It is often said that customers are the lifeblood of a business. However, customers are often not viewed holistically by businesses. Instead of considering a customer only from when they first interact with you to the time they make a purchase, the customer success journey maps out a specific process that allows you to go beyond the onboarding process and look at the entire lifecycle of the customer. This is from when a customer first discovers you – maybe through search, social media, or even a referral – until they entirely stop interacting with your content such as emails, targeted ads, and more. Managing your customers through this process is tricky and requires you to track everything that customers do in order to create a more holistic sense of where your customers’ pain points lie with your own business and how you can improve to better retain customers in the future.
To start, the customer success journey can help you identify how customers are going to actually find your brand. For example, if search is bringing in the majority of the customers, then it would make sense to invest more in SEO efforts to acquire more customers through this channel. Tracking which marketing channels give you the best conversion rates, as well as the amount of overall impressions, will give you a good sense of where the ideal customer success journey should start for your business.
However, planning for the success of your customers in the long-term requires more than just conversion rate optimization. You also have to have a superior customer success team that proactively follows up with customers to see if there were any issues with their purchase. If there were any issues, these issues need to be resolved in a timely manner in order to give the customer the best possible experience with your business. You also need to do things to get customers to come back – whether these are in the form of email marketing promotions or other types of customer touchpoints.
Finally, the overall goal of the customer success journey should be to map out a process that decreases customer churn. This can only happen by focusing on the ideal buyers and constructing buyer personas to understand who this person actually is. However, coming up with this requires you to leverage customer data, which you can only obtain if you have a recurring flow of customers who are satisfied with your products and services.
Online customer acquisition is a difficult process. However, with the right tools in place, and the right mindset about correctly tracking your customers and setting them up for success, you can increase your customer lifetime value and reduce your customer churn. In doing so, you’ll be able to create a more sustainable business that is not as reliant on a constant flow of new customers to make up for the ones that leave your business behind due to a poor experience with your brand. By investing in your customers’ success, you’ll also be investing in your own success as a business and be able to increase referrals, word of mouth, and your own brand reputation both offline and online.