3 Steps to Mapping a Robust Customer Journey with Chelsie Rae Lee of SnackNation

Does your organization have a system in place for measuring customer churn? In today’s episode, I chat with Chelsie Rae Lee, Senior Vice President of Customer Strategy at SnackNation, a subscription service that delivers snacks to homes and offices. In this sense, SnackNation is a B2B2C company, as it partners with grocers and other businesses, while also selling directly to consumers. Diving deeper into your analytics will help you understand why your customers left, if they’re thinking about leaving, and how you can work to keep them on board. 

Chelsie talks to me about defining her role as the SVP of Customer Strategy and how she worked with senior leadership and her team of account managers to improve employee experience, create a customer journey map, and understand customer churn. 

1. Create A 90-Day Plan For What You Want Your CX to Look Like

According to Chelsie, when she first stepped into her role as Senior Vice President of Customer Strategy, she was able to design the role in a way that allowed her to have full accountability of the customer experience.

Chelsie shares that she initially had to look at what the organization wanted to become and what the growth trajectory would look like over the next three years. She needed to learn the customers, who they were, and measure the experience through journey mapping and determining KPIs.

Chelsie explains that when she first stepped into the role, she created a 90-day plan, thinking through what she wanted the CX to look like in the end. She wanted to understand what lead to customer churn and subscription cancellations. Through this process, she realized she needed more data in order to put the pieces together to fully understand the customer journey. Chelsie noticed that they didn’t have a lot of customer survey data and had no NPS. She shares that she needed to figure out how to interview customers in order to gather data that would plug some of the holes.

Chelsie tells that she was able to create a dashboard story around the present situation, while also leading up to where SnackNation should be in the 90 days, and lastly, by the end of the year.

2. Make Your Dashboard Metrics About Human Beings, Not Just Revenue

Chelsie explains that her dashboards always have a “people component” placed at the top. This component might be a retention metric for those managing a large team of call center folks, or it could be an employee happiness metric.

It’s important to Chelsie that her employees see the dashboards, knowing that she prioritizes human connections. She tells me that revenue is the secondary metric, which was a new way of looking at things for SnackNation. Chelsie shares that even though everyone understood the importance of employee experience, she had to push to ensure that it would really move forward as part of the agenda. We chat about the importance of taking care of employees because they’re the ones who help you meet your metrics, so you can’t have good CX without good EX.

Chelsie shares that she maps CX, theoretically from the top down around what are the outcomes that she wants a customer to do or to feel, and to then take action on it every step of the way. From there, she shares that the KPIs are measured around execution. At SnackNation, measuring and impacting churn is important, so one of Chelsie’s goals is to understand how can churn be impacted through better customer experience.

As CX leaders, you need to understand how can churn be impacted through better customer experience. -Chelsie Rae Lee @snacknation #CX #customerexperience Share on X

3. Present Information to Leadership In A Digestible Format

Like all other CX leaders, Chelsie has to synthesize this information and present it to leadership. She shares that upon meeting with the leadership team to chat CX at least once a month, she presents her customer analysis scorecard. This scorecard talks about the outcome that she’s looking for: the churn, the cancellation, and reduction percentage. Chelsie then breaks these down into manageable smart goals for her team to achieve. She clarifies that it serves as a goal map that everyone has bought into at the very beginning of every quarter, and they do quarterly goals.

Additionally, Chelsie shares that she does A/B testing around certain cohorts and their purchasing behavior to understand the impact it has on churn. She tells us that she’s been able to use this data to map the behaviors.

To Chelsie, CX is more than just an NPS score, she wants to understand where the customer is by mapping their behaviors on a chart. On her chart, the NPS score is on the Y-axis, and on the X-axis, there’s churn propensity, which is calculated using a lot of different factors that they’ve been able to analyze (see left, for example).

Chelsie explains that by mapping the customer’s value proposition (such as cost, wanting the next level of snacks, and their communication cadence), they can know whom to build a better relationship with and how to build that with them.  

I encourage you to listen to the full episode as Chelsie goes into further detail, sharing more strategies regarding SnackNation’s approach to employee experience.

CX is more than just an NPS score, understand where the customer is by analyzing and mapping their behaviors on a chart. -Chelsie Rae Lee, @SnackNation #CX Share on X

What Do You Know Now That You Wish You Knew Then?

Chelsie says:

“Learning to articulate in the moment, the impact, not just that somebody did something good in your organization or a customer story, but the impacts that they’ve had specifically.

I think this helps us in all of our lives. It’s not just enough for me to tell an account manager, ‘Hey, you met your number. You did a really great job.’ I want to tell them, ‘Yeah, you met your number, but I had three customers write in and say this about you. They said that their life is better because you were part of it.'”