How Aezion Gets it right and Makes it right
The Aezion credo is captured in The Aezion promise: We get it right. We make it right.
Getting it right means (1) investing the effort required to truly understand Customer needs and what success looks like and (2) unambiguously confirming our understanding of Customer needs and success criteria before we begin building a solution.
Making it right means doing what is required to deliver on the promises we make to Customers — delivering the specified functional and non-functional solution components on time and within budget.
We put this promise into action each day with one goal in mind: to deliver value that transforms clients into life long partners. The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated us to redouble our commitment to make this promise real each day. To explain why I need to set the context.
We began 2020 with a plan, driven by optimism and determination to challenge ourselves to be be a better company by being better at delivering results that matter to clients, and to be better individuals by being vessels of light to our customers, our communities, our team mates and our families. This plan included deliverables, expectations and KPIs by quarter. The COVID-19 pandemic emerged as we started gaining traction in Q12020 .. and rendered much of that plan moot for us. Many of our Customers experienced the same dynamic.
We recalibrated growth expectations and began contingency planning for negative growth as businesses in many sectors began pulling back and shutting down. It is an understatement to say that 2020 was a year of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, but one clear, and unambiguous bright spot emerged for us: Our Customers.
- Even as many struggled to find their own way through uncertainty, our Customers thought of us and went the extra mile to find ways to keep us working on key projects which kept us afloat.
- As members of our team were personally impacted by COVID, our Customers showed us kindness and empathy.
- When some schedules slipped, we were shown tolerance, patience and grace.
In short, our Customers provided unexpected assistance and treated us as key partners when we were expecting to have to go it alone through this uncertain period. Our Customers provided tangible examples of the kind of partners we aspire to be, and experiencing their graciousness has motivated us to work even harder to achieve our aspirations of being that lifelong partner to all of our Customers. So, in this inaugural post on the new Aezion website I would like to share some of what we have done to move closer towards our ideal of Getting it right, Making it right and doing all we can to becoming even better partners to our Customers.
Process Improvements
We have conducted an end to end review of our core processes from sales engagement to software delivery, ongoing application support, invoicing and billing. The goal of this review was singular: Identify opportunities to improve our ability to “get it right”and “make it right” for our Customers and integrate these changes into The Aezion Way, our end-to-end process guide. I’m happy to report that we have identified numerous improvement opportunities that we will be implementing throughout the year. Most of these changes involve removing friction in internal processes, and the effect seen by Customers will be improved customer experience. Our Customer Success Manager will coordinate with Customers whenever any of these these process changes impact existing Customer routines.
Internal Tools
Our internal tooling is essential to institutionalizing process excellence. We have been working diligently to improve our enterprise resource planning tool to improve every aspect of service delivery from requirements management to estimation, resource management, sprint planning, software development, integration, testing, infrastructure management, software deployment, analysis and reporting. Over the course of the year we will be rolling out a number of enhancements to our toolset to further enhance our ability to “get it right”and “make it right” consistently and repeatedly for every Customer. Similar to our process Improvements efforts, these changes affect the removal of internal friction and the observed effect for Customers will be improved Customer experience.
Customer Success Metrics
We have also invested energy into identifying improvements to the Customer feedback process. Our goal is to deploy lightweight, actionable feedback mechanisms that provide in-flight visibility into the experience of each Customer. These measures will provide actionable, objective indicators of Customer experience for each Customer throughout the Customer lifecycle. We have settled upon two simple but very effective customer success measures: Transactional CSAT and Relationship Net Promoter Score (rNPS). Transactional Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys allow us to receive near-real-time feedback of Customer experience for key transactions. rNPS allows us to measure the impact of our collective effort to build lifelong partnerships with Aezion Customers. Our Customer Success Manager will coordinate CSAT and rNPS rollout with Customers.
New Aezion Website
Aezion culture is one of constant improvement and renewal. While we work to improve internally — our processes, systems, key metrics, offerings, knowledge and behaviors — we are also mindful of the importance of communicating our growth. Our updated website is intended to convey some of our growth while reinforcing our timeless and enduring foundation — the values that motivate us to do what we do. We encourage you to take a look, provide feedback and share it with your colleagues who can use a trusted software development partner.