For many customer success professionals, ensuring customers are engaged across all touchpoints is essential to achieving a stronger customer retention rate.
That’s why so many CS teams swear by customer journey mapping. Not only does it provide them with a visual roadmap of customers’ interactions with their brand but it also gives them insight into specific pain points so they can readjust their strategies and deliver better experiences in the future.
For Jamie Karoff, senior customer success manager at revenue management software company Clari, customer journey mapping acts as a window into clients’ core objectives and priorities. Each customer is different, and by listening closely to their unique needs, Karoff and her team can more easily deliver experiences that are as personalized and effective as possible, she said.
Built In San Francisco checked in with Karoff to learn about the power of customer journey mapping and how it holds the key to delivering outstanding experiences.
What’s one way customer journey mapping helps you deliver a better customer experience?
Customer journey mapping is a great way to gain insight into the customer’s goals and objectives. By mapping out what clients’ business objectives are and how they align with Clari, it allows us to prioritize where to begin the customer journey. Knowing where the customer wants to go allows us to deliver a better customer experience, as we can tailor our approach during meetings and calls. For example, one of our customers has plans of going public and is hyper-focused on pipeline generation. Based on our experience helping customers go public, we were able to put together an action plan of items that would need to be created to provide value. Specifically, we created a pipeline generation tab so they could see what their out-quarters would look like. We also created dashboards so executives could see if their sales reps were meeting pipeline target goals.
What other teams or team members do you collaborate with to support customers throughout their success journey, and how does mapping help clarify everyone’s roles and responsibilities?
Clari offers a very collaborative environment. I often work closely with my managers and more experienced CSMs to bounce ideas off of them about ways to accomplish items on the success map. I work with our implementation consults frequently as they provide consults on trickier processes a customer may be looking to get into our software. I work with our support engineers and product managers to make sure product features are working correctly and we have been able to troubleshoot any issues. All of these interactions come together to make sure we are guiding the customer on their success journey. Customer journey mapping helps us define roles and pull in experts when needed to accomplish a goal.
Customer journey mapping helps us define roles and pull in experts when needed to accomplish a goal.”
How do you tailor the customer journey map to meet the unique needs of different segments or types of customers?
Each customer I work with has unique needs and comes from a different industry. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to revenue operations. One customer may be very focused on renewals and protecting their business, while another may be very focused on what pipeline generation looks like. Once we have had conversations about what their business objectives are, we can begin to build a customer journey map based on what they are working toward. It begins with an initial conversation of understanding where they are trying to go and then creating goals and milestones to work towards throughout the process. For instance, someone whose work focuses on renewals versus pipeline generation has specific goals and expectations for their business, so we can work to find a tailored approach to help them throughout the customer lifecycle.
