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Evaluate external customer needs

Evaluating external customer needs is fundamental for aligning operational priorities with the expectations and requirements of the people using your services. Involving key stakeholders, including business, development, and operations teams, ensures that you have a thorough understanding of what customers need from your workloads. This process helps prioritize efforts to meet external customer demands and ensures that your operations are designed to support desired business outcomes.

Involve Stakeholders to Understand Customer Requirements

  • Engage Key Stakeholders: Collaborate with stakeholders from product, business, operations, and development teams to gather comprehensive insights into external customer needs. Conduct workshops, surveys, and regular meetings with customer-facing teams to obtain a detailed understanding of customer expectations.
  • Analyze Customer Feedback: Utilize feedback from customers gathered through support tickets, customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT), reviews, or direct interviews. This information provides insight into what features or services are most valuable to customers and where there are gaps in your current offerings.

Align Operational Efforts with Customer Expectations

  • Customer-Centric Metrics: Use metrics like response times, service availability, and feature adoption to measure how well operations meet customer needs. Align operational KPIs to ensure that service delivery, performance, and support are optimized for customer satisfaction.
  • Operational Planning Based on Feedback: Once customer needs are clearly identified, adjust your operational plans to address any pain points or prioritize features and services that are most important to your customers. This includes enhancing incident response processes or increasing focus on the operational reliability of high-value features.

Prioritize Based on Business Impact

  • Assess Customer Value and Business Alignment: Evaluate which customer needs have the highest impact on both customer satisfaction and business success. Prioritize efforts that improve the customer experience while driving business growth, such as features that lead to higher customer retention or satisfaction.
  • Impact Analysis of Unmet Needs: Assess the risks and potential negative impacts of not addressing certain customer requirements. Prioritize needs that, if unmet, could result in service disruption, customer dissatisfaction, or potential business loss.

Regularly Review and Update Priorities

  • Ongoing Customer Feedback Loops: Establish regular processes for reviewing customer feedback and operational data to ensure that priorities evolve in line with changing customer expectations. Periodic check-ins with key stakeholders will help refine operations as customer needs shift.
  • Stay Adaptable to Market Changes: Keep up with industry trends, competitor offerings, and new technologies to ensure that your services remain competitive and relevant. Adjust your operational priorities based on market shifts that could influence customer preferences.

Support Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Encourage collaboration between development, operations, and customer-facing teams to ensure that customer needs are addressed in a comprehensive and holistic manner. Regular communication across teams can help avoid misalignment and ensure that all departments are working towards the same customer-centric goals.
  • Customer-First Operations: Embed a culture of customer-first thinking within your operational teams, where decision-making and priority-setting are influenced directly by customer feedback and external needs.

Supporting Questions

  • What are your key customer-facing services, and how do they drive business value?
  • How do you gather and prioritize customer feedback to ensure your architecture aligns with external user expectations?
  • Are there any performance, reliability, or scalability requirements from your external customers that influence your priorities?
  • What metrics are used to measure the effectiveness of operational support for external customers?
  • How do you measure customer satisfaction, and how does it impact your operational priorities?
  • How do you ensure cross-functional teams are aligned on addressing customer priorities?

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Product Manager (or Product Owner):
    • Responsibilities:
      • Engage with external customers to gather feedback.
      • Define customer-centric requirements and priorities.
      • Analyze customer feedback to determine high-priority needs.
      • Ensure that product features and performance align with customer expectations and business value.
      • Balance user experience (UX) and feature priorities based on market and customer needs.
  • Operations Manager:
    • Responsibilities:
      • Align operational activities with prioritized customer needs.
  • Customer Success/Support Team:
    • Responsibilities:
      • Relay customer issues, needs, and pain points to the development and product teams.
      • Provide insights into customer usage patterns and feedback.
      • Participate in discussions about customer impact on architectural or service decisions.

Artefacts

  • Customer Requirement Documents (CRDs): Document the needs, expectations, and feedback from external customers that inform the architecture and service priorities.
  • Customer Impact Reports: Analysis reports of how operational activities affect customer satisfaction, feature adoption, and retention rates, including key metrics like availability and response times.
  • List of Customer Journeys: Create a list of Customer Journeys that need to be considered as part of the solution
  • User Stories & Acceptance Criteria: Capture customer needs in agile user stories with well-defined acceptance criteria to guide development.
  • Customer Feedback Reports: Periodic reports documenting customer satisfaction, complaints, and product/service usage patterns to prioritize improvements.
  • Customer Journey Maps: Visual documentation of the customer’s interactions with the product, showing pain points and areas for improvement.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration Meeting Records: Documentation of stakeholder meetings and discussions, summarizing decisions and actions to prioritize customer requirements.
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