Customer Distance Index (CDI)
The Customer Distance Index (CDI), developed by Allan Rennebo Jepsen in 2018, is a dynamic KPI aimed at assessing an organization’s responsiveness to customer needs, ultimately elevating the relevance of its products and services. This KPI sheds light on how challenging it is for agile teams to build customer-centric solutions by gauging their direct engagement with customers and end-users.
Key insights about Customer Distance Index:
- Systemic KPI: CDI focuses on improving the organizational system and its ability to act.
- Customer insights: Emphasizing CDI helps organizations gain and enhance their understanding of customer needs and desires, effectively incorporating these insights into their offerings.
- Increased adaptability: By bringing the customer insights directly to the agile teams, it enables them to quickly respond to changing needs and continuously optimize the user experience.
- Enhanced dialogue: Easier access to customers fosters more frequent and valuable direct engagements between agile teams and customers.
- Better products: Empowered with customer insights, teams not only know what to build but also how to craft products that genuinely excite customers and users.
How it is calculated:
- CDI (Customer Distance Index): The average number of interactions needed for a team to directly interact with customers and end-users.
- n: the number of agile teams
- Interactions: the number of interactions required before the team is in direct dialog with real customers and users. Interactions within an agile team are not counted.
To truly enable Business Agility, an organization should be able to retain a Customer Distance Index of 0.
Click here to take a deeper look into Customer Distance Index : Unleashing Business Agility with the Customer Distance Index (CDI).
Unleashing Adaptability with CDI and DDI
When coupled with the Decision Distance Index (DDI), CDI becomes a powerful tool for continuously enhancing adaptability. Organizations can effectively respond to changing market needs and conditions.
If you want to learn more about how to best introduce the Customer Distance Index in your organization, then simply click on “I want to know more!”.