What is a customer journey?

To have an adequate service process within your company, it is very important to know the contact points and how we are working on each of them to create a formidable experience. This process is known as The customer journey, creating an effective customer journey will help you as a company to reduce costs, increase income and establish lasting and valuable relationships with your customers, in addition to building loyalty.

All touchpoints represent key interactions in our customer journey. For this, both traditional experiences and digital, occurring through websites, emails, social media, phone calls, customer loyalty programs, paid ads, and physical locations.

Knowing each of your client's touch points is of utmost importance since the implications it brings will help you manage expectations and evaluate successes, not only this will also allow you to evaluate the losses In order to be ever closer to providing a unique experience, however, whatever the point of contact, you must ensure unbeatable customer experiences. To achieve this, it is vital to know the customers and provide them with an adequate journey.

• Phases of the customer journey

Understanding that journeys include all interactions of the customer life cycle, they can have a variable duration which can be days, weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the offer, and, generally, affect several channels. The best tool to make the route to a more effective and positive interaction with your customers easier and shorter will always be to ensure that your teams are coordinated in creating a unique, complete and fluid experience.

According to the customer life cycle, the contact points are divided into 5 phases, keeping this in mind and defining them appropriately you will be able to better understand as arrive at the right time, in the right way and at the right place, these phases are:

Awareness: This is the initial phase in which clients identify that they have a need and begin searching for information to find a solution to this point of difficulty. In this phase, your actions help in increasing awareness of the target audience regarding your product or service.

Consideration: The The second phase brings with it the possibility of providing more information to possible potential clients who at that moment are in a process of evaluating not only the offer delivered but also some alternatives to the offer of our product or service.

Conversion: In this phase, try to convince the customer to adopt your offer with a personalized call to action, usually a call to buy or sign.

Retention: Although it may seem somewhat cliché, we all know that there is no better advertising than a satisfied customer and that the work of retention is of great relevance since getting a customer is an expensive process, which is why within the phases described it cannot happen. unnoticed, in a company that works based on customer centric retention will always be a factor clue.

Defending: The defense phase brings with it the result of previous work well done with a lot of effort in which we find a satisfied customer who repeats his purchases and communicates his positive experiences to others by sharing opinions through word of mouth which is more valuable. for many potential clients than any other information provided. This is probably the type of customer most likely to help other customers in forums or by accepting structured initiatives, such as participating in case studies and success stories.

• Benefits for optimizing the customer journey

All companies have their own personality and therefore each journey is different, so knowing your own journey will allow you to evaluate and anticipate the behavior of your clients or potential clients, by identifying the possible path that they take. to travel you will increase your chances of successful interactions.

Among the many advantages that having the customer journey through continuation We present the following:

• Greater measurement and improvement in the experience we deliver

By analyzing the customer journey you'll find opportunities to improve your service and the marketing strategies that are used, obtaining greater efficiency in obtaining results.

• Reduce costs and increase efficiency

By knowing the customer journey be easier to identify those points in which we are presenting inefficiency and in this way find the best way to optimize them reducing effort for our client and at the same time reducing costs.

• Maximize loyalty

Knowing the journey of our clients, including those points of greatest relevance, will keep us aware of the moment in which a high probability of abandonment may occur, which will lead us to take prompt action to improve from our areas of experience involved and thus promote retention and loyalty.

• Leverage income

The moment we get to know our customers and their journey within our company, whether in person, through the website or social networks, we will have enough information to improve the customer experience, designing and implementing better marketing strategies with in order to increase our effectiveness by driving additional sales and propitiating cross sales between our current clients, thus leveraging our income.

• Design and implement the customer journey
  

By exploring and analyzing your customer's journey, you will be able to better understand their needs and be empathic with the. You must what will allow you to identify and examine everything you will experience during the process to determine how you want to interact with your brand. In this way, you will be able to identify the opportunities that allow you to better position your offers in order to satisfy the needs of your public objective and, in the best of cases, achieve loyalty so that customers repeat again and again.

• In the case in which you are going to start the design of your framework for the customer journey, we recommend that you keep in mind that it should include:
  

Actions: We must keep in mind what is the first step that our customers will take to discover our brand and after this what will lead them to make the decision to move on to the next purchasing phase, and with this develop strategies to bring the correct content to the customers. clients and how to help those who get stuck along the way.   

Motivation: We are going to identify what leads our client to buy, what need or desire they seek to satisfy.

Questions: What responses should we deliver according to the client's need that allows them to see our product or service as the best option.

Friction points: We must know very well what obstacles prevent the customer from making the purchase.

Having the framework of the customer journey will help us think from their perspective and better understand their behavior in certain circumstances, in this way meeting their expectations will be easier.