How do you create a Customer Success Journey Map

Mar 7, 2023

A great client experience doesn't just happen on the spur of the moment. It is the product of understanding how clients interact with you and deliberately building in high points that:

  1. Delight clients at different stages of the customer journey
  2. Let them reach particular goals

To deliver a great client experience, you need an outline of the customer's journey -- a roadmap which details the precise actions a customer will have to go through to achieve success within your brand.

This article outlines practical steps in creating a powerful customer journey mapping. We'll cover the following:

What's a success for the customer journey map?

A success roadmap for customer experiences will provide a step-by step plan to creating a positive customer experience after purchase to your customers.

It describes how your customers interact with your brand- from the point of first purchase through to repeat patronage -- and the steps to take at each interaction stage to ensure your clients have a great experience with your brand.

The reason you should have a Customer Success Journey Map?

With a customer success journey map, you can:

Help customers anticipate and overcome blockers of success

The journey of a customer is incredibly complex and easy to have things go off the rails -- which could have devastating consequences for your business as a designer. A slip here, a mistake here, and you'll have an unhappy customer before you know it.

Customer success journey mapping fixes this problem. This process lets you discover missed obstacles -- such as payment glitches and broken workflows -- that could negatively impact customer satisfaction. or to improve the existing touch points to ensure a better overall experience.

If you're selling your products to a worldwide audience, however, your payment processor is only accepting payments from Canada and the U.S. and Canada -You can set up proactively to set up an alternative payment channel. Doing this early saves you from losing customers when they purchase as a result of issues with payment to come up.

Standardize the customer experience

We're all way too well-versed in:

One of your friends has recommended a specific creator following a positive encounter with their product. But, after interacting with the creator and leaving, you have an entirely different impression. This happens when brands fail to uniformize their overall user experience.

A map of the customer's journey helps solve this issue. How? it is what guides your plan for customer satisfaction to ensure that each customer is able to have an identical experience when they interact of your company, regardless of when it is, where or how they interact with you.

In the process of mapping during the mapping process, you establish specific customer satisfaction requirements for each phase of communication. One example of your customer success requirements could be sending an email with a discount code for your course to new subscribers to your pay-per-click community- or shouting them out via social media.

When you've clarified what needs to happen throughout the interaction stages it's much easier to stick to your goals and create consistent experience.

Create trust in your brand

Your currency is trust as a creator. Your brand must be trusted by people enough to listen to your recommendations, pay for your courses or become part of your community. In addition to building a community that trusts you, trust can help you get lucrative brand contracts as well as collaborations.

To build trust, you must meet your customer's expectations that is, by stating your intentions and performing what you say. The mapping of the customer's journey to success could be helpful here.

Once you've spelled out the requirements for every stage of interaction with your customer, setting, communicating and meeting your client's expectations becomes easy. You can, for instance, inform the customer that they'll be given a gift card by your company after making their initial purchase, because you've established the procedure for making it happen.

How to develop an outline of the customer's journey

There are a myriad of examples and templates to help you with customer journey mapping. However, the customer's success journey mapping is exclusive to your business -be sure to remember that!

No two clients are alike Therefore, take your time to understand how your customers define success, and then create processes that empower clients to reach their goals.

Learn how your customers define the word "success".

It is important to understand what your customers' definition of success is so that you don't waste the time and energy on an goal they don't have a stake in. A lot of times, customers have a different goal or purpose than the one we believe they want to achieve.

So how do you discover what clients are looking to attain? It's simple -- inquire with them. There are a variety of methods to accomplish this:

  • When you gain an additional follower on social media, you can send them an email asking them the reason they chose to follow your page and what they expect to gain.
  • Send an email of welcome to new members of your community asking them what they expect from your website and content.
  • Include the "what do you want to see from me" field to sign-up forms on your site.

Divide the success of your customer journey into stages

Break the customer journey into steps to make it easier for you to design the best experiences for your clients. Like we said earlier, the process of achieving customer success is complex It's also easy to forget important aspects in the process of customer success journey mapping all at once.

The exact stages depend on your brand and the type of clients you have. In general, however the stages should look similar to this:

  1. purchase  Client opts to buy your program or work with your brand
  2. Onboarding: The client has been set up to have an enjoyable partnership with your company. Say they recently joined your community. You can send them a short welcome email with details of community activities, administrators, as well as answers to frequently asked questions.
  3. Adoption: A customer uses your service or product to accomplish their goals.
  4. Loyalty and advocacy: The client is satisfied by their experience and can help you acquire new clients using the power of word-of-mouth advertising.

Make sure you have brand points of contact for every stage of your journey to customer satisfaction

Brand or customer touchpoints can be used to establish a connection between customers and your brand. Once you've set your touchpoints, you can optimize them to deliver an identical experience for your customers throughout the entire.

On a high-level the majority of creators use these touchpoints:

  • To purchase  Pages for landing and websites
  • For onboarding: Email drips
  • For retention  owned channels such as newsletters and communities that are free.
  • For loyalty and advocacy: Social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter Websites and third-party creator review sites like Grin.

This categorization isn't set in stone. One touch point can apply to several stages. Some creators utilize payment functions within social media platforms to sell their digital products to subscribers. Others host their digital products directly on their sites instead of using a education management software.

For Purchase Websites and landing pages
For Onboarding Email drips
To be used for Adoption
  • Community tools such as Slack as well as Microsoft Teams.
For retention Newsletters and communities for free
For loyalty and advocacy Social media, third-party review sites as well as creator marketplaces

This is how it plays out in real time:

A client purchases your new course via a landing page. Once they have purchased the course they will receive a welcoming email with login access to the learning management system , where the course will be being hosted.

The course is progressing as the course progresses, students receive email reminders filled with helpful tips that will help them make the best of the course. They also get automatic access to Slack's community to connect with other students, get help from a one-to-one teacher and get personalized feedback.

When they finish the class, they choose to post their experiences through social media. This aids your business in gaining new customers.

Set customer milestones for every step.

Customer milestones refer to the steps that must happen in specific customers' journeys for the stage to be considered successful -- think of them as items in a customer journey success checklist. Milestones allow you to track your customer's progress towards a particular goal.

It is necessary to address two important questions as you determine milestones of your customer:

  1. What do you think the goal of the user is at this point in the interaction?
  2. What must be done in order for them to accomplish the goal?

At the time of the initial adoption phase For instance, in the adopt stage one of the key milestones could be the client registering for a one-on-one feedback session after wrapping up onboarding. And in the loyalty stage an example of a milestone may be the user clicking the personalized refer-a-friend link that you include in your weekly newsletter -getting them one step closer to being a part of the word-of-mouth advertising for your company.

Set goals and metrics for each milestone.

Success metrics help you measure the effectiveness of each milestone and measure how a particular milestone leads the client to the next until they've completed their customer satisfaction journey.

Set up success metrics for milestones is an incredibly simple process. Consider the task that the goal is to complete and include it on your customer success journey map.

Using our consideration stage example Let's say that a customer is able to sign up for your newsletter however, they don't sign-up for the newsletter. In this case, the "click newsletter link" event is not successful in this instance. To count it, the client needs to finish the registration process.

Design your Customer Success Journey map.

Now, it's time to create your customer success journey map. You can create it entirely from scratch with tools like Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel or visualization tools like Miro or Figma.

You also have the option of using templates. It's a good option if:

  1. It's your first time creating a customer success map for the first time
  2. You'd like to reduce time.

Mapping the customer's journey to success isn't a one-and-done process

The clients you serve are ever-changing and their definition of success is going to change as time goes by. To keep up with these changes, you must continually improve your customer's success plan of action.

Build a feedback process into your customer journey map so that you can easily track what's effective and what could be improved. Be sure to try out new milestones or customer journey steps as they could serve the customers better!