Customer Journey: Discover Each Step for Success

The concept of the customer journey encompasses all a brand’s points of contact with a customer. The journey begins when a potential customer first learns about a company and its products and continues through the comparison and purchasing stages. With the advent of online shopping, the journey’s path has become increasingly convoluted. Customers often revisit previous stages as they take the next steps in their journey. Today’s customers interact with a brand through multiple devices and platforms. Understanding and optimizing this omnichannel journey—because that’s what it is today—is crucial if we want to improve our conversion rates and build lasting relationships with our customers.

Grasping the Customer Journey

The customer journey is not a simple, linear procession. It is a complex, artful unfurling around several stages, each one inviting and yielding opportunities for engagement with the customer. At its core, the customer journey encompasses every interaction a customer has with your brand across numerous touchpoints, whether those are of the physical, digital, or hybrid kind.

Customer Journey and Buyer Journey: What’s the Difference?

You need to know the difference between the two. The buyer journey is all about the stages leading to a purchase. The customer journey picks up where the buyer journey leaves off and goes way beyond—the customer journey is not just post-purchase; it is about all interactions and all touch points over time. The customer journey seems much more holistic and aims to retain always-been-there supporters and brand advocates. The customer journey holds great significance for everyone involved in business. It is the pathway that leads a potentially interested person to become a pleased, loyal customer. When a customer interacts with a company, be it online or off, at any stage, the company is bound to pay attention to what the customer is experiencing. Companies need to know how to deliver personalized and meaningful experiences that will lead to heightened customer loyalty and retention. According to Nancy Dickens, an Insight and Experience Architect for smarts, the aforementioned outcomes are the result of a good CX (Customer Experience). When a customer has a good CX, he or she is more likely to remain loyal and is certainly more likely to refer others to become customers.

The Steps in the Customer Journey

Clients pass through several clear stages while interacting with a brand. Progressing through them can be done in a set order or sometimes, as is often the case today, in a non-linear fashion. But what defines these stages is how and where brands can step in and do their brand service—meaning the right service, in the right way, at the right time—to enhance the overall experience across the journey.

The initial stage of the buyer’s journey is the awareness stage, where prospective buyers are just beginning to understand that they have a problem or a need. They may first encounter your brand through advertising, social media, or online searches when they are in this early stage of the sales funnel.

Motivations and Actions

• Actions: Potential clients look for details, navigate sites, or interact with various types of material.
• Motivations: They wish to comprehend their problems and consider possible remedies. Your objective at this level is to render them well-informed and entertained. They should spending more time with your material and less with that of others. And the more ways they have to access your content—via posts to the company blog, to various social media platforms, or to widely visible corners of the Internet—the better.

Here are the optimization strategies I recommend:

1. Perform keyword research to ensure alignment with the search intent of your target audience.
2. Use the many forms of social media to distribute the kinds of content that will engage and delight your audience.
3. Consider teaming up with influencers or using user-generated content to build trust and credibility for your brand.

The consideration stage is where customers take the time to truly look at potential different solutions to what they see as a problem, which for our purposes is a need for a product. In this stage, they are comparing your product with that of the competitors, reading reviews, and analyzing the features (or benefits) of your offering versus theirs, as well as the pricing.

What Customers Do and Why They Do It

• What Customers Do: Customers peruse reviews, juxtapose prices, or inspect product pages.
• Why They Do It: They’re on a quest for veritable information to steer their decision-making in a precise direction. Your aim is to make them feel like they are steering their decision toward the best possible choice when they select your product or service.

Ways to Optimize

• Display your customer’s testimonials and case studies prominently on your site.
• Develop guides that compare your product to competitors and make the value difference clear.
• Stay top of mind with potential buyers by using retargeting ads.

Making a Choice

The customer has arrived at the decision stage but still requires some nudging or persuasion to finalize the purchase. They have performed extensive research and are deep into the selection process.

What They Do and Why They Do It

• What They Do: Customers place items in their carts, ask about promotions, and call customer service for clarifications.
• Why They Do It: They seek affirmation that they are making the right decision. They may also be seeking discounts or looking for some extra value.

Steps for Optimization

• Ensure the checkout process is smooth and requires as few steps as possible.
• Make the pricing as clear as possible and build trust by guaranteeing the payment is secure.
• Use emails to remind customers about items left in carts, and encourage them to complete the purchase.

After a purchase, the attention must turn to maintaining customer satisfaction and guaranteeing their return.

Actions and Reasons Behind Them

• Actions: Clients might need assistance, access to user assets, or could be looking into other offerings.
• Reasons Behind Them: They want to feel confident that they have made a sound investment and that the product is indeed “the one.” Retaining existing clients is cheaper than seeking new ones. This makes direct interaction with current clients invaluable.

Here’s how to improve customer satisfaction and their experience with your company. Start with the basics and do them well. Always send a thank-you email after a purchase and make sure it arrives just a few moments after the payment is processed. Use the time between receiving the order and shipping as a window of opportunity for pleasant surprises.

Advocating

At the advocating stage, your customers become even more closely aligned with your brand and become champions and ambassadors for your brand. They are now actively involved in spreading the word about your products and services.

Actions and Reasons for Acting

• Actions: Customers write reviews, suggest your brand to friends, or express their enthusiasm on social media.
• Reasons for Acting: They are very satisfied with your product or service.

Encouraging these folks to act reinforces their loyalty and nets you new customers through a pretty reliable word-of-mouth channel.

How to Enhance

• Put in place referral programs that come with genuine rewards.
• Prompt pleased customers to provide word-of-mouth endorsements and to write reviews.
• Acknowledge and reward customers who display a notable degree of loyalty; offer them exclusive deals and other perks that signal their special status.

Why You Should Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map lets an organization see the full picture of the experience a customer has with it. A customer journey map has several components and what the map looks like can depend on what the organization wants to draw out from it. The benefits of customer journey mapping are numerous, but some key ones are visualizing and analyzing the stages of the customer experience, ensuring that “all the touchpoints work together seamlessly,” and identifying where the organization can improve the experience for the customer.

Recognizing Customers’ Areas of Discontent

Investigate the reasons behind potential customers or current customers discontinuing their journey with you at various points in your process—and use that information to enhance and optimize your experience.

Promoting Personalization

Cultivate content, communication, and deals geared directly to the individual customers’ needs at each stage of their journey.

Boosting ROI

Maximizing the efficiency of your marketing and sales initiatives begins with understanding the customer journey. That means not just knowing how the customer interacts with your brand at different touch points, but understanding the customer’s needs and expectations at each stage of the journey. One way to increase customer engagement and retention is simply to foster better experiences. When you create a seamless journey, it does not detract. Instead, it allows a brighter spotlight to shine on the core brand experience, the fundamental reason customers keep coming back.

Developing and Refining a Customer Journey Map

The Initial Stage: Recognize Your Consumer Profiles

Formulate comprehensive consumer profiles to gain insight into the identities of the individuals who purchase your products or services.

Step 2: Determine the Key Points of Contact

Make a comprehensive list of all the ways customers interact with your brand, starting with the first time they became aware of it and going through every contact point to the stage right after they make a purchase.

Step 3: Trace the Feelings of Customers

At every interaction, what emotions does the customer experience? What do they feel at each point in time? What do they question? What are the unfulfilled wants and desires that are evident at each of the touchpoints? Capture that.

Step 4: Analyze and Iterate

Regularly scrutinize your map, modify it according to the customer feedback you receive, and ensure it is in line with the business’s ever-changing goals and marketplace dynamics.

Use Tools to Better Your Digital Customer Experience

Effectively managing the customer journey in a digital environment can be made simpler with the right tools. One such tool is WoopSocial, a platform that allows businesses not only to manage the accounts of various social media platforms but also to schedule posts, automate publishing, and grow autolytics across the aforementioned channels and more. WoopSocial and tools like it serve to make “touchpoints”—which are times the customer interacts with the brand—within the journey more engaging and consistent. And more engaging and consistent touchpoints make for a better overall customer experience.

Conclusion

A successful business strategy starts with a customer journey. When businesses take the time to understand and hone the journey their customers take, they can create experiences that not only delight but also foster a level of loyalty and conversion that translates nicely into bottom-line growth. The customer journey is the foundation for everything else that follows in a business strategy. And because the customer journey is so integral to any successful business, it stands to reason that mapping it and refining it by the use of customer feedback are smart tactics.