One of the things that excites me most these days is thinking about Customer Experience departments as holistic endeavors to provide users with an amazing experience and thus, retain them.

Too often businesses fund a specific effort to try to shove customers in or pry them back from the brink. But the businesses that seem to succeed with ease are the ones who have put funds, sweat, and tears into the entirety of the user journey. Instead of selling harder or giving more discounts when customers try to cancel, they create a powerful experience at every point in a customer’s journey, increasing the value you’re providing them and getting them to stick around longer (and spread the word).

Here’s how I think about approaching the whole customer experience.

Core Elements

These are the core tools a Customer Experience team has to drive retention.

Foundational

You can’t build on a weak foundation. These crucial underlying elements might not drive immediate retention effects, but must be included – and cared for – in order for the rest of the org to thrive.

Customer Support

Customer support isn’t sexy. But it’s also something that many customers will have to seek out, usually when they’re already feeling stressed out. If you can’t deliver a high-quality support experience, it doesn’t matter what sort of fancy events you host or quarterly business reviews you conduct.

Key metrics to consider:

• First reply time
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer effort score

Customer Feedback

You can’t serve your customers without understanding what they need. Customer feedback helps inform your initiatives, prioritize your work, and – when done well – show your customers that you are listening.

Key metrics to consider:

• Customer segment representation
• Customer satisfaction

Targeted

These are tools you can deploy at specific points to actively change outcomes. They’re your scalpels – and must be used with care.

Onboarding

Ensuring your customer knows how to use your product is crucial, and onboarding is your best opportunity to do this. However, onboarding is a double-edged sword; if you get in your customers’ way or overwhelm them, you may create the opposite effect you had hoped for.

Key metrics to consider:

• Completion rate
• Ratings
• Correct quiz answers

Customer Success

Customer success teams, in my opinion, are your SEAL Team 6. These are the people you deploy at the highest-leverage moments – when a customer is just starting with the product, or when you’re seeing warning signs – to provide expert, hands-on support and advice. The best Customer Success teams rely heavily on data and on conversations with customers, and are able to use the two to provide powerful intervention.

Key metrics to consider:

• Customer health score
• Churn rate

Offboarding

Offboarding might seem like the end of the relationship, but a former customer is still someone who will provide word of mouth about your product. Make it hard to cancel and they’ll complain. Offer discounts you don’t offer your happy customers and they’ll gossip. Instead, this should be seen as an opportunity to a) get feedback so you can make your product and services better and b) leave them feeling great about your company (even if the product is no longer right for them).

Key metrics to consider:

• Resurrection rate
• LTV of resurrected users (if they are resurrected and then churn a month later, it was pointless)
• Qualitative feedback

Value-Add

These tools create additional value for your customers, hopefully improving their appreciation of and commitment to your company. They shouldn’t be attempted without a strong foundation and some key targeted tools…but when combined with the above, they can really take a company over the top.

Education

Not to be confused with onboarding or help centers, education helps your customers advance in using your product and/or in their craft. This is the difference between someone using your product at 10% vs 90%, or the difference between retaining a manager as your point of contact vs having your point of contact promoted to Director. A word of warning, though: education can be an endless project, and you must make sure you’re creating the most valuable content and driving people to it at the right moment.

Metrics to consider:

• Education promotion clickthrough rate
• Completion rate
• Ratings

Community

Obviously one of my favorite subjects. Beyond your actual product, there’s only so much domain expertise your company can have and credibly deliver. Connecting customers (and/or prospects) to each other can unlock a wealth of information and value for your customers.

Metrics to consider:

• Community retention
• Percentage posts answered
• Customer satisfaction

Partner Touchpoints

As Brian Oblinger has rightly pointed out, a Customer Experience team working in a silo will not succeed. Customers’ experiences are affected by every touchpoint they have with a company, and it doesn’t make sense to fold all those touchpoints into the Customer Experience team proper.

Here are some of the crucial partnerships & touchpoints the Customer Experience team must influence.

Marketing & Expectations

Marketing teams want to get people in the door, but if they do so by setting too-high expectations, it can be for naught. A great Experience and Marketing partnership finds the balance between getting customers excited and ensuring accuracy. And, ideally, Experience can also provide a pipeline of potential references and satisfied customer quotes to market!

Sales & Fit

Sales teams are often rewarded for closing – and left unscathed if a customer is a bad fit or finds that your offering doesn’t live up to what they were told. A great partnership between a Customer Experience team and a Sales team ensures customers are great fits – and shares that success.

Billing & Experience

Billing is often seen as an operational function unrelated to customer experience. But it is an experience. And, if it’s a bad one, it can sour the other experiences a customer have. A great Experience and Finance partnership ensures that bills are paid without customers feeling stressed out.

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Customer Experience is a holistic effort. A customer doesn’t exist at just one point in time. They exist before they start talking to the company, while they’re sold to, while they’re setting up and using the product, and – yes – even after they stop using the product. A proper customer experience strategy should utilize all the tools above to ensure the customer has more than just a smooth experience, but a successful and delightful one.