher Performing Team

Product

• Speed and Efficiency During the Insight Phase
• Validated Product Impact
• Consistency From Insight to Testing

Business

• Retained Customers
• Greater Brand Cause
• A True Sense of Missional Objectives

Our simple Framework allowed us to reconnect teams to be more effective and efficient whilst designing and building existing products, and it has been a staple in our process of working with large-scale organizations with an already high-performing customer care team.

The User Is Not Always Our Customer But The Customer Is Always Our User.

*Presented at Customer Contact Week Nashville 2023*

If you are interested in how Format-3 can aid your organization in transforming your process of building products, get in touch for a free workshop

By Hardy Sidhu

Founder & CEO Format-3

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Thought leadership creates value, builds knowledge and takes a stand, bridging the gap between traditional and digital platforms