As the old saying says: “you do not find a second chance to make a first impression”, hence each touchpoint in the customer journey milestones matter throughout the journey of the customer through your brand.
54 percent of B2B marketers say they feel empowered to collaborate with their sales teams. Click To TweetIn fact, the primary ninety days of a customer relationship with any business can easily determine the outcome whether it has been good or bad.
Therefore, businesses must focus and double the efforts to satisfy their customers during these first ninety days which mostly includes processes like implementation, product or service training, and initial relationship cadences, even though it is important to note that the journey to customer success is a constant endeavor and so it never really ends.
This is because, post-implementation, you will find most of your customers in your easy to use CRM software’s database will need to feel that they have your company’s support at every level.
As one of the prominent vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms, we have often seen that companies too many times finish their implementation in a proactive manner and then gradually recedes into a reactive state.
Hence, we suggest that the best practice in this digital transformation path is to develop successful customer journey milestones with definite tasks and align them throughout the whole lifecycle of the customer.
Focus on the Entire Journey (Not Just a Single Aspect)
Remember you must never look into one single aspect in your customer journey milestones, but rather one of the main ways to uphold customer successes to focus on the entire journey of the customers through your brand.
This is because once you delve deep into the process, you will realize that your customers undergo and experience several changes through their journey on their pathway.
Hence creating a seamless customer experience or CX throughout their lifecycle aids them to know what they need from your company and in turn, this makes them feel valued, irrespective of where they are in the journey with your brand.
Therefore just after you develop a strong journey, your next goal will be to put metrics or measurements which you can find once you use an all in one CRM software for your business, which will allow you to quickly measure success and optimize pitfalls for further improvements.
For this you must take an outside-in approach and measure metrics that include:
The Customer Journey for Companies of All Sizes
Even though creating a customer journey milestone map is important for any organization that wishes to provide a world-class experience to its customers, it might look different for companies at various stages. For example:
For startup organizations, the journey can be siloed, limited, and even fragmented. This is because at this point, very few processes are in place and so their teams must shepherd the customers across onboarding, renewal, and other critical milestones. Hence customers involved with startup organizations the customer journey might often feel scrappy.
Now for emerging companies, the focus is often on onboarding and implementation touch-points on the customer journey milestones since those are the primary experiences that customers will face with mid-sized businesses. Therefore these organizations work hard to define these processes first and foremost while guiding their customers.
Finally, for scaling and enterprise-level companies, or scaling businesses, the customer journey is defined and executed across the entire Customer Lifecycle and is most strongly proactive in nature.
Someone Always Owns the Moment
If you have heard Walt Disney “someone always owns the moment” is a phrase that he often used in his approach to just about everything.
This is because Disney always understood the consistency of great moments which creates great experiences, and these experiences provide happy memories, and creating awesome memories is how Disney measured success in his wonderland.
Now the same principle also applies to customer experience or CX.
So who owes these moments and when- let us deep dive and find out more:
Best Practices to Create the Customer Success Journey Map Easily
As you develop your customer success journey map, you need to involve your whole team in the process, and it will take a lot of collaborations and alignments to do that.
This is because your goal (the outcome) should be that everyone in your business understands their specific roles and timings in help your customers succeed, and so here are few principles that you can undertake which can help you during the process:
Ensure that you view the journey primarily from the customer’s perspective, rather than from your company’s end. This is so since the customer journey map begins at brand impression and thereafter guides the customer towards success (renewals).
Identify the handoffs between departments as you build your journey. For this, it should be clear who does what and when?
Additionally, you also need to provide new game plans on how your information will circulate and travel and be consumed between handoff processes within your teams.
Always remain vigilant to define success milestones along the journey. For this make it clear to everyone in your teams that these customer journey milestones are actually moments that manifest a customer in moving and progressing and so it implies that they are having success with your offerings, which in other words are known as “moments of truth” in businesses.
Sharing the customer journey map with your loyal customers and having them help you with the process by validating whether things are true or not can help businesses a lot in forming a realistic customer journey mapping program for their company.
Therefore do not feel shy or vulnerable to get their feedback, we can assure you that it will pay its dividends in the long run.
As your organization and customers evolve, remember this map will change accordingly. Therefore do not indulge in mapping the customer journey milestones as you did a year ago.
Hence ensure that you are measuring the results and optimizing your customer’s journey on a regular basis that can foretell business growth.
Conclusion
No matter the stage your company is in right now, as one of the award-winning vendors of sales CRM tools, we can assure you that it is never too early to start thinking about your customer’s journey through your brand, which you can ask by asking questions like:
This is because it is only after you have a clear picture of success, you can then work backward to define your customer’s journey, its milestones and delineate hands off that can help you to take customer success from being just a departmental process and move it to the forefront of your company’s culture, vision, and more.
