Disciplined Agile Principle: Delight Customers

 

One of the seven principles behind Disciplined Agile (DA) is Delight Customers. For a value stream to succeed the delight of your customers must be your key priority. In 2001 the writers of the Agile Manifesto told us that “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software," which is clearly a good start.  Disciplined agilists, however, prefer the lean philosophy that to succeed it isn’t sufficient to simply satisfy the customer but instead we must regularly delight them if we wish to keep them as a customer.

We delight our customers when our products and services surpass their needs and expectations. Consider the last time you checked into a hotel. If you’re lucky there was no line, your room was available, and there was nothing wrong with it when you got there. You were likely satisfied with the service but that’s about it. Now imagine that you were greeted by name by the concierge when you arrived, that your favorite snack was waiting for you in the room, and that you received a complimentary upgrade to a room with a magnificent view – all without asking. This would be more than satisfying and would very likely delight you. Although the upgrade won’t happen every time you check in, it’s a nice touch when it does and you’re likely to stick with that hotel chain because they treat you well.

Successful organizations offer great products and services that delight their customers. Systems design tells us to build with the customer in mind, to work with them closely, to build in small increments and then seek feedback, so that we better understand what will actually delight them. As disciplined agilists we embrace change because we know that our stakeholders will change their minds as they learn what they truly want as the solution evolves.

Based on the great comments and questions that I've received about this blog posting (thank you!) I thought I would clarify a few points:

1. There's a cost to delight customers. Delightful offerings (products or services) are usually more costly to provide and to develop.
2. There's a cost to not do this. If you don't delight your customers someone else will.  It's much less expensive to keep a good customer than it is to attract a new one.
3. Focus on return, not cost. Effective organizations know that when it comes to financial issues it's about the return on investment that you're able to generate, rather than the overall cost to do so.  X costs $1 and generates $1.10 in revenue.  Y costs $2 and generates $2.50 in revenue.  Z costs $3 and generates $2.60 in revenue.  Assuming all other issues (risk, morale, ...) are equal, which is the better offering for your organization?  
4. Know your customers. At the individual level we are delighted by different things.  Being greeted by first name at the hotel, or even being greeted at all, may be delightful for some people and spectacularly annoying for others.  As another DA principle advises, context counts.
5. You want to target your efforts. It's really about delighting the customers that you care about and do so in a way that they actually value.  Consider the hotel example.  It's probably more important to them to delight an existing "gold" customer in a manner that they value than it is to delight someone who is staying at this hotel for the first time.  It's likely more important for them to try to delight a customer who is "gold" at another chain, hoping to lure them to this chain, than someone who is not a frequent hotel user.  
6. You need to vary the way that you delight a customer. If you delight people the same way over and over, it sets their expectations highly. If the hotel described above was to provide that level of service to me every time I checked in that would be great, but it would soon stop delighting me because I would come to expect it.  

SOURCE

This article is excerpted from Chapter 2 of the book An Executive’s Guide to Disciplined Agile: Winning the Race to Business Agility.