Customer timeline: what is it & how does it work?

What is a customer timeline?

A customer timeline, also known as customer journey mapping, is the progression a prospect advances through before, during, and after making a purchase. The timeline provides a detailed record of their interaction with your business from their initial contact to their initial purchase of your product or service and beyond. It provides a roadmap for you to follow your customer’s journey throughout their decision-making process, enabling you to tailor your marketing tactics appropriately.

 It lets you see every interaction with your business when they are most active, and what kind of content they react to best. It is essential to know exactly where your customers are in their journey as it provides invaluable insights into their behavior and preferences, as well as the effectiveness of your responses.

Developing and monitoring a customer timeline for a B2B company is essential for keeping track of client activities, understanding customer needs, and building better relationships. The customer timeline provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey and helps your business understand the interactions and events that take place throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Your customer timeline information can then be leveraged to:

1. Track customer interactions: The customer timeline displays all customer interactions, including email activities, workflow engagement, loyalty activities, and order updates chronologically.

2. Monitor customer behavior: The customer timeline provides insights into customer behavior, including their purchase history and feedback, helping your business better understand your customers.

3. Improve customer engagement: By tracking customer interactions, your business can identify areas where you need to improve your engagement strategies and implement changes to better serve your customers.

4. Enhance customer experience: The customer timeline provides your business with a comprehensive view of the customer journey, enabling you to identify pain points and improve the customer experience.

Why are customer timelines so important?

A customer timeline is a way to keep track of your customers' activity and engagement with your business across all channels. Every contact your business has provides a unique opportunity for you to develop a deep understanding of your customer’s behavior. By delineating the intricacies of your customer timeline, you will gain valuable insights into your target audience's needs, preferences, and pain points. A customer timeline enables you to manage customer expectations. It also helps you and your team to allocate resources accordingly and efficiently prioritize tasks. 

Armed with the knowledge gained from a customer timeline, you can optimize your marketing efforts, enhance your customer experiences, and drive meaningful engagement. It not only allows you to see their interactions with you when they are most active but also identifies the specific content that moves them to action.

The benefits of customer timelines

Maintaining a customer timeline for a B2B company is critical for tracking client activities, understanding customer needs, and forming better relationships. Some of the main benefits include:

• Boosted efficiency - A customer timeline facilitates streamlining your processes and provides access to the same information quickly and easily to your entire team. This allows your sales and customer service teams to efficiently assign tasks, follow up with clients, troubleshoot problems, and deliver great service faster. By maintaining all your relevant customer data in one place, your sales and customer service teams become more efficient and eliminate unnecessary communication and time wasted searching through emails, order paperwork, and invoices. Sales teams can share insights about prospective clients that could inform product development decisions; support teams can keep track of any problems reported by current customers; and marketing teams can use data collected from previous campaigns to refine their strategies. This makes sure that all teams have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips leading to faster decision making while also eliminating or reducing misunderstandings between departments due to lack of communication or outdated data.

• Tailored targeted services - Understanding your customers is the cornerstone of effective marketing. It is not just about knowing who they are, but truly getting them — connecting with their needs, crafting your product or service with them in mind, and communicating in a way that resonates. By tracking each step of customer behavior, you will better understand how your customers interact with your products and services. You can then use this data to tailor your services accordingly by responding to the specific customer needs and enhancing the overall customer experience, fostering a stronger connection between the customer and your brand, resulting in higher satisfaction rates.

• Better allocation of resources – A customer timeline provides valuable insight allowing you to better allocate time, money, and energy, including prioritizing offerings with the greatest return on investment. The information gathered also drives the design of marketing materials more responsive to your customers’ needs.

• Improved customer relationship management – Mapping a customer timeline enables you to gain insights into your customer needs, spot trends in customer behavior or complaints, and deliver hyper-personalized service that builds trust between your customers and your business.

• Increased customer loyalty - You will establish trust and loyalty with your customers by delivering personalized experiences, anticipating customer needs, and delivering exceptional service at every touchpoint. Loyal customers are more apt to generate repeat purchases, offer valuable feedback, and become brand ambassadors, propelling your business growth.

Identify your B2B customer categories

The initial step in creating a Customer Timeline is to identify the distinct categories of customers you serve. A separate timeline needs to be created for each group. Typically, there are four basic categories of business buyers:

• Producers purchase goods and services that they transform into other products. This group includes manufacturers and service providers.

• Resellers are companies that sell goods and services produced by other firms without materially changing them. This category includes wholesalers, brokers, and retailers.

• Local, state, and national governments purchase enormous goods and services. The U.S. Government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the world.

• Institutional markets include nonprofit organizations like the American Red Cross, hospitals, churches, charitable organizations, private colleges, and civic clubs.

The key stages of customer timelines

There are five stages of customer behavior on your customer’s journey: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Purchase, and Retention.

Business customers enter the awareness stage, identifying a need or desire. During this customer journey step, consumers are conducting research. This can include searching online for keyword solutions, reading blog posts and news articles, browsing online forums, and learning brand alternatives. Your business must leverage a variety of marketing channels, such as content marketing, SEO, and social media, to capture their attention.

During the consideration stage a potential customer evaluates available options, seeking information to make informed decisions. This is when customers begin to look for alternatives to their past purchases. Your brand must provide valuable content, product comparisons, and expert insights to guide customers through this stage by leveraging customer ratings, case studies, and customer testimonials.

In the decision stage, your potential customer has narrowed down their choices and is ready to make a purchase. This customer journey stage should always prompt visitors to take a particular action. Offering a clear call-to-action (CTA), you urge customers to make a purchase, subscribe to your mailing list, or sign up for your services. Clear calls-to-action, persuasive copywriting, and enticing offers play critical roles here.

Once a customer reaches the purchase stage, creating a seamless buying experience is crucial. In this stage, customers consider factors like price vs. value, customer service effectiveness, company values, and policies. Streamlined checkout processes, secure payment options, and personalized recommendations enhance customer satisfaction and foster brand loyalty.

The retention stage must deliver exceptional customer support, collect feedback, and nurture post-purchase relationships that turn purchasers into loyal advocates through loyalty programs, referral opportunities, and exclusive rewards. A study by Bain and Company reported that “loyal customers are 50% more likely to evaluate new products or services and spend 31% more than new customers.” This stage demonstrates the value of nurturing and maintaining contact with customers throughout their customer journey.

Notable events to capture on your timeline include free-trial sign-up, first purchase, customer service interactions, product returns, and customer churn or loss.

Building your customer timeline

The six steps to build your customer timeline are:

1. Decide what to measure. Be clear in setting your goals, so you know what to look for as you plot your customer journey.

2. Create your customer persona. Start with knowing which buyer you are focused on and what their general needs and wants are.

3. Define your customer buying phases. What are the stages your customer experiences between discovering their problem and purchasing your product or service? Which stages happen after purchase?

4. Plot your touchpoints. Where and how does your customer interact with your brand within each phase?

5. Add customer thoughts, actions, and emotions. At each touchpoint, what is the customer prompted to think, take action, or feel?

6. Note your opportunities. Based on your goals and what you discover through your customer journey map, what modifications can you make at each touchpoint or within each phase to improve the customer experience?

Developing strategies

Once you have identified your customer journey stages, you can start developing strategies for each stage. Your strategies should include creating content to educate customers in the awareness stage or offering discounts to encourage purchases in the decision stage. While your customer timeline could end with the initial purchase, it is best to continue through these activities also: abandoned cart, payment information added, order confirmed, order shipped, order received, and customer review submitted for the complete picture.

After you have identified all of your customer touchpoints, it is time to set and adjust your customer goals based on what you have learned from the timeline. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals will establish an improved customer experience. The goals may include:

• Improve service level to 90% by Q2.

• Boost customer reviews by 25% by year-end.

• Raise employee engagement by 50% by Q4.

Now that you have created a customer timeline and set goals, the last step is to adjust your marketing materials and revise your customer-facing interactions that detail specific tactics and strategies for improving your business performance. Strategies you might consider to achieve your goals are:

Create great content: 

Create relevant and high-quality subject matter that addresses your target audience’s pain points, questions, and interests. This could include blog posts, articles, videos, and infographics. Deliver the content regularly through your website, social media platforms, and email newsletters.

Get social:

Identify the social media platforms where your target audience is most active and engage with them there. Share valuable content, participate in chats, and use targeted advertising to reach specific demographics.

Outbound email: 

Reach out to potential clients directly through personalized emails. Research their needs in advance to tailor your message effectively, build a list of interested prospects, and send them targeted messages. Customize personalized emails and provide valuable insights, offers, or updates that resonate with their needs.

Multichannel outreach: 

While email is the top-performing single channel when it comes to B2B outreach, the absolute best results come from coordinated multi-channel outreach. Adding corporate gifts, synchronizing your website activity to your prospecting campaigns, reaching out on LinkedIn, picking up the phone once a dialog has been established, and any other method that helps to personalize prospecting and drive even better results.

Host webinars: 

Host online webinars or educational workshops that provide valuable insights or solutions to your target audience’s challenges. This not only positions you as an expert in your field but also fosters direct engagement.

Network: 

Attend industry-related events, conferences, and trade shows to personally connect with potential clients.

Partner up: 

Form strategic partnerships with complementary businesses that share your target audience. This can help you cross-promote and extend your presence to each other’s customer bases.

Examples of customer timelines

A group health insurance provider may define the customer touchpoints as:

• Contact by a broker or agent

• Phone and in-person assistance

• Coverage and plan options presented to staff

• Options for signing up and authorizing payroll deductions

• Upsell benefits – Health and Wellness Programs

• Renewal and plan updates

Customer pain points identified included: a lack of transparency in pricing and coverage, time-consuming with limited on-site availability, long wait times, and unhelpful customer service.

Strategies and action steps taken are to provide transparent pricing and clear policy information, improve customer response times and training, and communicate plan benefits and updates in simpler, more straightforward language.

Next, consider an eco-friendly packaging company that supplies businesses with environmentally friendly packaging to address almost any need, with the aim of matching customers with the proper packaging according to their business’s sustainability values.

The package manufacturer makes every effort to offer a B2C-like experience for B2B customers that includes clear product segmentation, user-friendly navigation, quality images of each item, must-have eCommerce image optimization, and detailed product specs.         

They also offer a variety of buying options: customers can either purchase in bulk without logging in to the website, or they can create an account, which results in faster checkout and accepts different saved shipping destinations, access to order history, new order monitoring, and wishlist functionality.

In addition, to help customers know what packaging items will be good for them, the manufacturer adds in-depth details on each item. For each item, the company provides a full spec sheet describing features, sizes, and technical specs. Plus, they also help customers identify whether the packaged item is recycled, recyclable, or biodegradable.

Researching and defining customer needs or issues

The company has researched and provided links on important customer issues, including:

• EPR and Packaging Compliance

• Compostable Packaging Guide

• Retailer Requirements Guide

• Transition From Plastic to Paper

• Bioplastics in eCommerce

• Sustainable Certifications Guide

• Packaging Case Studies

Finally, a multi-product corporate travel B2B company that makes travel bookings, manages travel expenses, and optimizes savings would have a unique customer timeline. The travel provider understands that customer service is the prime differentiator for their business. The company operates multiple customer support times for different customer sectors.

After creating a customer timeline, the company decided to keep the customer service function centralized and coordinated by employing Freshdesk software. It employs a unified customer database that does this, ensuring you always know which customer is reaching out from which channel. Automated ticket assignment workflows ensured that the right agents worked on the right request type.     

Streamlining the customer experience resulted in faster resolution at a lower cost. The action steps included cutting down on manual and repetitive tasks using advanced automation rules, and solving customer queries faster without increasing the number of agents. Using customizable analytics and reports to track team performance, they identified several bottlenecks before they snowballed and were able to track their individual and team performance.

 By simplifying operations, they achieve high customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Your customer’s experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has over the life of the relationship with your business and brand. Equally important are your customers' emotions, feelings, and perceptions about those interactions. One of the ways we understand the customer’s experience is through mapping and analyzing the journey through all customer touchpoints.

Creating a customer journey map or timeline will help you comprehend your customer’s experience before, during, and after buying your product or service, so you can identify barriers and create the best possible experience for every customer. This knowledge is critical to develop a better understanding of your audience.

There is no one correct way to build a customer timeline or journey map. It can be a simple spreadsheet, a graphic timeline, a flowchart, a slide deck, or a table. Regardless of which display template you choose, a customer journey map or timeline is a visual tool that helps you define your customers’ needs, problems, and engagement with your brand. The map is arranged as a timeline that details every interaction a customer has with your business, from the awareness stage to repeat business. It helps you see what the customer experiences at every touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you better understand your customers so you can spot, avoid, or fix potential roadblocks, make better business decisions, and improve customer retention.

The map helps you see which touchpoints generate positive responses from your customers, so you can emphasize those, and where there are common pain points you want to improve.

Defining touchpoints

Touchpoints delineate every interaction the customer has with your business throughout the buying journey. The touchpoints might include:

• Marketing collateral, like brochures, posters, stickers, billboards, flyers, commercials, or display ads.

• Physical properties, including your office, warehouse, or branch locations.

• Digital properties, including your website and social media pages.

• Interactions with your staff, such as accounting, customer service reps, and sales reps.

• Purchase experience, including the price and checkout process.

• Any post-purchase follow-up activity from your company, including an email or phone call.

• Ongoing customer support.

• Renewal, subsequent purchase history or cancellation of your service

Recording customer thoughts, actions, and emotions is then added to your plot to help define the precise customer experience at each touchpoint. What are they thinking? Which steps do they take? How are they feeling? You can then obtain honest customer feedback through customer surveys and — even better — live interactions with your customer support staff.

Iterate and make improvements along the way

Finally, recognize and note opportunities to make improvements in your customer interactions. Opportunities are anywhere you can remove pain points, touchpoints where your customers are hitting roadblocks, and where you can take steps to improve the buying journey for your customers and keep them coming back.

Optimize for the customer journey timeline

Building your customer journey timeline is the first step towards understanding the customer experience that you are delivering. Once you have mapped your customer’s journey, you need to analyze your map or timeline to pinpoint areas where you can simplify and streamline your customer interactions to deliver a customer experience that drives loyalty and improves outcomes for your business. 

This last step involves identifying points of friction, recognizing unnecessary or ineffective touchpoints, detecting channel transitions that may require the customer to duplicate information, and determining points that met or exceeded customer expectations.