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Introduction

Understanding and managing the customer lifecycle is fundamental to driving success in any customer-centric organization. By effectively tracking and guiding customers through various lifecycle stages, we can better understand their needs, predict their future actions, and deliver personalized experiences that enhance satisfaction and loyalty. This article will help you lay the groundwork by defining and enhancing customer lifecycle stages, setting the stage for advanced automation and compliance visibility.

Why does this matter?

Managing and enhancing customer lifecycle stages is crucial because it allows you to:

  • Understand customer journeys: Clearly map out where each customer is in their journey, allowing for more targeted engagement.

  • Improve forecasting: Better predict customer needs and behaviors, helping to align resources and anticipate future demands.

  • Increase customer satisfaction: Provide tailored interactions that meet customers where they are, enhancing their overall experience.

How to get started

To effectively manage and enhance customer lifecycle stages, follow these steps:

Step 1: Define your customer lifecycle stages

Begin by identifying the key stages in your customer lifecycle. Typically, these include Onboarding, Adopting, Renewal, Will Churn, and Churned. Each stage should reflect a distinct phase in the customer's journey and have clear criteria for when a customer transitions from one stage to the next.

  1. Onboarding: The initial phase where customers are introduced to your product or service.

  2. Adopting: The period where customers start actively using your product and deriving value from it.

  3. Renewal: The stage where customers are approached for contract renewal.

  4. Will churn: The critical phase where customers show signs of leaving.

  5. Churned: Customers who have decided to leave your service.

Step 2: Introduce and manage the “Launched” stage

For many businesses, it’s beneficial to add a “Launched” stage between Onboarding and Adopting. This stage captures customers who have completed the initial onboarding but have not fully adopted the product.

  1. Establish criteria: Define what actions or milestones signify that a customer has moved from Onboarding to Launched.

  2. Automate transitions: Set up automated processes to move customers to the Launched stage after a predetermined amount of time or specific actions.

Step 3: Develop transition rules and expectations

Clearly outline the rules and criteria for transitioning between stages. This ensures consistency and helps your team understand when and why a customer should move from one stage to another.

  1. Set timeframes: Determine how long customers typically stay in each stage.

  2. Define actions: Specify what actions customers must take to move to the next stage (e.g., completing onboarding training, achieving certain usage metrics).

  3. Communicate expectations: Ensure that your team is aware of these rules and criteria to maintain uniformity.

Step 4: Implement tools for tracking and visibility

Utilize tools and systems that allow you to track customer progression through these stages effectively. Gainsight’s platform offers robust features for this purpose.

  1. Customer stages: Use the Customer Stages feature to define and track each lifecycle stage.

  2. Reports and Dashboards: Set up dashboards to visualize customer distribution across stages and monitor transitions.

  3. CTAs and Playbooks: Leverage CTAs (Calls to Action) and Playbooks to guide your team’s interactions with customers at each stage.

Gainsight features you'll need

To successfully define and enhance your customer lifecycle stages, you’ll need to leverage the following Gainsight features:

  • Reports and Dashboards: For visualizing customer distribution across stages and monitoring transitions.

  • CTAs (Calls to Action): To prompt and guide your team’s interactions with customers at each stage.

  • Playbooks: To provide structured guidance for managing customer interactions and ensuring consistency.

What’s next?

With your customer lifecycle stages well-defined and managed, you’ll be in a strong position to implement advanced automation techniques. Our next article, "Advanced automation for customer lifecycle management" will guide you through automating these stages to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

After automating your lifecycle stages, it’s crucial to ensure compliance and maintain visibility into these processes. This will be covered in our final article, "Ensure Compliance and Visibility in Customer Lifecycle," where we’ll discuss how to monitor and manage compliance within your lifecycle management system.

Further reading and inspiration

 

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