Episode 04 | The Mental Blocks Around the Customer Journey

Hey, cs Psycho's, welcome back. In today's episode I'm going to share all sorts of things that can go wrong in creating the customer journey map due to the good old human brain acting like a two year old, from not getting buy in from the C suite on taking the time to create one, or creating one that does absolutely nothing. That's all coming up next right here on Psychology of Customer Success. Stay tuned Humans don't think or behave like computers. You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do. So why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic? I'm Rachel Provan CS Leadership Coach, award-winning CS strategist and certified psych nerd. I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world-class CS departments using a combination of strategy, leadership and mindset, using my secret weapon, psychology. Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success, where we'll dive into why people do the things they do, what motivates them and the effect that has on your CS strategy, team dynamics and executive presence. We'll dig into subjects like the helper personality, how thought errors like it's just easier if I do it keep your department stuck in reactive mode, and how cognitive bias can really screw up your customer journey Plus much more. Make sure to subscribe on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to share it with your CS bestie. Talk soon and here's to your success. Welcome back. This is episode four, and today we're talking about why brains hate the customer journey. As I've mentioned many times before, humans are not computers, in case anyone's still curious about that, a lot of the time we like to create these processes because it does make our lives easier, but we tend to act as though people are going to act like computers, like we're going to program it in one, two, three and they're going to do what we say and everybody's going to get what they want. And that would be really nice, but we don't work that way. For people to take actions that they're not used to taking requires a whole lot of motivation cojoling. It's really an interesting sort of psychological trap that has to be laid to get people to take new actions. I don't mean that in a way that we're being manipulative. This is something for their own good, it's something they want, but it really is something that has to be highly coordinated and considering the psychology of those people who you want to use your products. And before you even get there. It's so easy to have trouble even creating a customer journey. You can get trouble getting buy-in to perform the exercise in the first place that you can get from the executive team oh, you don't need to do that, we've done this before. You can have people asking you to just give them a high touch and a low touch with. The high touch has QBRs, the low touch doesn't. It shouldn't be a problem. Just onboard them, give them QBRs and collect the money. Isn't that what we do? If you think so, no, that's not the case and it's a lot harder. But a lot of people who don't know more about customer success tend to think that's all it is, because it can be hard to get buy-in to actually perform the exercise, or maybe you're not quite sure how to do it in the first place. Most CS leaders I see end up skipping it, and the problem with that is the customer journey or whatever you want to call it truly is that and segmentation. Those are truly the foundation of your customer success strategy. You can't skip it and expect to succeed. However, if you're doing it the wrong way, that's not going to work either. So you want one that actually is going to get your customers what they came for. To me, the way I look at it, is like a Lego instruction manual. So the real problems that are causing these symptoms is the customer journey is a term for marketing and, yeah, they probably have done the exercise before with sales and marketing. A customer journey typically is awareness when the customer, potential customer, when the lead, becomes aware of their problem and aware of your solution. Consideration they're thinking about buying the product, thinking about solving the problem, thinking about whether your company is going to be right for that purchase, they buy it. And usually the next, the rest of the, the customer journey, the traditional one, is renewal. Oh, look at that, we're at renewal already. Nothing had to happen. They're automatically going to get to renewal just by buying it. And then, finally, advocacy because the product is so perfect that if they purchase it, of course they're going to renew, of course they're going to tell other people. Yes, this is the way that the minds are going to work of those who are in product and probably the C suite, because, especially if you're dealing with founders in a startup, this is their baby. They created it. Why would people need help? It's intuitive to them, right, they built it. But it is easy to think that, well, they wanted the product, they bought the product. We showed them how to use the product. What the heck is the problem? So that's what their perspective is telling them and our perspective, most likely, is saying, yeah, they bought the product, but they don't want a product, they want an outcome. They want a result. They don't want to see how many millions of different cool things they can do with your product, they just want the result they came for. And then we can talk to them about those other cool things and see if those can help them. But it's not going to be automatic, unless you're not helping us with having bugs and with sales selling to people who aren't ideal customers. There's an old Native American story where they talk about a bunch of people sitting around a coffee cup, and it's 20 people sitting in a circle around a coffee cup and they're all looking at this coffee cup. It's a mug, it's got a handle, and every one of them sees that mug from a different perspective. So it looks different to each one of them and every single one of them is right from where they sit. That is an accurate perception from the context that they have, and this is the same thing with you and with the other people in your company. Yeah, it does make sense that the customer would use the product the way it's supposed to be used to get the desired result and renew. But it also makes sense that people are a little more complicated than that and sometimes there are other factors. All of these things can be true, but you're not going to really convince someone else who can see that cup in front of them from that perspective in their entire life, is living from that perspective, seeing that cup in that position, that you know it's actually in another position. What you'll just get from other departments if you're having trouble renewing them, that's your problem, that's your job. A little bit of a tangent there, but you can really see in the way that's put together that marketing customer journey, whose perspective they're really looking at this from right. It's from the companies, it's from their own perspective about what they have to achieve. That's what any of us are focused on, including your customers, including the C-suite, including your salespeople, including everybody you meet every single day. They're thinking what am I trying to do? What takes priority? What do I need to worry about now? What can I put to the side so I can focus on this and just like how am I going to get through the day? That's way too much. You can see again, the customer journey typically is focused on the company and that doesn't make it very much of a customer journey at all, does it? It has no perspective of the customer or what they go through or what they want. And the other glaring thing that's left out here to me is there's no point in the customer journey at which the customer achieves their outcome. You know, their outcome isn't renewal. Their outcome isn't advocacy or buying more. That's not what they're there to do. They're there to achieve some sort of business outcome, most likely a saving time, saving money or making money. Occasionally it will be to increase security, but typically those are the things that people are trying to do with tools. They're trying to save time, they're trying to have more money one way or another. And if you're not able to tie how your product does that for them, they're not going to renew. It's not going to be some secret that if you let it out of the bag by asking them hey, has this achieved that goal you wanted? Have you saved money? Have you made money? Have you saved time, it's not going to be like, oh, now that you mentioned it, we actually haven't. They're aware. They're aware that they bought it for a reason. So that is a huge mistake. That almost everyone makes on the customer journey is not having a line of demarcation of yes, they got there. No, they didn't. In terms of achieving their goal, because that is the biggest predictor of renewal. There is, as well as upsell, potential upsell the numbers go way up. Gainsight had an awesome presentation on verified outcomes, what they're doing with that now. And if a customer had just one verified outcome, saying yes, this did what it said it was going to do, the numbers increased astronomically. Yeah, so those who had one verified outcome had 30 points higher GRR or 30% higher GRR than customers without a verified outcome. So if you're just guessing and hoping the customer got what they wanted, you could be inching towards 70% churn. They also had a faster time to value. They had a 25% faster time to next expansion, 70% increase in expansion and that higher GRR. That's the biggest smoking gun I've ever heard of in customer success and it's one of those things where, when I saw this come out at Pulse, I actually smacked myself in the forehead because it was like how did I not come up with this myself, just finding a way to systematize, asking customers if they had achieved their outcome, verifying it in a way that created hard data, not just qualitative data? And they did that. It doesn't necessarily have to be as complicated as the way they do it. So if you don't have a tool yet or you don't have that tool, there are ways to do that. But the fact is, customer success is about getting the customers to their desired outcome, which is a lot more complicated than anyone would like it to be. So you may have been trying to figure this out, googling the customer journey, only to find articles about marketing or skipping it and doing the best you can with what you have. Some people just half-ass it and never look at it again. And some people get a CS tool, hoping that will solve the problem, and then they have the issue of it not really making a difference and being confusing and not really working, because, unfortunately, a CS tool is not a magic button. You have to tell it what to do, and the way you figure out what to tell it what to do is to figure out your actual customer journey Instead of the way we've been doing it, which clearly isn't working. It's focused on the company. People are only doing one, as if you only had one type of customer who's only trying to do one thing with your product, only have one goal with your product. None of that is working. So what I believe, what I do personally and have done in customer success organizations over and had it work, and what I now tell my clients to do is do what I call a customer value realization. It comes from the idea of a customer journey map, but instead of just all right, let's onboard them, give them some QBRs and try and renew them. It's a dual approach. It's every single step that you take on your end and every single step the customer takes on their end to get them to that business outcome that they need to achieve, to renew your product, to get them there. And then from there you take it to the rest, to the renewal, to the expansion, to the advocacy. But it's like you're walking up. You have to climb up a steep hill with lots of snow on it to get up through onboarding and adoption, and then, once you reach that business outcome, it's like you're at the top of the mountain and you get to ski down the other side of expansion, advocacy, renewal, all the things that you want as a CS leader and your company wants, but you don't get that without the onboarding, adoption and goal achievement all right. So that's what this is designed to do. It's every step both sides has to take, because you can show up to calls, you can send them, you can send customers digital education materials, you can host webinars. But guess what? If the customer isn't doing what they need to do on their end, none of it's going to work. That's what this is about. It's about the, and a lot of the time that customers don't do what they need to do on their end is because, a no one's asked them and, b we're only considering one person when we're figuring that out. We're only looking at the desired outcome or goal of the executive sponsor. And now, of course, that's important they're the one who is going to sign the check. They're the one who's going to decide if we do this again, if they're going to renew, if they're going to buy more, but they're probably not going to be the one using your product. So you have to make sure it gets their business outcome. But then you have to figure out who are the end users, who's going to be coordinating this from day to day, and figure out something that's going to motivate them to use it. I know it's a pain in the ass I never said it wasn't but if you want this to actually work, you need to find a way to do that. It doesn't need to be super complicated. If it's just a way to say, hey, this is going to help you get this done faster and easier, here's how you use it, that's fine. If it's just needing to send out some launch kits to give it a little hype, to get people excited about the product before just being like here's a new tool, learn how to use it, because we said again, working with humans, which one sounds like it's going to work better. Yes, it takes more upfront time, but it's actually effective versus having a customer experience that doesn't really do anything. And I think that's one of the reasons customer success has gotten somewhat of a bad rap is because a lot of companies don't actually consider the customer's point of view and their requirements and what they need. It's just focused on that company. So again, every step the customer takes on their end, every step your company has to take on your end to get them to that desired outcome. And then what does it look like after that? You don't necessarily have to know every step the customer has to take. You just have to have that conversation with them. It's like, all right, you're trying to do this. Who's going to be involved? What do you have to do? What's the timing like? Because if you don't have that conversation with them during your kickoff call, they may want to do this, but they're going to go back to their desk and they're going to answer 30 emails and they're going to get three calls and 15 Slack messages. And then they're going to say I was supposed to do something with that new product and it's going to be like staring at a blank page. For a writer, it's just too overwhelming to not know where to start. So if you know what they have to do on their end and you've typed it up in an email to them with a summary saying, hey, here's what we agreed on. You're going to do this, then we're going to do that. It makes things actually happen, because otherwise the way people work and the way the brain works is all right. I'm too tired for that now. It's not my number one priority. I know I have to do it. I'm going to put it here on my to-do list, but I'm going to focus on this other thing that's more urgent for me first. And how does that end up going for you? Because I can tell you how it goes for me. It keeps getting pushed down. It keeps getting pushed down and all of a sudden we're a month later and I still haven't done it. If I haven't done it by now hasn't had any consequences. Maybe I don't need to do it Now. I know full why I bought it. I've already spent the money, but that money's gone now. So do I really want to spend the effort there? Or should I spend it on this other thing that can make me money back? This is a really fast way to become shelfware and it's not necessary. So this is the foundation. And, yes, it takes a fair amount of time, but you don't have to get it perfect. You can start off with guessing. You can start off with saying all right, we've had some of our clients in the past. This is what's done. Well, let's take that as our V1, as our hypothesis. Be like little scientists here Say all right, this worked for them, let's see if it works for this customer over here who also wants to do the same thing. Now, another bummer is this is going to differ based on what the customer is trying to achieve. So if they have a different outcome, it's probably going to take different things to get them there and it's going to depend on the size of the customer. So if you have a large enterprise customer, it's probably going to take a lot more effort and coordination to roll out a tool there than it is at the mom and pop shop around the corner. So the steps that you're going to need to take are going to be different. So each of those requires a different customer journey map. Yes, but don't get bogged down in the details. Start with your customer outcome the outcome that most of your customers are trying to get, or your highest revenue customers are trying to get, and build that first. You can build the other ones later. There will be a lot of overlap If you're going to be on board all these people. You're going to have the kickoff call with probably all these people. There are going to be a lot of similar things that you're doing and you'll create materials you can use again and again, but it's just taking those extra minutes, say they're trying to achieve something different. Do we have to tell them to use the product in a different way? Do we have to meet with them more regularly to make sure that's going to task? Are there different people we have to train? It's not that much more work, but it is just infinitely more effective. It's really the point of customer success and the nice thing is do this right and it builds all your life cycle playbooks and your success plans and it sets you up for the time when you get a tool, because when you get a tool, it doesn't know what to do to make your customer successful. You have to tell it what to do. It's something for you to leverage to speed up your playbooks and your customer journey, but it's not something that you can, that can tell you how to make your customers successful. It's not the same for every, for every client, and it's not the same for every company, because there's just different instructions to get them what they need. All right. So this is the foundation. It's absolutely necessary. It's what everything else is built on. Foundations are boring. They're the broccoli of CS, but if you don't do them, you're really just building a house of cards. I see people do this all the time Like what's your, what are your customers outcomes, what's their customer journey? And they look at me stumped and I say you really shouldn't be automating this stuff yet because you're not automating success. So, final tips start messy and iterate. All right Done is better than perfect, and don't just pop in the drawer. Go back to it every quarter, each one of the customer journeys you're making. Try to just create one of them, a quarter. You're going to, you're going to iterate on them, you're going to build on them, you're going to put in kind of dupe and revise them for different kinds of customers who are trying to achieve different things, and finally share them with your cross functional teams once you've got them put together, because they go nuts for them. They've never understood the clients like this before. It helps product, it helps marketing, it helps sales. Everybody just gets so excited when you show this and you get more cross functional buy-in than you've probably experienced before. All right, so that's it for me today. That is, I know, one of the most valuable things that a lot of people take from the Customer Success Leadership Academy. We do have templates in there. We go through the whole thing, but that's really the high level overview of it. Again, it would take a long time to go through the nitty gritty of everything, but you can get a bunch of post-its and get started on that immediately. There's really nothing special to it. You just divide it up along the customer journey onboarding, adoption, goal, achievement, renewal, expansion, advocacy and put what do we do? What does the customer do at each of those stages? All right, thank you so much for joining me today for another episode of Psychology of Customer Success. If you want to level up your CS leadership strategy and mindset, go to ProVanceuccesscom. That's where you can get on the waitlist to learn more about Customer Success Leadership Academy when it opens again. Right now, our doors are closed. We're busy in there, but we open up every few months. So if you like this, please all go and give us five stars on Apple or Spotify. It really helps people find the podcast and it really helps because this takes so many hours, guys and I absolutely love it. But I have to make sure that it makes sense to keep going. So if you like it, make sure I know and make sure I buy going on there and voting. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I never shut up on there. So go say hi, drop something in one of the comments, tell me off, do whatever you got to do, all right, but just don't be a stranger. I am not scary, I love all CS people and yeah. So until next time, take care of yourself, get some rest and don't forget to share this episode with your CS bestie. Talk soon.