Customer Success serves many purposes, fundamentally focusing on the customers desired outcomes in order to delight the customer, grow the customers account and mitigate the risk of churn.

While a substantial focus is put onto progressing towards the realisation of customer outcomes, it’s important to remember that the journey is often just as important as the outcomes achieved.

“Flying into Los Angeles might be the outcome, but there are many different airlines can choose if the journey doesn’t meet expectations.”

The Pre-Customer Journey

Before we talk specifically about the defined customer journey for your service, it is important to acknowledge that the customer may have been on their own journey to their desired outcomes much longer, possibly before you were even selected as their chosen vendor. It could be they started with another vendor and it didn’t work out, or they have tried to realise their outcomes via their own means. Alternatively they may have been a client of yours for sometime and they are now beginning their journey on a new set of goals. The point is, you will always have clients who are coming with different experiences and at a different maturity level coming into what you have defined as ‘the customer journey’ for your service. Therefore, whilst process is incredibly important, it is important that it accommodates, not hinders where a client is on their own journey to achieving their objectives.

Onboarding

While a customer will likely join your own defined customer journey within or at the end of your sales process, post-sale, onboarding is the first vital step to any outcomes being achieved. It is where you first get to deeply understand the customer, their outcomes, and their importance.

Playbooks are a tried and tested way of being efficient, ensuring you cover all areas and provide a consistent experience to your clients. Aim to get as much detail as possible, and explain to your client this is so you can help steer their path to success.

Depending on your service, onboarding can take sometime, it often involves multiple meetings with multiple stakeholders. Due to this, there is a risk of clients getting frustrated if they do not see the value on a good thorough onboarding, especially if they have been part of the way internally or with another vendor before.

Explain the value, its importance to the project foundations and give them a tangible output for their time. Give them a copy of their success plan, a storyboard of their journey between now and outcome realisation, or a write up of their current state and desired outcomes. This not only allows them to see a direct output from their invested time, but it validates your understanding and shows to the client you are truly invested in understanding them as a business.

Onboarding is a vital part of the customer journey, done right it can be hugely valuable for both the vendor and the client, providing a strong foundation for the desired outcomes.

Business as Usual — To QBR or not to QBR?

Following on from Onboarding, the customer will progress in the customer journey into the proceeding phase. This will vary depending on the type of service being provided, but for the purpose of this article we will consider this in a broad, ‘Business as Usual’ phase.

For many Customer Success functions, during business as usual, Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are somewhat the norm, however there are differing opinions out there. For me I think they are vitally important, however its the ‘quarterly’ bit that I mainly don’t agree with. Don’t get me wrong, for some clients this makes sense, but for others its to frequent and for some not frequent enough.

During the natural running of a customer’s lifecycle there are two types of regular meeting I would recommend holding with a client.

1. Outcomes Review — Essentially incorporating what is typically within QBR’s but with a refreshed focus on value realisation. Have they experienced any value, is everything on track to achieve their desired outcomes? Setting these at a frequency of either 30, 60, 90 or 120 days depending on the client and the project.
2. Project Health Check — A quick check in at any frequency, 7 days, 30 days etc, How are things? What’s top of mind of you today? What’s next on the agenda? What problems have you encountered? — Short and sweet, no more than 15 minutes unless a significant problem arises.

Both are important to ensure the customer is on the right path for success and that you have current information to help them on their journey. You don’t however want to pester them for their time, where they see no value and you don’t want to be speaking with them so infrequently you miss a critical course correction.

Value Realisation

Value Realisation comes from beginning to achieve the customers desired outcomes. This could be a gradual or sudden realisation depending on the nature of your customer outcomes. It could also be something that needs to be achieved once, like a website launch, or something that needs to be consistently achieved such as lead generation.

It’s incredibly important to celebrate successes throughout the customer journey but especially when desired outcomes are realised. Provide tangible assets to your clients that they can share internally to expose the success with your service easily within their wider business.

If required, set new outcomes if all have been reached. Alternatively if a project type engagement that has completed, the customer journey will progress to offboarding.

Offboarding

It might be that your customer’s project has completed, their desired outcomes all obtained, or they have decided not to continue for any reason, the offboarding process is just as important as any other part of the customer journey.

This is a fantastic opportunity to ensure the customer has everything they need and are given a full offboarding summary suitable for your service. Remind them of the successes that they have achieved, remind them of what else they could achieve with your services, thank them for the collaboration and wish them well for the future.

Why Customer Success Is About the Journey Not Just the Outcome

Thank you for reading. You can read more Customer Success posts here.