The Customer Narrative is basically the experience that your customer has as they go through the experience of being your customer. You will look at three different perspectives:

  1. Before perspective: What is their experience before they buy your product/service?
  2. During perspective: What is their experience as a customer consuming your product/service?
  3. After perspective: What is their experience/relationship with you after they are done with your product/service?

Pull out a blank piece of paper and pick just one product or service at a time to walk through this process.

If you had a one to one coaching program, your Customer Narrative might look like this:

Before

  • Customer sees Facebook ad about hiring an assistant
    • Clicks on ad
    • Directed to landing page
    • Opts in with email to get free video
    • Invited to schedule consultation
    • Receives series of emails about common challenges with invitation to schedule consultation
    • Clicks on consultation button and taken to scheduling page
    • Selects time to schedule an appointment to meet for 20 minutes
    • Comes to consultation where I talk about their current challenges and offer program
    • Receives email with link to register and pay
    • Pays
    • Schedules first appointment on scheduler
    • Receives Zoom link, Dropbox for recorded calls, and coaching agreement
  • Customer listens to podcast
    • What’s the experience?
  • Customer hears about me through a friend
    • What’s the experience?
  • Customer searches online and finds my website
    • What’s the experience?

During

  • Gets link to Zoom call
  • Attends call and receive coaching
  • Receives call recording
  • On last call receives invitation to join Executive Group
  • etc.

After

  • Receives emails each week
  • etc.

 

Once you go through this exercise, you will have everything that happens on the front stage for your customers. What you do next is go behind the stage and document everything that needs to happen behind the stage in order for everything to happen in front of the stage.

You want to make sure to have links, supporting documents, or anything else that will help others reading the narrative know exactly what the step means. So, for example, when it says click ad in the narrative, you would have a link to the actual ad in Facebook. We like to use the SweetProcess software to track all of this.

There are so many great things that can happen when you start evaluating the steps like this. You may realize there is too much going on, too many buttons to push, or that the process is hard for the customer. Doing this allows you to change things and make everything easier for the customer.

Take this time to write a full Customer Narrative for at least one of your products. In the next module we’ll talk about how to do the backstage and build the systems behind the scenes for the narrative.

Workbook

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