What is a Customer Journey Map, what is a customer capability maturity framework, and how are they related?

A customer journey map charts the path your customer takes with your company and product – customer journey maps help you understand what customers are trying to accomplish, where your product fits in, and how they work with you through their journey. It identifies pain points, moments of truth, and unmet needs.  This map can help you create a set of experiences with your product and customer success teams that maximize the value you deliver to customers. These are captured in a defined product journey to take customers through.

Capability maturity refers to capabilities a customer needs to develop and execute on to be successful in fulfilling the business objective(s) your product serves – maturity refers to whatever they are trying to accomplish that your product is part of. For example, you may sell a tool that helps with integration of disparate customer data so that it can be better leveraged in marketing and personalized customer experiences. The ultimate success is using the customer data more effectively to drive incremental revenue growth. If they don’t achieve their ultimate objective, your revenue can be at risk. A capability maturity framework helps your team understand what it takes for customers to reach their objective, which in this case would be successful data integration and provisioning to other tools.  Understanding these business needs and activities enables you to add features into your product that make these activities easier and enable you to be more successful by helping your customers succeed at what matters to them. Maturity assessments developed from this framework drive accelerated growth across the marketing and sales funnel.

Both help you maximize your customers’ success – you must understand the value your product delivers, creates, or enables for your customers. The tangible value to the customer isn’t the product itself, but what it empowers the customer to achieve. This value is translatable into an ROI for your customers’ spend with you. The journey map enables you to know how to make the customer experience with your product more valuable and connected to the client’s needs. The customer maturity framework helps you inform and support customers on their path to value, making their success more likely, while creating more loyal customer relationships.

Customer Journey Map Overview

What is the purpose of a customer journey map for a company selling software/services?

It helps you move beyond relationship management to true customer success management – customer success can be viewed from two perspectives: the success your company has with renewing and expanding customer relationships, or the success your customers achieve enabled, at least in part, with your product. Both are focused on getting renewals and expansions, the former is the approach of a vendor and the latter is the approach of a partner. When customers feel your product and support are catered to their needs, they will be more loyal (renewing with a lot less effort) and more likely to expand their spending with you.

It helps you understand customer context – your product doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a larger business process. That often means integrations with other systems, or processes. Understanding this context is crucial to maximizing the value your customers get from your product. 

It is a roadmap to value creation – your company’s performance can be defined in terms of the aggregate lifetime value of your customer relationships. Beyond acquiring new customers, value is created by growing relationships, increasing profitability, and reducing churn rates. The journey map identifies a large number of “opportunities” that if addressed will grow your aggregate CLV. Once prioritized based on impact on value, the business can surgically address value creation opportunities with a high ROI. 

What are the typical, high-level stages in a customer journey?

The stages of a typical customer journey might look like:

• Stage 1: Need Identification and Solution Awareness Building – this is the initial stage where the customer discovers their need/desire and begins to learn about solutions and how it fits into their broader needs. This can happen in reverse order, but is rare.

• Stage 2: Purchase Process – Once the customer has decided to address the identified need or desire, they will go through a process of information gathering and a winnowing down process of the solution alternatives being considered, which is less and less linear than it used to be in the past, until a decision is made on which solution to acquire.

• Stage 3: Contracting – In many industries, there are multi-step contracting processes for initiating, renewing, or expanding relationships. This often involves multiple stakeholders beyond the core buyer, including possibly procurement, legal, and finance.

• Stage 4: Onboarding (initial and in-flight for new stakeholders) – once a customer has decided to purchase and use your product or service, you have a vested interest that they begin to use your product as intended and see value. While it would be nice if all products were plug-and-play, most are not. An onboarding process is crucial for introducing new users of your product to its capabilities and how to use it to take full advantage of them. 

• Stage 5: Regular Cadence of Usage – this stage involves the customer regularly using the product. It’s important to understand not just their expectations of the product, how they use it, and any pain points they encounter, but also how it gets shared with other stakeholders, what processes it supports, and what are the unmet needs.

• Ad-Hoc Stage A: Problem Resolution– if the customer encounters any issues with the product, it’s crucial to resolve them effectively and in a timely fashion. These issues can arise at almost any time throughout the journey. This journey stage often has significant effects on the customer relationship.

• Ad-Hoc Stage B: Training and Consulting Services – customer satisfaction and continued patronage often depend heavily on the customer being able to use your product to its fullest and maximize derived value. Often this comes from providing knowledge throughout the journey on various features and capabilities, as well as use cases.

Note: You will likely have sub-journeys – these are smaller journeys that are a part of the main customer journey. They may involve different major objectives or tasks or a more granular look at the major steps in the overall journey. Journey maps may also be customized to describe the experience of specific customer personas.

What are the steps to creating a customer journey map? Who should be involved?

Start with customer research –  hold in-depth interviews with customers, past customers who have churned, partners, and internal team members. Hypothesis sessions can help you understand what you think is happening in the journey, which can then be tested with customers. 

Seek to understand: 

• Customer Jobs – what tasks the customer is trying to accomplish.
• Pain Points – the challenges and difficulties the customer experiences.
• Moments of Truth – key interactions that can make or break the customer’s relationship with your business.
• Unmet Needs – areas where the customer’s needs are not being met.
• Dependencies – what stakeholders, processes, or tools does the product interact with and what are the keys to success?
• Success Milestones – the achievements and progress the customer makes along their journey.

Customer Capability Maturity Framework Overview

What is the purpose of a maturity framework? Why is it valuable for companies selling software/services to develop one?

Understanding your customers’ context is crucial to your success. You should be able to answer the following questions:

• Can you explain the ROI of the spend on your product in terms of revenue and/or profitability impact?
• What business outcome(s) does your product enable customers to achieve?
• How does your product interact with people, processes, and other technologies to achieve the customer’s desired outcomes?

If you can’t answer these questions effectively:

• Your product is more susceptible to being perceived as a cost that can be cut 
• Renewals and account expansions are at risk due to people, processes, and other technologies not in your control that you may not even be aware of
• Customer success teams will be less able to understand customer concerns and needs, making it harder for them to deliver value and a good experience
• Product teams will miss opportunities to differentiate your product with added features that help customers get to value more easily and efficiently
• Marketing content and sales messaging will be less resonant, resulting in lower click-thru rates, lower lead conversion rates, and higher CAC

A customer capability maturity framework provides you with the customer context you need to accelerate your business.

Enable your customers to understand how capability maturity impacts outcomes – Analysis of the maturity assessment data across many companies enables the development of various maturity levels. Each maturity level has an average performance on various business outcome metrics. Typically, there is increasing performance as companies advance their capability maturity. This helps customers understand the value of maturity, which can help them understand the ROI, convey the value to others in the organization, and gain commitment.

Provide your customers with prescriptive guidance on how to successfully deliver on their objectives in using your product – as part of the quantitative analysis of aggregate assessment data a success algorithm is developed.  Combined with the diagnostic nature of the questions that make up the assessment, the assessment is a powerful diagnostic tool. This helps customers understand where they currently stand and provides prescriptive guidance on what they need to do to progress to higher levels of maturity.

Enable Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to improve performance – a short version of the assessment, along with insights from the collective assessment data provides marketing compelling content to drive top-of-funnel activity. It provides sales with a way to engage prospects more effectively and show the value of working with you, and it enables customer success to have defined journeys they can take customers through that lead them to successful outcomes.

Gather intelligence for product teams that provide opportunities to improve the value delivered by the product – customer processes involving your product can be complicated and involved, often having inefficiencies and onerous levels of effort required. In building the maturity framework, these issues can be uncovered and often can be addressed to some extent in the product, improving its value proposition and competitive differentiation.

Establish Authority – once you’ve assessed multiple companies, you can create a powerful benchmark that helps establish your authority in the market. This can be used to influence industry analysts, enable delivery of insightful webcasts, and offer market insights through press releases.

How does a maturity model drive your growth?

It helps across four different areas: 

1. Acquisition Phase – The maturity assessment can help attract new customers by showcasing your expertise and the potential benefits of your product or service.
2. Customer Retention – by showing customers their progress and helping them achieve their goals, the maturity assessment can improve customer retention.
3. Customer Expansion – the maturity assessment can encourage customers to use more of your products or services by showing them how they can become more successful.
4. Partner Network Development and Activation – the maturity assessment can help foster the development and success of your partner network by clearly showing what you and your partners can offer customers.

What types of companies should create a customer maturity framework? 

Not all companies need to build a maturity framework (though all should have a journey map) – regardless of a company’s size or industry, a journey map provides a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s context, which is crucial for tailoring products and services to meet customer needs and expectations. In the software space, product innovation is table stakes, and a journey map can help identify ways to broaden the product’s functionality to bring greater value to customers and drive loyalty, retention, and growth. 

Public-facing Customer Maturity frameworks are most useful in developing or evolving markets – the need for a maturity framework may be lessened in more established and developed marketplaces. However, in rapidly evolving sectors, there is a significant need for maturity frameworks due to the constant changes and developments, as well as the lack of experience and standards across companies. Not all companies need to conduct external assessments. But having an internal understanding of the customer’s context is crucial for tailoring products and services to meet customer needs and expectations.

How do you go about developing your customer maturity framework? Who should be involved?

Step 1: Identify the Dimensions of Success – the first step in building a maturity framework is to identify all the capability dimensions and the individual capabilities within each dimension that contribute to success. This involves understanding the various people, processes, and technologies that need to be employed to achieve successful outcomes.

Step 2: Establish Levels of Performance – once the individual capabilities are identified, the next step is to establish the levels of performance. This means identifying the difference on each capability between low, middling, and high maturity

Step 3: Identify Business Outcomes and Other Metrics of Success – Identify the outcome metrics you want to collect for each customer organization that completes the assessment. This could be top-level outcomes such as NRR, churn rates, or profitability, They can also be metrics that come from databases such as an error rate, engagement frequency, or utilization as examples. A third type is perception-based outcomes such as confidence that can be measured within the assessment.  

Step 4: Build and Pilot the Assessments  – This involves programming the assessment in a data collection tool. Building a playbook for how to run the assessments and deliver results. Developing a report template. Once piloted, refine the assessment and process as necessary. 

Step 5: Determine the Maturity Levels and the Success Algorithm  – Once sufficient data is collected, conduct multivariate statistical analysis to identify the capability’s relationship to outcomes. From this work, the maturity levels are established. This can be revisited as the assessment database becomes more robust.

Involve Subject Matter Experts from within your organization – Start the creation of your framework and subsequent tools by involving a group of people within your organization who have the collective subject matter expertise. They will help identify all the dimensions of the framework.

Build a hypothetical model, then validate and refine it- with the internal team, build a hypothetical or draft model. This model will serve as the foundation of your framework and subsequent tools.

Run the draft by partners and customers – follow up the initial creation with conversations with both partners and customers. Ask customers about their experiences with your product, what blocks them from being successful, and what keeps their organization from being more successful with your product. Their feedback will help refine, validate, and expand the model and ensure it meets their needs. 

Consider leveraging external advisors and experts – consider consulting external experts, advisors, or board members with relevant expertise. Their insights can further enrich the framework and subsequent tools.

What kind of metrics or signals might you incorporate into your customer maturity framework? 

There are three types of measures that track to your maturity framework: 

• Outcome Measures – these are concrete metrics that can be tracked over time. For example, asking for the percentage of marketing click-throughs lost to bad links. 
• Confidence Measures – while these are subjective, they are relative and can be tracked over time. An example is asking for the level of confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of your Adobe or Google Analytics data. 
• Diagnostic Questions – these are designed to understand specific areas of a customer’s business. The full assessment includes around 24 diagnostic questions.

The way you ask your diagnostic questions matters greatly to your ability to define maturity levels and be prescriptive – in a maturity framework, four types of questions are typically used. These include:

• Level-Based Questions – these questions describe four different levels of performance in ordinal terms.
• Count-Based Questions – these involve counting up all the different tasks or practices that are performed. This helps to assess the thoroughness of the practices.
• Agree/Disagree Questions – these questions are used to determine whether certain practices are being performed or not. They are not ordinal but are based on an agree/disagree scale.
• Practice Frequency Questions – these questions are used to evaluate the frequency that certain practices occur when frequency is determinative of maturity level. 

Using a Customer Maturity Framework in Go-to-Market

What are examples of sales and marketing collateral based on your maturity framework?

How do you leverage what you learn from your customer maturity framework in your GTM motion?

Use it to demonstrate understanding of your customers – the best way to get customers excited and clicking through is to make them feel understood. Offering something that they can value and access efficiently is key. 

The maturity framework can facilitate sales conversations without them seeming like sales conversations – if you frame the conversation in terms of the success that the customer will achieve, it’s no longer about you trying to get them to buy something else. It’s about you helping them achieve something more. If your products are designed and built properly, they will naturally fit into this framework. 

Use the maturity framework to guide your customers toward successful product behavior – it’s important to provide customers with a roadmap to success. Guide your customers on what they need to do to maximize the value they get from your product. This could include certain actions or behaviors that will enhance their results. 

Overall

What are the most important things to get right?

Start with the right end in mind – It’s about delivering customer value! Customers buy from you, stay with you, and increase their spend with you when they perceive they are getting value from your products and services. Both journey maps and maturity frameworks are about uncovering how you can maximize the value you deliver to them. Each function should be able to explain how what they do delivers customer value.

Quantifying and prioritizing key elements of the customer journey is crucial – coming out of any journey mapping exercise, a “portfolio of opportunities” to improve the customer experience will emerge. It’s critical to evaluate these opportunities to identify the relative value of addressing each one in terms of impact on customer retention, expansion, and profitability. This will increase receptiveness to the identified opportunities and help you better communicate them to leadership and functional leaders.

Define the capability maturity framework more broadly than just the solutions you offer – The point of the capability maturity map is to better understand and define the keys to an algorithm for your customers’ success. With this knowledge, you can maximize the value you deliver and the growth you can achieve, while also helping customers achieve their objectives. Having a broader maturity model also prevents you from coming off as purely self-serving with your motivation for putting out the model.

Obtain Buy-in to the Journey Maps and Maturity Framework Across the Business – when done well, a customer journey map and the capability maturity framework should be unifying within an organization. Ultimately, the journey map(s) and maturity framework define very clearly what success looks like for your customers and the role that you can play in achieving that goal. Each part of the business including product, marketing, sales, partner ecosystem, operations, and customer success teams should be able to align their objectives and activities to the journey maps and the maturity framework. 

What are common pitfalls?

Avoid nakedly business development-focused frameworks – maturity frameworks that are solely about business development offer no real value. These frameworks are often transparently sales-oriented and do not provide substantial benefits to the customer. Instead, consider the Challenger sales model, which encourages asking questions and bringing up topics that make the customer reflect on their goals and achievements. This approach fosters engagement and interest and gives the impression that you can help the customer achieve success in ways they may not have considered.

Beware of subjectivity in analysis –maturity frameworks by experts who have been in the field for a long time often bank on analysis that is entirely subjective. If there’s no objective component that ties back to value for the customer, the framework becomes merely an input to an expensive consulting engagement rather than a roadmap to success. Always ensure that your maturity framework is grounded in objective analysis that directly correlates to customer outcomes.