3 companies who perfected their customer lifecycles with Front

Emily Hackeling

Emily Hackeling,

Content Marketing at Front

11 December 20200 min read

Your customer journey map shouldn’t be built around your company’s capabilities, but around the actual milestones the customer is accomplishing. Read 3 examples of modern customer lifecycles from Hootsuite, Pilot, and Convelio.

When you think about your customer journey, you might be looking at it like this:

  • Marketing farms a lead. They collect an email and hand it to sales development.

  • Sales development works the lead. If they meet a criteria, they hand off to an AE.

  • The account executive works it some more, and they close a deal.

  • They have it off to implementation, who helps the customer with setup and onboarding and training.

  • A few months down the line, they have a conversation with a support rep to solve a problem.

  • Marketing sends them some emails with updates here and there.

  • Product gets some feedback about their use case in a usage survey.

  • And so forth…

The problem with this structure is this: It’s all about your internal organizational structure and where the seams are.

But it’s not your journey. It’s the customer’s.

Your journey map shouldn’t be built around your company’s capabilities, but around the actual milestones the customer is accomplishing. From their perspective, they aren’t checking off criteria for intent so they can be handed off to the next department at your company. They just want to use your product and service and achieve whatever you’re promising with it—and they want a straightforward, easy experience along the way.

What does that look like? CSMs joining in the sales process to help define success. AEs checking back in post-sale to ensure they set the right expectations. Support issues being handled with a holistic view of customer success. These are just a few ways you can rethink the customer lifecycle.

Below are a few examples of teams using Front who have done just that—improving their customer experience by designing the lifecycle around the customer, not just their internal business structure.

Hootsuite replies faster with a collaborative approach

The customer success team behind the highly successful social media scheduling platform Hootsuite used a combination of Zendesk and email for customer success and support. The team couldn’t collaborate internally on support inquiries—which wasn’t resulting in the excellent, fast responses they aimed for. If a teammate needed to ask another teammate about a request, they had to do so in Slack separately, which made for a disjointed workflow.

The team connects the Trello integration to Front so they can recognize if a certain request is associated with a project-based Trello card for additional context.

This process helps us follow up with customers during their journey and helps our team stay focused and be proactive.

—Laura Ene, Customer Success Team Lead at Hootsuite

Pilot gives proactive service despite massive uptick in requests

Normally when your team gets inundated with customer messages, you’re not thinking, “Hm, how can I be more proactive?” Instead, you’re just trying to get through the day and answer them. Not the case for the financial services company Pilot, who serves high-growth startups.

They saw a 45% jump in communications come 2020’s economic uncertainty, juggling nearly 50,000 messages a month. When the pandemic hit, they saw a rare opportunity to help out and provide customers with information on how to apply for PPE loans.

Instead of moving messages through the traditional flow, they collaborated on messages in a shared inbox with a generic email address across all teams. They could simple assign the message to the right person to help, no matter where in the lifecycle that customer resided.

Convelio creates loyal customers every step of the journey

Art buyers often purchase lots of art—so the world of art shipment has a lot of repeat customers. Art shipment company Convelio has mastered their customer lifecycle with loyalty in mind: their fine-tuned algorithm gives you a quote in 2 minutes or less. Then their entire team works collaboratively in Front to fulfill it for you.

We develop relationships with our customers, because they’ll keep buying art.

— Co-founder Clément Ouizille

They track new customer messages in shared inboxes, rules, and tags in Front. They automatically tag messages and assign them to the person to handle steps, whether it’s shipping, packaging, billing, or new requests. “We have all sorts of tags, for instance by language, since we operate in 40 different countries,” Clement said.

Written by Emily Hackeling

Originally Published: 11 December 2020

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