The Customer Success Professional's Handbook

8Operationalize Your Customer Journey with Moments of Truth

In the previous chapter, “Defining the Journey to Customer Outcomes,” you were presented with the idea that collecting data on your customer allows you to manage your customers' outcomes with the use of tools such as the Journey Map. Combining a concrete Customer Lifecycle and a clearly defined Journey Map will result in delivering a complete Customer Journey.

With these assets, you can better manage and align expectations, goals, and emotional experiences because you have minimized any surprises. The experiences turn into customer lessons. They can be meaningful, reaffirmed, and even recorded, just like any other goal or objective. You can also, through monitoring and guidance, align the customer with the product expectations as to what it really can and cannot do, producing a positive emotional outcome.

Once you, the Customer Success Manager, know and understand the customer's objectives and the “why,” you can frame all of the post-sales tasks around those goals, including the experiences of what are called “Moments of Truth.”

Identifying Your Moments of Truth

Within the Journey Map, there will be multiple interactions and experiences with you and your product that the customer can identify with. For the sake of the Journey Map, you need to identify the most critical of these interactions and experiences called “Moments of Truth.” In the book Customer Genius, the author, Peter Fisk, wrote that these “Moments of ...