An oft-repeated quote, ‘IT teams don’t understand our pain points’ - even though this is pointed towards internal IT teams by their internal Enterprise Customers, it is common knowledge that most technical teams are far more interested in their technology implementation than customer’s challenges. This is where we at Rhybus are different. One of our core motivations is ‘Functional Empathy’ - defined within our manifesto and broken down into the following five areas:

1. Begin with the end in mind: ‘Customer’s Success’: In a process implementation, success is not some esoteric term, but a well defined clearly understood, prioritized business factors which then become the central theme of a Rhybus implementation.

2. Understand the customer, their organization and culture: Each customer is unique and different; and while the same words are used in a business context, say, ‘Budget’, ‘Procurement’ - they all have different connotations with different customers. Organizational growth is not consistent across any two organizations. We strongly believe in understanding these differences and in doing so, our core focus is to help them standardize their processes while preserving their uniqueness.

3. Engage in genuine ‘search for the Holy Grail’ discovery conversations: ‘The devil is always in the details’ - we bring critical questioning into our discovery efforts. We focus in asking essential questions using the Familiar Five - What, Where, Why, When, How. This is done to elicit granular, and intricate details that may otherwise get discovered after an implementation. This is a key factor in creating ‘customer success’.

4. Understand expectations: Often, expectations are not always aligned between Stakeholders, Subject Matter Experts and actual End-Users. We understand this, and try to clarify the details with each constituent. We then focus on the best way to align (read, innovate) the process solution. In our experience, these gaps are part of organizational growth and the ability to map each constituent’s needs back to the success factors will help in ensuring expectations are managed effectively.

5. Drive engaged implementations: Our focus is to be in touch with our users as frequently as possible. Through monthly demos, giving access to the implementations very early, we try to capture our user’s feedback and knowledge. Hence, by the time we get to launch, most of our users are familiar with the system, need minimal training and are looking forward to using it because they know that their feedback is what created it. So ‘Functional Empathy’ is not just a term, but our key driving force in creating lasting ‘customer success’.

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--Venu Yerra, CEO, Lead Change Agent