Part II: Turning Insights into Action: The Prescriptive Customer Journey

In my most recent post, I talked through the role of Chief Customer Officers – the part they play, what’s driving their charge, and their impact on the SaaS industry. Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time for a deeper dive into the crucial pivot that CCOs are driving – maturing from being only customer led to also experience and outcome driven, and prescriptive in their customer journey mapping. ?

?The question is, can you prescribe the journey and still be customer-obsessed, or are these two fundamentally at odds? Great companies start with being customer led but to endure, they have to be savvy enough to turn the richness of customer insights and product innovation into action. They have to develop this sort of “second muscle” in order to lead customers along the journey at scale instead of following only the precious few. Through data, experience, and value-driven insights, we can pivot their usage, process, intensity and penetration to create exponential progress in achieving digital outcomes.

?With this in mind, it’s not so much that organizations should move away from being customer-obsessed, but more that they should be able to provide substantiated guidance. They should be able to identify when there’s enough information to do more than simply respond to customer wants and instead, help them understand what they really need and how to get there. It’s about finding the sweet spot between the two and being able to flow between them. Running a large organization myself, I love to hear from our own vendors (Financial Force, Gainsight, TSIA, Salesforce, Skilljar, Masterclass) about all the great work that our teams are doing and how our usage is trending. But to make me lean forward and really tune in, vendors must share how we can get even more value; filling me in on what we inadvertently left on the table – more formally referred to as value leakage – in the gap to maximizing our usage and adoption. It’s far too rare a conversation, but one that’s becoming increasingly important to have. Think of it in terms of tough love.

?When these tough love conversations do happen, they happen at the value realization stage, where value is stacked up against peers to determine if what customers are getting is actually good enough. This stage occurs naturally after the value creation stage (making the right deployment and usage decisions to take out costs and deliver better outcomes) and the value realization stage (taking a step back to understand the value being delivered). The value assessment? stage presents a unique opportunity to figure out what the team can do better to increase value. Usually, it comes down to how you’re marshaling technology. Driving customers to adopt your technology is one thing, but guiding them to incorporate advanced functionality in the context of real process change is another.?

?In other words, are customers getting enough bang for their buck? If they’re spending one dollar and getting a five dollar value when they could’ve been getting a ten dollar value, that’s value leakage. We’ve inadvertently left money on the table in this scenario because even if the customer is doing well, we’ve missed the opportunity to advise them on how they could’ve done even better. It’s important to approach tough love conversations from a place of partnership and maintain a collaborative mindset in order to build trust and ultimately maximize value. When the opportunity arises, we should seize the moment to drive true partnership with customers instead of feeding strictly transactional relationships. The underlying sentiment is to grow together, not just chase renewals.

?Focusing on growing together has never been more appropriate than it is in the SaaS industry given today's economic headwinds. Customers trust us – they’ve given us control by permitting us to house their data and provide continuous visibility into where they are in their journey. They trust us to keep them successfully on track. That’s the whole SaaS promise. As a company, you can only get so far before customers expect you to tell them what best in class looks like and how they can get there faster.??

?That said, organizations often don’t know where to start or what the right opportunity is for them to begin pivoting toward a more prescriptive customer journey. There’s not always a clear, defined path to progressing faster with less risk while maintaining the highest value, but there are some indicators that can help determine if your company is mature enough to start pivoting. Looking at Smartsheet as an example, we made the pivot when we had a demonstrated market fit of a finite number of personas and use cases, and our best customers started to use relatively common language around why and how they were growing in terms of outcomes and value achievement. Six conversations that converted the potential of our platform into specific types of process change and resulting business impacts.

?When you start to pick up on these trends, chances are you’re anchored in enough data and insights to start making the change. Understanding the commonalities and connective tissue between retention rates, revenue, net promoter scores (NPS) and usage also helps put companies in the position to create prescriptive journeys for customers. This approach also benefits vendors because it solidifies trust and drives brand appreciation.?

?It’s important to note that just because you’re leading a prescriptive customer journey doesn’t mean you’re not listening. Going between is not a polarizing swing but rather a natural oscillation between modalities, with one leading to the opportunity to do the other, then coming back together again to figure out when to augment. We’re still listening and adding the customer signal into our thinking while maintaining an organizing framework of:??

1.? Tech Capabilities: The first part of the framework is focused on how your tech’s capabilities are mapped across maturity phases for a sense of time and sequencing. What are the capabilities that first draw users and process owners to put work on your platform? Where do they go next? In this example of Smartsheet’s Journey to the Dynamic Enterprise, you see that we start to organize nine areas of platform capabilities into three phases of increasing maturity and we declare the nature of the value pursued in each phase.?

2.? Process Digitization: Next, we focus on how the context of processes digitized on your platform grows as new capabilities unlock new use cases and value. The type of work you pursue changes… both because of the capabilities you're applying and also because of the value drivers you’re pursuing. This is shown in the Value Driver portion of the Smartsheet example, but let’s introduce a second example, this one my presentation at ServiceNow’s Financial Analyst Day on their journey to the Lightspeed Enterprise. The focus is on the concept that processes/users/domains/value changes as you move through your journey. In both examples, the focus shifts from primarily internal simple use cases and cost based drivers, to more multi-org, external (customer or supplier) drivers and as a result, the processes you are impacting change. With ServiceNow from IT, to employee based, to customer based. With Smartsheet from tasks and projects, to full departmental processes for customers and operations.

3.? Outcome Grouping & Value Laddering: In the third part of this organizing framework, we want to define the most common market drivers or secular shifts propelling change and ensuring that those on this journey will be winners among their peers. These themes are the ones that precede you in the mind of the customer and shape their overall strategy. We can provide the context that makes improving each of our example use cases not only accretive in financial value, but strategic in achieving business outcomes. This becomes the path to laddering the user/transactional level impact of operational value up to departmental and corporate level enterprise value that unlocks new stakeholders and budgets. In the Smartsheet example, we move from horizontally applicable terms like project or portfolio management (PPM) driving “project success” outcomes to applying these methods within specific context tied to higher value outcomes, like marketing operations driving revenue and time to market. Where many campaigns are run like projects that are tied to launches and brand moments, Smartsheet drives programs across collaboration centers of agencies and employees, laddering from themes tied to cost (PPM) to those of revenue (marketing). The key is to think big but show the connective tissue to keep it credible. The work at the user/function level builds a wave all the way up to the department and the company results.??

4.? Acceleration Insights and Information Asymmetry: And finally, the greatest gift of SaaS: the confidence that we are successfully mining the journeys of ALL customers to bring forward methods for heuristic leaps in progress for EACH customer. These are shown as break points that are often tied to shifts in accrued value, required sponsorship, or risk/reward tolerances that, when well managed, accelerate journeys and when ignored, lead to stalled momentum. Returning to the ServiceNow journey, we see this in the transition of the sponsorship from a tool for IT to a platform for employee productivity, to a mechanism to unlock customer experience. In Smartsheet’s journey, we see this in the integration of our work management into enterprise data stores, and the management of not only tasks but the capacity behind them. How do we have the credibility to assert these claims? Well that can be driven from the correlation of your mature customer’s financial results in topics such as revenue per employee, or growth of revenue vs. growth of headcount, to non-customers or lagging customers. That “information asymmetry” of what we know as partners in driving client change caused those improved financial outcomes (in the ServiceNow example these were revenue growth vectors). We anonymize at the industry-peer level and share it as a gift, creating confidence and urgency to leverage what has already been proven to work! Prescriptive, proven, measurable benefits in the context of common business strategy and change drivers.??

“What got us here won’t get us there.” - Marshall Goldsmith ??

Ultimately, it’s about staying agile in order to flow between customer-obsession and being prescriptive in the customer journey; focusing on retention without neglecting initial sales. The sweet spot between the two is not a fixed target but rather one that’s nuanced and based on a variety of factors. When customers start to look to you as the expert, it’s up to you to understand what it is they really need and provide clear guidance on how to get there. It’s not easy, but it’s the next step in growing your company and gaining traction in the industry. So how do you start? Take a deep dive into your customer usage and insights, and look for trends and patterns. Understand each of your customers deeply and work together in partnership in order to provide sound leadership. And lastly, don’t shy away from tough love conversations. It’s the secret ingredient to accelerate insights into action, as is the talent of Outcomes focused leaders on your team. A huge THANK YOU and recognition to Chris Dowse for his partnership, leadership and creativity in the realization of both the Smartsheet and ServiceNow examples - amazing results enabling these companies and their pivot to outcomes!

Next up, I’ll close the loop on the overall brand experience, and talk through how the Chief Customer Officer role and creation of prescriptive journeys play a large part in realizing the brand promise and delivering a better customer experience. Stay tuned for Part III!