This year at Pulse, I presented how to create a disciplined practice of driving growth through customer centric alignment.
Using the customer journey as the proxy for the success path of its customers, a business can align its operations accordingly to serve its customers effectively.
More often than not I see companies not understanding what their customer journey is.
They either are missing one entirely, or they have a map that represents its own business process for how they envision customers should adopt and expand product.
That begs the question, if the company does not understand what its customer journey is from the customer’s perspective, how the technology supports its customers businesses, or what the customers need to progress along the journey, what is the business’ operations founded on?
I would argue in that case, that the tactics of the Customer Success practice are simply random acts of Customer Success “done to” the customer, not “for” moving them forward along their journey.
This is the equivalent of throwing as much resource effort (i.e. “hero” mentality) and “best practices” at the customer to see what works and hoping that the customer will adopt and stay loyal.
It is really hard (and expensive) to drive a repeatable and measurable practice that consistently drives customer success like this.
It is impossible to scale.
To move towards a disciplined practice of driving growth, Customer Success needs to understand what that success path, or customer journey, looks and feels like for the customer, so they know what the customer needs to be successful and can service them accordingly at the appropriate time.
Only then can Customer Success operate in a truly proactive manner that is repeatable and scales.
When executed as such, the results are compelling!
On average, companies employing DesiredPath's Intelligent Framework, accelerate adoption velocity by 33%, increase retention 9%, realize a 25% gain in resource capacity, reduce escalations by 50% and double revenue.
Customer Journey Defined
A customer journey is therefore critical to a company’s success and is:
Three Actionable Insights
So, what can your organization do to move towards a disciplined practice of customer growth?
Map the customer journey from the customer’s perspective
Move from random acts of Customer Success to a disciplined approach by aligning company efforts to the customer journey
Use the journey to monitor and measure customer progress and identify opportunities to improve Customer Success
When it does, the company will find itself on the path to expansion nirvana!
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