How DevOps Can Help in Improving Customer Satisfaction

Source – customerthink.com

The advent of Digital Revolution has changed, not only the way people live their lives, but also the way businesses interact and reach out to their customers. In fact, major overhauls have occurred in terms of giving overall customer satisfaction, particularly in the technological aspect of a 21st-century company.

These advancements in technology is widely influenced by the emergence of new consumer markets. These markets are composed of Millennials and Generation Z (Gen Z). By this time, it’s quite clear to everyone that these two generations are totally different from their predecessors. They are distinct in the way they think, their means of communication, and in their overall preference. Millennials and Gen Z are both unique demographics that businesses and marketers are still trying to fully comprehend.

However, there’s a good reason for the persistence of companies to take hold of these two young generations because, by 2020, Millennials will account for one in three adults while Gen Z will account for about 40 percent of the whole consumer population. With that in mind, organizations are trying their best to stay relevant in order to reach out this significant consumer market. And one way that they are doing that is by entering the digitalized world through mobile applications and other software-based products and services.

With the ever-increasing dependence of individuals to their smartphones, mobile apps have already become a mainstream need for businesses worldwide. In fact, statistics show that more than 80% of business owners believe that having their own and customized mobile apps immensely helped their companies in earning additional ROIs. In another survey, researchers determined that the top three reasons why companies are adopting mobile apps are to increase their sales, improve their customer experience, and be more competitive in the market.

There’s no denying that mobile app programming and mobile apps are two of the biggest drivers of business growth in today’s highly digital economy. But there’s a downside to this trend and that is the changing face of competition when it comes to customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Today, people will easily equate your company with how your mobile app works. If your app has a lot of bugs and errors, consumers will use it as baseline measure to judge the quality of the service you can give. There’s a demand for companies to produce mobile applications that will allow them to learn more about their customers, provide prompt feedback, and give the customers the experience that they want. Failure to do this might result in a loss of sales or even bad reputation about their products and services.

The demand of consumers on great apps and a software-based product is a bottleneck. It’s an area where a lot of enterprises are having difficulty dealing with. Major companies are throwing billions of dollars for their R&D investments, yet only a measly 30 percent of executives are satisfied regarding their speed in converting ideas into market-ready products. One of the major reason for this situation is the inability of personnel in the overall IT Department, particularly those who work in developing software and those whose jobs are to operate it, to work in sync with one another. With the inability to produce timely products based on customer feedback, failure to repair bugs and errors found in mobile apps, and ineffectiveness to stand up to competition in terms of quality, customer satisfaction is put at stake.

These prevailing issues and challenges are the reason why DevOps is born. Coined in 2009, DevOps, which is short for “development” and “operation,” is a wide umbrella of technology-based discipline, practices, and culture that emphasizes the need for communication, collaboration, and synergy by bringing together software developers and operation personnel in a common goal. It highlights the importance of interdependence by removing the traditional barriers that exist between these two departments practically making them one in terms of mission and vision.

The idea behind this is that when these two departments worked together in a collaborative manner, use agile principles, and create more automatic processes, then the cooperation will lead to shorter development cycles, faster production of products, overall lower costs, and a stronger competitive edge against companies who are engaged in traditional development practices. No wonder why a lot of companies today are investing significant amount of money to bring their personnel to DevOps Foundation training for them to adapt the highly advantageous culture of DevOps in their organizations.

A global study conducted by CA Technologies revealed that adopters of DevOps methodology experience up to 52 percent in customer satisfaction. Here are some reasons why:

1. Faster customer feedback and response
The sheer number of mobile apps and other software-based products in existence have altered the competitive landscape in terms of customer loyalty. Consumers today expect that a business will respond quickly and will handle their complaints, questions, and suggestions as fast as possible. If a company won’t be able to answer the demand, then the consumer will simply switch to other options and might choose to do business with a competitor instead. With the integrated and frequent feedback loop system of a DevOps company, mobile apps support have the capability to fix bugs and errors in no time.

2. Products are made and delivered rapidly
Gone are the days when a competitor will produce a cutting-edge product and a rival company will take months or even years just to come up with their own creation that matches the quality of the first product. By eliminating routine tasks, streamlining the processes and automating most of its activities, a company that adopts a DevOps culture can produce a product at lightning speed. In other words, it reduced the time required for software delivery. That’s the reason why technological innovations are now happening in a matter of days or weeks. And with new and improved products that are according to customer preferences, the customer satisfaction will be taken care of.

3. Lower price for products
One of the main benefits of using DevOps is the shorter time that is needed for production, operation, delivery, and feedback. With the reduced cycle time that is being spent, the cost to create the product is also lowered. This reduction in cost translates to lower prices that consumers have to pay.

Indeed, DevOps did not only remove the traditional barrier between developers and operators, it also provided a way for companies to adjust to changing consumer demands and thus massively affect the enterprise’s ability to influence customer satisfaction.