What are account lifecycle stages?
In Customer Success, the purpose of the customer lifecycle is to define the stages of progress that customers achieve with your product, and the associated business processes your company uses to manage customers throughout these stages.
If you want to understand customer behavior, it's important to know where they are in their customer lifecycle. For instance, an account that just started using your product will likely behave differently than a long-standing account that has been using your product for months.
Lifecycle stages help CSMs track the status of an account, automate lifecycle management, and streamline outreach efforts. Each organization should create a customer lifecycle that best reflects the key stages of their customers' journey.
Updating account lifecycle stages
Map stage through a 3rd-party field
If you already capture lifecycle stages for your accounts in another system, typically through a field for the account, Natero can sync that information as part of the data integration.
Set stage through a trigger
Your account stage can also be automatically updated via a Natero backend trigger based on simple rules you provide.
Example rule:
| Stage name | Rule | Data source |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Account signed up in the last 30 days. | Salesforce account_creation field. |
| Established | Account is more than 120 days old. | Salesforce account_age field. |
Set stage manually in Natero
You can manually define and update lifecycle stages for your accounts in Natero.
- Hover over the gear icon on the main navigation bar.
- Select Management Center from the drop-down list.
- Click the Account Settings tab.
- Select Edit stage configuration from the drop-down menu.
There are four default lifecycle stages pre-defined in Natero.
-
Trial: Account is in trial or using a free version of the product. -
Onboarding: Account is going through the product on-boarding process. -
Established: Account has successfully on-boarded and uses the product on a regular basis with moderate proficiency. -
Advocate: Account is well-versed in using the product and willing to be a reference customer.
Change an existing stage or click "Add New Stage" to add a new stage to the current lifecycle. You can add as many stages as you want.
When adding a stage, you'll need to name the stage and add a description for that stage. Click "Delete" to remove a stage. Click "Save" to save all the changes to the lifecycle.
Once you've defined your stages, you can then update your accounts via the account bulk edit feature or on the individual account editing page. Alternatively, you can bulk update account stage history via a CSV upload using the API uploader feature.