The starting point for a Customer Experience Management (CEM) program is identifying the customer lifecycle. At first, the customer lifecycle seems pretty obvious. A customer finds out about your products and services, investigates, buys, and uses them. If the product or service involves a contract, the customer enters a renewal cycle. Looking deeper into your customer lifecycle will reveal some surprises—and opportunities for you to improve your customers’ experience and increase your revenue.

Your company likely assigns responsibility for parts of the customer lifecycle to different areas of the organization but this structure often prevents a complete view of the lifecycle: marketing attracts the customers; sales closes them; service provides support; and billing collects the money. Each department knows how they interact with the customer, but they don’t know how the customer interacts with other departments.

Today’s customers are increasingly impatient with having your organizational structure imposed on them. A common example is the experience a customer may have getting passed across departments to have an issue resolved. Over time, ResponseTek has collected customer data that suggests first call resolution has a greater impact on customer experience and advocacy than time on hold.

Getting everybody together in a room to map the customer lifecycle is an essential first step to getting insight into the complete customer experience. During these sessions you can identify issues that may not have surfaced before but are having a significant impact on your customers.

After mapping the customer lifecycle, one organization discovered that the sales experience was negatively impacting advocacy and creating problems further down the lifecycle. Another organization discovered that their customers were making the contract renewal decision much earlier in the lifecycle than where the company had been focusing.

In both cases, redirecting a small amount of resources yielded a significant increase in customer advocacy.

Customer Experience Management uses the whole customer lifecycle to ensure you are directing your very precious customer-facing resources where they will have the greatest benefit to your customers and to your business.

Read more about mapping your customer lifecycle, sign up for an executive web seminar, or email us with your questions.