Expert insights on how to optimize the customer journey

The journey to deriving business value is a long one, but it doesn't have to be long and winding. By understanding key touchpoints and aligning across the organization, teams can efficiently drive value and enhance customer experiences and outcomes.

At Propel24, Peter Armaly delved into the key phases of the customer journey and the roles that various departments play in making this journey smooth and effective. 

Peter is a Principal at ValueWise Consulting, advising executive clients to drive higher net dollar retention. Peter also advises Proof Analytics' executive team on customer success strategies for their automated marketing optimization platform.

Here’s a summary of all that he shared on the broader context of onboarding within the customer journey.

Peter believes onboarding is a critical phase, yet it cannot be divorced from the overall journey that customers take with your company. With this perspective, Peter shared a series of broad insights that underscore the importance of effective onboarding and its impact on long-term customer success.

1. The customer journey starts with marketing

The customer journey begins with marketing, which plays a crucial role in journey mapping. Marketing's role does not end at lead generation or sales handoff. Effective customer marketing can gather valuable insights from the customer base, refining messaging and market approaches. Marketing should continue to engage with existing customers to ensure their needs and expectations are met, emphasizing that their role is ongoing and integral to the customer journey.

2. Customers actually do value salespeople

Contrary to popular belief, customers do value salespeople, particularly those who respect their time and bring valuable insights to the table. Salespeople who consistently offer useful information and actionable advice are appreciated by customers. This highlights the importance of salespeople being well-prepared and knowledgeable, ensuring that every interaction adds value to the customer.

3. The customer's journey doesn't always end at churn

When customers leave or churn, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of their journey with your organization. Former customers can still influence your brand perception, positively or negatively. It is essential to manage this by ensuring that even their departure is handled gracefully, maintaining a positive relationship that could lead to future opportunities.

4. Perception is an invisible variable in the customer journey 

Perception, though intangible, significantly impacts the customer journey. Different stakeholders within the customer’s organization may have varying opinions about your product, affecting the overall sentiment. It is crucial to acknowledge and manage these perceptions, ensuring that the value of your product is recognized and appreciated across all levels of the customer organization.

5. Customers struggle to receive expected value unless their journey is orchestrated

Customer success teams must orchestrate the resources required to deliver excellent service throughout the customer journey. This orchestration is often challenging for other departments to accept, but it is necessary for iensuring customers achieve their expected value. Clear communication and collaboration across departments are vital for successful orchestration.

6. Onboarding relies on a philosophy that originates in the C-suite

C-level executives at an organization must be accountable for the entire customer journey. Often, senior executives focus too much on new customer acquisition, neglecting the ongoing customer lifecycle. However, in the subscription economy, customer retention and success are equally important, requiring a shift in focus and accountability at the executive level.

7. Education about onboarding starts in sales and marketing

Sales and marketing teams must understand the post-sale customer experience to set accurate expectations and prevent churn. By integrating post-sales insights into sales training, companies can ensure that salespeople appreciate the entire customer lifecycle. This understanding is critical for creating a seamless and positive customer journey.

8. The best onboarding requires strong consulting elements

Effective onboarding recognizes that each customer is unique. Understanding the specific needs, culture, and dynamics of each customer is essential for a successful onboarding process. This customized approach helps in building strong relationships and ensuring customer satisfaction from the start.

9. The best program managers are governors

Program managers who excel in both strategic and tactical thinking are invaluable during onboarding. They can navigate the tactical steps while keeping the overall strategic goals in focus, ensuring that each step aligns with the broader objectives. This dual capability is crucial for effective program management and customer success.

10. No amount of sophisticated process matters without proof of impact

Ultimately, the effectiveness of any process must be demonstrated through tangible results. Especially in a financially constrained environment, proof of impact is necessary to justify investments and actions. Clear evidence of value delivered is essential for gaining and maintaining customer trust and satisfaction.

The importance of aligning internal teams for effective onboarding

Ensuring a smooth onboarding process is crucial for deriving business value, and this requires the alignment of various teams within the organization. Here, we explore the roles and responses of different teams to common customer questions, highlighting the need for cohesion and clear communication.

The different perspectives on onboarding

When discussing onboarding, it’s essential to consider the perspectives of different roles: C-level executives, marketing, sales, and customer success. Each role often has a unique take on the process, which can lead to misalignment and confusion for the customer.

Here are a few examples of how this plays out in the real world.

Example 1:

Customer: What should we expect overall?

• C-level executives: Often provide a vague answer, emphasizing a customer-centric philosophy without specific details
• Marketing: Highlights the product's intuitiveness, focusing on its ease of use
• Sales: Directs the customer to the success team as the go-to resource for all onboarding needs
• Customer Success: Offers a detailed plan, outlining numerous steps to go live and achieve first value

Example 2:

Customer: What teams need to be involved on our side?

• C-level executives: Typically tend to provide a broad, non-specific answer
• Marketing: Offers a marketing-centric response, focusing on high-level involvement
• Sales: Defaults to a reassuring yet non-detailed answer, aimed at not overwhelming the customer
• Customer Success: Provides a comprehensive overview of the teams required, detailing the collaboration needed for a successful onboarding

Example 3: 

Customer: How long does it take for implementation and to go live?

• C-level executives: Highlights industry-leading implementation times
• Marketing: Shares claims of on-time implementations without specifics
• Sales: Suggests that the timeline depends on the customer's budget
• Customer Success: Explains that the duration depends on the customer’s commitment and effort, providing a realistic view of the process

These varied answers can lead to confusion and mixed emotions for the customer, ranging from excitement to trepidation. This misalignment is a significant reason customers often approach onboarding with uncertainty because they are unsure of what to expect.

The role of sales and marketing teams in improving the onboarding experience lies is often ignored.

Often, these teams do not adequately prepare customers for what to expect post-sale. A newly appointed CRO might receive a simplified process outline, focused solely on signing renewals and expansions, which underestimates the complexity of the post-sale journey and undermines the efforts of post-sales teams.

Instead, the CRO, executives, and other team members should provide a more accurate depiction of the post-sale process. They should explain that onboarding involves enablement, driving platform adoption, and ultimately achieving customer outcomes. This approach not only sets realistic expectations but also respects the critical work done by post-sales teams.

By fostering a culture of transparency and alignment, organizations can ensure that all teams, from sales to customer success, are working towards the same goal: delivering a seamless and valuable onboarding experience. Companies need to align their teams and set clear, consistent expectations with customers from the get-go. Organizations like HubSpot identify common onboarding challenges, emphasizing the importance of alignment in preventing these issues.

This holistic approach will help customers feel more confident and supported throughout their journey, ultimately leading to better business outcomes.

Integrating customer centricity into your onboarding strategy

Achieving customer centricity is pivotal in deriving value during the onboarding process. It places the customer at the heart of all business operations, ensuring their needs and expectations are met at every stage. This approach ensures that customers receive the attention and support they need right from the start, which is crucial for long-term satisfaction and retention.

Ernst and Young’s five-step approach to becoming customer-centric is a useful framework for companies striving to achieve this goal. The steps are straightforward, providing a rallying cry for the entire organization to prioritize the customer.

For a company to be truly customer-centric, the customer must be at the core of its vision, strategy, and processes. This means:

1. Strategizing: Developing a corporate strategy with a clear focus on customer needs and expectations.
2. Designing processes: Crafting processes that are streamlined and designed with the customer in mind.
3. Executing with precision: Implementing these strategies and processes effectively to deliver value and satisfaction.

Remember: The customer journey should be as straightforward as possible. A clear, direct path from onboarding to value realization ensures that customers do not encounter unnecessary hurdles or confusion. This approach should be embedded in the company’s DNA, guiding every action and decision to ensure a seamless customer experience.

Backstrokes: Insights on driving change in customer success

1. The role of customer success leadership

In customer success, much of the responsibility for driving change within a company falls on the CS leader. Regardless of the company's size, customer success teams have a unique advantage due to their close proximity to customers. They have access to valuable insights about how the company's solutions are performing in the market, the challenges customers face, and the opportunities that arise. It is the duty of CS leaders to leverage this information to persuade the rest of the organization to prioritize the customer in their strategy. This task is not easy and requires confidence, experience, and the ability to engage in meaningful conversations with other leaders.

2. Control what you can and manage what you can't

Customer success managers (CSMs) should focus on controlling the processes directly in front of them while managing the factors beyond their control. This involves utilizing their skills in orchestration, persuasion, communication, and organization. These abilities are particularly crucial during the onboarding phase, which can determine whether a customer will stay or churn. CSMs must ensure that the onboarding process is streamlined, transparent, and as friction-free as possible. Accountability is key; CSMs must hold other teams responsible for their roles in the process, adhering to the RACI model to ensure everyone is doing their job effectively.

3. Make sure the onboarding process can be measured in terms of its progress

The onboarding process must be measurable to track its progress and impact. In recent years, customer success has had to emphasize the importance of measuring its contributions. The economic downturn has highlighted the need for CS teams to demonstrate their value. It is essential to have systems in place that can quantify the impact of customer success efforts, so they can support customers, impact the business, and help improve their products and services going forward.

Understanding and implementing these insights will help organizations improve their customer success strategies, leading to better customer retention and satisfaction. By focusing on customer-centric strategies, emphasizing the importance of onboarding, and fostering strong leadership within teams, organizations can ensure a seamless and impactful customer journey. The key lies in detailed execution, measurement of progress, and maintaining transparency and accountability.

Looking ahead, the future of customer onboarding and success remains promising, even as technologies like AI reshape the landscape. Ultimately, the focus for organizations will always be on serving customers in the best possible way. They will need to ensure that the customer journey is not only successful but also a source of lasting satisfaction and continue to deliver value.

The book "Mastering Customer Success: Discover Tactics to Decrease Churn and Expand Revenue," co-authored by our speaker, offers a comprehensive guide for both seasoned and aspiring customer success managers. It provides strategic and tactical advice on leveraging data, enhancing customer relationships, and building inter-organizational collaboration to drive career advancement and company growth. Get the book here.