#65: Create Successful Customer Journeys

Your churn list is filled with customers who could have been successful (if only you'd taken them through a solid value realisation journey). 

The value realisation journey starts with understanding why customers buy your products.

>> Rewind one week to last week's newsletter and the first episode of the CS MasterClass on how to define and measure customer value (Spotify | Apple).

Once you have a clear picture of what your customers expect from your product, your job as a CS leader is to design a repeatable yet flexible journey that will help customers achieve results with your products.

This week's newsletter and CS Masterclass are here to help you do just that!

Why do you need a customer journey?

Most churn data I've seen shows that failure to onboard successfully is highly correlated to churn.

Makes sense right?

You can't get value if you don't get set up properly. 

The problem is that CS folks are quick to conclude that the customer failed to onboard because they were mis-sold. Is that true?

In some cases, the answer is a resounding YES.

However, there are plenty of customers who die on the value-realisation hill for other reasons: 

• lack of resources
• technical roadblocks
• shift in business priorities 
• project management hiccups
• change management challenges

Each of these reasons could have been mitigated early with the right intervention from your team.

The solution is to create a value realisation journey that:

1. decreases the time between purchase and results;
2. intervenes when there are signs of risk or growth opportunities
3. unlocks new and unexpected outcomes for your customers

What's a value realisation journey?

A guided path for how customers turn opportunities into outcomes using your product. 

Think about the customer journey as Google Maps.

To craft a journey that works for your customer, you'll need:

• place of departure ➡️ where the customer is today
• place of desired arrival  ➡️ where they want to get to
• desired time of departure/arrival  ➡️ by when they want to get there
• the transport method  ➡️ what resources they will have for the journey

The beauty of the Google Maps experience is that it constantly adapts the path to success. 

It finds the most effective route based on the unique circumstances (ie. accidents, traffic jams, need for re-fueling etc).

But that's not how a SaaS B2B journey feels like... 

In fact, it feels quite the opposite.

You are either forced into this stupidly rigid structure, no matter your circumstances. Or it lacks opinion on the path to success, expecting customers to pave the way. 

Here's what customers want:

• Visibility on the path to success
• Optimal recommendations depending on the goals and resources available
• Reliability of achieving the outcome desired in a suitable timeframe

So why is it that most of us fail epicly at this?

We create siloed and inside-out journeys broken down by "department". Eg. Marketing, Sales, Onboarding, Customer Success, Renewals. It's easier to structure a business this way.

But that means that our customer journeys feel more like relay races than integrated Google Maps experiences.

To create a value realisation journey that works, you need to flip the script and ask yourself:

What steps do I need to guide customers to successful outcomes in the most effective way? 

A value realisation journey that works

I use this 7-stage Customer journey to guide the development of processes that help customers in every single segment:

1. successfully implement their use cases in your product
2. improve adoption of tools that will help drive value for their business 
3. understand key areas they could improve to achieve better results 
4. articulate the value they get from your product
5. benchmark their results against other customers like them
6. find areas of growth to unlock new outcomes for their business

Every single one of these stages could be a book.

That's how much there is to unpack on the topic of value realisation!

Lucky for you, I just released Episode 2 of the CS MasterClass where I walk you through how to take this 7-Step journey and make it fit your customer, product, industry and business model.

I am joined by ⁠Tori Jeffcoat⁠, the Head of Customer Success and AI Strategy at Gainsight. In this conversation, Tori helps us understand the nuances of this process!

But here's the catch...

This journey is doomed to be a pretty PowerPoint if you can't lean on your data to proactively identify risk and opportunity signs in your customer installbase, so you can take action depending on customer behaviour.

Want to explore how to proactively monitor risk and growth signs at scale?

Don't miss next week's episode of the CS MasterClass where we will cover exactly that with a *very* special guest.

See you next Friday!