Future-proofing your company’s customer experience
Imagine that you’re a mountain guide and you’re taking your clients to summit a mountain. It’s your job to take them to the top of the mountain successfully and without mishap.
Customer success is in essence the same thing where you guide your client towards their vision, i.e. the summit of the mountain.
What is customer success and what is a customer success roadmap?
Customer success can be described as business strategies that support your customers’ experience and evolve in accordance with their needs.
We all know that you’ll need a map to navigate through treacherous terrain and other pitfalls while climbing a mountain.
In the same way, you’ll also need a clear and defined roadmap for your customers so that they reach their goals and do not lose sight of their vision.
This is what a customer success roadmap does.
A roadmap for customer success management is basically a plan to be followed by you to help your customers achieve their goals.
- With this, companies can gather customer feedback, and track people’s habits and needs, out of which they’ll have a clear overview of their journey; where they were, are, and will be.
- A customer success roadmap will further help you in figuring out what future actions and resources might be needed to guarantee customer satisfaction.
- A roadmap for customer success management will also keep you on track to fulfill your obligations towards your customers.
You can steer the customer towards where you had said you would take them at the beginning of your relationship.
How to build a customer success roadmap?
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Listed below are Six steps to jumpstart you into building your very own customer success roadmap:
1. Identify the end goal of your customer
- Determining the end goal of your customer is the basic step that should be taken in order for you to understand your customer’s vision of success.
- Without a clear picture to work with it will be very difficult to create a successful customer success roadmap.
- It’s imperative that you know where your product or service fits into the customer’s vision of their end goal.
- If you want to optimize your customers’ chances of success, you’ll have to target the most ideal candidates.
2. Build a customer success team with a capable team leader
- To show that you take their success seriously, you’ll have to invest in a customer success team.
This shows the customer that you’re committed to helping them in achieving their goals.
- This dedicated team should design and implement your customer success roadmap.
- Without this team, your customers might view your offerings as mere suggestions rather than stepping stones toward their goals.
- Find the right person to lead your team. The person assigned to lead your customer success roadmap should have strong strategic and communication skills and be able to put together a cohesive team out of people coming from diverse backgrounds and with varied skill sets.
3. Invest in the right tools
Before you start on your customer success roadmap you should be aware of which type of program would be best suited for your needs:
- Manual: These customer success programs require you to manually build and implement the roadmap on your own.
- Automated: These Programs are software that manages your customer success initiatives and makes it easy to evaluate their results. Automated programs have features like automatic alerts and customer status reports which make it easy to keep track of your customer’s progress.
4. Develop a customer success roadmap
- Create a brief of your customer’s journey and try to identify the moments where you can make an impression with your product/service.
- Explore where your product/service fails to meet customer expectations. Find out where the abandonment happens and highlight these points with researched data and feedback.
- Put your finger on the value-based outcomes that you want to see. Identify the steps that need to be taken for those outcomes to materialize.
- Be aware of your limitations while developing a customer success roadmap. Don’t push on something which you can’t deliver.
- Let your team take ownership of the project. Giving each of the responsibility and making them accountable will keep them focused and committed.
5. Choose the right metrics
- Determine how you’ll measure customer success and choose metrics that you can track over time.
- Include metrics that measure both your company’s and your customer’s success.
- Choose metrics that reflect a customer’s successful accomplishment of their goal with your company.
6. Make changes to your customer success roadmap judiciously
So, your customer success roadmap is set up and you’re eagerly waiting for the opportunity to, “release the Kraken”. But, right now is not the time for impatience.
Introducing multiple changes at once can be quite overwhelming for customers and can lead to customer churn.
Introducing the customer success roadmap in a phased and timely manner also makes it easier to gauge the impact of the changes implemented, leading to consistent growth.
Benefits of a Customer Success roadmap
The benefits of a customer success roadmap can be fully reaped when it is built at the beginning of your customer’s journey with you.
Matching every step with your customer helps to plan and set strategies for the road ahead.
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Given below are some of the benefits of a Customer Success roadmap:
1 . Customer Retention
When you regularly and consistently show how customers are progressing toward their goals they will trust you and your customer success roadmap implicitly and stay true to it.
A customer success roadmap gives them direction and confidence to forge ahead.
This level of trust and confidence from the customers towards your company converts to very high levels of customer retention.
2 . Efficient Operations
When you know why you’re doing something as monotonous as entering data it gives new meaning to the task.
Knowing that the task at hand is an integral part of achieving your goal will lead to efficiency in daily operations.
3. Customer Acquisition
A good customer success roadmap’s end result should be to convert existing customers into loyal brand advocates. Their references and testimonials about your product/service to their acquaintances should help in more customer acquisition.
You may be thinking that since you already have a customer service team a customer success team isn’t needed.
Remember that Customer success is a proactive function.
They deal with customer problems before they occur and Customer service is a reactive function. They deal with customer problems after the fact.
These two teams working in tandem can only enhance the customer experience of your company.
And, that’s a win for anyone.
Kapture can help you with implementing processes to start you up on your customer success roadmap.
To know more, click here.
About the Author | |
 | Elvis Richard Cormuz |
| Elvis hails from Darjeeling and has had vibrant work life experiences – a musician, social worker and freelance translator/transcriber, his hobbies include music, movies and reading. | |
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