It Takes A Postsale Team To Avoid A Messy DX

A postsale digital experience (PDX) helps customers succeed through self-directed activity, guides them to gain more value from current investments, and reduces churn risk. Sound straightforward? Think again. If creating customer digital experiences was easy, we would see far more in practice than we do.

One of the biggest challenges in designing, launching, and maintaining an effective PDX is coordinating across the five main areas that boost engagement to create a single, seamless, customer-centered destination. Without coordination and accountability, PDX can quickly degenerate into a mishmash of training and support content, dissimilar user interfaces, disconnected tools, broken links, and outdated or conflicting information. In short order, it starts to look like grandma’s attic.

Postsale B2B Digital Experience Directly Impacts Loyalty

To keep and grow existing customers, B2B companies must focus on creating a postsale experience where customers attain value. Customer marketing, customer success, and customer advocacy must coordinate with each other — and other internal stakeholders in sales, support, education, and events — to ensure that the customer’s digital experience is reliable, meets their needs, justifies the investment, and leaves them feeling positive. Our research shows that producing an experience with these qualities creates and sustains loyalty among B2B buyers. And in these volatile times, customer loyalty breeds retention, expansion, and endorsement that, in turn, help to grow the business.

A Great PDX Depends On Clearly Defined Roles And Responsibilities

Customer marketing, customer success, and customer advocacy teams perform distinct yet complementary roles to optimize the relationship between customers and their company. Teams that align and coordinate well toward this goal:

• Adhere to a consistent view of the customer’s postsale journey toward value. Forrester publishes frameworks that provide the structure against which teams can align the processes, metrics, and technology/data needed to support the postsale journey and retain customers. These, along with agreements about customer personas served, make focusing on one view of the postsale journey simpler and more consistent.
• Contribute to business and customer outcomes through a functional lens. The PDX is one area where common responsibilities for delivering on customer outcomes also depends on achieving the specific contributions of each team toward: 1) engaging the value network that shapes the overall customer experience; 2) ensuring that adoption maximizes value gained from the offering; 3) confirming that customers have achieved measurable value; 4) creating advocates who enhance the business’s reputation and growth; and 5) identifying new opportunities to increase revenue through current-account expansion.
• Involve peer functions in specifying PDX objectives and capabilities. Top postsale teams cross departmental lines fluidly, make cross-functional collaboration a requirement, and avoid exposing reporting structures to customers — especially when designing the PDX.
• Celebrate outcomes that align with customer value. Each function will own specific KPIs related to the objectives and operations of the PDX. Leading teams make sure that digital experience activity and outcome measures reflect shared customer value goals such as adoption, learning, customer health, and customer goal achievements. They also ensure that KPIs complement, rather than conflict.
• Plan, execute, and report on the PDX’s impact on the business. While activity measures such as successful onboarding completion, case study production, and webinar attendance are helpful barometers, postsale teams must look at how the PDX contributes to not only efficiency and scale but also to business impact, such as retention, revenue, and reputation.

Is a new or updated customer digital experience in your future? Feel free to set up some time with Forrester to discuss how to optimize it for your customers’ needs and your business goals.