Many people think the customer journey ends with a purchase, but that‘s where the most valuable part begins. Working with Skybound Entertainment’s loyalty program, I've learned that effective customer lifecycle management means understanding what keeps customers coming back and using that insight to turn buyers into lifelong advocates.
This focus on the journey reflects a massive shift in customer expectations over the years. According to a Salesforce report, 80% of customers now say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. This means immediate support and seamless interactions are no longer optional.
My perspective is this. You can’t truly manage the customer lifecycle without listening to the voice of the customer. No one is closer to that voice than the support team. In this article, I’ll break down everything you need to know about customer lifecycle management from the perspective of someone in support and operations, and how you can create a better journey at every stage.
Table of Contents
- What is the customer lifecycle?
- Customer Lifecycle Stages
- Customer Lifecycle Map
- Conducting a Customer Lifecycle Analysis
- How to Manage the Customer Lifecycle
- Customer Lifecycle Management: Best Practices
- Customer Lifecycle Software
What is the customer lifecycle?
The customer lifecycle refers to the process of prospects becoming aware of a product, purchasing from a brand, and ideally becoming a company's longtime customer. The process is made up of five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty.
More simply, it outlines the steps a customer takes as they progress through the flywheel and sales funnel. It gives marketing, sales, and customer service teams a complete picture of the customer's journey and highlights areas for improvement.
Your team can leverage the lifecycle to create lead acquisition content and deliver customer experiences that delight customers at every stage.
Before we go over the customer lifecycle stages, grab your free customer journey map templates so you can map your customer's journey as we go along.
Every company has the opportunity to control and guide the customer journey.
From my experience, most customers follow a similar set of steps when choosing a brand's product or service and eventually becoming loyal to that brand. Rather than leaving that to chance and hoping that customers will choose us, I guide them in our direction.
How do I do this? By tailoring my content and interactions based on where the customer is in their journey.
This isn‘t manipulation. Rather, it’s an intentional approach where I provide them with the content they‘re looking for, thus providing value. In doing so, I prove my company is a reputable, transparent brand that has its visitors’ and customers' best intentions at heart.
The customer lifecycle is handy to see how your customers behave, so let’s jump into detail on what that looks like at each stage of the process below.
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Customer Lifecycle Stages
As I mentioned, the customer lifecycle has five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. While it's similar to the buyer's journey, the customer lifecycle takes into account the customer’s experience, or what happens long after a prospect makes a purchase.
I'll walk through these stages one by one.
1. Reach
This stage is called “reach” because it‘s your chance to reach the customer while they’re deliberating.
In this stage, a customer searches for a product after becoming aware of an issue or problem they need to solve. They are comparing products across competing brands (including yours), carrying out research, and reading customer reviews. Social media marketing, SEO, search engine marketing, and other inbound and outbound methods should place your brand on this customer's radar.
The reach stage is successful when the customer reaches out to you for more information, looking to either educate themselves further or get a definitive price.
2. Acquisition
When the customer gets to your website or calls you on the phone, they've officially entered the acquisition stage.
This stage varies by acquisition channel. If they call, you’ll need to address their questions and concerns, gathering more information about the customer's needs. Then, offer the best products or services to meet those needs and educate them on their benefits.
If they find you through your website, ensure they encounter helpful, educational content to guide their purchasing decision. Every content piece, pricing page, or blog post should provide the information they need to make a decision.
Pro tip: Gating some content can help capture their information. And don't forget: Your service team should be ready via live chat to handle urgent inquiries. Remember, all interactions are customer service experiences. Even a simple website visit is a customer service touchpoint.
3. Conversion
Having received all the necessary information and being delighted with your brand‘s customer experience, the prospect makes a purchase. They’ve officially converted and turned into your customer.
In the conversion stage, you want to make it clear that you‘re providing value. They’ve entered a relationship with you, not just made a purchase. But the work doesn‘t end here. It’s time to retain the customer so that they continuously come back to your brand.
4. Retention
Customer retention starts with knowing how the customer feels. Check in with them to ask how they've enjoyed their new product or service. I highly recommend conducting customer service surveys, measuring your Customer Satisfaction Score, and establishing a Voice of the Customer program to find out what you can do better.
Using information directly from them, you can continuously make improvements to your products and services, and the customer service experience.
Pro tip: In this retention stage, you'll want to offer exclusive perks only your customers have access to. Think: 24/7 support, product discounts, and referral bonuses. Basically, all perks that can take your customer from a plain purchaser to a brand promoter.
5. Loyalty
In the loyalty stage, the customer becomes an important asset to your brand by making additional purchases. They might post on social media about their experience with your company and write product reviews that inform a future customer during the reach stage.
Brand loyalty is paramount. Take the automobile industry, for example.
There are dozens of brands selling similar vehicles for similar purposes. So, what makes a customer choose an SUV between, say, Toyota and Chevrolet?
The answer: brand loyalty. Imagine a customer‘s first car was a Toyota Camry in the 90s. It served them well through college and beyond. Now, as they look to buy a new SUV, they’re likely to stick with Toyota, the brand that’s been reliable for decades, unless poor customer service pushes them away.
Your customer reaches this stage after experiencing the previous four stages. You can't manufacture loyalty out of thin air. It must be nurtured and instilled in the customer through positive service experiences and proven product value.
Note that the customer lifecycle isn’t rigid, it's fluid. Customers can discover your brand in various ways: recommendations from friends or family, social media, ads, research, and more.
Understanding this lifecycle helps you manage it effectively, and mapping it is a great way to start.
Customer Lifecycle Map
A customer lifecycle map is a high-level, visual tool that marketers use to track where customers are in their buyer journey. It helps you understand customer behavior as they go through different stages.
Differentiating, or mapping out, what actions in the lifecycle correlate to each stage helps you build a buyer journey that takes prospects from being familiar with your business, to raving advocates.
Now that we understand the customer lifecycle and the use in mapping it out, let’s talk analysis.
Managing the customer lifecycle won’t be possible unless you carry out a customer lifecycle analysis, which will show you how your customers are currently moving through the pipeline.
Conducting a Customer Lifecycle Analysis
To build a strategy around customer lifecycle management that actually works, you need good data. I’m not just talking about numbers on a dashboard, but the real human stories behind them. While analytics and marketing teams provide the “what” and “how many,” my support teams on the front lines help provide the crucial “why.” Part of our job is to translate what we hear every day into meaningful insights that give the numbers their context for the whole company.
Analyzing the Reach Stage
When I think about the Reach stage, I’m looking at our customer email campaigns on platforms like Braze at Skybound. Are people actually opening them? Are they clicking through? Those engagement numbers are the first signal we get about whether our message is landing with the right audience. If open rates are low, it’s a clear sign we have a disconnect long before they even think about becoming a customer. That’s why I like to push for regular meetings between the email and content teams to review what’s working and what isn’t. It’s a simple feedback loop that helps us create more of what people want to see.
Analyzing the Acquisition Stage
Once a prospect is in our ecosystem, my focus shifts entirely to friction. How easy, intuitive, and compelling is our front door? I’ve found that the most valuable and often overlooked data here comes directly from new user support tickets. They are a literal, real-time map of where your onboarding process is broken. When I see a spike in questions about the same feature, I know our in-app guidance has failed. That’s not a support problem. It’s a growth problem, and I take that data directly to the product team.
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- Buyer's Journey Template
- Future State Template
- Day-in-the-Life Template
- And more!
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Analyzing the Conversion Stage
This is where small frictions have huge revenue implications. I’ve learned to be obsessed with this stage. My analysis goes beyond just looking at sales close rates or cart abandonment. I want to know why. One of the most powerful things I ever did was start systematically tracking the questions prospects asked right before they had to make a decision. Those questions are the last hurdles between you and a new customer. At both Trendy Butler (subscription e-commerce service) and Skybound, we monitored every part of the transaction flow, because a confusing payment step can kill more conversions than any competitor.
Analyzing the Retention Stage
This is where I believe the most value is won or lost, and frankly, it’s where most companies drop the ball. It’s shocking that while focusing on CX can lead to an 80% increase in revenue, only 7% of companies care to track their Customer Health Scores. That’s a massive blind spot.
It’s why I’ve made it a priority to implement Net Promoter Score programs in my roles. While there are other newer metrics that can help you gauge customer health, NPS acts as a constant stream of candid, unfiltered feedback. You can use the comments section to understand exactly what you need to fix to reduce churn and improve the experience, which then drives retention.
Analyzing the Loyalty Stage
My work managing the loyalty program at Skybound showed me that you have to earn loyalty every day. The analysis I focused on wasn’t just about customer long-term value. I was obsessed with the quality of the feedback from our most dedicated members. You’ll often find that your dedicated members consistently have more insightful and actionable ideas than any broad market survey. The goal of loyalty analysis isn’t just to count your advocates but also to identify them, build a system to listen to them, and then act on what they say. That’s how you truly drive loyalty.
How to Manage the Customer Lifecycle
I’ve seen, time and again, that the biggest breakdown in the customer experience happens at the handoffs. Marketing generates leads but has no idea if it was a good fit for Sales. Sales close a deal but has little visibility into whether that customer is actually successful with the product. It’s a series of disconnected events.
I’ve spent my career working at the intersection of these departments, building the feedback loops and shared goals needed to turn that disjointed process into a single, seamless journey. Regardless of industry, the principles for solving this are always the same.
1. The Foundation: Aligning Your Teams and Attracting the Right Audience
Reach + Acquisition
Before you can do anything else, you have to get your own house in order. This foundational stage is all about internal alignment and building trust with your audience before you ask for a sale.
- It all starts with buyer personas. I’ve learned that you can’t have a relevant conversation if you don’t know who you’re talking to. Creating detailed buyer personas is a critical alignment tool. It forces every department, from Marketing to Product, to see the customer as a real person. We use them as our north star for every decision. Download this buyer persona template from HubSpot to get started.
- You have to earn this trust. In the early stages, I believe your goal should be to teach, not to sell. This is core to inbound marketing. My strategy has always been to share our expertise generously through valuable, search-optimized content. This includes not just blog posts, but also high-value resources like the expert courses you might find at HubSpot Academy. When you establish your brand as a trusted expert, you become the obvious choice when it’s time to buy.
- Empower them with knowledge. As people get closer to your brand, they want to do their own research. I’m a big believer in empowering them with a comprehensive knowledge base. A great self-service portal does more than just deflect support tickets, it gives the potential customer the confidence to make a well-informed decision on their own terms. I know personally, when I am looking at using a new product or service, the knowledge base is one of the first places I look.
2. The Core: Perfecting the Transaction and Connection
Acquisition + Conversion
This phase is about making the transition from prospect to customer as seamless and reassuring as possible. The smallest amount of friction can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
- Become obsessed with removing friction. I treat the checkout or sign-up process like one might do product management. Every single click, every form field, every second of loading time is a potential reason for a customer to walk away. I’ve learned from e-commerce experience that a simple, clear, and fast purchasing system is one of the most effective levers you can leverage to increase conversions.
- Provide instant reassurance. The buying moment can create anxiety. That’s why I believe in having on-demand support available, like live chat, directly on the pricing and checkout pages. It’s not for support, it’s for conversion. A quick, reassuring answer from a real person can be the final nudge a customer needs to complete their purchase with confidence.
- Embrace proactive support. The best way to connect is to get ahead of a customer’s needs. This is where good CRM is your eyes and ears. I’ve coached my teams to use CRM data to see when a prospect is highly engaged or struggling with a part of the process. A timely, proactive outreach from a sales or support rep, based on data, feels helpful and personal, not intrusive. It shows the customer you’re paying attention.
3. The Long-Term: Scaling and Deepening the Relationship
Retention + Loyalty
The journey doesn’t end at the sale. This final phase is about turning a one-time transaction into a long-term, high-value relationship, and doing it at scale.
- Automate your personalization. You can’t manually maintain a personal relationship with thousands of customers. This is where the powerful combination of marketing automation and your CRM comes into play. I use the CRM as a single source of truth about a customer. Then, I use a tool like Braze to power personalized communication based on that data. This allows me to automatically send the right message to the right person at the right time, keeping the relationship active and valuable.
- Activate your advocates. Your happiest customers are your strongest marketing asset. I always set up simple, automated emails that encourage satisfied customers to leave public reviews or refer their friends. The key, I’ve learned, is to then track these advocates in your CRM. This creates a valuable list of champions that you can call on for future case studies, testimonials, or beta programs, turning their loyalty into a sustainable growth engine for the company.
Customer Lifecycle Management: Best Practices
Executing this strategy requires a deep commitment to a few core principles. These are the practices I’ve learned are non-negotiable for long-term success.
1. I believe in being proactive, not reactive.
The best companies don’t just solve problems quickly; they prevent them from happening in the first place. I’ve always coached my teams to think ahead. This means using data to see where customers are likely to get stuck and offering help before they even have to ask. A simple, automated email with a helpful guide when a user enters a complex part of your product builds far more trust than a fast response to a frustrated support ticket later on. It shows you're paying attention.
2. I insist on meeting customers where they are.
Customers should be able to interact with you on their terms, on whatever channel is most convenient for them at that moment. In my career, I’ve managed support across email, chat, social media, and even modern community platforms like Discord. The key is to ensure the experience is seamless and consistent everywhere. A customer should never have to repeat their story just because they switched channels. This requires a deep integration of your technology and a commitment to a single, unified view of every interaction. While this may not always be possible, it’s what you should aim for.
3. Invest in your frontline teams.
Your customer-facing teams are the stewards of your customer experience, and they need to be treated as a strategic asset, not a cost center. Throughout my career, I’ve focused on implementing career ladders, clear OKRs, and continuous coaching for my team members. I saw it at SmartRecruiters and again at Greenhouse. When you invest in your team’s growth and empower them to solve problems, they deliver a better, more empathetic experience, which directly impacts customer loyalty and retention.
4. Leverage technology intelligently.
Technology should enhance the human experience, not just replace it. I’ve built AI and automation strategies where the goal wasn’t to eliminate the frontline team members. It was to free them from repetitive, soul-crushing tasks so they could focus on high-empathy, complex problem-solving where humans excel. A smart tech stack should make your team more effective and your customers’ lives easier. Period.
5. I’ve learned that culture is the ultimate best practice.
Ultimately, tools and processes can only take you so far. True, sustainable customer lifecycle management comes from a culture that is genuinely customer-obsessed. This has to start from the top, but it’s everyone’s responsibility. As a leader, I see it as my job to constantly bring the voice of the customer into every room I’m in, especially the ones where they aren’t represented, to ensure that we never lose sight of who we’re building for.
Free Customer Journey Template
Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.
- Buyer's Journey Template
- Future State Template
- Day-in-the-Life Template
- And more!
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Customer Lifecycle Software
Using customer lifecycle software can help you automate the client lifecycle management process. There's no need to remember each customer by name, so long as your software does it for you.
Here's some software you may need:
1. Content Management System
Customer Lifecycle Stage: Reach, Acquisition, Conversion
Most customers find companies online. This means you'll need a website and, more specifically, a content management system. With a CMS, you'll be able to reach customers via search engines, acquire them with tailored content offers, and convert them with an easy-to-navigate site that facilitates the purchasing process.
It should also give prospects immediate access to your service team. You should have the option to add live chat, lead capture forms, and click-to-call buttons.
Here are some CMS resources to get you started:
2. Marketing Automation Tool
Customer Lifecycle Stage: Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention
After acquiring or converting a prospect into a customer, it‘s time to nurture and retain them. You’ll need a marketing automation tool that allows you to send emails, gate content, provide personalized experiences, and segment your customer list based on behaviors and attributes.
Here are some marketing automation resources:
- How to Implement & Succeed With Marketing Automation
- The 14 Best Marketing Automation Software Tools Available to You
3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
Customer Lifecycle Stage: Acquisition, Conversion, Retention, Loyalty
A CRM tool tracks prospect information and activity in a unified database. In their contact card, you'll have access to their name, email, and phone number, as well as their activity on your website.
A CRM comes in after the customer submits a form or signs up on your website. In other words, you'll use it after they enter the reach stage to collect leads, assign contacts to team members, and create automation workflows.
HubSpot allows you to keep all of your prospects' information in one simple-to-use platform, keep all conversations in one inbox, and automate follow-up emails. You can start with our all-in-one CRM for free, then scale up as your business grows.
Here are some CRM resources:
- How to Use a CRM: The Ultimate Guide
- The 11 Best CRM Tools for SMBs & Enterprises Alike
- 12 Key Benefits CRM Systems Provide to a Business
4. Customer Service (Help Desk) Software
Customer Lifecycle Stage: Conversion, Retention, Loyalty
Last but certainly not least, you'll want a customer service tool. While it only applies to the last three stages of the customer lifecycle, help desk software is arguably the most important tool for customer lifecycle management. Customer service experiences can deter a customer from returning to you, or worse, they might tell others to avoid doing business with you.
A customer service software tool should allow you to create tickets, communicate with customers across platforms, carry out customer experience surveys, and create a knowledge base.
Here are some customer service tool resources for client lifecycle management:
- What Is Customer Experience? (And Why It's So Important)
- Help Desk: What It Is & The Software That Supports It
- The 16 Best Customer Service Software Tools in 2021
Grow your business with customer lifecycle management.
I believe that effective Customer Lifecycle Management is the primary growth engine of a modern business. It’s a strategic commitment to understanding and improving every step of your customer’s journey. It requires a customer-obsessed culture, deep collaboration, and a willingness to act on the feedback your customers are giving you every day.
While my own experience is rooted in leading customer-facing teams, the most important lesson I’ve learned is that no single department owns the customer. Marketing, Sales, Product, Success, and Support are all stewards of the lifecycle. When these teams work in concert to create a seamless, supportive, and valuable experience, you build more than just a customer base. I know you can build a loyal community that will sustain your business for years to come.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Free Customer Journey Template
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- Buyer's Journey Template
- Future State Template
- Day-in-the-Life Template
- And more!
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