It is a truism of every business that they need a consistent base of customers to survive. However, not all customers are created equal. Some customers who are not properly targeted or clients that are not properly vetted may cause your business more headaches than they bring in in revenue. As such, it is important to focus on your customer success process to ensure that your customer acquisition process is relationship-focused and aligned with the goals of potential customers or clients. In doing so, you’ll be able to decrease customer churn and increase upsell opportunities or sell additional products to customers and clients that feel more engaged and confident in your products and services.

One of the best ways to do this is through the use of the customer success journey process. Using this process, you can build a customer journey map that is focused on optimizing your sales, marketing, and customer service processes. It will also help you to build a more customer-centric culture with the ultimate goal of increasing customer lifetime value.

When investing in customer success, you need to consider the customer holistically. Instead of using a series of pre-made ‘touches’ and a one size fits all approach, the goal of mapping out the customer success journey is to focus on how they are thinking and feeling about your products and services, as well as your company as a whole. For example, if you are invested in customer success, you’ll want to take reviews and other feedback seriously and integrate it into your approach to your product and service offerings and how you conduct yourself as a business.

Furthermore, you can gain insights into how your customers are finding you and how you can better optimize these channels to increase customer acquisition efforts. For example, if your email marketing campaigns are particularly well-targeted and have higher conversion rates than your other marketing channels, you may want to further invest in it in order to gain better results. Using the 80/20 principle, you can then put decide what your customers respond death to and double down on those efforts. By listening to your customers and ensuring that they receive desired outcomes with your product and service offerings, you will better help your customers succeed and be able to better manage their wants, needs, and expectations.

In focusing on customer success, you will find that your business will become more proactive instead of reactive. This will allow you pinpoint both problems and opportunities by collecting and leveraging data points to better inform your customer acquisition and customer retention strategies. You will also be able to focus more on the experience of the customer and see where pain points arise in the sales process or buying process, and resolve issues such as cart abandonment in ecommerce or client dissatisfied with the results of professional marketing services.

By gaining a better understanding of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of everything, and using data to ensure that the customer is treated in accordance with your desired outcomes, you will have a much better experience with your customers, and in turn, they will have a much better experience when transacting with your business.