Map the Customer Journey to Success

Eric Crane

Published 1/12/2021

What makes a customer keep coming back? Think about it: what keeps you loyal to your favorite brands?

The answer: We buy from companies when we feel like they understand us.

Kia Puhm, Founder and CEO of DesiredPath helps companies take a customer-centric approach to achieve faster, smarter revenue growth.

Kia says to know the path of the customer is to walk in the customer’s shoes.

And to do that, we have to think like the customer. It’s a mindset that should be adopted across an entire organization.

This is where our customer journey begins. Our host Eric sits down with Kia to discuss the importance of creating a customer journey map that supports the customer down a successful path.

See through the customer’s eyes

Thinking from the customer's perspective is the best way to understand a customer holistically, meet them where they need to be met, and help them achieve their objectives.

In an experience economy, things are changing rapidly:

Our products and services that we deliver
The markets
The environment

Customers' expectations are increasing exponentially with these changes. This puts a significant amount of pressure on businesses to be able to support customers.

By thinking from a customer's perspective and using that as a desired path to success, you can continually gain insight about your customers.

Understand: What are the patterns of our most successful customers? Then, use those insights and learnings to figure out how we can replicate this to create a very prescriptive and proactive journey that allows our customers to achieve their successes.

Understand the difference between random acts of customer success vs. holistic customer success

As marketing strategy continually grows and evolves, companies are looking for better ways to do customer support. But there is often a disconnect between what customers need to be successful and the activities being executed at them in order to do that.

"When we execute all these things without that holistic context of the customer, we are executing acts at our customer, not for them." — Kia Puhm

How can we spot the difference in our approach?

Your customer should feel like you're executing acts for them rather than at them.

Holistic customer success looks like:

Knowing your customer’s objectives
Knowing your customer’s timeline for reaching goals
Aligning yourself with the customer
Providing value that drives outcomes
Understanding the bigger context of customers

“We need to be intelligent about how we are aligning ourselves to the customer, so that we are providing value add and driving outcomes, not just executing random acts of success at them.” — Kia Puhm

Align Your Objectives

To become intimate with customer experience, we want to feel like an extension of their business.

Mapping out a customer’s holistic experience can be a challenge. But now that we understand the customer perspective and how to take an authentically holistic approach, we can start to figure out how to align activities and objectives to support the customer along their journey.

How? Flip the structure upside down.

Instead of starting the organizational structure with our people, their roles, responsibilities, and what they will do with customers, we need to go backwards to a customer-centric approach that looks at the customer journey before anything else.

This customer-centric approach allows clients to:

Discover and uncover areas that they weren't previously addressing
Add value into their customer success engagement model
Significantly impact retention and revenue

Do you know your customer's objectives, challenges, and timeline? If not, you might be practicing random acts of customer success. Your customer could feel like you're executing acts at them rather than for them.

In this episode of Customer Success Leader, we discuss: