How to design an amazing customer experience

Amazing customer experiences don't happen out of luck, or through some magical customer service representative.

Instead, they are designed.

And one of the most common compliments I have gotten for both Lead Cookie and my B2B podcast production agency is something along the lines of "your processes and the whole experience is on point."

In this article, I am going to share my entire process of thinking through designing a customer experience, and share my most recently revamped experience for Content Allies.

First, a shout out

While I would love to say I am a customer experience pro, that's not the case. Nearly everything you read in this article is something that I learned from Nils Vinje and Alex McClafferty. These two taught me the ropes of customer experience and have helped me tremendously in levelling up my game over the years.


Why focus on customer experience

You may think to yourself:

“Our service is already great and produces results. Is it really worth all of the time and energy to think through customer experience?”

My answer is a resounding yes. Here are just a few of the interesting things that have happened as a result of our positive customer experience.

Compliments before they even start - When people go through our onboarding process at Lead Cookie or Content Allies, we often hear "this is amazing and so professional." People are complimenting us before we ever even do a single piece of work for them.

This helps alleviate any buyer remorse or doubts they may have had after committing. It also instills confidence in our team and what is to come.

Increased referrals - We have seen clients refer us to others and compliment on our processes and systems when they refer to others. We've had our clients say "Yeah, you could go cheaper and find someone else but Lead Cookie is the most professional."

Reduced churn - When I went through this entire experience in the early days of Lead Cookie, I saw our churn drop by nearly 10% by focusing on customer experience.

Reduced refunds - Every once in a while, we sign a client who doesn't see the results we thought they would. It's part of running a lead gen service where the outcome of our service varies from client to client.

What has been interesting is we've had clients who ended their contract early due to lack of results but did not ask for a refund stating "While this didn't work, I appreciate your team and the process and work you guys put in. Let's end early but no need for a refund, you did great work."

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All of these things combined together add up to significant revenue and profit impacts. It's worth investing the time and energy into.


How to think through customer experience

The process for thinking through and designing an amazing customer experience is easier than one might think. Here are the simple steps.

  1. Write out your existing touch points with a customer from the moment someone purchases, through 90 days with your service.

  2. Go through that process step-by-step and brainstorm ways to optimize.

  3. Begin implementing optimization, one piece at a time.

  4. Repeat this optimization process every 3-6 months until this is dialled in.

It's really that simple, yet most companies never dedicate much time to thinking through this. They spend all of their time focused inward on delivering great results, but rarely stop to think of how the customer experiences their process.

Here's an example of what that looks like in practice. I've recently revamped our customer experience for the article writing service at Content Allies, so here is what that looked like.


Step 1) Write out your existing process

The first step of the process is to simply write out all of the touch points you have with the customer over the first 90 days as it exists right now.

When I started this process for Content Allies, here is what that looked like.

  • Sale Closes

    • Sales rep sends Next Step invoice which includes:

      • Invoice

      • LinkedIn Access Request

      • Scheduling link for onboarding call

  • Onboarding call

    • Strategist walks through our standard questions, seeks to learn and understand the client.

    • Strategist schedules first interview during onboarding call.

  • Post-Onboarding Call

    • Strategist sends over a summary document detailing everything we heard during onboarding

    • Strategist sends over questions and prompts for first interview

    • Strategist invites customer to Trello where we organize all content ideas and works in progress

  • First Interview

    • Strategist holds first interview with client

  • After Interview

    • Strategist emails client and informs them of 7 day turnaround for finished article

  • Once article is complete

  • Strategist emails to set up the next interview

    • Repeat


That was essentially our process when we started. While it may not look bad, it was actually riddled with problems. Here are just a few challenges we were hitting.

  1. Customers had to repeat themselves - The sales call was often redundant with the onboarding call. Customers would end up repeating themselves twice on the basics of their business.

  2. Misaligned expectations - We didn't do a great job of setting expectations on how our service worked or what we needed from them.

  3. No customer education - Other than the basic "feedback page" we had no customer education in place on how to be a good customer.

  4. Onboarding was weak - Our onboarding process was a super weak experience. Prospects would have to repeat themselves too much. This often meant we were rushed on time because clients would ramble about unnecessary details. We spent zero time educating clients on our process, and so as a result they didn't feel confident in where they were going after onboarding.


Step 2) Go through the process and brainstorm optimizations

When I took time to look at all of the challenges we were facing, the areas for optimization seemed massive. Here are a few of the ideas that we ended up adding.

Expectations page - As I write this, we are in process of creating an expectations page. We have used this for Lead Cookie for quite some time as a way to set and align someone’s expectations before they ever pay their invoice.

Create an onboarding questionnaire - We created a simple Google Doc Questionnaire that helped us gather some additional info that was not already gathered on the sales call.

Onboarding call agenda sent pre-call - Want to reduce the amount of rambling clients who go over on their onboarding call times? Send an agenda ahead of time. It puts you in the driver seat and shows that you have a clear process you are going to walk them through.

Revamped our entire onboarding call - This is one of the biggest changes we ended up making. In an effort to have clients "repeat themselves less", we changed our entire onboarding.

With our old onboarding, there would be a weak handoff from sales to account management. As a result, the account management team would have to re-ask the customer the same questions.

We ended up building an "Onboarding Deck" that the strategist would walk through which included all of the information gathered in the onboarding process and the questionnaire. This meant we simply repeated back to the client what we heard from them, and aligned on any specific details that could be in question. 

Schedule all calls during onboarding - One of our biggest road blocks was scheduling time with customers. We would have customers get started, and then fail to make scheduling their interviews a priority.

We started scheduling out all of the interviews right there during the onboarding call. A big shout out to Nils Vinje for this idea which was a game changer for us, even if it sounds simple.

Set up a post-onboarding educational drip - After the onboarding call, we set up an email drip sequence that sends several educational articles to the client to re-iterate what we have explained and teach them how they can get the most value from our service.

Automatically survey customers for feedback - In this drip sequence, we also added customer surveys to get feedback from customers at key times on how we are doing and what could be improved.

Create content pieces to support the service - During this process we came up with several content ideas that we ended up creating (or are in process of creating) to support our service. Here are a few example ideas of what we came up with.

Got rid of Trello and replaced it with a customer dashboard that did not require a log-in - Anytime you give your customers a 3rd party tool that they have to log-in to, you are setting yourself up for likely failure.

We were trying to manage our clients content pipelines with Trello. It's possibly the most basic tool we could use... yet hardly of our clients used it or even looked at it.

Instead, we ended up creating customer dashboards which were hidden landing pages on our website. On these pages we would embed an Airtable spreadsheet that included all of their content ideas and the status of each project.

This made it simple because they could just go to the link and see their status, or submit new ideas. We didn't need them to log-in to anything.

Remove our client’s biggest bottleneck by offering extra support - We had several clients who were creating articles with us, but not posting them on our website. So we added the bespoke service of publishing to their websites and LinkedIn profiles at no additional cost. It's kind of a pain for our team, but it's not that hard and removes the biggest bottleneck to them receiving value which keeps them coming back and purchasing more from us.


Step 3) Implement the optimizations

Our new and improved customer experience at Content Allies

With all of those optimizations in place, here is what our new and improved content experience looks like.

  • Sales Consultant Closes Deal and sends over closing email which includes:

    • Onboarding Expectations Page, which covers":

      • Revision details

      • Billing details and how interview time works 

      • How we bill 

      • How to prepare for an interview

      • In scope vs out of scope

      • Timeline and process

    • Invoice

    • LinkedIn Access Instructions

    • Questionnaire

    • Booking link (If they have not booked onboarding already)

  • Pre-Onboarding Call

    • Strategist to send pre-call agenda 

      • Meeting agenda

        • Tell them to have their calendar ready to schedule interviews on the call

      • Questionnaire reminder, if not already filled out

  • Onboarding Call

    • Part 1- Logistics 

      • Give agenda of meeting at start of deck 

      • Gain LinkedIn access

      • Go through Deck of Expectations on how our service works

      • Ask if the customer would like us to publish for them on:

        • Website 

        • Linkedin

    • Part 2 - Alignment on strategy

      • Repeat back what we heard in sales conversation and align on softer points like customer awareness and pain points

    • Part 3 - Content Brainstorm

      • Brainstorm and prioritize first 3-4 pieces of content

    • Part 4 - Schedule

      • Dedicate the last 5 minutes of the meeting to scheduling all upcoming interviews on the client’s calendar.

  • After Onboarding Call

    • Strategist sends over

      • Here is where you are at email

      • Polished onboarding deck

      • Customer Dashboard

      • Content prompts and questions for first interview

    • Start Automated Email Drip Sequence

      • Welcome to the onboarding flow

      • How to prepare for a content interview

      • How to use your content dashboard

      • The importance of feedback

      • Customer Feedback Survey / NPS Score

  • First interview 

    • Hold the interview

    • Spend last 5 minutes confirming next topic and call time

  • After interview

    • Strategist to email 

      • Follow up on any items or needs from client to complete article

      • Set one week delivery expectations

  • Once article is complete

  • First approved article

    • Send “what now / how to promote” article

    • Start publishing support services, if needed

  • Every 3 hours of interview time we hold a re-alignment call

    • Sales comes back in for re-alignment and project planning call for the next batch of content


Step 4) Repeat this process every 3-6 months until dialled in

As you can see, there are a lot of changes and improvements. Every detail, touch point, and experience is thought out.

Is it perfect? No.

But in 3-6 months, I will go through this process again. See what obstacles we are hitting, and seek to optimize it once again.

As I write this article, this full process isn't even built yet. It's going to take probably 30-45 days to create everything that is needed for this experience, and get this into our process and flow.

But we are working at it, and improving bit by bit.

Customer experience takes rounds of iteration. At any given time, you take your best swing at this. But you aren't going to get it perfect.

In fact it will never be perfect. Your product will shift, your customer base may shift, the market may shift. As a result, this is something you have to come back and revisit frequently.

But once you get this dialled in, it will take your service to new heights.


Customer experience is worth investing in

If what I just shared looks like a lot of work, well it is. But it's worth it. It's something you can build once, and see the benefits for years to come. This has helped us become a top B2B content marketing agency.

One more big shout out to Nils and Alex for teaching me basically everything I shared in this post. My customer experiences would be horrible without them.

Now, go take the time to run through this process for your service. Reply in the comments or shoot me an email with what you come up with.



Jake Jorgovan