4 Stages of the Customer Support Funnel

1. Onboarding

Turning a single sale into long-term success starts with the first product experience. It should be clear, obvious, and match the customer’s expectations.

In the onboarding stage, there can be one-to-one communication to educate and nurture each new customer. Some examples of customer touch points within the onboarding process:

• Documentation/self-service help

• Live chat

• Email

• Phone

• In-person contact

The specific elements of an onboarding program will depend on the scale of the company, the nature of the product and pricing, and the type of customers.

2. Post-sales support

The sales and onboarding stages often blend into each other, with sales teams heavily involved throughout. After the onboarding stage, customers enter the post-sale period where they are fitting your product into their workflows and establishing processes and best practices.

During this stage, the support team’s role is to provide the resources that customers need in order to be successful and to be easily accessible when your customers need you. Touchpoints within the post-sale support stage are much the same — self-service, chat, email and phone channels. The channels are similar, but the usage of those tools transitions from “getting set up” to “day-to-day usage,” new team members are often involved.

3. Retention

Depending on your product, the onboarding and post-sales support stages can range in duration from days to weeks, even months. Although your customer support team may still provide ongoing support to customers via live chat, email and phone, high-touch service will tend to give way to self-service support with more infrequent touch points.

The retention stage is all about proactively educating customers on best practices and providing support around product updates and new releases. The touch points during the retention phase:

• Documentation/self-service help

• Integrations/channel partners

• Social media monitoring/support

• Periodic success reviews

• User groups

4. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers love your product so much they share it with others. Customer Success teams are often heavily involved in the retention and advocacy stages of the customer support funnel.

The advocacy stage is all about connecting customers so they can support each other and share best practices around your product. The common touch points here:

• Community forums

• Social media

• Testimonials

• Meetups

• User conferences