What’s driving your team—customer experience or task completion?
If your team’s goal is to “get things done,” you’re likely stuck on the task treadmill. And you’re not to blame. Customer expectations are increasing with each passing day, and keeping up with their expectations is crucial for any business.
But in this race to keep up, businesses often find themselves trapped on a treadmill of endless tasks, losing sight of their ultimate goals. This is especially true for customer-facing (Customer Success and Customer Support) teams, who are dealing with increasing complexity, siloed information, and inefficient processes.
The solution here lies not in just another tool but in rethinking how you work. This is where the Essential Methodology offers a refreshing approach to drive customer-centric growth through better prioritization based on data.
Understanding the Essential Methodology
The Essential Methodology is a response to the prevalent “do more, do more” mentality that has dominated in recent years driven by the use of agile practices.
While agile methodologies have pushed teams to complete as many tasks as possible in short time frames, they may have lost sight of what actually matters: creating exceptional customer experiences.
So, the Essential Methodology addresses the shortcomings by shifting the focus on customer needs in every step. This is very much in tune with Amazon’s Working Backwards process as described in the book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. The process involves starting with the desired outcome and working backward until the team knows what to build to achieve the desired customer experience. For instance, as part of this process, Amazon writes a press release for a product before beginning development. The key similarity between Working Backwards and the Essential Methodology is the unrelenting emphasis on customer-centricity.
The Essential Methodology is built on three key components:
1. Customer-centricity:
Making customer insights and data accessible to all teams within an organization. The goal is to break down silos and ensure that customer context and history are available to everyone, without recency bias.
Example: Instead of manually analyzing support tickets or digging through Jira issues for customer insights, teams can use AI-powered tools to cluster and surface relevant customer information across the organization.
2. Product-led growth:
Creating automations and using AI agents for repeatable, scalable processes. It’s about making sure when you do something once, you don’t do it manually again.
Example: Customer Success teams often have to be the first line of defense when a customer needs help, what if that inquiry for help were automatically routed to the right person, instead of just the person your customer knows?
3. AI-native approach:
A company that embraces AI-native solutions looks for opportunities to drive efficiency related to three key aspects:
- Deflect: The most commonly understood/used AI concept in Support, when a knowledge base can be used to provide efficient customer self-service via chat or a help center search.
- Common pitfalls: Deflected information links back to a full article and the user cannot find their answer; chat responses are limited to a simple workflow and any deviation errors out.
- Discern: Making connections between different pieces of information, and finding patterns and clustering similar or like items to reveal trends and commonalities. For example, AI can link similar tickets from a single or across customers to reveal a recurring problem, or suggest prioritization when it comes to engineering work items that apply to certain customer requests.
- Common pitfalls: Data accessible to your AI model is limited to only a certain team, type of work, etc. and therefore cannot connect information across customers, support and engineering work.
- Deduplicate: Utilizing AI to find dirty data and help proactively maintain clean, consistent data. Consider this: Instead of manually cleaning and deduplicating customer account data within your CRM, the system automatically identifies and resolves duplicates, ensuring data consistency.
The Essential Methodology also emphasizes the importance of simplification. It’s very easy to make things complex, as my favorite quote from Mark Twain demonstrates, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” This methodology encourages teams to distill problems down to their most basic, foundational elements, similar to first-principles thinking.
By adopting the Essential methodology, businesses can shift from a project-based mindset to a product-oriented approach by working backwards from the desired customer-centric outcome. This approach ensures that teams focus on building scalable, repeatable solutions that truly serve customer needs, rather than just completing the next task on their list.
Computer: Powering the Essential Methodology
Computer, by DevRev, is an AI native business system that brings all your data, work, and customer context together in one connected environment. Built on unified memory and powered by real-time Search, Workflows, and Analytics, Computer helps teams practice the Essential Methodology by focusing on what truly moves the customer experience forward.
1. Intelligent Search
Computer Search lets teams retrieve the right information instantly, no matter where it lives. Whether it is support conversations, product insights, engineering work, or account activity, Computer connects everything through unified memory. Customer facing teams can access complete, contextual insights at their keystrokes, enabling fast, accurate decisions and improving self service for users who want answers without having to depend on support.
2. Proactive Workflows
Computer Workflows automate repetitive tasks and reduce operational overhead, giving teams more space to focus on high value work. These workflows are designed for scale and follow a product led approach, helping teams replace scattered manual processes with reliable, repeatable automations. As user behavior changes in real time, Workflows ensure the product adapts and customer experience remains consistent.
3. Advanced Analytics
Computer Analytics provides natural language insights into customer behavior, product performance, and operational health. Teams can use simple text queries to analyze data, create visualizations, and surface trends without needing SQL or BI expertise. This makes decision making faster, clearer, and grounded in accurate, connected data that reflects the entire customer and product journey.
The Impact of Computer on business operations
1. Reduced complexity
By unifying data and surfacing insights through Search and Analytics, Computer removes the need for disconnected tools and complex integrations. Decision making becomes clearer and faster.
2. Better cross functional alignment
With shared access to customer context, teams can prioritize together, act confidently, and eliminate the information gaps that slow down execution.
3. Higher operational efficiency
Automated Workflows and instant Search reduce manual work across support, product, engineering, and growth teams, giving them time to focus on meaningful outcomes.
4. Stronger data driven decisions
Real time Analytics lets teams answer questions instantly and align on actions backed by accurate, connected data.
5. Scalable customer support
With fast self service, pattern detection, and smarter routing, Computer helps businesses scale support without scaling headcount, improving both speed and customer satisfaction.
Simplify, focus, and scale
In an era where businesses are constantly pushed to do more, the Essential Methodology, powered by Computer, offers a path to meaningful simplification and customer-centric growth.
By leveraging AI and comprehensive data integration, Computer helps businesses move away from the “task treadmill” and towards a more strategic, product-led approach that truly serves their customers’ needs.
Learn more on how you can deliver maximum value to your customers by doing fewer things but better in our The Essentialist Methodology whitepaper.
