All businesses transact with customers or clients in order to sustain their operations. Whether they sell supplements online to individuals or industrial wind turbines to other businesses, a company is only good as the amount of revenue it can generate from its customers. In order to systemize the customer acquisition process, many businesses, particularly those who sell online, have begun creating customer success journey maps.
What the customer success journey process does is map out the steps that a customer takes when they interact with your company. These include each step of the process of customer acquisition, and should mark major milestones in the customer’s progress in their relationship with your business. By mapping out these milestones and gearing your customer acquisition process toward achieving them you can set up clear marketing and customer engagement strategies. Once you set specific milestones, you can also use analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track where your customers are coming from. You can also use analytics tools to make sure that your customers are taking the correct actions on your website in order to achieve your customer milestones.
However, the modern customer success journey process does not end with customer onboarding. Instead, you need to consider the entire lifecycle of the customer and what you can do to keep getting them to come back for more. Doing so will decrease customer churn, maximize your company revenue and help you to better manage your customers.
When creating a customer success journey, the idea is to promote a customer-centric culture. What this means is that you want to tailor your company culture around listening to customers and being able to make changes based on what customers want. After all, a business is only as good as its customers, and purely selling pre-built packages that do not conform to what a customer might need is not a holistic way of looking at the marketing, sales, and customer retention process.
Furthermore, if you are able to develop products and services based on customer feedback rather than from the top down, then you will be able to increase sales conversion rates, increase the efficiency of your inbound marketing efforts and enhance the customer experience. These all have a strong advantage of keeping customers happy and together will help you to increase the lifetime value of any customers that you acquire through targeted sales or marketing efforts.
In order to map the custom success journey, you need to be able to gain insight into where your customers are coming from. Part of this process requires you to distinguish the different ways that customers find you, such as email marketing, cold outreach, or search engines, and seeing which ways this enables customers to interact with your business. If you tailor your customer success journey map to this instead of just focusing on what you think customers want or what you want to do, then you will most certainly have a higher rate of success. If your goal is to retain customers as long as possible and even get them to potentially refer other customers, then the customer success journey map process is essential to doing so.
