Mapping Your Customer Journey From the Outside In

Every start-up knows the intense hustle of capturing market share. Getting your brand out there is one thing. But securing customers who’ll stick with your product is a whole different ballgame.

At Skedulo, our secret to reaching 50,000 users from 140+ different organizations is based on one philosophy: customer first. Customers are the lifeblood of our company, so we make a commitment to treating them wonderfully. But what does that actually look like in practice?

In this blog post, we share our story of using customer journey mapping to drive customer satisfaction and accelerate growth at Skedulo.

Read on to find out how our customer journey mapping processes have evolved since we first started mapping back in 2017, and what we’ve learned along the way.

The First Customer Journey Map

Customer journey maps are a visual representation of how customers interact with your company. By identifying each touch point between you and the customer, you can assess what the experience is like for your customers as they strive to achieve their goals.

When we created Skedulo’s first customer journey map, we wanted to understand what it’s like for organizations to use Skedulo. How do customers engage with our customer success managers? Are their needs being met quickly and effectively? What are our pressure points and where can we do things better?

We found that, as Skedulo had grown, our small team of customer success managers (CSMs) had taken on a huge range of functions and roles. They barely had time to take a breath between running projects, implementing customizations, managing accounts and providing tech support. Our CSMs were too stretched to meet the growing needs of Skedulo customers.

Specialist Roles and Measuring Success

To better scale Skedulo’s customer success management function, we decided to introduce specialist roles and teams to share the workload and facilitate a great customer experience at every touch point.

We ramped up a tech support team, introduced project managers and educated our customers on who to call for what type of question. We worked with each Skedulo team to agree on objectives and key results so that everyone was aligned on achieving company goals and focusing their effort on where they could add the most value.

This gave us a new ability to measure and track our performance around customer experience – a critical precursor for improvement.

Experiencing Our Customers’ Experience

Once we’d tightened our customer engagement processes, we put them to the test. Skedulo’s developers, product owners and salespeople were taken offline and given mock scenarios for using Skedulo software, just as our customers would. This was a powerful way for our engineering, product and sales teams to truly understand our customers’ frustrations.

In addition, engineering and product teams came onsite to hear real feedback first-hand from customers. Every part of the Skedulo team now has a direct connection to the customer journey.

Enabling success

We’ve now developed a new customer journey which has clearly defined pillars of success for every interaction point with Skedulo customers. It’s a live document that we’ll keep iterating as we continue to improve our customer experience.

Going forward, we’re establishing a new community enablement team and introducing online training to make it easier for our customers and partners to access what they need when they need it.

What we’ve learned along the way

If you’re taking on your own customer journey mapping exercise, here’s a few things we wish we’d known when we started:

• Adoption: There’s no point creating a customer journey map unless your teams rally around it. Rather than overwhelming your staff with complex diagrams and excessive detail, start small and keep it simple. Validate your approach with real customers and keep a relentless focus on continual improvement of customer experience.
• Partners: Partners and contractors might be a critical part of your business model, but don’t forget that they can also have a huge impact on customer sentiment, perception and experience. Work closely with your partners and contractors from day one to make sure you’re aligned on your vision, values and expectations for customer experience. Scalability: Particularly for fast-growing companies, customer journey mapping is something you’ll need to keep revisiting. When things are moving fast, don’t be afraid to try new things, work iteratively and fail fast. Most importantly – remember to keep listening to customer feedback during this time.
• Effectiveness: The best customer journey maps are simple, evolve over time, engage every person in the organization and are backed by senior leadership.

Customer success management is a core part of our business at Skedulo. If you like what you’ve read, find out more about who we are and how we work.