To deliver exceptional customer experiences, you first need to define what you want those experiences to be. If you just wing it and hope that your customers will have a seamless experience with your company, chances are low that will happen.
Throughout your customer lifecycle, there can be multiple journeys that you may want to design and help your customers progress through. From sales through onboarding, through ongoing servicing to upsell opportunities on new products and services. Each of these experiences have defined steps that either your customers need to do or you need to do behind the scenes to ensure your customers have the best experience.
We recently launched our new Customer Journey product that allows you to define your ideal customer journeys and orchestrate those experiences for your customers. Creating a customer journey can include:
- Define the stages of the journey
- Ensure your customer progresses through the stages in a timely manner
- Facilitate seamless communication across all stages
- Easily share responsibility across teams throughout the journey
- Provide visibility and insight for everyone involved with the customer
Once you define your journey and stages, you then need an easy way to manage the process and new customers enter and progress through completion.
Journeys can be any important experience that your customers have. This could be as simple as an outbound upgrade campaign to a subset of customers or as critical and robust as a complete onboarding process.
Let’s take a new customer onboarding or activation journey as an example to show how this might work.
First you create your Journey and the required Stages.
For this journey (we’ll call it our Activation Journey), the stages will be: 1) Activation 2) Onboarding 3) Go Live and 4) Check-in Call.
Once your journey is set up, you will want to create a View specific to that Journey so it’s easy to reference and ensure no customers are getting stuck.
[Create View]
We use a Kanban view to track the progress of customers through each journey. This drag-and-drop board makes it easy to see the overall picture of the process in one place as well as take specific actions for each customer to ensure everyone is getting the attention they need.
Each journey can have custom fields displayed on the cards so you can ensure you see what you need to without having to click into each card. These cards also show you the owner of that Case, the time that case has been in each stage, and the last event on the case so you know if your attention is needed.
To facilitate ownership, handoffs, timelines, communications, and more, we use a specific type of Case for each Journey. This means that each Case is assigned to a Customer, has a full events timeline of every interaction, has unlimited communication threads to collaborate with the customer, internal teams and across organizational walls, and provides easy access to your knowledge base or documents that you or your customer may need for the journey.
Each Journey Case has a special progress bar and timeline related to the stages that the customer has completed. It tracks progress through the journey at a glance.
Once the Journey is complete, you can resolve the case it it closes out the journey and removes it from your kanban board. In one of our next posts we’ll talk about how you can use the Automation Engine to automate communications, progressions and other aspects of your customer journeys to ensure your customers always have the latest information and keep moving through your process.
In one of our next posts we’ll talk about how you can use the Automation Engine to automate communications, progressions and other aspects of your customer journeys to ensure your customers always have the latest information and keep moving through your process.
