Just realized most teams skip the step where you actually map the customer journey before building workflows

I spent 4 months at a fintech startup in Austin building out automation for our renewal process. After all that work, only 3 customers actually followed the path we built. Turns out the operations team never sat down and mapped what really happens when a customer hits month 11. We just assumed we knew. Has anyone else seen processes fail because nobody checked how customers actually move through the system?

3 comments

3 Comments

claire_davis3111d ago

Mapping is overrated for MOST things honestly. You probably just had bad assumptions about month 11 behavior. Half the time customers don't even follow the journey they SAY they follow when you ask them in a meeting. Real talk - maybe the path you built was fine and those 3 customers were just the ones who actually had their stuff together. The other 97% probably would've ignored ANY workflow you put in front of them because they're hot messes that month.

gibson.morgan11d ago

Honestly I used to think like @claire_davis31 did... like who needs a map just build it right? But after watching our month 11 retention rate drop 40% because we automated the wrong triggers I changed my mind. We had customers dropping out because the system kept asking for credit card info when they were actually trying to cancel their add-on service. The whole mess could've been avoided if we'd just watched a few customers click around for an afternoon.

diana_kim6610d ago

Not quite right that month 11 is some special mess. The real issue is they built triggers based on what they thought users would do instead of watching real clicks.