Customer journeys in SaaS are often depicted as linear paths, with customers moving from purchase to adoption to renewal. However, in reality, customer journeys are not always so straightforward. There are many factors that can influence a customer’s journey, including their individual needs and preferences, their past experiences, and how they engage.

Identifying the main types of customer journeys that exist for your business allows you to tailor and scale your customer playbooks and experience accordingly. In doing so, you can also ensure internal teams are aligned to changes and to maintaining margins.

Below are four areas to refine your customer journeys to provide the most adaptability coupled with scale.

Onboard based on your customer needs and segmentation

Onboarding is one way to differentiate and meet customer needs, while also defining set pathways for internal success. A general rule of thumb is to use customer segmentation, such as a lower touch strategy for less complex and base-tier customers, which changes according to increasing complexity or add-ons. While most onboardings may be projects with a finite start and end, in my experience with global enterprise rollouts, customer end dates can vary based on stages of the customer’s plan and size of the rollout. Building in some flexible playbooks and milestones to support ongoing efforts, and defining expectations clearly at each stage can ensure your customer onboarding meets your customers’ expectations while also meeting yours.

Set behavior expectations based on persona-based adoption (a.k.a. usage data)

When it comes to customer data, not all data is created equal; adoption or usage data is one great example of this. Consider the case of different customer personas such as an administrator/champion versus an end user. When designing expected workflows, you should adjust for personas and expected behaviors based on role. An example from my experience was when I led a risk management customer-success team. End users would use the platform only when an incident occurred. If no incidents occurred, it could have been seen as a positive risk trend, but also one causing reduced end-user activity. However, for admins, there was an expectation that they would use the platform regularly regardless of incidents, to track data and trends across all end users. So our expected usage for each persona was different, and therefore our journeys for each were different as well.

Design long-tail journeys based on the maturity of your customer in your product

Customer tenure has a role to play in how your journeys evolve. Maturity can impact how your product is utilized and by whom. In my experience leading a health and safety SaaS customer-success team, we would often see team change or organizational re-prioritization every three years or so. This became a guide for how to measure maturity among our base, in addition to our normal checkpoints. It also allowed us to set key journey milestones, like training refreshers and goal review sessions, which helped keep adoption high and allowed new stakeholders to be fully brought in.

Include space to evolve based on customer health changes

Customer health changes, including support health, can also guide your journeys in the form of escalations. Not all escalations are negative, but they may introduce journey pathway plays to take future action. For example, the aforementioned change of key contact should trigger a playbook action to connect, train, and ensure the new stakeholder is bought in. It’s an escalation which, if missed, could lead to customer churn but if caught early, could get buy-in early from a new stakeholder. Customer health and related escalations are also an excellent way to prepare for potential risks before they occur, such as a change from green to yellow health based on a key measure, which can initiate a playbook or action by your team.

Customer journeys are full of variables and are not linear paths. There are necessary forks in the road, which could be based on your customer segments, maturity, and at times, their expectations. By understanding these variables, you can improve your customer experience efforts and create more related experiences, while not sacrificing scale and the bottom line.