Blend the customer journeys across products

1. The constraint and what graduates it

Customer service is how you get more customers to refer, retain, review and resell.

Item	At this stage
The constraint	With several products, the journeys customers take through them clash, or are badly timed against one another
To graduate	Recommend cross-sells proactively, and blend the customer journey

Blending means the products stop butting heads. Each one runs in its own lane, alongside the others.

2. Lay out every contingency

Write down every path a customer could take through your products. For example:

• a person who buys product A wants to buy product B;
• someone comes in on product B but wants product A;
• someone buys A, then C, and then B.

Then make sure none of these journeys contradicts another. A common failure, and it often happens, is messaging that tells the customer things must be done in a particular sequence, or that these are the levels. With more products in the suite, what a customer hears along any of these hypothetical journeys has to make sense.

3. Give each path its own handling

Once every contingency is laid out and you have made sure the paths do not conflict, each path will need its own handling:

• you are probably going to have a different onboarding for each path;
• you are probably going to have different email sequencing for each;
• you are probably going to have to segment your customer service teams, so each path is served;
• and you are probably going to have to tag customers, so your team knows which path each one is on.

4. Cut the paths that cost the most and return the least

The aim is to eliminate conflict and to solve for the highest lifetime value. Once you have laid out every contingency that could exist across your customer base, look for the bottom paths: the ones taking up the most time and the most effort while giving the business no return, or a very low one.

What marks such a path is that it does not create a good customer experience. Those customers are not referring, not reselling and not ascending, and they take a lot of the team's resources.

Then go back to customer segmentation, which you should be doing by now. Look at the segment and ask what resources would open up if you eliminated it. Could you put more effort into getting customers into the other pathways instead (three, in the example given)?

The theme is resource allocation again: pruning so you solve for the customers with the highest lifetime value, and doing it over and over. It just gets more complicated once several products each have their own entry points and upsell points. Segmenting customers by product is SOP 158 — Diagnose churn by cohort, section 5. Pruning as a standing habit, across products, hires and processes, is SOP 274, section 10.

5. Automate the tags

When all of this is worked out, automate as much of it as you can. Without the technology and the automation to tag and segment customers properly, someone on your team gets on the phone and tells a customer to get onboarded, and the customer says they already onboarded with the other product. Then the team realizes he had an onboarding call only last week and wonders what to do with him now. It starts to feel very disjointed.

Eliminating the paths with the lowest return and the lowest lifetime value makes room for the ones with the highest, and simplifies the business. Instead of 17 customer journeys all hitting each other in the face, you have something like three, running nicely alongside each other.

6. Testing the order of products

These tests come from one practice here.

Which product goes first. A first business had a sister company, and each had a product. For a while the two tried selling the sister company's product first and then upselling their own. Then they tried the reverse: their own first, with the sister company's as the upsell. Tested side by side, one pathway's lifetime value came out significantly higher than the other's, while a customer cost the same to acquire on either. Which order won is not established on this page. They also tried getting people to buy both together, and that did not work either.

The lesson drawn: across a suite of products there will be moments that are the best time to upsell or cross-sell each one, the moment right for that specific customer. That is what eliminates conflict and makes the most natural sense. The claim made for that business is that a higher lifetime value than its competitors' is what lets it keep outlasting them.

Skipping the front end. Another example is described as really common. With two products, you start to ask why everyone has to buy the first product to get to the second, as if they had to qualify for it. In one practice here this was tested across several businesses. The customers who came in to buy only the higher-level product, without going through the lower-level one, often had the highest churn and the lowest lifetime value.

The reason given: at this point a lot of companies are optimizing what already exists. Serving the higher product directly means creating an entirely new onboarding and customer journey for it, and a new way of acquiring customers, because it needs a new front end of its own to set expectations properly. That cannot be done in a snap of the fingers; it might take 12 months to build out.

In the first business, people who came in through the front-end program and then ascended into the back-end program had the highest lifetime value. People brought in to go straight to the back end, since that was all they really wanted, ended up churning pretty early, roughly in the first quarter. Maybe, the team did not have the skills yet. But the marketing that brought those people in had set them up to succeed in the first program, not the back end.

So sending people straight into the back end is not impossible, but it takes a completely new customer journey, and you are probably going to have to change the marketing as well, because the marketing sets the expectations. When the order was flipped, in one practice here, those customers got a different acquisition channel, a different sales process, a different sales team and a different onboarding process. Once all of that was in place, it worked.

7. The point under the tests

Fundamentally, you are solving for the highest lifetime value and the lowest operational complexity. Things just grow arms and legs.

In short: when several customer journeys conflict or are badly timed, make proactive recommendations to cross-sell and upsell, blend the journey, and get rid of the paths that no longer make sense.

8. Where this sits

• One stage earlier, customer service moved from reactive to proactive, built on retaining, reviews, referrals and reselling: SOP 164 — Categorize the business at fifty to ninety-nine people, section 6.
• The milestones a customer should reach after buying: SOP 143.
• The points at which a customer can be asked to buy the next thing: SOP 162.
• An upsell can fail by coming at the wrong time: SOP 66 — Run the classic upsell and choose the moment, section 3.
• Building a back end to sell in the first place: SOP 152, section 3. How offers stack into one model: SOP 59.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• Which order won the test of which product goes first. Not established on this page.
• Where a path counts as low-return. This page gives no figure for the return below which a path is cut.
• The tools that tag and segment customers. Not established on this page.
• What the front end built for a direct back-end customer contains. Not established on this page.

10. What this page does not cover

Pricing and discounts are not covered on this page.