Have you ever thought that all the purchases we make involve a buying process, prior to the time of the transaction?
We call this process customer journey and it encompasses all the phases a person/buyer persona goes through from the moment they identify they have a need until they acquire a product or service to satisfy it.
This process can be as short as a few minutes in the case of low-cost products that we buy impulsively (food in a supermarket, for example). The buying process may also last for months or more than a year (for instance, when acquiring a car or purchasing a customer experience management software).
In this article we will cover what the customer journey is, what phases it has and how we can define it in our customer experience strategy.
What is a Customer Journey?
By book definition, a customer journey is the set of interactions that a customer has with a brand in the process of buying a service or product. Put plainly, it considers the complete interaction roadmap – from brand discovery to purchasing and beyond.
The focus isn’t only on transactions, but on how the customer feels after every interaction with the brand. In other words, it can be used as a strategy to gain insights on what’s the experience of a customer throughout all their buying process.
The objective of a customer journey is, on the one hand, to measure and evaluate how you are taking care of your customers and, on the other, in which way you can enhance and bring further delight to their experience with your brand.
Excellent products, a praiseworthy website, and an on-call customer service team may seem like the perfect mix to capture prospective clients. However, when customers feel something is off in your communication, they’re more likely to seek competitors.
By improving the customer experience at each point in the journey, you focus your business on your customers, putting them at the heart of all. This builds a loyal fan base and keeps customers coming back time and again. This builds brand loyalty as a positive outcome, leading to having satisfied customers and an influence over their lives, choosing your brand above others.
The brands that gain the most loyalty are the ones that have influence over their clients’ lives. is the outcome of so many variables —some of which we can control, and others we cannot—, and understanding how those variables play out in our markets is a crucial first step to understanding what causes brand loyalty.
Customer Journey stages
Now that you know what a customer journey is, it’s time to look more closely at what you can actually do to commit both to your present and potential clients. Various stages make up the complete customer journey.
These three steps generally make up most journeys: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. These stages are most suitable for offline purchases.
With the progress of digital platforms, two critical additions appear in the customer experience: Retention and Advocacy. These new stages explore brand touchpoints with online shoppers.
1. Awareness
Awareness involves spreading general information about your products and services to your target audience(s).
During the awareness stage of the journey, consumers search for solutions and encounter multiple brands and products. Hint: This is the time to shine if you want to make a good first impression.
What consumers are doing: During this step, consumers are likely conducting research. This can include searching online for solutions to keyword problems, reading blog posts and news articles, browsing online forums, and first meeting brands.
What brands can do: You might think that consumers are doing all the heavy lifting at this stage because they’re asking questions and browsing content.
However, you don’t want to approach brand awareness passively. You have to already be there, where the consumer is looking at alternatives. By “being there”, we mean taking the form of an educational blog post or video, providing the solution or information they want. Bringing valuable resources to the consumer is key in this initial phase.
2. Consideration
Brands focus on promotion during the consideration stage of the journey. This is where customers begin to look for alternatives to past purchases. During this phase, your business strives to convince potential buyers to include you on the list of available options.
Your brand will most likely be considered alongside others, so make sure every impression you make counts.
At this point, consumers are directly interacting with your brand, and you want them to stick around for the next step in the customer journey.
What consumers are doing: Researching specific brands and products, comparing competitors, and evaluating your priorities. This could include taking a closer look at your product and service specifications, features, examining customer support policies, and turning to direct comparison reviews.
The consideration phase varies because consumer-centric channels can come in many forms.
What brands can do: Value the importance of the user experience (UX). Continuously optimize the UX across all your touchpoints, including e-commerce transaction and description pages.
Little things like making sure the descriptions and processes are clear and that all the buttons work properly go a long way when someone considers you against a competitor.
For instance, a person becomes aware they’re hungry and could be scouting for a place to eat on an app like Google Maps. If your business has a strong presence there, i.e with information about what kind of food you sell, the menu, photos of the place and the food, phone number, and truthful positive customer reviews, you might make them consider that you could be a good alternative to what they’re looking for.
3. Conversion
This stage prompts visitors to take a particular action. Using a dedicated call-to-action (CTA), you encourage customers to make a purchase, subscribe to a mailing list, or sign up for services. You should use this phase to sell your product as the best fit to solve a visitor’s problem.
It is your moment to make or break during the Customer Journey. Once potential customers are satisfied with researching and comparing their options, they will eventually make a decision.
Sometimes they find that none of the brands they’ve been considering offer what they’re looking for. If they make a positive decision, they want to make the process easier by choosing their trusted products.
What consumers are doing: They are considering factors like price vs. value, customer service responsiveness, company values, and policies. By the time they’re in the decision phase, it’s not just about product specifications or the shopping experience.
Consumers want to support a brand that they can trust to provide a quality solution to their problems.
What brands can do: To anticipate this step, you have to go further. This could include marketing strategies where you offer incentives to potential customers who have already visited your website or engaged with your business.
Make sure your return and refund policies are easy to find and train your customer support team to answer key decision-making questions.
Note about the following two stages: Retention and Advocacy stages were optional in previous business models. Nevertheless, the increase in online purchases makes these stages as significant as the others.
4. Retention
At this point, you already have a new customer – Congratulations! All that planning and asset building is paying off when they get to this phase. The consumer has decided to make their purchase with you, but don’t assume it’s a done deal.
A loyal customer brings an organization consistent business and costs less than the effort to bring in new customers. In fact, a study by Bain & Company discovered that loyal customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, in comparison to new customers.
Retention includes keeping customers happy with a relationship management/customer success team to stop customers from leaving and take as many as possible to the next and final stage – make them so loyal to your brand that they want to advocate for your product and/or service.
What consumers are doing: Depending on your business model, customers are taking advantage of this moment to buy your products online, with a physical retailer, or are booking a service they plan to experience soon.
Once they have the product or service, they will start to implement their purchase and if they go through the phase successfully, you will earn their customer loyalty.
What brands can do: Optimize the transaction experience in the Customer Journey. Ensuring the quality of your own e-commerce site or physical store, and regularly review how your competition is optimizing their customers’ experience for each of the customer journey touchpoints.
5. Advocacy
Most organizations acknowledge the benefits of word-of-mouth (WOM). However, few companies commit to a plan for boosting customer advocacy. Encouraging each customer to share reviews or opinions can take time and money. Reaching out to influencers or guest bloggers is an effective alternative to traditional word-of-mouth.
Enthusiastic customers are more likely to recommend your brand and products to a friend, which for many can be a deal-breaker.
When you keep your customers happy and exceed their expectations with innovation and excellent customer service, the customer journey shortens and transaction costs decrease.
What consumers are doing: At this point, customers are using your offerings to address their needs. The better the results and experience they get with your product, the more likely they are to buy again and recommend you.
They can also begin to engage with your brand more casually on social media and plan their next purchase.
What brands can do: Take the initiative to contact customers in a friendly and supportive way. A short customer experience survey is a good way to let them know that you care about their feedback.
Consider starting a loyalty program for referrals and future transactions. This is also an excellent opportunity to keep consumers coming back to some of the relevant assets you create to build brand awareness.
This could include blog content with tips to enrich your product experience, a newsletter with updates, promotions, and occasional opportunities to provide further feedback.
Benefits of understanding the Customer Journey
Identifying the journey of customers allows us to better understand how they buy to meet their needs and expectations and what role a specific business plays in this process.
Furthermore, being aware of all the interactions (touchpoints) they have through any channel, such as email or social networks, allows designing a better shopping experience while delivering a consistent message across all communication channels.
Next, we will explain in detail what are the benefits of implementing a customer journey strategy in your business.
A better understanding of customer emotions:
Building a journey framework puts you directly in the mind of the consumer. Understanding the reasons why a customer makes a particular choice sets your business up for success.
Knowing how customers feel encourages you to improve how the organization functions because it allows you to clearly identify what are the friction points throughout their customer journey, making them easier to fix.
Analyze the stumbling blocks in products/services:
Mapping the customer journey gives your organization insights into where your customer communications fall short. For instance, if your support staff is undermanned, customers don’t receive help when they need it. Your customers become angry because they expect prompt replies. You resolve the issue by hiring another support team member to tackle more customer questions.
Creating a customer journey map provides the customers’ viewpoint of a business. The map is a visual representation of the transactions and emotions that leads through each touchpoint with customers that helps to identify weak points in your messaging.
Improve employee and customer satisfaction:
As issues are resolved, confidence levels among customers and employees alike increase. Employees are encouraged to continue doing great work, which in turn increases overall customer satisfaction.
Create a united team:
To develop amazing customer experiences, the teams in your organization need to be on the same page. Marketing, product development, sales, and customer service must work together to improve processes within the organization. As the teams work together, the efficiency and effectiveness of each team increase.
Customer Journey Analysis
Understanding the organization from the customer’s point of view brings new ideas and opinions to the table. Customer journey analysis does precisely that – it analyzes customer viewpoints about products so that you can make appropriate changes to keep customers loyal to your brand. Use data from customers to implement improved marketing strategies.
The analysis involves three stages: gathering accurate information, developing customer personas, and analyzing customer interactions.
Here is how customer journey analysis is beneficial in gathering information:
Clearly defines all customer interaction points.
Evaluates how the journey progresses from beginning to end.
Analyzes the impact on customer loyalty and brand shareability according to customer interaction points.
Highlights areas that waste a customer’s time in order to improve efficiency.
Generalize the journey of similar audiences to make improvements and keep customers satisfied.
Customer Journey communication channels
Your map is a 360-degree view of customer feedback from each step in their journey. Mapping is a proven model for understanding how, when, and where your customers experience your brand.
Some places to measure experience on an ongoing basis include:
On-site: Capture feedback in the moment customers visit businesses with physical locations. For example, let’s say you run a restaurant. Give diners a short survey to complete along with their bill at the end of their meal.
Email: Sending emails is one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback. Set up your sales system to trigger an email after a customer completes a purchase.
Call center: After every customer interaction, you can collect feedback by email or via a phone-based survey.
In-App: For app developers, collecting responses without leaving the app is ideal. An in-app survey allows users to continue enjoying the app while still providing you with feedback.
Website: Your prospects browse your site to consider becoming customers. Once customers, continue visiting for support and account access. Gathering feedback on your website is an essential part of a holistic customer experience approach.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
A Customer Journey Map (CJM), tells the story of your customer’s experiences with your brand across every touchpoint – all on the same canvas. or Customer Journey Map (CJM), as a key tool to improve the customer experience. Depending on the objective of the CJM, it can be more or less complex.
The things your customer feels, sees and hears as they interact with your business builds the foundation for their experience. Understanding these experiences allows you to accurately map and control the customer journey.
Example of Customer Journey Mapping
Starbucks, for example, masters the concept of customer intimacy to control the experience. The journey is calculated from the moment you step in the door.
Imagine a trip to your local Starbucks. As you walk inside, you smell the aroma of roasted coffee beans. The barista behind the counter greets you with a smile.
You feel the coziness around you as the muffled chit-chat disappears into the tranquil background music. When you receive your coffee, you see your name handwritten by one of the friendly baristas.
If you’re a regular, the staff knows you by name and can make your order from memory.
The coffee giant doesn’t just sell a product. It sells what people are best at remembering – the experience.
By packaging the product with an unforgettable experience, the company retains incredibly loyal customers. They’re also able to charge up to 10 times more than their competitors. Starbucks clearly understands customer experience and infuses that into the core of its business strategy.
Your customer’s journey could take place over a few hours or more than several weeks. The simplest way to start is to create a timeline. Using your customer knowledge, fill in what’s happening with your customer at each stage of your timeline.
The customer journey mapping framework includes the following alongside the timeline:
Actions: What is your customer doing? What are the key actions a customer takes to move to the next stage? What actions does a person take when they don’t move on?
Motivations: What drives the customer to proceed to the next stage? What is the goal? Are they trying to solve a problem? What are they feeling?
Questions: What are the customer’s uncertainties? Are they looking for something specific? Are they confused? Identify which stage customers have the most questions and quickly address them.
Pain points: What obstacles prevent your customers from moving on to the next stage? Is it the process? Price?
Direct customer opinions are the most effective way to get answers. Send surveys or conduct interviews to learn more about your customers and their needs. Input the data you receive to the framework above, so you can see your company from your customer’s view.
Tips for conducting a Customer Journey Mapping
If you’ve made it this far you would agree that knowing the journey of your customer is critical to creating a great customer experience. But how do you make the most out of it?
We’d like to share with you the following tips to create an effective Customer Journey Map.
Building a customer journey map is a team effort
It is not easy to reflect on the Customer Journey Map all the interactions that a customer goes through. The task can be further complicated when the people responsible for interaction cannot be found in the different departments. This leads to taking for granted the phases or interactions that the client goes through with the company. What’s worse, it sometimes leads to mapping a Customer Journey Map that has more emphasis on departmental silos than the overall customer journey.
Remember, your team cannot forget the goal. It seeks to map the Customer Experience from its perspective. This is most effectively achieved when different company profiles are brought together. Only in this way will the final result reflect the knowledge that each one has of the client.
The ideal is to dedicate a workspace together with the different professionals, with and without contact with clients. If this is impossible, it is important to carry out at least one validation with each department. This will also allow you to turn your Customer Journey Map into a shared responsibility tool.
Know your customer thoroughly
You need to understand your customers at each intersection or checkpoint in their journey. This allows you to develop content, products, and services that meet their needs. Rather than gathering occasional data from customers, employ continuous surveys to collect information.
You’ll enjoy the ability to adjust your marketing or product development in real-time to meet customer needs as the market changes.
Obtain a comprehensive view
The customer journey starts before potential customers make a purchase or sign up for services. Prospects begin their journey as they learn about offerings on your website, online review sites, or advertisements. After the awareness and discovery stages, consumers enter the purchase process. When a purchase is made, customers experience your products and services and form opinions.
Throughout these stages, you need to know how customers feel about your business and products. For example, do you know what factors cause customers to choose you over the competition? How do customers perceive your sales staff? What do customers like about your products? Is your support team answering customer questions with accuracy?
How to create a Customer Journey Map?
There are six main steps for mapping.
Understand the target buyer’s persona: An organization must define its ideal buyer’s persona before customer journey mapping.
Acknowledge the target audience’s intent: What does a buyer hope to achieve by interacting with a brand? What are their expectations?
Answer these questions by:
Sending out online surveys to all the customers
Organizing focus groups or one-on-one interviews
Then develop action plans using the results of your research to meet buyer expectations.
Note the touchpoints: Map all interaction touchpoints every time new customers visit your website or contact a sales team member. Include interactions before, during, and after purchase in your map.
Your organization should understand:
Where customers obtain information about your website – Google search, social media, or Google ads.
Which pages do most customers visit? What’s the average time spent on each?
Did the customers enjoy shopping with the organization? Did they face any difficulties, and how helpful was the customer service team?
Ask crucial questions: It’s essential to ask questions such as:
Is my organization satisfying all the requirements of my target audience?
In which stages do customers face common problems?
Which website pages have higher bounce rates than what is acceptable?
If you interact directly with customers, be sure to ask them:
How did you know about our organization?
What were your expectations from our organization’s website?
Were your expectations satisfied?
What prompted you to purchase from our organization?
Make a list of priorities: You can optimize customer journey mapping by identifying the areas that need immediate attention. Once you know common problems, you can take steps to limit their impact on customer loyalty.
Put all ideas to paper: Most marketers prefer drawing the entire map on a whiteboard or using online mapping tools to create a digital copy. Refer to your copy when you need to make decisions to improve customer experience.
Free Customer Journey Map template
At QuestionPro we know that all this information can be overwhelming and starting to create your own Customer Journey without help can be intimidating, that is why we have created this small article where you can find a template to easily create your own journey map.
We invite you to learn more about the Customer Journey Canva
How to use Customer Journey to improve your customer experience?
Customers expect every exchange with a brand to be seamless from the start. Understanding the interactions at each touchpoint helps you satisfy customer needs and also improves the efficiency of your business.
“Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those not focused on the customer.” – Deloitte and Touche
To accurately map the journey, consider each stage of buying a product. At each stage, write down what a customer feels and the actions they must take to move forward.
Examine the emotions at each touchpoint and rate the experiences. Is it positive or negative?
Begin to connect the dots and identify which gaps are falling short of your customer’s expectations. This exercise will help you formulate and decipher where you can have the most significant impact on improving the experience.
Leverage customer satisfaction data for more accurate results
Include your customer satisfaction scores as you map out your customer journey template. This additional set of information helps validate gaps or assumptions you make from mapping.
For example, your customer rates a CSAT score of 3 at their point of purchase and gives a score of 8 post-purchase. You immediately know that your point of purchase requires attention.
Be sure to look at multiple customer satisfaction scores to find the most crucial pain points. If there is a touchpoint that ranks poorly for most customers, start your improvements there.
Start following your customer’s journey.
(This article is from www.questionpro.com)