Guide to Customer Journey Mapping for High Touch CS Teams

Customer Journey Mapping for Customer Success Teams provides a clear visualisation of the customer's interactions, pain points, and needs throughout their experience with your solution. It helps identify opportunities for improvement, enhances understanding of customer behaviour, and guides strategic decisions to create more personalised and seamless experiences. Ultimately, it aligns business efforts with customer expectations.

Below we list the 4 core sections every customer journey map must have in enterprise customer success. A Trial, Onboarding, Established and Advocate phase. Every team may add a few more in addition to these 4 sections. Use the below prompting questions to help you build out your own customer journey map.

Be specific and keep in mind the feelings (both positive and negative) that each stage may illicit from your clients as you work through it. This'll help you anticipate opportunities and risks so you can respond appropriately when the time comes.

Trial

1. What are the pain points the prospect wants to solve?


   • Prompt: Identify their challenges and how your SaaS solution addresses these pain points.

2. How does our solution add value and solve their pain points?


   • Prompt: Highlight specific benefits and outcomes that directly address their needs.

3. What success metrics matter to the client?


   • Prompt: Understand their definition of success and align your solution's features to meet those goals.

4. What are the checkpoints that allows the client to move to the next stage?

   • Prompt: Plan a structured follow-up process to nurture the relationship, answer any lingering questions, and solidify the client's decision to help them move on to the next stage.

Onboarding

1. How can we shorten the time to value?


   • Prompt: Find the big moments of impact related to your service and ask yourself how fast can you get your client to experience them?

2. What are the KPIs we can reflect on at the end of onboarding?


   • Prompt: Collaborate with the client to establish measurable milestones that indicate progress and success with the new solution.

3. What ongoing support structure do they need?


   • Prompt: Define a support plan for the client post-onboarding, including available resources, escalation procedures, and regular check-ins.

4. How do we ensure user adoption across the client org?

   • Prompt: Create strategies to encourage and facilitate widespread acceptance and use of your solution among different teams or departments.

Established

1. How can we support their long-term ambitions?


   • Prompt: Explore their evolving objectives and strategise how your solution can continue to contribute to their success.

2. How can we establish a feedback loop?


   • Prompt: Invite them to participate in beta testing, provide feedback, or join user communities to foster a sense of ownership and partnership.

3. How can we strategically support them?


   • Prompt: Explore incentive programs, referral bonuses, or collaboration opportunities that encourage them to advocate for your solution within their industry.

4. How can we deliver tailored education and training
to create more champions?

   • Prompt: Adapt training sessions to suit their team's skill levels and roles within the organisation and support fast learners with tailored content.

Advocate

1. How can we celebrate milestones achieved?


   • Prompt: Acknowledge and celebrate achievements during the onboarding process to motivate and reinforce positive adoption behaviours.

2. Are they open to participating in case studies?


   • Prompt: Case studies can be used as a way to share big milestones achieved by your clients to bolster the trust and value of your services.

3. What other initiatives can we offer to encourage
advocacy?


   • Prompt: Explore incentive programs, referral bonuses, or collaboration opportunities that encourage them to advocate for your solution within their industry.

4. Can we use our expertise and network to help them
in reaching their goals?

   • Prompt: Organise events, forums, or online groups where clients can network, share insights, and learn from each other.

Understanding and guiding a customer's journey involves asking key questions at each stage of the journey. As clients progress, address obstacles, customise support, and celebrate milestones. In the established phase, explore long-term goals, offer expansion opportunities, and encourage advocacy through collaboration and wider recognition.

These questions above is designed to help create a customer-focused approach, ensuring satisfaction and the potential for them to become advocates for your product or service. True customer success is when your customer screams about the success they've had using your solutions.

How do you turn customer journey maps into success plans?

Turning customer journey maps into success plans involves translating insights gained from the map into actionable strategies that you and your clients can put in a plan to implement.

Here's a breakdown of potential objectives you can create for your success plan from a customer journey map:

1. Identify Pain Points and Opportunities: Pinpoint key pain points and opportunities highlighted in the customer journey map. These insights will form the basis of your objectives.
   

2. Set Clear Objectives: Define clear objectives aligned with addressing identified pain points and leveraging opportunities to unlock new value for your clients.
   

3. Develop Actionable Steps: Create specific, actionable steps that address each stage of the customer journey. These steps should aim to mitigate pain points and capitalise on opportunities.
   

4. Assign Responsibilities and Timelines: Allocate responsibilities to team members and clients, outlining who will execute each step of the plan, and set realistic timelines for implementation. This is for accountability across stakeholders and ensures engagement with your success plans.
   

5. Measure and Iterate: Establish metrics and KPIs to measure the success of the plan. Regularly review and iterate the plan based on feedback and evolving customer needs.

By aligning the success plan with the insights from the customer journey map, you can effectively address customer needs, improve experiences, and foster long-term satisfaction and loyalty.

This is where Retentional comes in, use Retentional to host your success plan and measure the success of your implementation. Present back your success plan in the most authenticate way that emphasises the value you've directly generated for you clients.

Expansion and Renewals get a lot easier using success plans from Retentional.

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