Today’s guest post was contributed by ClientSuccess. ClientSuccess is a customer success management platform that provides actionable insights, rich customer analytics, and best practices that will help you maximize the lifetime value of your customers. Follow ClientSuccess on Twitter @clientsuccess

Each touchpoint matters throughout the customer journey. The old saying is true, “you don’t have a second chance to make a first impression”. The first 90 days of a customer relationship can determine the outcome whether good or bad. A big focus of the first 90 days is implementation, product training, and initial relationship cadence. However important those first days are, the journey to customer success is constant and never really ends.

Post implementation, your customers need to feel like they have your support at every level. Too many times a company finishes implementation in a strong proactive manner and then moves to a reactive strategy. This doesn’t work very well and introduces renewal risk. The best practice is to develop a customer success journey map with defined tasks, milestones, and alignment throughout the whole lifecycle.

Check out the rest of this blog post where Dave Blake, CEO of Client Success outlines the 5 best practices for building a customer success journey map. 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the Software team on Twitter at @SIIASoftware.