The customer lifecycle encompasses a complete company-customer relationship, from start to finish. In a sense, the customer lifecycle is like your complete life history, and includes birthplace, family history, childhood events, high school years, college, early career, starting a family, birth of children, retirement, and even death. Your life story is filled with journeys and important moments. If you went to college, that journey includes certain interactions and milestones that led you to graduate. Your college journey was filled with decisions and paths you took toward a certain career. In other words, a lifecycle includes many journeys, but there is a clear relationship between the two frameworks.
The customer lifecycle represents all the interactions and journeys a customer has with a company. Journeys, on the other hand, show a sequence of all touchpoints, interactions, and engagements of a customer before that person reaches a journey milestone. While lifecycle is a progression, the journey is the actual path.
The end of each meaningful journey is reaching a milestone. For example, the high school journey ends with graduation day. In SaaS, a free trial signup journey includes all steps that users must take to get inside the product for the first time. As buyers progress through one customer lifecycle stage to another, their journeys can be very unique. One may take a couple of days and four interactions between signing up to becoming fully onboarded. Another’s onboarding journey could span a four-week period and contain twenty interactions.
The customer journey is a series of all touchpoints a customer has with a company, brand, or product to reach a certain milestone.
Journeys can include digital and real-world touchpoints; they can span over many devices and channels.
Each prospective customer goes through unique steps when she evaluates and purchases software. This is why it is extremely challenging for companies to gain a complete picture of important journeys that lead customers to important milestones, such as completing onboarding, using your product for the first time, purchasing the product, reaching daily active user status, or renewing. But the challenge is also in recognizing an optimal pattern.
While individual customer journeys can vary greatly from one customer to another, SaaS companies need to understand the overall pattern. Pattern analysis helps companies understand the most common journey, as well as critical outliers or bottlenecks that prevent prospects from reaching the next stage in the lifecycle.
Improving the customer experience starts with the company understanding its customer lifecycle. The next step is evaluating current journeys, and designing new optimal ones that lead customers to desired outcomes and milestones. Only when an organization understands the complete lifecycle and primary journeys can it effectively design individual touchpoints and interactions. Research suggests companies that focus on customer journeys before designing individual touchpoints are much more successful at enhancing the overall customer experience1. That’s because more touchpoints can make the journey more complex. Overseeing the journey helps teams evaluate the need for each standalone touchpoint, and eliminate any unnecessary ones.
Designing interactions and engagements without outlining the journey can often result in high customer satisfaction with individual touchpoints, but low satisfaction across the journey (2).
One way companies can improve the customer experience is to break down the customer path along the lifecycle into meaningful journeys that act as guideposts. While companies can rarely fully control customer journeys, designing the optimal journey is a great first step. The optimal journey is the shortest and most convenient path for prospective customers to reach the goal.
To summarize, the process of transitioning to a customer-experience company follows these steps:
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of understanding customer journeys for enabling a new customer acquisition approach. Enticing prospects to evaluate and try a product via self-service free trials or freemiums opens a unique opportunity for SaaS companies. It enables them to track and optimize in-product journeys that move prospective customers to important milestones, such as realizing initial product value.
Therefore, monitoring customer journeys is a crucial step. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.
A customer journey can consist of online and offline interactions. Digital (or online) touchpoints can happen outside of a product, or in-product. Remember, in Figure 3.1, the x-axis divides the customer lifecycle into out-of-product and in-product engagement areas.
We’ve explored the shift of SaaS companies away from lead generation forms that focus on customer journeys and interactions outside of their product to free trials and signups that focus on in-product customer journeys.