How to Build the Ideal Customer Journey Using Your Customer Success Platform
The customer journey has four stages: onboarding, adoption, growth, and renewal. How a customer success platform supports each with central data and dashboards.
TL;DR
- The customer journey is the full picture of an account relationship, broken into four stages: onboarding, adoption, growth, and renewal.
- A customer success platform supports the journey with a central location for customer information, a dynamic project plan with KPIs and milestones, multiple data points (including product usage) in one place, and easy-to-access dashboards for leaders.
- Mapping how your platform touches each stage helps teams know when a customer is ready to move from one stage to the next.
If you’re like most modern customer success team leaders, you already have some sort of platform in place to help optimize and streamline your internal processes while keeping things straight with customers.
Whether you’re using a generic CRM tool or a customer success-specific solution to manage your customer interactions, it’s helpful to map out exactly how your platform will impact each stage of the customer journey.
What is the customer journey?
As a refresher, the customer journey is the complete picture of an entire customer account relationship. From the minute the account is handed off to a CSM from sales to their ongoing renewals or eventual termination, the customer journey encompasses every step of the processes and workflows along the way. From a CSM’s perspective, the customer journey can be broken into four distinct stages: onboarding, adoption, growth, and renewal.
Here are some quick tips on how to build the ideal customer journey (across all four stages) using your customer success platform:
A central location for customer information:
During the onboarding stage, your customer success platform can be used to organize and transfer all critical information from the sales team to keep your CSM team on track towards your customer’s KPIs and goals. Throughout the entire customer journey, your CSM and account team can continuously access this information to ensure support tickets and renewal conversations are being handled by the right teams.
A dynamic project plan:
Building a flexible, dynamic project plan with clearly defined KPIs, milestones, and other action items that your team can work from to move your customer accounts through their customer journey, from onboarding to adoption and beyond. This project plan is what will help your account management team identify when customers are actually ready (both from a timeline and sentiment perspective) to move from one stage of the customer journey to the next.
Multiple data points in one place:
Merging your customer data with the product usage data from your platform early on in the customer relationship can allow your team to track and manage your customer engagement in real-time. In growth and adoption stages of the customer journey, your team can see exactly how customers are using your platform and then optimize decision-making around these insights.
Easy-to-access dashboards:
Every customer is critical to the success of a business and setting up dashboards for department heads and executive leadership can keep things in check throughout the customer relationship. From growth adoption scorecards to prospective renewals, dashboards are the best way to keep everyone on track across your organization. Plus, when it comes to growing customer accounts, your executive team can see exactly what the growth forecasts look like at any given moment.
Want to learn more?
The ClientSuccess platform is the only customer success-specific solution designed to help CSMs effortlessly move their customer accounts from Onboarding to Adoption to Renewal to Growth.
Check out these additional resources from ClientSuccess about how to map your ideal customer journey:
- Toolkit: Customer Journey Toolkit
- eBook: Top CS Executives Predict Trends
- Webinar: Creating an Onboarding Program
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the stages of the customer journey?
How does a customer success platform support the customer journey?
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