If you want to make your business customer-centered, you’re going to need customer data. Without it, you can’t keep track of your customers’ needs, business goals, and challenges.
When you gather and analyze customer data, you can uncover customer journey insights that will allow you to take action to deliver a more personalized customer experience. Analyzing customer data also gives you feedback on how to improve your product or service to better meet your customers’ needs and help them overcome pain points. Plus, you can use it to improve standardized processes and better serve customers in the future.
Here are some ways you can find data about the customer journey and leverage it to improve the customer experience.
How to Unlock Customer Journey Insights
Customer data can be collected during customer engagements, through surveys, demographic information, by analyzing help desk tickets, or by monitoring activity and product use—and these are just a few examples of where you can draw customer data from. You should pull data from multiple sources and review it carefully. Then, draw conclusions and use it to create actionable next steps.
As customers progress through their journey, you’ll need to continue gathering customer journey insights at every step. To make this a manageable task no matter how many customers or product lines you have, break down each stage of the customer journey into a series of modular, measurable goals. You can do this by considering three main stages of the customer journey:
Onboarding
Onboarding is the first and most important phase of the customer journey. You should focus on speeding up time to value and teaching them how to use all your product’s features. Be sure you understand your customer’s goals and set up KPIs so you can know when they’ve achieved them.
Data points to monitor include:
- How many customers are pending onboarding
- How many are currently onboarding (organized by status)
- How many have successfully completed onboarding
- Time to value
- Quality of onboarding
- CSAT survey
- CSM Score
- Usage after onboarding
In addition to monitoring key data points, internal communication is key during this stage, as you need a smooth handoff from sales to the customer success team. As such, be sure you are sharing customer data so that everyone is on the same page and you aren’t asking the customer to repeat information about their goals.
Adoption
This is a longer phase where customers must expand their ability to fully use the product. Adoption requires constant monitoring and proactive engagements with each customer.
You can track data points such as:
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- License utilization
- Frequency of product use
- How often certain features are used
If a customer shows warning signs such as low license utilization or low adoption of main features, try to figure out what’s wrong and engage with them. Perhaps a particular feature is confusing to them and they simply need some education. By keeping an eye on data, you can take action before the customer gets really frustrated.
Renewal
Renewals are critical for ensuring your business’s health and longevity. That’s why you must focus on understanding the customer and their goals to create a successful environment throughout their entire journey. By closely monitoring your customer, you will better understand their needs and avoid any surprises at renewal time.
Data points to focus on include:
- Churn cost per quarter-to-date (QTD)
- The number of customers who have low health scores
- The number of customers entering the renewal quarter
- The number of customers who are past their renewal date
Have your customer success teams contact customers to encourage them to renew. It’s a good idea to create and send a no-risk renewal path before renewal is due and remind customers again when renewal is coming up.
Turning Customer Journey Insights into Action
How you use these strategies depends on your goals. For example, say you want to increase customer retention. If your data reveals that customers have declined making a second purchase because they had trouble understanding how to use the product during their first use, you can create a trigger that will send an automated message based on what may be causing a customer to struggle.
Decide how to gather and use intelligence and how to track each customer’s progress. You can define the actions you want to occur, and events will respond to the automated triggers you set up. This way, you will know right away if a customer needs attention. This way, if every team member has access to customer’s data, they will know right away if a customer needs attention. This makes collaboration easier, helps you ensure your team is aligned on goals, and allows you to create a standardized process.
Applying customer journey insights doesn’t just help you improve the customer relationship; it’s also a way of gathering valuable feedback to improve your product. Your product should be constantly evolving because you want to offer ongoing value to customers. Customer journey insights are a great way to spot problem areas with your product or process, as it will be easy to see what features are proving troublesome or what steps need more development. Constantly improving your product’s quality and establishing clear communication within your teams will lay the foundation for building long-term customer relationships.
If you take action according to the insights learned by monitoring customer progress, you can improve the customer experience and reduce churn.
Deepen Engagements Using Comprehensive Software
You should always have visibility into your customer’s journey to improve your brand and product. Customer success software can help you consolidate, streamline, and manage all of your customer data to create proactive, intelligent customer engagements. The best software will use a modular framework for building customer success best practices into every stage of the customer journey. This powerful process for creating greater customer success helps you locate and implement insights that lead to deeper customer relationships. You will be able to set goals, analyze and share data, and create action plans.
Your customers create data every day just by using your product. Fully harness and apply the power of that data, and you’ll be able to connect with customers by offering an engaging customer experience based on their unique business goals.
Totango is a customer success platform built around SuccessBLOCs— modular, attainable, and measurable goals for each step of the customer journey. Our SuccessBLOCs make it easy to apply customer journey insights in ways that build lasting customer relationships. Request a demo to learn more.