Crafting customer journeys
If you were swimming in a pool, you would not want the lifeguard to have to ask “Excuse me, but are you drowning?”
A lifeguard is trained to notice what drowning looks like.
A lifeguard sits and watches and dives in to help as soon as they see the signs of someone drowning.
Customer support is the lifeguard for any business.
Being proactive in support is not randomly checking in asking “is there anything I can help you with?”
Often times customers don't know what they need help with, who to ask, what to ask, or where they should be going next. That's your job. Great proactive support shifts the question from “what can I help you with?” to noticing when someone needs help, and saying “here's where you are, and here's how I can help you get to where you should go next.”
In order to deliver the the kind of proactive support that drives growth, you need to understand what behaviors lead to a successful, happy customer. You also need to know what customer behaviors look like drowning. To do this, you need to create what is known across the industry as a customer journey.
What is a customer journey?
If you’re not familiar with the concept of a customer journey, it’s a diagram of each touchpoint your customer takes with your company during the buying process. It works for online experiences, retail experiences, products, services, you name it. Customer journeys can map the entire customer lifecycle, or smaller pieces of a larger journey like visiting the website to checking out items in a cart, moving customers from starting a trial to becoming paying customer, or “land and expand” journeys that lead customers towards post purchase expansion. Knowing where your customer has been, and more importantly where they should be headed next, is critical to delivering excellent customer support and even more critical to measuring the impact of that support on the business.
There are two parts to the customer journey process: mapping and crafting. Mapping involves plotting out the existing process to identify points of friction and needs for improvement, aligning the team on what happens with each customer when, and who has ownership over what part of the process. This post covers crafting.
Starting your journey from scratch
Your customer journey needs to answer three questions:
What product or website touchpoints lead folks to buy (or stay happy and healthy long term)
What engagement touchpoints encourage buying (and staying) behavior
What customer segments make the most business impact
There’s also an optional 4th touchpoint, and that’s educational resources: video tutorials, documents, guides, etc. If you have the means to track that in a way that corresponds to conversion, it’s definitely worth it! That said, for simplicity’s sake, we won’t be including it in the map.
Knowing what product or website touchpoints lead to happy, healthy customers will allow you to identify the points where it’s most important to monitor adoption, offer proactive help, and smooth over any friction.
Determining the touchpoints
There are three ways to figure out the answers to those questions:
Hire a data scientist
Do it manually
A combination of the two.
During my tenure at Help Scout, we hired a data scientist to help answer questions 1 and 3. That’s certainly easiest, and if you have the resources to do it, highly recommended. The goal was specifically to create a customer journey for the onboarding experience, to increase trial to paid conversion.
The data scientist looked at customers in different times of the life cycle, what size they were to start, when they added specific features or adopted parts of the product, and what happened to their accounts long term (did they grow? did they churn?) Looking at those factors, the data scientist determined for us what product touch points customers needed to hit early in the process in order to buy, what they would eventually need to adopt to keep them sticky and grow long term, and how we should bucket our customer groups in order to set them on customer paths that made sense for business impact.
We had to find the answer to number 2 manually.
We created a behemoth spreadsheet that included all the customer engagement touchpoints: email, chat, group class webinars, and 1:1 coaching calls. We broke them down in the following three ways:
What % of customers on trial engaged.
Of those who engaged, who became paying
Protip: It helps having some sort of BI tool and means of tracking customer engagement channels that can cross-check with your billing system to cross check engagement with account status. Otherwise, there are hacky ways to do this with tools like Help Scout and Hubspot.
Looking at these two metrics highlighted two things for us: which engagement methods were pulling their weight (like if time-expensive channels like chat or coaching calls were worth the ROI) and how many trial customers were taking advantage of certain support channels. That helped us determine whether or not we should direct more traffic to certain channels to increase engagement.
Now, from doing a little research on customer behavior and data, we could answer the following questions:
What product or Site touchpoints lead folks to buY (or Stay)?
Keeping Help Scout as the example, we learned:
That it was significantly more likely for a customer to become paying if they sent their email into Help Scout (this finding was a bit obvious, as Help Scout is a shared email inbox). If anything, the most important indicator on if a customer might become paying or not, was this first step.
We also found the following behaviors heavily indicated whether a customer signed for a paying account:
Adding Users
Sent and received conversations
Adding Tags (a tracking feature)
Adding Workflows (used for lightweight automation)
There were some other learnings as well, like setting up the Office Hours feature to Reports was the highest indicator a company would become paying, but we deemed this correlation and not causation. Setting up Office Hours to reports, while valuable, isn’t really a “wow” feature, but more of a house keeping setup that shows someone is getting serious about account setup. We settled on the top three to include in our customer journey, since they correlated to trial to paid conversion, but also showcased product value.
What engagement touchpoints encourage buying (and staying) behavior?
From our laborious manual efforts tracking engagement touchpoints, we discovered:
Among the customers on trial that engaged with support in any way, 42% became paying customers. We also found that 80% of customers that became paying engaged with support in some way.
To break that down a bit further with the Help Scout example:
Email: About 17% of customers engaged with support by email during the trial period. Of the engaged, 39% of those companies have converted to paying customers. This was the most reliable metric month after month.
Chat: 10% of customers engaged with support by chat, but 70% of the people who have chatted with us while on trial ended up as paying customers.
1:1 coaching calls: Between 55-65% of companies who had a coaching call while on trial converted to paying customers. This percentage fluctuated month after month, and once even reached as high as 80%. 1:1 calls are costly and time consuming, but effective.
Webinars: Only 3% of our trials signed up for Webinars, but for those who did, about 60% convert. This revealed webinars a huge opportunity to drive 1:many traffic to.
These findings indicated it would be pretty worthwhile to build customer engagement touchpoints in the customer journey in addition to product ones.
What customer segments make the most business impacT?
We got insights into the following customer patterns:
1-3 User accounts churned quickly and rarely grew
4-10 User account stayed stable or grew slowly over time
11+ User accounts, when we landed them, expanded exponentially
Based on these findings, we knew that we would want to create different paths, particularly where it came to engagement effort from our team, by User count.
Once you’ve identified the answers to those three questions, crafting a customer journey becomes more like a logic exercise:
In order for a customer to reach Y (product touch point that leads to success), they must do X.
Plot along those lines, thinking in terms of what makes for a logical progression each step of the way, starting from the point of entry. The point of entry might be signing landing on the website, or it might be signing up for a trial. Depending on the complexity of your website or product, best practice is to create a journey for each conversion goal.
Journey examples
Some examples of individual journeys based on conversion goals:
Website entry to signing up for a trial
Signing up for a trial to becoming a paying customer
Becoming a paying customer that lasts over 90 days
90 day+ customer that expands and increases lifetime value
To deliver an example based on the learnings from above, we used the data scientist to help us identify the product touch points that lead to a trial customer becoming a paying aunt, and user segments most worth investing in. We also did our own research to find what customer engagement touchpoints also correlated with trial to paid conversion. In the first iteration of this exercise, we used these learnings to create a product journey that was the same for everyone, then an engagement journey that varied based on user count.
Product journey
Start trial > send email into Help Scout > add users > test conversations > add Tags > add Workflows > add credit card info.
1-3 user engagement journey
The goal of the 1-3 user journey was to lead them through the product with as minimal touch as possible, while still introducing them to lightweight 1 to many support channels like email, chat, and webinars.
1-3 Engagement Journey
Welcome email to intro support > chat popup during trial > webinar invite.
4-10 user engagement journey
For 4-10, we saw these accounts had a stabilizing effect on the business, and a strong potential to grow. For this customer segment, we wanted to add a little extra muscle to make sure they were getting all the help and resources they need to stay the course. We added the 1:1 coaching call to this segment. It wasn’t quite as labor intensive as a full on account manager, but a little more human help to talk things out where they needed to.
4-10 Engagement Journey
Welcome email to intro support > chat popup during trial > webinar invite > coaching call invitation.
That single addition made a huge impact with a tremendous ROI. After deploying, Help Scout saw a significant lift in trial to paid conversion for this segment, with only a single, half hour call per account that opted in.
11+ user engagement journey
Since these users fit more of an enterprise price tag, we followed a more enterprise sales approach with them. These companies were routed as leads to our high-touch “red carpet” team.
11+ Engagement Journey
Discovery call > demo > set up/implementation > team training > contract signed.
The chief difference between these companies and the 1-10 companies was that instead of the product, marketing automation, and low/lower touch 1 to many support channels leading them through the product journey, they had a dedicated “red carpet” team both pre-sale and post-sale lead them through the process.
Using your customer journey
Once you know what product touch points lead to a successful customer (buying or staying), what engagement points increase customer’s success, how to prioritize the level of support engagement resources based on customer segment, and then wrap all of those touch points together into a segmented customer journey map that accounts for both product and engagement, how do you make it actionable?
Apply your journey
Apply the map to every way a customer interacts with your company or product. That could look like:
In-app product tours
Onboarding educational email drip campaigns
Educational video tours
Knowledge base and help guide structuring
UX design and flow
Once you have a map, you can start to monitor when someone starts to wander off the map. That’s where proactivity comes into play. When your customer veers off the map, use that as a signal to your team to reach out and lead them on the right course. The amount of energy spent to veer them on the right course should reflect your engagement map.
Using the example from Help Scout, if we noticed a 1-3 User did not set up their email to go to Help Scout, we would use marketing automation to trigger an email with instructions on how to do that. But, if a 4-10 user account hadn’t reached that step, we would reach out and offer to schedule a 1:1 call to specifically help with that step. Since 11+ journeys were all managed by a dedicated “red carpet” customers team member, there was no need to monitor at scale.
You also use the customer journey map to inform proactive nudges in the queue when the customer writes in, using the Yes, And tactic in a Support Driven Growth strategy.
Share your journey internally
Customer journey maps align teams across departments on what happens with each customer when, and who has ownership over what part of the process. It helps build customer empathy, but also irons out frictions, identifies gaps in ownership, and makes sure nothing slips through the cracks. You’ll want to publish the journey in a public, internal place like a shared internal wiki, and go over the journey map as part of internal onboarding for all team members.
The shape and presentation of your customer journey map is related to the complexity of your customer journey.
Your published customer journey map might look like a tree if you have multiple journeys for different customer segments:
For space, this diagram only shows the first steps and actions of each tree on the customer journey to illustrate the concept, not the finished product.
Or a chart if you have a single, but complex, customer segment. This is common with enterprise process that requires high touch for all customers. The company Brightback, for example, follows a high-touch, high-price, low volume model, and here’s how the journey map looks.
It can also be combination of both! This is common for SAAS companies that have a high volume, low cost, low-touch arm of the business and a high-touch, high cost, low volume side of the business (like the Help Scout example).
Expanding your customer journey
It’s an easy and natural inclination to “boil the ocean” when it comes to customer journey mapping, but best practice is to keep each journey to a singular conversion goal. Once you’ve built one customer journey to a singular goal, it becomes easier to build and expand, enriching in detail.
Using Help Scout as the example again, we started with the trial to paid customer journey, but also knew that paying customers that stayed longer than 90 days were significantly more likely to stick around long term. We, again, looked at the product touch points that lead to successful long term customers. With those increased product touchpoints, we built a 90-day customer journey that lead customers to those touch points during their first 90 days, resulting in a reduction in overall churn.
Another way we expanded the customer journey was looking at behavior that indicated potential for customer expansion. Things like adding lots of users or over-using and abusing certain features flagged an indication the customer might be better suited for an upgraded tier or plan. Creating an “expansion” journey can help lead the way towards a land and expand strategy to grow your business.
We can help…
If customer journey mapping and crafting sounds like something that would benefit your business, but you don’t have the resources or headspace to lead the initiative yourself, let our Support Driven Growth coaches take that off your plate.