It takes many people to keep one large customer happy. The more important a customer is to your organization, the more people are typically involved in maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. Regardless of the size or composition of the support team, there should be just one person who owns the customer relationship. This account manager (a.k.a. key account representative, customer support analyst, etc.) needs tools that will help him or her manage the customer AND manage the people within their own companies. A customer roadmap is a tool that can be used by account managers to keep the larger customer support team focused, organized, and working toward the same goals.

A customer roadmap is useful any time a customer is important enough to have an assigned account manager. It supports the account manager’s need to strategize beyond just the next month, into the next year. Milestone dates and promise dates are tracked on the customer roadmap, so team members can verify deliverable dates and customer’s expectations. Successful roadmaps divide a year into quarters, with dates and tasks assigned to the appropriate quarter. If a customer is very active, a monthly interval may be more appropriate and even required. Additional benefits are gained when the roadmap is published to your company’s intranet so all groups can refer to it.

Here’s a scenario illustrating how a customer roadmap is used. Let’s say you work for a software company whose product is an application that a wireless communications company uses to sell and activate mobile phones at retailers throughout the country. Your business development group just landed what could be a really huge contract, provided the trial involving just a handful of retailers goes well. You’re an account manager and are assigned this customer because of your success with managing existing accounts. The customer relationship is YOUR responsibility, but your company is a customer-centric company, so EVERYONE wants a relationship with your customer:

• Your marketing director wants to work with their marketing folks to produce and distribute collateral to the retailers.
  
• Your business development group wants to encourage a trial with more users and a shorter trial period.
  
• The supervisor of the help desk group that will answer calls from the retailers wants to meet with the customer to ensure them that the help desk is well staffed and well equipped to handle anything that may come up.
  
• Executive management wants to meet with the customer’s executives—perhaps play a few rounds of golf.
  
• Project management wants to meet the customer to establish a rapport and a process for updating project plans.
  
• The development group wants to talk to the customer about how cool the technology is and how it’s going to work so well for them.

All of these people heard that you scheduled a meeting in two weeks at the customer’s headquarters and they all want to come with you. You’re thrilled to have so much support, but concerned that there would be too many discussion points and will overwhelm your customer.

To manage the situation, you are going to map out a schedule over the next 12 months to accommodate the needs of the customer and the desire of your company’s teams. Here’s how the first three months may look:

Your customer roadmap would not say Account Manager or Business Development, it would have the name of the person.

During the customer meetings, the account manager takes notes of all deliverables and includes these dates on the customer’s roadmap. Also included on the roadmap is a note about talking to the customer about his budget for next year. If your goal is to increase sales, their increased spend needs to be in their budget.

In the example used here, the implementation plan drives the scheduling of items on the customer roadmap. If there are no big projects for your customer this year, then what are your customer’s goals and what are your company’s goals? They should be similar and will determine what goes on the customer roadmap and in what order. For instance, be sure to talk about enhancements/upgrades BEFORE your customer submits their budget projections for next year.

Effective customer roadmaps are really just simple spreadsheets or tables that act as reference points for what has happened with the customer and what the plans are for the customer over the next year. The person responsible for the customer relationship owns the roadmap and has the authority to manage it. This process will help focus your company’s customer-centric groups into one effective and efficient customer support team with a leader and a plan. Wow—that’s great!

About the author
Sandra Houppert is the Director of Client Services at CTI in Indianapolis, Indiana. CTI’s patented TRANSACTSM technology allows enterprises to “slice and dice” large quantities of data. CTI targets the telecommunications market place with its product trio: SmartBill®, MagnaFlex® and Proteus™. www.ctigroup.com