Customer Journey Mapping

Overview

As a Customer Success leader, one of the first projects you take on when joining a new company is reviewing the Customer Journey. You want to map all the interactions new customers have with your team. This includes reviewing the sales process and the handover to CS, the onboarding and training programs the team has in place, up to QBRs and renewals.

Getting insights on all these touchpoints is just the first part of the project. Once you formulate your hypothesis on how to improve the user experience, you need to present your proposal. Multiple times. Since all departments impact the experience customers have with your company, you want to involve as many perspectives as possible.

So traditionally, you would need at least three meetings to:

• Get feedback from your team on the new touch points and triggers.
• Gather feedback from content, design, data to secure the resources you need.
• Present to your executive team for final approval.

With Claap? You record your video, leave comments exactly where you expect feedback, and  share your video. Do you want to avoid bias in the feedback? No problem. Same recording, just duplicate it and collect two (or three!) sets of feedback.

When to use the Customer Journey Mapping Playbook

Let’s start with what this playbook is not about. It’s not our purpose to do a deep dive into the research you need to do in order to map and define your Customer Journey. There are plenty of articles and books dedicated to the topic. But at the very minimum you want to collect insights and align with three teams:

• Sales and Marketing: To avoid overlaps and missing gaps, you want to ask questions like: are you asking in your kick-off call or onboarding survey questions that were already asked by the Sales team? Are you asking power users for testimonials or to join a webinar at the same time they received an email from your marketing team? In some cases, duplication is good, but you won’t know until you understand the overlaps and missing gaps. Ideally, you surfaced all of this during the research phase, but you should definitely double-check everything before you start implementing your journey.

• Product: to have maximum visibility on the actions customers do when using the product, you want to ensure product events are sent to your Customer Success Platform. These will enable you to trigger playbooks and automated outreaches at specific times of the journey. For example, send the NPS survey when customers experience the aha moment or send a personal email when they become inactive. Define the critical events and work with your product team to make them available to you.

Now, what is this playbook about? We designed it to help you run inclusive customer journey mapping reviews once you’re ready to present your proposal. Iterate faster, improve the quality of the feedback you get, and align on next steps. Without scheduling endless meetings.

How to get started

Prepare your workflow

Prepare a document to walk your team through your proposal. You can use a presentation, a whiteboarding tool, or even pen and paper. Regardless of the tool you use, these are some best practices to take into account when presenting your journey map:

• Stages: identify the steps in the journey, such as onboarding, adoption, nurturing, expansion, etc.
• Goal: clearly state the desired goal for each stage, both for you and the customer
• Triggers: color code your triggers to differentiate the reactive from the proactive ones
• Action: specify which actions must be delivered with a 1:1 engagement and which ones are included in your digital program.

Record your presentation

Now it’s time to record your screen and go present your proposal. Your goal here is to explain your proposal and the choices you made with as much clarity as possible. Show the data you have, from customer interviews, to support tickets or product usage analysis. Walk them step by step, giving context and the explaining the reasons for your choices. Try to anticipate questions and doubts and address them proactively. This will speed up decisions and move the project faster.

Best practices to follow:

• Link relevant documents, like your deck or Figjam file, in the description of the claap.
• Start the recording by giving context and explaining the problem you’re trying to solve, before jumping into the solution.
• Add comments while recording to structure your presentation. These comments act as sections or a table of contents if you wish, to make it easier for watchers to navigate through your video.
• Zoom in on each step so your teammates can check details. This also ensures they are focused on one step at a time.

Share your claap video to collect feedback

While you should make your claap available for anyone to watch, you want to call the attention of key stakeholders. As mentioned in the introduction, you want to align with these groups:

• Sales & Marketing: you need to consider the journey end-to-end. So even if you just focus on the CS side of the journey, it’s key that you validate it with Sales and Marketing, to avoid overlaps and – most importantly – contradictory messages!
• Product: similar overlaps can happen with your Product ream. What banners or in-app messages are customers seeing in the Product? Mostly in SaaS and especially in Product-led growth models, your customers spend most of their time in the product, not talking to your team. So you want to ensure you complement each other.

There are several ways to share your claap: adding to a topic, inviting colleagues by email, or even integrating with your favourite tools, like Slack or Notion. To ensure maximum visibility, we recommend moving the claap to a dedicated topic under your team. For example “Projects quick-off” topic under team “Customer Success”.

Reply to comments and align on next steps

As feedback starts coming in, ensure you clarify doubts, answer questions, and move forward with decisions. Organize discussions in threads to keep topics separated and resolve threads once a decision is made.

Book a short meeting if a discussion starts being too complex to discuss asynchronously. That’s the beauty of asynchronous collaboration. Align first on the easiest topics and then, if needed, book a 15-min sync to tackle the challenging ones. Only with the relevant people instead of having 10 people in the same room for 90 minutes.

Conclusion

This playbook is a useful tool for leaders aiming to improve the user experience. With Claap, you can quickly present your proposal and get feedback from stakeholders, iterate, and move projects forward without having lots of meetings. By following the best practices outlined in this playbook, you can ensure that your organization is aligned and working towards a common goal of delivering an excellent customer journey.