SaaS Customer Journey: Mapping Your Way To Customer Success

Let’s find out more about the SaaS customer journey. Skip ahead if you like:

What is a customer journey map?

Benefits of building a customer journey map.

How to build a SaaS customer journey map.

The takeaway

1. Get a 360° view of your customers’ interactions with you that allows all teams in your organization to understand those interactions. This can include identifying where you could improve your SEO, an area where accelerate agency can be of real benefit. 
2. Create empathy with your customers by better understanding any pain points they encounter and how the experience is, as a whole. 
3. Identify any flaws in your service that may be causing negative experiences for your customers. 
4. Predicting behaviour at different touchpoints by seeing from the customer’s POV. 

1. Avoid making your map overly complex. While you do want to understand the whole journey, you don’t want to get bogged down by the minutiae. Create an initial storyboard that includes all the relevant info and touchpoints. If your first draft looks too complex, examine what may be irrelevant to helping improve customer experience.
2. Tie any map you’re creating to existing customer data. Where data is minimal due to that engagement being “rare”, then you don’t need to include that step. Mapping is about getting an idea of how the majority of your customers interact with you. 
3. Focus on the main three areas that customers encounter or where they interact with you: 

• Stages of the customer lifecycle. These are the different steps customers take in interacting with your brand. The first stage is usually as a visitor to your site, and the later stages can include contact with customer support.

If you’re using CRM tools, then you may find that these stages are defined within them or within any marketing automation tools. As SaaS is mainly a B2B model, your stages should be something like this:

• First time visitor (to your site or to your social media platform). This is where accelerate agency’s top level content can engage them and start increasing their interest. 
• Lead. This is anyone who has had some interaction with your business. 
• Qualified lead. A lead who has moved forward with their interest and who may be almost ready to buy. 
• Opportunity. The point at which your salespeople, or your automated system, identifies that there is a chance to close the sale. 
• Customer. The lead has now made a purchasing decision and you have onboarded them as a new customer. 
• Aftersales. This is not just about customer support, but also any post-purchase interactions. It could include customer service, upselling, contract renewal, or offering other services.

4. Customer journey paths. Identify the most common paths that customers take from discovery to purchase. It should also include the following:

• Sales processes. How do you get customers to the signup point? Look at free trials, direct sales contacts, and requests for product demos. 
• Product paths. Did the customer discover you themselves? Were they approached by a salesperson? Were they recommended by another user? 
• Pricing. What tiers did customers express an interest in? Most SaaS products offer various tiers from solo to enterprise. 
• Segmentation. You may want to map different types of customers, from private individuals through small businesses and up to large enterprises.

5. List all conversion events. That doesn’t mean where they convert to a paying customer, but every event that saw them move a stage forward in the customer lifecycle. Identifying what makes your customers progress, or what stops them from progressing, is a crucial part of the customer map.
6. Start building your map. You now have all the ideas and data you need to build your initial map. Don’t be worried if it looks messy at first, this is a process you need to refine and, as with written marketing content, you start with a first draft.