How To Build a Successful Customer Journey - Only in Five Steps!
Before we even get started with how to build a successful customer journey, let’s dig into why we even need a customer journey plan in the first place?
One of the most important things that the Customer Success team is responsible for is making sure the customers see the value of your product and the capabilities of your product is providing value to the overall business goals of your customers’ company.
I cannot emphasize enough how building a customer journey for your customer segments can be fundamental for you to build a successful customer portfolio along with setting your CS team for success. Not having a customer journey in place would be like cooking Paella for 100 people without even measuring any of the ingredients. It would be a disaster, right? The same principle applies here, as well.
The customer journey is basically your account strategy to make sure your customer goes through the steps you want them to take to be able to get the most out of your product, so your customers can renew with you and build a long term relationship with your company.
There are ground rules when it comes to building the most efficient customer journey as your product and the type of customers you work with change in every industry. However, in this post, I would like to cover B2B customers within the SaaS business.
First and foremost, you need to segment your clients and understand the overall goals of your business and how this has an impact on your customer success team.
If you aren’t managing a team of CSMs, it’s totally fine. This rule will apply to individual CSM contributors to make a significant impact, as well.
Ask yourself, what is the goal of your company in the first place? Are you reducing churn, and increasing the number of Enterprise customers? Are you shifting the focus on emerging SMB customers to earn more revenue in scale?
As you can see, all these questions are directing you to answer what your focus is going to be to make sure your company is achieving its internal goals.
Depending on your answers, your goal might be focusing on your critical enterprise account’s renewal or increasing their health score, this will require a more detailed customer journey due to the scale of your customers whereas, SMB & Midmarket clients will require a totally different level of support, maybe more towards thought leadership in the industry your product is in. You get the idea.
To be able to give a more holistic approach, I will focus on how to build a customer journey for Enterprise clients.
Step by step, let’s build an example of a 360 customer journey, ready?
STEP 1: Kickoff
Kickoff step is the most crucial step as most of the time; it is the first encounter your customers will have with your customer success team. So we all know how the first impression is the most crucial one, especially when it comes to Customer Success.
Kicking off a meeting or phone call with your client is the first step where you identify transparent handoff between departments. Now your customer is ready to meet the point of contact with your company moving forward.
Here is a sample agenda to get you started:
Team Introductions: Meeting your stakeholders such as power users, champions, and executive stakeholders who made the purchasing decision with the recommendation of your advocate user is the key to any kickoff meeting. Kickoff sessions will help you map out your account strategy and pursue user-based training, or communicate with the right person depending on the context. For this purpose, you may want to get a list of the attendees who will be joining the meeting or the call and then list their roles and responsibilities and what you think their goals are with your platform. This way, you will be able to perform kickoff in a way more personalized approach.
Business goals of your customer: This is the backbone of the whole meeting and why you are having the kickoff in the first place. Make sure you spend a reasonable amount of time here and really try to give the majority of the time to your customers and lead them to express their intention with using your product. The business goals section is about the KPIs of your customers and what they are trying to achieve by using your product. You may want to fill in before the meeting which is always an excellent way to spark more in-depth and genuine conversations as your customer notices you did your homework.
Client challenges & Obstacles: This could be simply the reason why your customer needs your product in the first place. This will help you find out if there are any challenges internally for your customer which can hold them back from being successful at leveraging the capabilities of your product.
Project Timeline: Sharing the rest of the customer journey with your stakeholders goes a long way as this journey gives your customer a clear understanding of the next steps and the expectations of you from your customers moving forward.
Next steps: This is your chance to own this project and communicate how important it is to set the expectations and share the list of action items from that meeting, so everyone leaves the session with a clear to-do list in their mind. Yes, this part of the kickoff meeting is going to make your life much easier as your customer will be already familiar with the action items she/he has to take right after this meeting until the next time you engage with them.
STEP 2: Account Set-Up & Onboarding
Getting the users to access the platform can be helpful for the customers to log in right away as they're usually anxious about getting their hands on the tool and playing around or poking around right away. Also, allowing them to explore the platform before the training will allow the user to come prepared with questions. The initial setup can help your customers to see the value of the product right away because they can see their own data and insights, but this may not apply to every onboarding, as it varies depending on the product.
STEP 3: Training Planning & Scheduling
The agenda for training calls and onsite meetings can vary depending on the length of the training, the size of the account, and the format of the practice. At this point, before even planning your customer journey, it is highly recommended to have a training plan in place for different sizes of accounts, as this is the key to success for adoption for any customer success team. If you don’t have a format in place, and you are a newly hired customer success manager, which is fine! Don’t get stressed. First things first, talk to your peer CSMs and ask them their best practices with different types of customers and help your team build that format that works for your company and make that contribution to your CS team!
STEP 4: Account Strategy & Planning
At this stage, you should have gathered enough information to kickstart your account planning and strategy to move the customer engagements in the desired direction. Again, with your key accounts, you would always want to have an account strategy as these key accounts are promising engagements for your company’s mission and goals. These goals will be discussed and shared during business reviews and executive meetings; therefore you would want to start working on the account strategy before you schedule a business review session or any executive meeting.
STEP 5: Ongoing Customer Engagement
Once your customer’s account is up and running, the training sessions are completed, now you are onto the “Ongoing Customer Engagement” phase. Mainly, this phase creates a significant impact on Enterprise clients, as this is the phase that leads to a successful renewal process.
Here are some of the potential ways to keep your customers engaged during this phase:
Checking User Logins, Time Spent on the Platform, and Product Analytics overall: As you finished the training for your customer, the first thing you want to make sure is to check all the account logins and see if everyone from your customers’ team is onboard. The next step varies between different products but mainly focuses on how your customers are using the platform and the different use cases and patterns you see in product usage. Some users have different ways of using the product, which can give you a lot of insights into their goals and how they leverage the platform. Product usage analysis is where you can gain insights into new potential use cases and share these insights with your internal team, which could actually help you build a list of different and unique use cases.
Business Reviews: I would say Business Reviews are the best form of engaging with your customers, especially if they are in-person meetings. This is where you can do a pulse check and see how your customer’s experience has been so far with the product, gather product feedback, listen to how they have been levering some of the core capabilities of the platform, evaluate if there are any capabilities that are not leveraged and see if your customer is facing any obstacles to success. Also, this is a great opportunity to circle back on the customer's KPIs and if your customer is on the right track towards achieving these KPIs, or changes in your customer's goals.
Upgrade & Upsell & Renewal Conversations: At this stage, you should at least have an idea of your customer’s state and how they want to move forward with your services. It could be only a renewal, or your client may want to upgrade their current plan and get a more comprehensive offering from you. Or maybe, your champion is ready to pitch your product and share how significant milestones they achieved by leveraging the capabilities of the platform internally, which may then lead t an expansion opportunity. All these details are mainly shared in business reviews, and as a follow-up, you need to keep these conversations going by sharing a clear timeline and seeing this step as a delicate project to manage as this is where you can make a big difference and see the fruits of your hard work.
The best way to ensure you have a high-performing customer journey is to prepare your CS team and share the goal behind this customer journey so that your CS team is aware of your company’s ultimate goal and how they can achieve this by implementing every step of the customer journey with no hesitation.
Do you have questions and want to learn more about how to build a customer journey for your customers? Feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin.