What Is Agile (Marketing) Customer Experience?
April 09, 2015
Agile Marketing is derived from the agile concept, the process designed for developing software.
Agile Development – Agile aimed to replace the old waterfall process. Instead of planning and producing software without making any changes as you build to the original plan. Using agile product developers plan, build, and test whether the software is working and acceptable throughout the software development process. A series of iterations produces improvements to the product, so that at the end of the process you have feedback on the software from stakeholders and customers. Think Windows 7 not Vista!
What is Agile Marketing? – Marketers use Agile to implement processes that bring an iterative learning process to marketing, so that marketing is improved over time. Agile provides a number of process tools to manage marketing, including:
- Developing a backlog of tasks
- Planning a sprint
- Holding scrums
- Holding a sprint review
- A sprint retrospective
- Kanban boards
The deployment of agile marketing can vary from company to company, there are different levels of maturity in its use, from using agile marketing for marketing task management to iterative improvement of marketing. Marketers, ever pragmatic take what works.
Agile Marketing Values
Attendees of the SprintZero conference held June 11th 2012 in San Francisco, CA developed the following values for agile marketing.
1 Validated learning over opinions and conventions
2 Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
3 Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
4 The process of customer discovery over static prediction
5 Flexible vs. rigid planning
6 Responding to change over following a plan
7 Many small experiments over a few large bets
The New Marketing - Agile marketing developed because of the intersection of product marketers, marketers and developers, they recognized that agile processes helped developers in building software and wanted to apply those processes to marketing.
With the rise of digital disruption from digital technologies, marketers are faced with rapidly changing customer journeys and look for new ways to reach their customers. As a result of this digital disruption, marketers are building a new set of processes for managing digital disruption, including:
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Building customer personas
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Building a maturity model of your industry so that you can measure and improve your company's digital marketing maturity
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Mapping customer buyer journey
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Managing the marketing technology stack
Digital Transformation describes the process of companies changing their business practices to manage digital disruption, it so happens that agile marketing can help with digital transformation.
Increasingly marketers are using agile marketing to build and improve these New Marketing processes. One of the best examples of a company using agile marketing for transforming marketing is EMC.
Agile Customer Experience
Finally, agile marketing may work best ultimately if companies adopt agile customer experience, whereby a company requires any teams associated with customer management; marketing, sales, and customer service to integrate into teams to use agile to manage customer experience.
Above we see the rise of agile marketing vs. digital transformation, DT took off in 2013