Community and the Customer Lifecycle
Supporting Your Customers as They Navigate the Seven Lifecycle Phases
By Matthew D. Lees, Vice President and Consultant, December 11, 2008

NETTING IT OUT

Customer communities touch all parts of the customer lifecycle, a concept for describing the phases in which customers interact with your company around your products and/or services. These phases are: Plan, Explore, Select, Buy, Use, Maintain/Manage, and Renew/Replenish. The various business units that comprise your organization have particular interest in, and responsibility for, these phases (in whole or in part).

Because customers don’t always progress sequentially through the lifecycle, complexities can arise. Conversations within communities may cause customers to jump from phase to phase, depending on their situation and the direction in which the discussions take them. Supporting your customer community allows customers to help each other successfully navigate the various lifecycle phases.

By understanding (1) the dynamics of the customer lifecycle and (2) the ways in which your customer community and your own organization supports lifecycle phases, you’ll be able to better leverage both the community and your company to make it easier for your customers to do business with you.

THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE

Being a customer-centric organization means understanding your customers, which in turn means knowing how they—as a whole and in their various segments—want to do business with you. An approach for achieving this understanding is to look at what the overall customer lifecycle and what types of relationships and experiences your customers look to you to provide at each lifecycle phase.

The Seven Lifecycle Phases

We consider the customer lifecycle to have seven phases (details of these phases are described in Table A.):

1. Plan

2. Explore

3. Select

4. Buy

5. Use

6. Maintain/Manage

7. Renew/Replenish

The Seven Phases of the Customer Lifecycle
Please download the PDF to see the table.
Table A. This table looks at the activities associated with each of the seven lifecycle phases.

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You want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to successfully navigate each phase of the cycle. As a company, you’re acquiring customers, selling them products and services, supporting those products and services, and continuing to sell to those customers, as the cycle continues and (ideally) repeats itself.

As an individual employee, you’re looking to do the same thing, although your own job responsibilities and sphere of influence may not span all of your customers’ lifecycle phases. You’re looking to help your customers complete each phase that’s appropriate to the work you do.

Navigating the Seven Phases

Although your customers aren’t likely to think in terms of lifecycle phases, they are also trying to help themselves be successful at each phase, from learning about which products or services will meet their needs, to acquiring and using your products and services, through to reordering more from you or re-engaging with your organization.

When questions or problems arise during their tenure as your customers, they may seek help from a number of sources. They may turn to you (in person, by phone, via the Web, etc.), they may look at other information sources (starting, perhaps, with Google and ending at a knowledgebase or even your competitors), or they may turn to others like themselves—other customers of yours who may have some particular experience and/or expertise that is directly relevant to the situation they’re in.

Supporting your customer community helps customers help each other in the various lifecycle phases. So, by understanding (1) the dynamics of the customer lifecycle and (2) the ways in which your customer community and your own organization support lifecycle stages, you’ll be able to better leverage both the community and your own organization to make it easier for your customers to do business with you.

Non-Sequential Progression within the Customer Lifecycle

© 2008 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

Illustration 3. A conversation within a community may cause customers to jump around within the lifecycle, as opposed to following it in a sequential, phase-by-phase fashion. This illustration shows the example of a software customer who moves from the Use to the Maintain/Manage phase with a question about the product. Depending on the situation and the responses, the customer may stay for a while longer in the Maintain/Manage phase, may return (probably happily) to Use, may move to Renew/Replace, or may jump to Explore.

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Where Customers Want to Spend Their Time

For the most part, customers want to spend their time in the Use phase. After all, they purchase your products and services because they want to use them. (In certain industries, such as media—e.g., publishing, television, or music—just about the entire lifecycle is spent in the Use phase, where customers read, listen to, watch, or otherwise engage with the content created or offered by the company.)

In some situations, particularly in the B2B world, there can be multiple “customers” who spend their time in only certain phases. A purchasing agent, for example, may be involved only in the Buy and Renew/Replace phases, rarely in the Plan/Select, and never in Using or Maintaining/Managing the product.

In practice, of course, customers spend more time than they might like in phases other than Use, especially in the Manage/Maintain phase where service and support fall. But this isn’t the only phase that might require a lot of attention by customers; if you offer complex products or services, the Plan and Explore phases may take up a lot of time; similarly, if your sales processes are unwieldy, the Buy phase may take an inordinate amount of time (and could, of course, cost you sales).

Where Community Fits In

As Illustration 1 shows, community touches the customer lifecycle in every phase. This is because a customer community is made up of individual customers, each of whom is at his or her own phase of the lifecycle at any given moment. As we said earlier, customers often look at a variety of channels when they need help getting through each phase, including turning to other customers. And this is where community plays an important role.

Note that some phases are more community intensive than others. Illustration 2 highlights (in orange with bold borders) these three community-heavy phases: Explore, Use, and Maintain/Manage. These are the phases in which (1) the reasons for customers to connect with other customers overlap with (2) the purposes of each lifecycle phase. (Or, more colloquially, it’s in these phases that there is more for customers to talk about with each other.)

Exploring the relationship between customer needs/goals and lifecycle phases brings some useful insights.

WHY CUSTOMERS CONNECT WITH OTHER CUSTOMERS. The overarching reasons that customers interact with others in communities are defined by their Customer Scenarios, the set of objectives that they would ideally like to accomplish to be successful in whatever it is they are trying to do. These scenarios include:

• I want to find answers to questions

• I want to find solutions to problems

• I want to connect with people who share my concerns and interests

• I want to contribute to the community, and be acknowledged for my contributions

• I want to express my opinions and ideas

• I want to have an enjoyable experience

• I want (appropriate) inside information

For more details on these scenarios, see “Framework for Evaluating Community Platforms, Version 2.” 

This report continues...

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