Too often companies spend time analyzing problems with the good intent of fixing them to improve customer experience yet they ignore the hiding-in-plain-site wealth of information that can be gleaned from its most successful customers.
When an organization learns from the patterns of its most successful customers, it has an opportunity to codify what is working for product adoption into an engagement model for repeatable success across the entire customer base.
An approach that learns from customers to consistently deliver and improve customer desired outcomes is an intelligent approach to customer management.
How Can Customers Be Successful If You Don’t Know?
Three different customers of DesiredPath each started their engagement not being able to identify what their most successful customers were doing to be ahead of the game.
In fact, one of them could not even originally identify any successful customers - not because they did not have any - but because they were so focused on looking for issues to solve, that they did not pause to recognize what was going well.
If these organizations could not identify how to be successful with their technology, then how could they expect all customers to figure it out themselves?
And how could they expect to drive repeatable product adoption amongst the entire customer base?
What these organizations did to amend this was to identify the use cases for which customers bought, and then figure out how those use cases were realized with the use of the technology and within the customers’ business environment.
This understanding of how the value proposition was actualized at the customer site allowed them to start noticing similar patterns that successful customers were exhibiting.
Those successful customers may, as an example, have had executive support and alignment in place, the project management structure in place, they were addressing change management effectively by enabling employees properly, etc.
With these patterns in hand, DesiredPath’s customers could codify these behaviours and activities into a guide of best practices for all customers to follow, and they could align their own playbook accordingly to support the entire success path.
As a result, these companies were able to implement a proactive, repeatable customer journey that consistently drives desired outcomes, and because the journey is used to constantly observe and learn from customers, continues to evolve as customers do.
An Eye-Opening Experience for One Vendor and Its Partners
Understanding the patterns of your most successful customers can also be hugely rewarding for vendors that work with channel partners to drive customer adoption and usage.
One of DesiredPath’s customers wanted to journey map three times over.
Once internally themselves to build better cross-functional understanding and alignment about its customers.
Once with its customers.
And the third time with its channel partners.
The sessions were held separately so each group had no knowledge of what the other groups’ maps looked like until the end of the day when the results were shared.
For our customer and its partners, the exercise was eye-opening.
The partners, who had been focusing predominantly on the deployment of the technology, realized there was a lot more opportunity to be had post deployment by helping the struggling customer end-users (IT stakeholders) convince their internal business stakeholders to do more.
The vendor realized they could focus their efforts on providing the end-users more enablement around the product value proposition and internal selling and leave the deployment to their partners to focus on.
By first recognizing the desire path to success, the vendor and its channel partners could better align their effort to build on the patterns of success.
The partners were obviously ecstatic about the opportunity to generate more revenue from their existing customer base and the vendor was able to more effectively resource its effort to support end-customers and channel partners by very specifically targeting the help to what was accretive for driving success.
Bottom Line: Understand the Patterns of Your Most Successful Customers
When companies understand the patterns of their most successful customers, they can create an intelligent framework that codifies (and is continually learning and improving) how success is achieved.
Repeatable success allows for increased consistency and efficiency in delivering success across the entire customer base.
Consistent delivery of customer desired outcomes also improves and elevates customer success and experience for all customers.
An intelligent approach to customer management that is sure to win favour – and revenue!
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