How do you respond when rapid growth actually slows down your teams?

The challenge

The technology arm of this Fortune 250 Financial Data Services enterprise has a team of around 600 people spread across three locations. Between them they are responsible for supporting a complex and extremely busy digital customer support operation.

Email, online chat and the platforms supporting them all require optimization, maintenance, and support. Despite being well-versed in Agile methodologies, due to rapid business growth, the support team was experiencing major delivery delays.

The net effect of these delays was a decline in the quality of customer service and an impact on the brand’s carefully protected market reputation. 

Approach

Our goal was to establish high-performing teams that could create a new baseline for performance and set a roadmap for improvement.

Changing the internal team’s mindset was vital. So we instigated a shift toward more data-driven and customer-focused ways of thinking. With our Enterprise Transformation teams in place,  we were able to demonstrate how a greater emphasis on user insights and customer experience could support strategic business outcomes.

Much of what we did was cultural too as we sought to instill feelings of inclusion, collaboration, and experimentation. Through our coaching and education program, we enhanced practices that were already in place. We were also able to support different product teams as they rose to the next level of modern ways of working.

Our impact

We showed internal teams the impact of a sharper focus on the end customer and on the quality of support products and services. Product owners now have better tools at their disposal to follow customer-centric ways of thinking and working. And product teams are better aligned to business outcomes.

Ways of working are now more productive and efficient, with an average saving of three hours per sprint, per person. Agile workflows have been enhanced and so has the quality of the work the product teams create.

Leaders also now recognize the potential barriers to continuous improvement. So they are armed to continue growing their teams’ capabilities by themselves as the wider business grows.

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