From the moment a customer hears about your company or sees something about it in search engine results, they are on a journey with you.

You hope the journey takes them beyond their initial search, and they decide to trial and ultimately purchase your software. Pleased with your solution, they’ll renew annually and advocate for you. They rely on your services and become big supporters.

(Yan Krukau / pexels)

By mapping out your customers’ journeys—putting it down in writing—you can help more of them achieve this kind of success faster. Why? Because you can not only get alignment on the plan before a customer onboards to your solution, but also because you can adjust as time passes to ensure your customers stay on the right track.

Understanding customer journey maps

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The customer journey includes every stage the customer goes through when interacting with your product or service, from initial interest all the way through purchase, retention, and advocacy.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of customer engagement with your company. In it, you’ll find customer attitudes, needs, interactions and problems from their first engagement to purchasing and beyond.

By understanding and supporting their journey, you can empower them to succeed.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

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• Improve customer experience—A visual representation of the customer journey helps you gain deeper insight into where your customers experience friction. You get to examine every step, looking at the balance between what you want a customer to do versus what they are empowered and supported to do.
• Keep customers at the heart of decisions—You have so many irons in the fire (e.g. Product, Sales, Marketing, etc.) that the crux of why you exist (helping your customers with their needs) can sometimes get lost in the shuffle. By mapping their journey, you can better maintain your customer-centric philosophy and avoid losing sight of the big picture.
• Predict behavior—As a customer goes through each step in their journey, you might notice trends; for example, how the company reacts to new information. At a macro level, you’ll also begin to notice overall trends about what a company or internal champion might need in order to move to the next step in the customer journey. All this insight helps you become more predictive, anticipating what a customer needs rather than showing them the map and hoping for the best.
• Stronger churn analysis—Over time, you’ll begin to see what stages customers got stuck (or churned on). Combined with a high-quality churn post-mortem, you’ll be in a much better position to understand the reasons behind customer churn. From there, you can put a number on it, for instance the number of customers churning (with their average contract values) at each step in the customer journey. With this insight, you can develop new resources or push internally for Product to build a feature or address a problem.
• Increase profits—Examine touchpoints to drive gains. Identify opportunities to expand your client’s service. Prevent pitfalls to improve usage. Your well-timed and convenient approaches enhance retention rates and reduce churn.

How to create customer journey maps

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Creating an accurate journey map requires you to put yourself in your customers’ shoes to see steps, milestones and goals from their point of view.

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Step 1: Understand the lifecycle

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From purchasing through renewal, the lifecycle is what happens to your customer as they interact with you and your product from an internal perspective.

Generally speaking, all customers go through a similar lifecycle—though their experiences will have unique elements.

Brand Awareness→Purchase→Onboarding→Adoption→Retention→Expansion→Loyalty

Recognizing the progression of your customers’ lifecycles allows you to make a plan for engagement for each stage, which in turn, helps you personalize across every touchpoint.

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Step 2: Identify customer personas

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Personas embody the essential characteristics found within your broader audience. Get to know them and understand their view of success. For example, maybe young start-ups gravitate toward your base-tier service, while the C-suite finds your enterprise package attractive.

There’s a chance you may only have one ‘type’ of buyer, but usually, there are several. These well-rounded profiles represent your ideal customers and should be based on market and target audience research.

Consider including the following in your buyer personas:

• Demographic and psychographic profiles
• Behaviors
• Values
• Desires
• Pain points
• Associations with other organizations

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Step 3: Set clear goals for each persona

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What signals “success”?  How do you–and, more importantly, how does your customer–know when they are ready to move into the next step?

For each step in the customer lifecycle (internal), document that that looks like from the customer’s perspective (their journey). Within each, document what “success” looks like so you know what to look for when qualifying a customer for the next step in the journey.

For example, one persona might follow this path:

• Brand awareness → signing up for the company newsletter.
• Purchase → buying a paid plan (trials don’t count).
• Onboarding → adding a minimum of five users.
• Adoption → doing a specific action (e.g. sending a document or sharing something externally using your platform).
• Retention → the action or basket of actions that, when a customer does it, they are highly likely to renew.
• Expansion → the action or basket of actions that, when a customer does it, indicates they are getting significant value from your platform and might be a Customer Success Qualified Lead (CSQL) for expansion.
• Loyalty → when a customer has a good CSAT score and you send them a prompt to leave a G2 review… and they do!

Another persona–for instance, an enterprise buyer–might follow a different path, with awareness stemming from cold outreach or ebook download rather than a newsletter sign up.

Step 4: Identify customer touch points

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A touch point is anywhere the client interacts with your business. List out all areas and be as detailed as possible. A few common ones include:

• Mobile app login page
• Home page
• Landing page
• Pricing page
• Sales page
• Sign-up page
• Thank you page
• Product demos
• Product trials
• Emails (marketing or product-focused)

With your touch points listed, you can map them to particular stages within the customer journey to improve retention, increase expansions and boost revenue. For example, your pricing page could explain expansion opportunities and highlight product features to increase adoption.

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Step 5: Highlight customer milestones

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A little flattery or a pat on the back goes a long way. Remind customers what they have achieved with you by matching touch points to goals.

You can achieve this both internally and externally.

Internally (privately) with customers: Through regular conversations, email shares, or even in-product notifications.

Externally (marketing) to the world: Through case studies, co-marketing, or simply having permission for your sales team to share a customer’s success story in calls with prospects.

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Step 6: Revisit and revise

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Make a habit (perhaps quarterly) of assuming the role of one of your personas and taking the journey to see things through a customer’s eyes. What did their success look like? Just as important, what did their failures look like?

Approach your process with a critical eye and take notes along the way. Flag areas needing improvement and pair them with actionable tasks. Continue to collect data to optimize your clients’ journeys.

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It’s an ongoing journey

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Your work as a customer success manager is never done. Your customers will continually evolve, and you must, too. You may start by mapping your current processes and move on to more ideal or strategic/targeted personas and scenarios.

Both you and your clients will grow and improve together as long as you keep them and their journey in focus. Use an intuitive customer journey tool to help you build and strengthen your client relationships.

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