Quick Summary: Redesigning your customer journey isn’t just a CS project—it’s a cross-functional initiative that drives real impact across retention, onboarding speed, and customer satisfaction. Virtuous increased NRR by 7% and cut time to value by 63% by aligning teams, clarifying handoffs, and mapping an end-to-end experience centered on customer outcomes.
This is a ChurnZero guest article by Megan Beltran, Chief Customer Officer, Virtuous.
At some point in your company’s growth, the customer journey stops holding together. You’ve built processes, hired smart people, and refined onboarding, support, and renewals. But, from the customer’s perspective, it still feels fragmented.
That’s where we were at Virtuous before we redesigned our customer journey map for the customers who use our responsive fundraising platform, and for our internal teams too.
Since we completed the project, our net revenue retention has increased by 7% in less than three quarters. Gross revenue retention rose by 5%. We cut onboarding from 4.5 months to 50 days, reduced time to value by 63%, and achieved a technical services CSAT of 96%.
But… it wasn’t easy. It took a deliberate, cross-functional effort (and some hands-on guidance from Sabina Pons and her team at Growth Molecules) to redesign our customer journey into something that would meet and exceed our goals well into the future.
Here’s how we executed the project and what we learned.
1. Recognize when it’s time to go all-in.
An entire redesign of a customer journey map is an intimidating project. Why not take an incremental approach and improve one stage of your customer journey at a time?
At first, we’d approached it incrementally. Based on customer feedback that our onboarding was harder then expected, we invested a significant effort into refining the process.
Yet, while we felt confident in the structure we had built, the feedback told a different story. Some customers said they didn’t realize they were live when we transitioned them to post-onboarding support. Internally, our different teams didn’t agree on what “go-live” meant or when handoffs should occur.
On careful analysis of the feedback, there was a consistent pattern around gaps: gaps between what we built, and what customers and colleagues experienced. It became clear that incremental improvements weren’t solving the root problem. Things felt disjointed not because of poor execution, but because we had built individual stages in isolation without mapping how they connected. When handoffs and transitions feel abrupt or unclear, it won’t help to continue optimizing the pieces.
Listen to your feedback holistically and you may see signs that it’s time to go all-in on a redesign:
- Customers saying, “This isn’t what I expected.”
- Different teams defining success milestones differently.
- Referrals and expansion aren’t happening organically.
Customers don’t move through your business in phases—they experience it as one continuous relationship. Fixing individual touchpoints doesn’t make a meaningful difference unless the experience connects end to end.
2. Define the vision before you address the process.
Before you dig into the process, define what you want the journey to achieve. For Virtuous, the goal was to build a journey that was holistic, proactive, and prescriptive.
We wanted our entire customer lifecycle, from first sales conversation to expansion, to feel unified. Customers should know what to expect at every stage, and each internal team needed to support their shared experience instead of creating their own version of it.
My advice: don’t aim for perfection; aim for clarity. You want your customers to know what’s coming next, who’s responsible for what, and when they can expect to see value.
3. Make it a cross-functional event.
We partnered with Growth Molecules on a deep-dive organizational diagnostic assessment as pre-work, and then embarked on a two-day, cross-functional, in-person customer journey mapping workshop. We brought in leaders from product, onboarding, sales, enablement, support, marketing, and operations. Our CEO and CRO participated too. That diversity of perspective made all the difference.
Ahead of the workshop, I met with each stakeholder individually to understand what they wanted from the process. It was important for each team to see their priorities reflected and come into the room aligned.
During the workshop, we broke into cross-functional groups, assigned customer personas, and mapped the journey phase by phase. We looked at each stage from both the customer and internal perspective: activities, responsibilities, outcomes, and transitions. This approach ensured that we left the workshop with:
- An 18-month strategic recommendation framework for our project roadmap.
- A categorized and stack-ranked list of initiatives with ownership and timelines.
- A tactical prioritization model to align effort with business impact.
We spent six months after the initial workshop rolling out the new journey: building new resources, training internal teams, and setting up systems to track progress. Growth Molecules encouraged us to use clear ownership models, which helped maintain momentum long after the workshop ended.
4. Pay attention to transitions and handoffs as friction points.
One of the biggest things the journey mapping process helped us uncover was friction during two transitions: from sales to onboarding, and onboarding to post-live.
On paper, our onboarding process was solid, yet customers didn’t always feel prepared or confident. We realized that we weren’t setting expectations clearly, aligning on goals before onboarding began, or communicating what customers would experience along the way.
To fix this, we introduced mutual action plans before the sale closed, created customer-facing resources to outline onboarding complexity and outcomes, and enabled internal teams with RACI models to clarify who owns what.
On their own, none of these changes were dramatic. When combined, however, they made the customer journey coherent instead of confusing.
5. Measure carefully, and keep things future-ready.
When it came to measuring success, we wanted more than just CSAT. We updated our Customer Confidence Score survey with some pointed questions, based on outcome, that are much more correlated to the customer journey overall:
- How confident are you that your organization has received the expected value in outcomes so far?
- How likely is your organization to provide a positive recommendation or reference?
- How likely are you to renew or expand?
- How likely are you to continue as a Virtuous customer beyond this renewal period?”
We also made sure our journey framework is product-agnostic. It focuses on roles, outcomes, and experiences, not features. This makes it scalable as Virtuous grows and our offerings evolve, whether they’re new services, partnerships, or capabilities.
Final advice: you don’t have to go it alone.
Bringing in Growth Molecules as experienced facilitators made a big difference in helping us achieve our outcomes. Without somebody as experienced in creating a customer journey map to guide us and prompt the right questions, I don’t think our journey mapping workshop would have been as productive.
And, finally, treat customer journey mapping as a company initiative, not a CS task. The more teams you include, the more aligned your organization will be, and the better your customers will feel that alignment.
Editor’s note: Growth Molecules is a certified ChurnZero Service Partner, accredited for their expertise in digital customer success and ChurnZero’s platform. Find out more about Growth Molecules and our other partners here.
