Agile Project Management — Success Story

Project Management is one of the most critical aspects of a project lifecycle. Subpar project management can decrease the performance of even the most experienced development team whereas effective project management would help each member of the development team to grow, take ownership and produce better quality output while keeping the clients happy and satisfied.

To provide a background, I’m a tech-savvy Agile Project Manager and have 4+ years of experience in Software Development and IT. I worked with an Enterprise SaaS product based company that specializes in Customer Experience Management (CEM). Their vision was to help their clients provide an exceptional experience to their customers.

There are numerous ways of gathering Customers’ experience data, for instance, by social media, analytics, feedback, etc. One such way is through sending surveys (via email, app and sms).

I would be sharing how we worked with our clients, identified their customers’ pain points and expectations, helped them to provide exceptional customer experience and streamlined their frontline executives’ workflow.

Problem Statement

One of our Auto clients came with a vague requirement — “I want to know how my frontline executives for customer grievances are doing, is there any way we can know more about their impact on clients and maybe do something with that information?”

We probed the client to understand where the requirement was coming from. We asked and discuss the questions about the present situation, their motivation behind it, expected end result, any steps they have taken already for this, what is the priority for this etc.

After a long discussion, we understood that there have been instances where the dissatisfied customer took the route of social media to vent about their issue with the company’s service and company wanted to proactively take steps to protect and improve the company’s image.

Dissatisfied customer took the route of social media to vent about their issue with the company’s service

Additionally, clients were unsure how the frontline executives are contributing to their overall company image and if there was a way to objectively calculate their performance KPI and impact.

Current Process

The company collects feedback surveys from the customers who visit the store to understand how their experience with the store was. If a customer had a dissatisfying experience, then the company’s frontline executives would personally call the customers to understand their grievances and offer them a resolution as needed.

Requirement Gathering:

• Spent a day with Frontline executives to understand how they work, interact with clients and their perspective. Surveyed them about their experience with the customers.
• After gaining insight into how the frontline execs work, we met our clients with our technical teams to brainstorm about the possible ideas.
• Created a temporary survey on the client’s website and social media to gain more insight into how the customers feel about the company and collect their suggestions.

Observation:

• 80% of customers who were lashing out on social media were of millennials profiles.
• Millennials want two things — responsiveness and self-service. Social Media and Mobile app was largely absent for the company and thus millennials had no productive way to vent their issues.
• Frontline executives had no feedback system for their performances. There was a script, but no quantitative way for them to know how they performed. Thus, no source for them to understand where they can improve and where do they excel
• Incorrect closing of loop. After Frontline executive would call the customers and address their issue, the loop would close for them. However, ideally, the loop should close only when the customer indicates that the issue has been addressed as per their satisfaction (as they opened the loop, they should be the one to close).
• Unclear KPIs for call performance.

80% of customers who were lashing out on social media were of millennials profiles.

Millennials want two things — responsiveness and self-service

Solutions:

• Developed the mobile app interface to collect feedback. Developed chatbots on their social media as well as for their website so that customers have multiple lines for communication.
• Created a mechanism to collect feedback from customers after the customer has been contacted by frontline executive. The survey had questions about their experience with the frontline executive, company image, likelihood to recommend, etc
• Gather all the data from social media, app and surveys and created a single dashboard. The dashboard included “best practice” parameters for customer interaction, customer sentiment analysis, recording of the calls, top questions asked etc. This created a single source of truth and transparency for all levels of organizations.

What did I do?

I worked as the Scrum Master / Project Manager for the implementation of the solution.

- Interacted with the end-clients to understand their end goal. Their requirement and end goal vision kept on modifying as we carried on with the project, my task was to satisfy the client by delivering a value-adding product while keeping the scope, time and budget in check.

- To manage the client expectations and reminding them of their end goal when they seem to move in a direction that would not satisfy their end result.

- Managed the product backlog and sprint planning.

- Helped in removing any impediments within the Sprint Team (technical or otherwise).

- Went on-site (Walton-on-Thames, UK) to provide a demo of the solution and collected feedback from the clients.

- Managed UAT and UAT tickets.

- Created documents for clients.

- Conducted demos for different stakeholders.

- Managed the iterations

- Successfully launched the project within time and budget.

Result

This project was so useful for the clients, that they submitted this and won the “Global Best Practice” award for this implementation.