Start 2023 with a SaaS Customer Journey Mapping Session

If you’re a B2B SaaS company, there’s no better time than now to conduct a customer journey mapping session — here’s why.

The SaaS industry has been in a complex state throughout much of the past year, with the boom of late 2021 and early 2022 giving way to greater hesitation from investors and the need for SaaS leaders to devote more attention to preserving revenue ahead of a potential recession via customer success. While this has been a priority for SaaS companies over the past few years, it’s becoming even more crucial now. As we previously noted:

To put new customers in the best position to stay with you and grow over time, it’s important to focus on optimizing their year-one customer experience. 

A fundamental step for determining the areas to prioritize when optimizing that year-one experience is to conduct a customer journey mapping exercise — and to gather customer feedback in order to validate and hone your ‘assumptive’ customer journey map (but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). First, what is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping visually represents the customer experience from start to finish. It allows you to identify your customers’ pain points and unmet needs in an actionable way because you’re digging deep into what the customer is doing and thinking during each step of their journey.

Check out our example: a taxi ride in a Chicago winter. This is a great example of how a company such as Uber might have approached creating a customer journey map in order to better understand its customers and identify specific, unmet needs. Each row in the chart showcases what a customer goes through and thinks while identifying opportunities to streamline the process and improve the customer experience.

With the SaaS industry still facing greater uncertainty in the year ahead, taking time to revisit your customers’ core needs and challenges and how your platform solves them will ensure you’re focused on delivering maximum value. This gives you a fresh lens through which to view your customer success, sales, and marketing efforts and thus make a greater impact on preserving revenue and capturing new opportunities. With that said…

Here are the top three reasons why it’s important to start the new year with a customer journey mapping session.

1. Your customer’s journey is always changing.

Just because an onboarding playbook has worked well for the past 12 months doesn’t mean it will continue to work well for the next 12 months. Your customers’ businesses are changing (if for no other reason than the economic slowdown), and so is yours — resulting in new needs and, potentially, friction in the year-one journey. A customer journey mapping session will challenge your customer success organization to relentlessly look for ways to improve that journey.

2. An economic slowdown demands renewed attention on delivering on customers’ business outcomes.

If any part of your current customer journey is struggling to deliver on your company’s top business outcomes, then that friction point will become even more apparent during tight economic times — when customers are more cautious with their SaaS/tech investments. A customer journey mapping session is the proactive way to mitigate this scenario.

While many economists and financial experts continue to warn of a recession in 2023, much still remains to be seen. If your particular SaaS business or market segment finds a way through this gloomy outlook, or if the tide fortuitously turns, then the time spent freshly mapping the customer journey will put you even more ahead of the curve.

3. Customer journey mapping can improve your customer success team’s scalability.

Today, most SaaS companies are attempting to do more with less — less budget, less human capital, etc. Working with a recently completed customer journey map, a company is in a position to optimize a prescriptive approach to onboarding, account management, renewal, and expansion in support of customers’ top business outcomes — improving productivity and output. It’s a way to hone in your customer success team’s focus and efforts in order to produce even greater output and results.

Let’s Chart the Course to Success Together

Carema Consulting works with B2B SaaS companies looking to proactively build, improve, and scale their customer success and product marketing strategies. With decades of experience in helping SaaS companies grow their revenue, our team works with you to build a revitalized, refocused customer journey map that puts you on track toward resilient, lasting growth. We offer a variety of solutions based on where you are now and what you’re looking to achieve — and we’ll be there to guide you along the way.

The new year is rapidly approaching — is your SaaS business focused on the right initiatives? Whether your customer base has been steadily declining, or you’re looking to maximize your successes, our team is ready to help. Get in touch with us today.