Customer pain points and unmet needs - these are nothing new to marketers and product managers. It’s how we go about trying to discover and solve them that is changing, and changing for the better.
Experian’s AgileWorks team is focused on finding and solving problems by creating an agile culture amongst product development teams in Experian’s Business Information Services (BIS) group.
In fact, an agile culture and “Lean Startup” mindset are permeating across Experian – spearheaded by groups like AgileWorks and the Experian DataLabs. The DataLabs, recently mentioned by Harvard Business Review, is a team of dedicated problem solvers that uses client problems as a launch pad to develop new services.
One focus area for the AgileWorks team is finding problems experienced by a core group of BIS customers: commercial credit managers. AgileWorks found that trade credit managers were spending far too much time managing the systems and tools their teams used to approve new customers, which cuts into their ability to focus on their core responsibility: making better credit decisions.
“The key issue is that our tools are so fragmented. There are too many one-off solutions… My job is not to be a system administrator… I need to focus on how to make better credit decisions. What would be great is a holistic solution that does everything under the sun and does it well.”
AgileWorks sees the API Portal at developer.experian.com as the core of a “holistic solution that does everything under the sun and does it well”. By consolidating Experian’s data into a single API portal, Experian can help its credit managers get back to doing what they do best – making the kind of credit decisions that are the best for their business.