By Jeremy Gillespie
Customer Success is about delivering ongoing value and continued success to your customers. But, how do Customer Success teams deliver ongoing value to their customers?
While each CS team is trying to deliver different value, the process is the same for all teams: Map out your customer journey and define the value you want to deliver at stage of the journey.
*Image from Totango
In my last post, I briefly touched on the Customer Journey. Today, I’m going to show you how to build your own Customer Journey Map:
1. Define the goals - What good is a map, if you don’t know where you want to go? Be very specific about the goals for your journey. Make them clear, concise and concrete. Goals should be measurable and easy for everyone in the company to understand. If you can’t capture it in a Tweet, it’s probably not well defined. For example, "Double the number of users in each account." is a great goal. You'll probably have several.
2. Research - Build your map using data and key insights. Start your research with:
Hard data – look at product usage, tickets, renewal rates, surveys, etc.
Customer feedback – go to the source and include their feedback in your map. Note: customers have different definitions of success across their lifecycle, so make sure to gather feedback from a wide variety of customers.
CS Team – your Customer Success reps hear from customers, day in and day out. Use their feedback to develop your map.
3. Develop a timeline – start to build your map and define touch-points along the journey. At each of these touchpoints, there must be a desired outcome. Remember, customers have different definitions of success, so work with them to define the timeframe and desired outcome for each step.
4. Define plays and processes – Build a playbook by defining the actions each CS Manager should take at each touchpoint. Each of these plays should be built with making sure the customer is achieving value across their journey. Team processes will come out of playbook and will provide the structure and consistency to make sure there is a uniform customer experience.
5. Implement – now that you have a map and a plan, put it to work. Whether you have the tools in place to automate a lot of this or you need to manually build reports, get going. The sooner you implement the sooner you’ll see results.
Remember, this is not a one-time exercise, it is an iterative process that you should be measuring and tweaking on an ongoing basis. By revisiting these five steps whenever there are changes to your customer base, you'll be able to optimize the value that you're delivering to customers.
Need help mapping the customer journey for your client base? The Success League helps companies unlock their potential by transforming customer support into customer success. www.TheSuccessLeague.io
Jeremy Gillespie - Jeremy is a growth-oriented marketing geek, technology enthusiast and customer evangelist. He loves using complex data to build creative retention solutions. By leveraging technology, Jeremy excels at creating scalable retention marketing programs. He works for LinkedIn, holds a BA in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh and MBA from Point Park University. He is a proud former Pittsburgher, but currently lives in San Francisco, CA.