Customer-First Touchpoints
By Russell Bourne
“Sports don’t build character, they reveal it” is a classic quote that can easily apply to the process of writing a customer journey.
Writing a journey has to be a cross-functional effort, and as such, any journey-writing exercise will give you a great education about your organization. The exercise may reveal tremendous teamwork and cooperation, or it may surface friction that you have no option other than to deal with. Either way, you’re set up to come out of the session unified.
To help ensure a productive session, I encourage you to set one ground rule. Write it on the wall and keep it as your north star. The rule is this:
Always consider touchpoints from the customer’s point of view.
As you design touchpoints, these few in particular may be revealing:
SALES-TO-CS HANDOFF
There are lots of opinions about when a Salesperson should introduce a customer to their CSM. For technical products, the issue is doubled because there’s a transition from a pre-sales Engineer (SE) to the implementation engineer, often someone in Professional Services (PS). There may also be an onboarding Project Manager (PM) in the mix.
Often, Sales is reluctant to bring the post-sales functions into sales calls because they fear it would prolong or torpedo a deal. PS, PMs, and CSMs may also be reluctant to spend time on calls with prospects, preferring only to be brought in once the customer and project are in stone.
Other times, everyone is eager to jump in and join sales-stage touchpoints whether it’s to play an active role or just to listen and learn. That’s well-intentioned, but can create duplicate work and customer confusion unless you design and communicate good swim lanes.
You need to know your target customers well enough to predict what works best for them. Would it shock them to show up to a call and suddenly be met with a panel of 5-7 people whose roles they don’t understand, and who are asking them questions they’re not ready for? Or, would it shock them to sign a deal and be handed over to people they don’t know and trust? Whatever the answer, when you arrive at it, it’s hard to imagine an internal reason to go against the customer’s wishes.
EXECUTIVE BUSINESS REVIEW
Customer executives are notorious for finding ways to avoid EBRs, and that’s because vendors are notorious for delivering off-target messages. An EBR agenda should be limited to what the executive cares about.
Too often, vendors’ EBR deck templates follow a pattern like this:
Title slide
World map showing office locations
Full page of customer logos
Full page of overall vendor metrics like customer count, accompanied by a count of the money, data, people, or other items under the vendor’s management
Metrics about how much product the customer uses
Full page of products the customer doesn’t have
A non-custom, full-suite product roadmap, often without firm delivery dates
Thank you slide
It’s important to offer a welcome and thanks; however, the middle slides are all about the vendor.
This is a topic for another article, but the best EBRs have one agenda item: a review of the results on the metrics in the Joint Success Plan. Joint success planning hinges around the customer executive telling you what they care about, and collaborating with you on how to measure it. With that as your EBR agenda, you’re sure to deliver what matters to them.
COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY
Who should sell into the existing customer base? Whether it’s flat renewals, upsells, or cross-sells, this topic has the potential to surface passion. CS and Sales each may have their own reasons for wanting commercial responsibility, and no doubt there could be long - often counterproductive - debate.
A more productive approach might be to ask, “who does the customer want to buy from?” Generally speaking, people buy from people they want to buy from. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer here, but customer profile, product complexity, and competitive landscape are all factors to consider - that is, from the customer’s perspective.
ADVOCACY
Customer Advocacy comes in many forms, but chief among them are feedback and advocacy.
Feedback programs are only successful if customers provide feedback in big enough sample sizes, and with honesty. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes; what would make you feel good about responding to a feedback request honestly? Consider when to ask, who asks, and how much to ask. Customers can’t give feedback on something they’re still in the middle of, or that was too long ago. They may be shy about giving negative feedback to the person the feedback is about. And they may not have the time or interest to answer long surveys.
Advocacy comes in the form of things like case studies, video testimonials, and reference calls. You’re asking your customer to take time to help you amplify a positive message about their time with you. To do it effectively, they need to feel inspired! Who in your company has the skills to inspire positivity? Whoever it is, that’s who you should appoint to collaborate with the customer on a script, act as a director if it’s on video, or give a refined message. In many cases, you may find your Marketing team is the right one to make responsible for these touchpoints.
A full customer journey certainly has more than these 4 touchpoints. Not all will inspire passionate debate, but with the customer’s preferences as your guide, you can be confident and aligned that your new journey gives them the experience they want.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CS Leadership certification program which includes a class on Mapping Customer Journeys. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more information on these and our other offerings.
Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.
