A comprehensive guide to understanding and enhancing the customer lifecycle

The customer journey is an interconnected stream of touchpoints that your customers experience. By understanding how your customers change and shift as they move through your business's customer lifecycle, you’ll be able to better relate to them, create effective content, and enhance their customer experience (CX).

In this article, we’ll discuss the customer lifecycle, outline what you need to know about each of its stages, and discuss how you can measure customer satisfaction across the entire customer journey.

The customer lifecycle refers to the stages a customer goes through during their journey with your company, from the initial interaction to long-term engagement.

It begins with their first contact with your organization and progresses through five key customer lifecycle phases:

In each phase, customers engage with your business in unique ways. Understanding customer lifecycle stages and how to interact with your audience at each point is essential for:

A customer lifecycle strategy is the process of outlining relevant marketing tactics and practices that your business will use to interact with customers at different stages of their lifecycle. A customer who has only seen your brand once or twice on social media is going to be a lot less trusting than a seasoned customer, meaning they require different communication styles and strategies.

Developing a comprehensive customer lifecycle strategy will enable your business to enhance customer communication, streamline its pathway to becoming a loyal customer, and improve the customer experience with your brand. Effective customer lifecycle strategy planning is key for enhancing customer loyalty and improving your bottom line.

By better understanding your customers at each stage of the customer lifecycle, you can enhance their experience and ensure they have favorable interactions with your company. Improving the customer experience is vital, as customers with higher levels of satisfaction translate to better sales, increased loyalty, and more word-of-mouth marketing for your company.

The State of CX report by SurveyMonkey explored the CX landscape, revealing several reasons that your business should focus on streamlining the customer experience:

From gaining new customers to retaining current ones, a streamlined and supportive customer experience is the key to success.

The five stages of the customer lifecycle are awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Each core stage reflects a group of customers in a distinct period of getting to know your brand.

The first stage is for customers just hearing about your brand, while the last stage is for seasoned customers loyal to your company. Let’s explore each stage, demonstrating what sort of customer exists in each and how you can adjust your marketing strategy to improve the customer experience at every phase.

The first stage of the customer lifecycle is awareness. The awareness stage is for customers who are only beginning to hear about your brand. They could contact your company through an advertisement, a social media post, or a recommendation from a friend or colleague. 

Here’s what you need to know about the awareness stage of the customer lifecycle:

A good first impression is essential for laying the foundations for your future customer relationship. 

The consideration stage of the customer lifecycle is for customers who know who you are and what products or services you offer but aren’t sure whether they’ll buy. This stage is about scoping out the wider industry, comparing your products to those of competitors, and seeing whether you meet their needs.

Here’s what you need to know about the consideration stage of the customer lifecycle:

The consideration stage is for showing off why you’re the best in the business. What do you do differently or offer to differentiate you from your competitors? Identify these factors and create marketing campaigns around them.

After a smooth consideration phase, your customer is now ready to commit to your business. In the purchase stage of the customer lifecycle, a consumer becomes your customer after making their first purchase. This stage is all about making the purchase experience as easy as possible, streamlining payment, and ensuring they receive their product in a timely manner.

Here’s everything you need to know about the purchase phase of the customer lifecycle:

While the purchase stage of the customer lifecycle is when a customer finally crosses the finish line, the race is far from over. This is the starting point of a much longer relationship with your customers, which brings us to the retention phase.

Related: Launch a purchase satisfaction survey to understand customer satisfaction during the purchase stage. 

A loyal customer is infinitely more valuable to your business than one who makes a one-time purchase. Fostering a sense of loyalty and enhancing customer retention are the main goals of the retention phase of the customer lifecycle. 

Here’s everything you need to know about the retention phase of the customer lifecycle:

Going the extra mile to show that you appreciate your customers is the most important aspect of the retention phase. If your customers don’t feel like your business cares for them, they’ll go elsewhere. 

Related reading: The ultimate guide to customer service.

The final, ongoing stage of the customer lifecycle is advocacy. At this stage, you cultivate a lasting relationship with your customers, and their brand loyalty extends to recommending you to friends and family. 

Here’s everything you need to know about the advocacy stage of the customer lifecycle:

The advocacy phase lasts as long as your company can keep offering a flawless customer experience to its customers. While this is the final stage of the customer lifecycle, it does not usually end, as customers already trust and rely on your brand. 

Related reading: What is customer advocacy? 

While the ideal customer lifecycle may vary across organizations, understanding your customers' perspectives is always essential.

Creating a customer experience pyramid—where you solicit feedback at key touchpoints, refine your customer support process, and enhance the overall experience—can improve your management of every lifecycle stage.

You can leverage SurveyMonkey to quickly gather customer feedback using our customer feedback survey templates tailored for each stage of the customer lifecycle. 

Let’s explore three common customer feedback surveys to help you start monitoring the customer lifecycle.

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey is the gold standard for measuring customer loyalty. With a single question, organizations all over the world quantify their customer loyalty with this core customer experience metric.

Businesses use NPS surveys to collect data on whether or not their customer experience efforts are paying off.  Additionally, organizations can benchmark NPS to track improvements or declines in customer satisfaction, identify areas for enhancement, and establish an iterative process that continuously refines the customer journey based on data-driven feedback.

Get started with the SurveyMonkey NPS Survey Template.

Customer satisfaction surveys, or CSAT for short, measure customer happiness with your company and the services or products it offers. The CSAT asks customers to rate their satisfaction with your business on a scale of 1 to 10. 

The results of CSAT help quantify how satisfied your audience is with your business's overall offerings. By monitoring movements in your CSAT score over time, you can demonstrate the impact of your customer experience program efforts, helping to create a better experience for your customers one change at a time. 

Get started with the SurveyMonkey Customer Satisfaction Survey Template.

The Customer Effort Score, also known as the CES, is a survey that measures the relative effort required to complete certain actions with your business. You can use the CES to measure the ease of tasks like purchasing, communicating with support, or using your website. CES surveys identify difficulties in your customer lifecycle and streamline them. 

Get started today with the SurveyMonkey Customer Effort Score Survey Template.

Measuring the customer experience is the first step to improving it. Knowing which metrics to measure and how to calculate them will offer you quantitative insight into your customer experience program.

Here are some of the most important customer experience metrics.

Customer lifetime value is a metric that describes the total value a customer has generated for your business over their entire time with your company. As customer loyalty increases, your customer lifetime value will also increase as customers repeat their purchases over months and years.

Calculating customer lifetime value is important as it provides insight into how customer satisfaction impacts your bottom line.

Customer retention is the rate of customers who stay with your business over a certain period of time. High customer retention rates suggest that your customers are happy with your business and will continue to work with it for an extended period of time.

High retention rates translate into improved CLV, which in turn helps enhance your bottom line. Measuring customer retention can provide insight into how small changes in your customer experience program have major impacts on your customers and whether or not they return to your business. 

Customer churn is the total number of customers lost over a certain period of time. Customer churn goes hand-in-hand with customer retention rates. When you have high customer churn, it’s a sure sign that there is something about your products, services, or general company that customers are upset with.

Investigating spikes in churn or high churn rates by collecting customer and churning customer feedback is vital for enhancing retention in the future. Improving churn and actively measuring it over time should be a top priority for every business.

Your customer service team is on the front lines of customer support, ensuring that your customers have a pleasant and smooth experience with your company and its products. Investing in customer support is vital, as these people can heavily shape a customer’s perspective of your business.

Calculating the ROI of customer service is a useful metric to regularly conduct, as it offers a direct figure that you can show to stakeholders to justify larger investments in your customer experience. 

Customer lifecycle management is the process of streamlining touchpoints across each phase of your customer lifecycle. By creating frictionless experiences with your company, your customers will naturally flow from one lifecycle phase to the next, improving everything from conversion rates to retention.

Here are some of our top strategies for enhancing the customer lifecycle management process.

Building a customer feedback program is an effective way of enhancing every stage of your customer lifecycle. Feedback provides clear insight into what you do well and where you could improve, creating a roadmap to better customer interactions.

There are several benefits to creating a customer feedback program:

As you enhance your customer feedback program, your business will have to deal with a lot of feedback. If you’re not careful, this can quickly become an administrative nightmare that lets opinions slip through the cracks and feedback loops open. 

There are several benefits to streamlining feedback management:

One final tip for improving the customer lifecycle management process is to invest in data security. Your customer data is a valuable resource you should protect at all costs.

Here are a few benefits of focusing on creating secure data storage facilities:

Understanding each of the unique stages of the customer lifecycle and adapting your marketing and customer interaction strategies to them will help you enhance customer satisfaction, improve loyalty, and increase conversations.

Customer lifecycle management enhances every stage of your customer journey, creating streamlined and effective customer experiences. Get the feedback you need to identify customer issues and improve every stage of the customer lifecycle with SurveyMonkey.