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Most project managers know that creating the project plan is only the start of the project management journey. All the careful planning and forecasting don’t count for much if there isn’t a concrete way to execute the project plan. And with most projects having so many moving parts, creating a schedule that is actionable and takes into account all the realities of the project can become the most critical part of the project management process.  

What is Project Scheduling?

A project schedule is your project’s timeline, it consists of all the sequenced tasks, activities and milestones that need to be completed in a certain timeframe. 

Creating a project schedule is a way of communicating all the tasks that are needed to be performed, while clarifying what resources are needed, under what time frame. 

Effective project scheduling leads to the success of  a project, reduced cost, and increased customer satisfaction

Broadly speaking project scheduling consists of 3 steps

• Determine what needs to be performed
• Determine who needs to perform the work
• Determine how long it will take to perform the work.

Creating the Project Schedule

Even large, complex projects need to be broken down into smaller manageable tasks that have clear objectives and timelines. Creating a project schedule can be done by following these steps:

1. Plan Schedule Management: This includes all the groundwork involved in setting up a schedule. It consists of establishing all the policies, procedures and guidelines that will govern your project. It identifies all the stakeholders in the project management process, identifies who must approve the schedule and who has the authority to make changes to it.

2. Define Project Activities: This consists of all the activities required to be finished to complete the project. This involves clearly stating the nature of each task, what the subtasks under them are, and determining milestones to track the project’s progress along the way. Activities should be measurable, easily estimated and related to both a project deliverable and a budgeted cost.

3.  Determine Dependencies: Identifying dependencies involves listing down all the activities that rely on others to be completed. This helps you to structure your schedule based on which tasks need to be done parallelly and which need to be done sequentially.

4. Sequence Activities: After you have identified dependencies, you can begin to sequence the activities in a project. This does not involve assigning timelines to each task but involves creating an efficient workflow in which the order of the tasks is identified.

5. Estimate Resources: Every activity in your project requires resources. This could be in the form of personnel, software, workspace and much more. Estimating resources ensures that the optimal amount of resources are available at each stage of the project, so that you don’t encounter delays while executing your project.

6. Establish Durations: Accurately documenting how long each activity will take is key to ensuring the project as a whole stays on track. Underestimating how long a task would take can have cascading effects of the entire schedule, while overestimating how long a project will take can lead to the wasteful use of time and resources. 

7. Monitor and Control: This process takes place throughout the length of the project. It involves running reports and assessing the progress of a project against the schedule, managing performance, and communicating with the team.

Techniques of Project Scheduling

Project scheduling typically includes various techniques, some of the most common techniques are:

Mathematical Methods:

These models calculate the start and end date of various tasks in the project based on their known scope.

Critical Path: 

The Critical Path Method is a model that identifies the maximum and minimum required time to complete a project. It also helps to identify all the critical tasks that need to be completed in a project for it to stay on track. It also identifies other tasks in which the delivery time does not affect the schedule. CPM is implemented by listing down the tasks necessary for a project’s completion and noting the dependencies between them.

A critical path helps to visualize the project flow and calculate its duration when all dependencies and deliverables are known.

PERT Chart:

Just like a Critical Path Diagram, a PERT chart also helps visualize the task flow in a project and estimates a timeline based on their assumed duration. Like in CPM, you need to define tasks and order them based on project timelines. You can then create a network estimating different timelines of your project depending on various levels of confidence to create,

• Optimistic timeline
• Most-likely timeline
• Pessimistic timeline

PERT Charts use a weighted average duration to calculate possible timelines. 

Duration Compression

These are techniques to shorten a schedule, it is used to adjust the schedule without changing the scope.

Fast-Tracking

This is another way to use a Critical Path. It helps you to find tasks that could be done simultaneously or be partially overlapped to speed up the project’s delivery. By analyzing the Critical Path, you can identify which tasks can be fast-tracked.

Crashing

This is a technique where additional resources are brought in to complete a project on time. This can be used in unique cases where a project has extra resources to spare. It can also be applied to situations where simply adding more resources can speed up the completion of a project. This technique significantly increases the cost of a project.

Task List:

This is the simplest technique of project scheduling and involves creating a spreadsheet or document of all the possible tasks involved in a project. 

Gantt Chart

It is used by project managers most of the time to get an idea about the average time needed to finish a project. A project schedule Gantt chart is a bar chart that represents key activities in sequence on the left vs time. Each task is represented by a bar that reflects the start and date of the activity, and therefore its duration.

Tips To Master Project Scheduling

Input from Stakeholders: Creating a project schedule cannot be done in isolation. Consulting your team and other stakeholders allows you to identify tasks, resources and dependencies more accurately so you can estimate durations with realistic timelines.

Refer to Past Projects: Referring to previous projects with similar scope can help create a more comprehensive schedule with realistic estimates and a more exhaustive task list. 

Identify Risks:  Proactively identifying and documenting all the factors that could potentially derail your project allow you to create a risk management plan that could effectively mitigate risks if they occur without affecting the project schedule drastically. 

Record Scheduling Assumptions: Clearly define your reasoning for calculating an estimate. A large part of scheduling is making predictions, this involves making assumptions based on the current information available. Listing down these assumptions makes it easier to identify how  the entire schedule may change if some of your assumptions change along the way. 

Tell us About Your Experience with Project Scheduling 

Project scheduling techniques are constantly evolving. Do you have any experience with the implementation of project scheduling techniques, we’d love to hear from you. Tell us about your insights in the comments below.

An essential part of the continuous delivery system of product development is the management and implementation of a product backlog. It is a critical component of the Agile process and is the core of the delivery cycle. It allows teams to deliver value in short, iterative increments which focus on the end-user.

What is a Product Backlog?

A product backlog is a prioritized set of desired functionality that contains all the necessary items to complete a product release. It contains everything from new features, enhancements, technology upgrades, and bug fixes. And while it’s easy to mistake a product backlog for a task sheet or just a product development ‘to-do’ list, it’s so much more than that.

It is essentially the development command center where Agile teams break down requests into a series of components which are prioritized based on importance and complexity. A properly managed product backlog is critical for the team to run like a well-oiled machine.

What Does a Product Backlog Include?

A product backlog is not a list of technical specifications that need to be completed to further the development process. On the contrary, it is a collection of tasks expressed in plain language, communicating how it will make the user experience better.

It consists of user stories, possible bugs and challenges, insightful research findings and much more.

An important thing to note is that a product backlog is never truly ‘complete’. It is continually evolving as more issues, challenges, and opportunities are identified.
During the development, process teams are unable to do everything they want to do at once.  A product backlog helps prioritize items based on importance and impact and creates a systematic workflow where teams address the most important items as they go.

Product Backlog Management 

Backlog management is the process through which product owners add, adjust, groom, and prioritize the backlog to make sure the most valued features are shipped to users. Without proper backlog management, the backlog can become unreasonably large and complex. An oversized backlog affects innovation, slows your time to market, and can frustrate Agile teams. 

Product backlog management is a discipline that ensures many of the core tenets of the Agile manifesto are preserved through the development process and is implemented to make sure the big picture is not lost during everyday tasks. 

The core principles of backlog management are:

1. Ensure continual innovation
2. Focus on user experience
3. Maintain costs

Visualizing the Product Backlog

A lot of product backlog management has to do with the coordination of multiple efforts. In order to do that effectively, you need to see all the moving parts involved in a build. A great way to do that is by using visual tools to represent different aspects of the development process to keep teams aligned and effectively distribute work.

User Stories

User stories are a great way to make sense of your backlog, it helps you prioritize what needs to get done and makes sure you keep the product vision at the core of everything you do.
This simple collaborative exercise helps you define where your users are with respect to your product, helps identify gaps and prioritize those features that will have the largest impact to the most number of people.

Kanban Boards

A Kanban board is a tool made popular in project management but can have great utility when implemented in the Agile process. It helps establish order into a team’s daily activities. You can visualize all the work that needs to be completed, limit work-in-progress and maximizes efficiency. It uses cards, columns, and continuous improvement to help teams commit the right amount of resources to each task and get the job done in the most efficient manner.  A Kanban board software helps to create Kanban board easily.

Retro Boards

Retrospective meetings are a great way to evaluate the progress a team is making at regular intervals during a build. A retro board helps teams list down the tasks completed, the wins and what challenges stood in their way. The backlog manager can then use this information to re-allocate resources, identify blockers, and more efficiently manage the backlog as a whole.

Backlog Grooming

One of the primary tasks of a backlog manager is to ensure that the product backlog stays as an effective tool for teams to plan and execute tasks around. When backlogs get too big or are filled with outdated or incomplete tasks, it can be hard for teams to properly prioritize work and maintain a continuous workflow. 

Backlog grooming usually takes place as regularly scheduled sessions with the entire Agile team. The primary goal of backlog grooming is to keep the backlog up-to-date and ensure that backlog item are prepared for upcoming sprints

This regular refining of the backlog is done to ensure:

• Outdated stories and tasks are removed
• New users stories that reflect newly discovered insights are added to the backlog
• Larger user stories are broken down into smaller items
• User stories are reordered based on the current priority
• Story-points or timelines are reassigned if required
• Blockers are quickly identified and corrective action is taken.

Tips for Effective Backlog Management:  

Start With the End User in Mind

Even the operational aspects of Agile development should focus on the value that will be delivered to the end user. You must align your product backlog with the product vision and tasks should be prioritized accordingly. Every decision should be made in context with the key benefits for the customer, and how the product is differentiated from the competition.

Improve Collaboration

Backlog management can never be done in isolation. It involves the consistent and frequent involvement of product managers and the development team. Encouraging people to participate in backlog discussions will increase the understanding of everyone in the team and result in a clear understanding of the project requirements. 

Regularly Update Stakeholders

The product backlog is the single source of truth for the entire Agile team. The backlog manager needs to ensure the backlog is transparent and clearly communicates all the important information to everyone involved. Any change or update not reflected in the backlog needs to be communicated to all stakeholders.

Regularly Review Timelines

Fluidity is one of the core principles of the Agile Methodology. Adapting to changes and prioritizing tasks as new information arises is critical to keeping the user’s needs at the forefront. 

As a result, original timelines are likely to change frequently. Regularly updating timelines is key to managing release cycles. 

Set Priorities

Prioritization is the key point in backlog management and should be clearly aligned with the mutually agreed upon product vision and KPIs.

Using popular prioritization frameworks allows you to order ideas and plan iterations more easily.

Using the Impact Effort matrix template, you can prioritize the tasks better and choose the most important ones for immediate development. 

Tell us Your Views on Product Backlog Management

Product backlog management is an emerging discipline that is constantly evolving. Do you have any experience with the implementation of backlog management in your development process? We would love to hear some of your insights and learnings along the way. Please feel free to tell us about it in the comments below.

Any experienced salesperson will tell you that the completion of a sale is only a small part of the sales process. Selling is not an act, but a process. It begins long before any transaction takes place. Carefully identifying and managing all the ways a potential lead interacts with your business to make sure they are constantly engaged is key to ensuring the conversion from awareness to purchase decision. 

At every step of the way, potential leads need to feel like your business is adding value to their experience while being convinced of your ability to fulfill their needs. Creating a sales funnel allows potential customers to interact with your business in the most optimal way so you can influence their purchase decision.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a visual representation of the journey prospects go through on their way to make their purchase. If you can successfully get prospects from one end of the funnel to the other without them dropping out along the way, you now have a new customer.  

In order to design a successful purchase journey, you need to understand how and when users interact with your business. Creating a sales funnel allows you to visualize each step of the process and the insight it provides can help you set up an effective marketing strategy for each stage

Why the Sales Funnel Matters

According to Pardot, 68% of all organizations have not identified or measured their sales funnel and 79% of the leads never gets converted to paying customers. Without an effective sales funnel, businesses are unable to move leads through the pipeline and cannot identify improvements that need to be made in the processes for effective conversions. A detailed sales funnel can help an organization achieve a variety of goals and help fine-tune the series of steps required to nudge potential customers into making a purchase decision. Some of the benefits of a sales funnel are:

• It can help attract a community that may not be familiar with your business
• Help engage with an audience that knows and understands your business
• Educates prospects who would like to purchase your product or service
• Identifies leads that are about to drop out so you can take corrective measures needed for conversion

The Stages of the Sales Funnel

Creating a sales funnel allows you to track a prospect from the time it first interacts with your business all the way to a completed purchase while identifying all the ways customers have dropped out along the way.

A usual sales funnel has the following stages:

Awareness:

When your customer learns about your business for the first time he is in the awareness stage. Early in the journey, customers are going through exploring options to solve a specific problem.

To target customers during the awareness stage it is important to understand where they are present and find a way to reach out to them with a relevant message. A clear understanding of a customer here will help you develop the right channels to communicate through so you can reach them in the most effective manner.

This is the first impression of your brand, so a carefully crafted experience is key to keeping them engaged.

Interest and Evaluation:

Once you have succeeded in piquing their interest, the potential customer may now consider you as a viable option. At this stage, the customer probably has many questions about your product and how it fits into their lives. The key task here is to provide clarity and remove any friction that may cause them to drop out. Remember, they have expressed their interest in certain ways- clicking on an ad, responding to a form, replying to a sales e-mail and now the onus falls on you to convert that interest into a sale.

Desire:

After a lead has moved from the awareness stage to the interest stage if they are still engaging with your business or your promotional material, it is likely that they have now entered the ‘Desire’ stage. At this point, they are evaluating options and are considering the reasons to choose your product. Many times they are often looking for some validation to their decision, so a well-timed content plan can reassure them they are making the right decision. It could be customer testimonials, case studies from other customers, tutorials, or even discount codes.  

The main goal at this stage is to show prospects what life would be like if they chose your product or service. 

Action:

There is still some ground to cover between a customer deciding on your product and actually making a purchase. But your goal here isn’t simply to get your customer to complete a transaction, it is to ensure they find customer success. This means supporting them with educational material providing the right onboarding experience or even training them to use the product to the best of their ability. 

Delight:

One of the most commonly overlooked aspects in a sales funnel is the delight stage. This is the stage where your sales funnel gives birth to the next sale funnel. Converting customers to evangelists greatly minimizes the number of new customers that drop out in the earlier stages of the funnel. Delighting customers can increase retention rates which can have great implications on a business. Just a 5 % retention rate can result in a 25% to 90% increase in profits.

Lead Nurturing 

Just setting up a funnel and identifying touchpoints isn’t enough. Your sales strategy needs to nurture sales along every step of the funnel and develop and reinforce relationships with buyers that have lasting effects. You can do this by providing the information and answers they need to build trust, increase brand awareness, and maintain a connection until prospects are ready to make a purchase.

Companies who properly nurture their leads see a 450% increase in qualified prospects. And, those who take the time to nurture and grow those customer relationships, see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.

Sales Cycle Management:

After the sales funnel is identified, effectively visualized, and the various touchpoints considered, your sales team must create a process to effectively and consistently convert potential sales into customers. Sales cycle management is the process of keeping track of all the stages in the sales life cycle. It involves adjusting them to customers based on their behavior during those key stages. 

A Sales Funnel Has the Following steps:

Prospect:  Involves identifying potential customers. Here it is important to create an idealized customer persona so your sales team can look for prospects that most closely match it. 

Contact: After preparing a list of prospects it is important to identify which stage of the buyer’s journey each prospect is on. This will allow your sales team to more readily identify what the prospect’s needs may be.

Qualify: Here the salesperson identifies whether or not a potential prospect is interested in a purchase and how far away they are from making an actual decision.

Nurture: This involves actively engaging with prospects until they are ready to make a transaction.

Offer: Leads that sign up for demos or trials and are inquiring about pricing are ready to make a purchase. At this point, it is appropriate to make a sales pitch that concludes with an appropriate offer.

Handle Objections: This is where sales representatives listen to customer concerns and consider any counteroffer they make.

Close: The sale is now complete, all questions the lead had have been answered and the transaction is complete. Your business efforts should now be spent on ensuring your customer achieves success with your product. 

Creating and implementing a sales funnel is a series of incremental steps that eventually lead to successfully closing a sale. Spending the time and effort to ensure every stage of the funnel is well thought through and engages the customer in the right way, can greatly boost overall sales number, increase repeat customers, and overall customer satisfaction.

If you have had experience with creating and implementing a sales funnel, we’d love to hear some of the insights you discovered along the way. Please feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

2020 may have had other plans for all your goals, but a new year brings with it a blank slate and a chance to start afresh. As we re-center and look ahead, it’s important to set achievable and detailed plans to guide our new year goal setting process.

Setting lofty new year goals doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a way to get there. You need to find a way to create meaningful goals to focus your intentions. This ensures your team stays motivated throughout the year and doesn’t abandon their goals after a few weeks.

If goals are your rudder that points you in the direction you want to go, plans and processes are the oars that will actually get you there. Understanding the importance of goals and the techniques involved in setting achievable goals paves the way for success.

What is Goal Setting?

Goals can never be created in isolation, the context in which they are set and the plans around achieving them are what makes any goal useful. You can use goal setting techniques to give your organization long-term vision and short-term motivation. Concise goals allow your teams to focus on their acquisition of knowledge and helps them organize their time and resources in a more streamlined manner. 

5 Principles of Successful Goal Setting

Commitment: Commitment refers to the degree to which an organization is attached to a goal. You need to set goals that align with your core values, the closer the goals are to your core values the more focused they will be on achieving them. When teams are less committed to goals- particularly more challenging ones, there is a higher chance of them giving up. If your team is strongly committed to your goals they are more likely to do what needs to be done to accomplish them. 

Clarity: When a goal is vague it has very little utility. The most important task is to set precise and unambiguous goals that can be measured. Teams need to communicate with each other in order to achieve goals, so being able to talk about them in accurate terms allows them to better align themselves and carry out tasks more efficiently. 

Challenge: It’s important to set goals that are challenging yet attainable. Challenging goals can increase self-satisfaction and help teams develop new skills to achieve them. If a goal is unreasonably lofty then teams will develop a feeling of dissatisfaction and frustration when they are not achieved. 

Complexity: Finding the optimal level of complexity of your goals can be a challenge. Special efforts should be made to break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable tasks. Highly complex goals can become overwhelming for people. For such goals, people need to be provided sufficient time to work toward the goal, improve performance, practice, or learn what is necessary for success.

Feedback: Goal setting is more effective in the presence of immediate feedback. It allows teams to assess the degree to which their goals are being achieved and how they are progressing.

How to Get Teams to Set and Achieve Goals

Small Steps: Goals need to be broken down into actionable plans. The board, long-term vision should be laid out into attainable steps along the way.

Put Things Down: Writing down your goals helps you commit them to memory. Post them in a visible location to keep them top of mind. You can use online collaborative tools like Creately where team members can get together and review these goals, and add inputs and suggestions whenever they feel necessary.

Offer Incentives: Devising the right incentive structure can greatly promote dedication and commitment to achieving their new year goals.  The right incentives for each team will vary according to your team dynamic. Some teams work better when there is competition amongst members, other work better when the incentives promote cooperation.

Reward Success: A little bit of praise can go a long way. Recognizing and praising success is one of the best ways to reward a job well done. It’s best to do it amongst peers and can add a sense of validation to the efforts put in by team members.

Set New Goals Together: Getting teams together and setting goals as a collective is a great way to add a sense of ownership to the task at hand.

How Visual Tools Can Help

Visual goal-setting tools are a great way to formalize the goals for the coming year and serve as a common resource that teams can easily access and refer to.

SMART Goals

This tool allows you to structure your thinking and put achievable yet challenging goals in place. You can use this tool in the new year goal setting process. It allows you to finely and accurately define your goals and create concrete plans to accomplish them.

Specific: More clearly defined goals have a better chance of being accomplished. For a goal to be specific consider the 5 ‘W’ questions:

Who: Who is involved in this goal?

What: What do I want to accomplish?

Where: Where is this goal to be achieved?

When: When do I want to achieve this goal?

Why: Why do I want to achieve this goal?

Measurable: How do you measure your success once you have accomplished your goal? Use this tool to list down how you will measure progress and how you will know once your goal is achieved. 

Achievable: Answer tough questions like do you have the expertise, time, money, and resources to achieve this goal?

Relevant: A goal should relate to the situation you are trying to address. It’s important to consider whether achieving this goal contributes to significant business growth?

Timely: Your goals should have deadlines and they should be realistic. This will create urgency and energize you to get the work done without procrastinating.

Action Plans

Using an action plan allows teams to break down long-term goals into specific steps that need to be accomplished along the way. The template provides a visual representation of the new year goal setting process what needs to be accomplished. It lists important dates that need to be kept in mind and highlights what each team member’s responsibility is.

Objectives and Key Results 

Once the team goals are decided, the objective and key results templates help assign individual members with specific tasks. This ensures clarity and avoids duplication of work.

Visual Task Management

Goal setting is just the beginning. Organisational success depends largely on how effectively teams can organize themselves to execute the goals they have set for themselves. Using visual task management tools like Asna and Favro helps you keep track of the various aspects of your project and serve as a central hub where teams can track progress, identify delays, note dependencies, and much more.

Kanban Boards

Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. It enables you to optimise your workflow and can promote focus, boost visibility, and increase productivity. Visual details are displayed in a single place on a Kanban board, minimizing the time spent tracking down progress reports or sitting in status update meetings.

Scrum Boards

Scrum boards are a simple visualisation tool that helps teams plan and execute short, focused tasks that align with larger goals. It provides a daily recap of the status of individual tasks, the progress made and helps identify blockers that are in the way.

Gantt Charts

Gantt charts are a project management tool that teams can use to track the progress of a project and the work that is scheduled to be done on a specific day over the lifetime of the project. It can also help you view the start and end dates of a project in one simple Gantt Chart. It helps teams prioritize tasks and identify which tasks may be holding up others if not completed on time.

Have More Tips on How to Set Goals for the New Year?

Goal setting is both an art and a science. The key is to find techniques that work for your individual teams. You need to constantly track, adjust, and make improvements to the way you set and address your goals. This is what will keep your teams focused and motivated. If you have any goal setting tips that have worked for your team or plans on how you are going to implement them in the future, please let us know in the comments below.

Many businesses quote generalities like, ‘the customer is always right’ or ‘the customer is king’ without truly knowing what it means. Putting the customer first is more than just a motto that hangs on your office walls. A customer-centric strategy needs to be implemented across every level of your business and is a method to structure operations to put the customer experience at the heart of everything you do.

So What is a Customer-Centric Strategy?

A customer-centric approach is simply a way of thinking about your customer and their needs in every business decision you make. It is about understanding ways to better serve them and constantly adding a sense of delight to their experience.

Why is a Customer-Centric Strategy so Important?

Putting your customer’s needs first has positive implications across all aspects of your business. Increasing customer satisfaction is simply a way of investing in your business. 

The concept of customer success is a practice where businesses actively seek out problems or issues faced by customers and solve them before they arise. 

This process leads to greater satisfaction and results in increasing loyalty which translates into a sustainable and more impactful business.

According to research, customers rank it as one of the highest considerations when making their purchase decision.

Source: insightsforprofessionals.com

• 33% of Americans agree that they would consider switching companies after a single instance of poor service. – American Express
• Faced with poor customer service, 20% of consumers would complain publicly via social media. – New Voice Media
• 85% of consumers churn because of poor service that could have been prevented. – Kolsky
• One in three customers would pay more to receive a higher level of service. – Genesys
• 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience. 

5 Visual Tools That Help Better Understand Your Customer

Creating a customer-centric strategy requires an in-depth understanding of your customer, their goals, motivations, desires, and much more. It involves having access to data and making informed decisions. But more importantly, it involves gathering insights into their behavior,  how they respond to different situations, and identifying the actions you can take to maximize customer satisfaction. 

Customer Journey Mapping 

Creating a detailed customer journey map allows you to align your team, uncover new opportunities, and jumpstart your customer-centric strategy. 

It is a visual tool that can provide you with a deep understanding of your customer and their motivations. It allows you to visually represent the various touchpoints where they interact with your product or service and identifies room for improvement.

A customer journey map is a useful tool that answers important questions like

• Who are your key customers?
• What point of the journey is your customer in today?
• Where are they facing challenges?
• What are the touchpoints where you could improve their experience?
• How does your product or service help solve the customer’s problems?

Creating unique and intentionally designed customer journey mapping is critical to putting your customer’s needs first and should be a process adopted by all employees in the organization and built right into the culture.

User Personas

A user persona creator is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s based on user research but contains key psychometric points that help you identify how your customer thinks and behaves. A deep understanding of your ideal customer will influence everything from product design to post transaction support. It helps you uncover ways people search for your business, buy and use your products, and gives you a basis to focus your efforts across multiple areas.

Empathy Maps

This visual tool is great for gaining insights into the mind of the customer. As the name suggests, it allows you to think and feel like the customer to develop a better understanding of the context, psychological and emotional needs. This is a fundamental step in making sure you understand the goals and are solving the right problems.

Empathy map template usually poses the following questions:

• What does the user think and feel? 
• What are their goals and associated fears?
• How would their social circle react to the user using your product?
• What would the user experience in their environment while using your product?
• What does the user say about the product experience?

5 Whys Analysis

This is a great tool to improve customer service. 5 Whys analysis template allows you to get to the root of the problem and address issues in a meaningful way so that you can prevent it from happening again. 

In customer service, putting the customer first involves more than simply saying yes to every demand. It requires a systematic analysis of the issue customers may be facing. It is important to first know who your customer is: understand their questions, needs, and concerns to affect change in a meaningful way.

User Flow Diagrams 

Putting the customer first begins from the conception of the product and in many cases, it involves designing a product around the way a customer may interact with it.

Using user flow diagram tool you can map out the identified customer needs in a systematic manner and create a detailed representation of each stage of their interaction with it.

User flows are most commonly used by product and UX teams and provide a way of thinking about design that centers around a customer, their needs and desires.

Tips for building a customer-centric culture

Service at the core: Traditionally customer service is a task associated with post-sale activities, a shift in this mindset is critical to putting the customer first. This shift requires the service team to think beyond traditional channels, such as phone and email, and meet the customers where they are.

Everyone is responsible: Shaping a customer-centric culture is a responsibility that belongs to the entire organization. It is not a task that falls to a particular department. Customers don’t care about organizational charts when they interact with a company; all they perceive, and associate with the brand, is the experience they have.

Proactive, not reactive: Putting the customer first involves solving problems before they take place. This approach is one where service and product teams understand customer needs well enough to anticipate issues that may arise and devise meaningful solutions.

Personalised: In a customer-centric model companies don’t treat their consumers as a broad demographic or a random data set. You need to gather rich insights and understand the individual relationships each customer has with your product.