In the business circle, the life cycle stages form an important part of strategic decisions. Life cycle stages cover the entire process of an event, starting from its inception to its ending stage. To understand what are the best strategies that a business can take to provide its customers with the best experience, you first need to understand the various stages a customer goes through when dealing with your organization.
Similarly, if you are executing a project, you must know all the stages of the project beginning from the initial stage to the closure stage. Only if you know about these stages and the processes involved, will you be able to execute a project successfully.
A project can be simple or complex. Naturally, the successful execution of the project will also involve either simple straight-forward steps or more complex intricate steps. Depending on the nature of the project, you can divide the project lifecycle into primarily four stages.
Finally, when you have all these details document it into a proper project execution plan and hold a kick-off meeting with all the stakeholders to explain the process and how you want to execute the project.
This is the first step to start the project. It starts with the conceptualization of the project. Why is the project required? Is the requirement practical? Is it possible to execute the project? These are the types of questions that need to be answered in this stage. It involves the identification of the project scope, deliverables, the responsibility matrix, and finally a feasibility analysis. All of this needs to be studied and documented during this stage.
This is the second step that involves planning how to execute the project. You need to create charts that will explain how the project will be executed. How much money and resources will be required? What is the timeline to complete each of the identified steps to execute the project? Apart from answers to these questions, you also need to figure out any probable issues you could face while executing the project and the probable steps to resolve these issues.
The third step involves executing the project by adhering to the project planning finalized in the previous stages. This stage begins with the delegation of work to various team members and explaining to them how to execute their assigned work. This stage also involves establishing communication channels among all the stakeholders so that they can interact and coordinate seamlessly to do their assigned tasks. Another important aspect of the execution stage is evaluating the progress and monitoring if the work is getting executed as per plan and budget.
This stage comes at the end of the project execution. Once the assigned tasks are completed as per the project plan, it is time to find out if the scope and purpose of the project were met. This step also simultaneously evaluates the performance of all the stakeholders, documentation about the project closure, and handing over to the user team.
Finally, an analysis must be done to whether the project was able to solve the issue that was there in the first place and if any major findings are there which could prove useful in the future. On the financial aspect, a final accounting must be done to track the utilized and unutilized funds, and if any surplus resources can be reutilized elsewhere.
The customer lifecycle stages cover the entire journey of a customer. It can be broadly categorized into 6 stages.
This is the first stage of the process when the customer comes to know about your business and the products and services you offer. It is your marketing strategy and the channels your business uses to market its products that will decide how your customers come to know about you.
The next step in the customer’s journey involves engaging with your business. They generally engage with your customer service or sales team, with whom they discuss and try to understand if your products and services can meet their requirements. This is an important stage since this is where the customer gets to understand if your products qualify for their buying needs.
This stage precedes the customer’s decision to buy your products or services. The customers will evaluate what they have learned about their products in the previous stage and compare them with suitable alternatives. You should keep engaging with the customers to prove how your offering best suits them compared to your competitor’s.
This is the stage when the customer finally decides to buy your product. This is the most critical stage in terms of your business needs, and hence all your customer support team and channels should be geared for this step to make the final effort to convert the customer.
Once the sale is made, you must focus your effort to deliver the best experience to the customer. From product deliveries and installations to any after-sales service or queries, the customer should be made to feel that they made the right decision to choose your business.
This is an additional stage that you could follow to ensure that your customer gives you repeat business. Bonding with the customer and providing them regular updates about best practices and attractive offers, will open up avenues for you to grab repeat business from the customer.
Whether attending to customers by selling your products or servicing a customer by executing a project to address their pain areas, your objective must be to provide the customer with the best experience and results so that they choose only you whenever they have a repeat requirement.
Acquiring a new customer always attracts many additional costs, which can easily be avoided if you provide your existing customers the best experience and grab their repeat orders. Hence, it is necessary to understand and plan each of the life cycle stages to perfection so that the customers are satisfied and come back with more business.
