Lean and agile principles complement each other to improve operations and outcomes. They enable organizations to achieve better results while using less time and resources. The concepts encourage continuous learning, experimentation, cross-functional collaboration, waste elimination, streamlined processes, improved product quality, and higher customer satisfaction.
In our work with one large company, we applied lean management techniques across a customer support unit to enhance efficiency by at least 40%. This success story is just one of many that demonstrate the transformative power of lean-agile. Working with a European food manufacturing client, a lean-agile transformation of customer communications systems increased customer satisfaction by 18% globally and 30% in Europe. A lean-agile project with a government client reduced wait times by almost 90%, reduced business IT costs by 25%, and increased citizen satisfaction by 35%. Often, one compelling side benefit of lean-agile is concrete sustainability gains. For example, this government client saw their paper usage plummet by 80%.
In the wrong hands, lean-agile can be just another piece of surface-level management-speak. However, when its key concepts are developed into a structured transformation program, it can dramatically improve customer experience metrics.
Why Lean-Agile for Customer Service?
Most customer support entities need more efficient processes, better services, and better customer feedback. These issues can be traced back to improper customer handling, unbalanced workloads, and a lack of competent systems. These shortcomings show up in high customer churn rates, poor net promoter scores (NPS), and thousands of customer tickets open for a month or longer.
High-tech systems like AIS, IVRs, robots, and chatbots have been brought in to address these challenges, and thanks to GenAI, such systems are poised for a significant upgrade. These systems can automate routine tasks, provide instant responses to customer queries, and even predict customer needs. However, customer service organizations must still integrate such technologies into their systems and ensure they align with lean-agile principles.
Applying lean-agile (as well as the theory of constraints) holistically opens the door to high performance and measurable results. Today’s customer service organizations must balance running a full-service customer support shop and serving as a business unit that can deliver professional service (i.e., sales, up-selling, new upgrades, etc.). By blending a laser focus on process efficiency with an insistence on delivering customer value at every step, lean and agile approaches can increase efficiency and profitability. Indeed, according to a McKinsey report, agile alone boosts financial performance by 20-30% and operational efficiency by up to 50%. A lean-agile approach seeks to achieve those gains while continuously and methodologically identifying new opportunities to reduce the amount of waste in the system.
How Lean-Agile Transforms Customer Service
Lean-agile rigorously emphasizes process efficiency, but not at the cost of customer satisfaction. Instead, it emphasizes thoughtfully serving as many customers as possible while remaining cost-effective and scalable, always keeping customer satisfaction at the forefront of the process.
When we apply lean-agile with clients, we generally take a five-step approach: Assessment, Planning, Evolution, Outcome, and Advance phases. Each phase has specific tasks and goals, providing a clear roadmap for implementing lean-agile transformation.
- Assessment phase: Before any transformation begins, customer service organizations must define the values, principles, and goals driving change, identify key stakeholders, benchmark openness to lean-agile, and start allocating budgets. A maturity assessment can capture the organization’s current adoption of lean-agile.
- Planning phase: This phase involves engaging in process documentation to understand how customers are currently routed through both human and automated means. We also verify the key client KPIs, which tend to be some matrix of response time, resolution time, modes of accessibility, and service availability. Process assessment can identify the most common customer workflows, which tend to break down into a few main categories, such as billing care (clarifications, minor display errors, etc.), collections (late payments), and administration (payment errors, billing charges, contract changes, and updates). We then create a transformation plan comprising a mix of quick sprints and larger-scale transformation programs, addressing each identified challenge in a systematic manner.
- Evolution Phase is the most critical phase, where most change occurs. Change management drives active communication, change champions socialize change in their teams, and customer surveys begin to validate the effectiveness of the numerous process changes taking place.
- Outcome Phase: By this point, the organization has enough data to fully understand the initial impact of lean-agile transformation on customer service. However, because lean-agile is highly iterative, the work isn’t done. At this point, organizations should reevaluate maturity levels, realign strategies and roadmaps, and begin new experiments to further reduce waste and achieve customer-centricity.
- Advance Phase: In this phase, lean-agile is genuinely solidified. It is no longer a temporary push but deeply embedded in the organization and beyond. Transformation/innovation hubs, centers of excellence, consultants, and cross-functional teams make continual lean-agile improvement a core operational reality internally and across processes shared with suppliers.
Today, most process reimagination will focus on automating anything that is highly repeatable by upgrading digital systems and social tools. For more complex inquiries, such as technical support, we might automate some additional elements of information intake while leaving plenty of room for person-to-person interaction with a support technician. Whether automated or manual, interventions and processes are implemented (and, just as often, removed) at precise moments in specific customer journeys. After undergoing lean-agile transformation, a customer call process that once took 28 minutes might easily be transformed into a process that takes only 18 minutes on average to complete.
Achieving the Benefits of Lean-Agile
Remaking an underperforming customer service organization can take time and effort. Even when leaders know, broadly speaking, what needs to be done, the cultural and technical challenges of executing an ambitious change often prevent ambitious action.
