Knowing that, what can you do to improve your customer experience?
It all starts with understanding the journey that each customer goes through when buying, considering a purchase from your brand, getting a question answered, signing up to your newsletter, or any other interaction with your brand over the course of their journey.
In marketing terms, we call this the customer journey. It’s a story about truly understanding your users, how they behave while visiting your website, your social media channels, and other touchpoints along their path.
Having said that, it’s your job to make sure that every touchpoint is seamless and effortless.
This is probably the 100th article you found about optimizing the customer experience.
But there’s a reason why so many companies are emphasizing its importance. ?
- 95% of clients share bad experiences with family and friends.
- 54% shared bad experiences with more than five people
Talk about scary stats… ?
In the next section, we’ll show you what customer journey mapping is, how it can help you improve the customer experience, enhance the decision-making process and quickly increase revenue.
How to use the customer journey to enhance the customer experience
Knowing the steps your potential customers take to achieve a specific goal is one thing.
However, simply understanding their journey isn’t enough. A popular best practice within successful organizations is to create a customer journey map.
This is a visual representation of the process a customer or potential buyer goes through to achieve a specific goal.
Whether you work in a B2B or B2C environment, this exercise will help you analyze the behavior of customers through the entire sales process and what emotions they feel at each stage.
A customer journey map provides major advantages such as:
– Becoming customer-centric.
– Creating seamless touch points throughout the customer journey.
– Enhance customer experience and increase brand loyalty.
– Understanding your various buyer personas to better cater to them.
– Driving incremental revenues and conversions from missed opportunities.
It all starts with understanding each buyer persona’s motivations, desires, and pain points. What is it they need?
During the mapping process, you might hear feedback such as: “It was difficult to compare options’’. This isn’t an assumption, this feedback could’ve been shared with one of your customer service reps.
What’s important here, is to avoid thinking “It’s so obvious, it’s right there under the pricing tab, how did they not see it?”. Remember that you’re used to seeing what’s on your website, therefore you can’t really look at it through a potential customer’s eyes.
If a prospect faced that challenge, it means that others just like them might be facing the same problem when navigating your website. Even worse, some of these prospects probably became someone else’s customers.
After all, your competitors are only a couple of clicks away!
And then what?
Once you’ve laid out a complete customer journey map, your business will become more efficient!
Here’s an example:
Let’s say that during the mapping process, your customer service team reported that potential clients are often asking the same 2 questions.
?
Your marketing team can now answer these questions on the website and create relevant content based on what your customers are asking. Now that potential customers are getting their questions answered on the website and on social media, it might accelerate the sales process and eliminate unnecessary frustrations.
As you can notice, this exercise helps you align everything around the customer’s point of view.
By making it available to everyone, each department can now put the customer at the heart of every decision.
This is especially beneficial for marketing, sales, and customer service teams! These minor adjustments can create an impactful change and drive incremental revenue.
Recently, our digital marketing consultant was helping a client prepare for an upcoming trade show. The client had a booth reserved and was hoping to capture new leads from the attendees via a signup form.
In order to make sure that all their bases were covered, she decided to prepare a customer journey map.
Through this crucial exercise, she uncovered many issues:
– The form fields were not matched with their CRM (which would have caused re-work after the show).
– The sign-up form was too long and would potentially discourage leads from signing up.
– There was no value provided to the leads once they filled out the form.
– There was no automated follow-up email after the event.
– Sales and marketing were not aligned, sometimes emailing the same lead twice in the same week.
This example proves that customer journey mapping doesn’t only shorten the sales cycle, it can be applied to any marketing goal.
People buy emotions, not things
You may think that you’re selling a product or service but don’t believe it. Businesses offer an emotional state, a step closer to the dreams and desires of your target market.
You sell feelings, status, and connection, not stuff.
This is a well-known notion in marketing and in sales. There’s one more thing that we’d like to add to this concept: through each step of the buyer journey, your potential customers are chasing a feeling.
It means that emotions don’t only appear at the moment of purchase, they appear along every touchpoint.
The main idea behind customer journey mapping is to make sure that every touchpoint across the sales process provides a positive emotion.
Where should you start?
You may be tempted to gather your team and prepare a customer journey map together, but wait… We are offering a free audit so you can uncover quick wins in your own customer journey!