What is a customer journey?
To have an effective customer service process within your company, it's crucial to understand the touchpoints and how we're working at each one to create a fantastic experience. This process is known as the Customer Journey. Creating an efficient customer journey will help your company reduce costs, increase revenue, and build lasting, valuable relationships with your customers, as well as fostering customer loyalty.
All touchpoints represent key interactions in our customers' journey. This includes both traditional and digital experiences, which occur through websites, emails, social media, phone calls, customer loyalty programs, paid advertising, and physical locations.
Understanding each of your customer's touchpoints is of utmost importance, as the implications will help you manage expectations and evaluate successes. Not only that, but it will also allow you to assess losses in order to get closer to providing a unique experience. However, whatever the touchpoint, you must ensure the customer has an unbeatable experience. To achieve this, it is vital to know your customers and provide them with a suitable journey.
Customer journey phases
Understanding that journeys include all interactions in the customer lifecycle, they can have a variable duration, which can be days, weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the offer, and, generally, affects several channels.
The best tool to simplify and shorten the path to a more effective and positive interaction with your customers will always be to ensure that your teams are coordinated in creating a unique, complete, and seamless experience.
According to the customer lifecycle, touchpoints are divided into 5 phases. Keeping this in mind and defining them appropriately will help you better understand how to reach the right person at the right time, in the right way, and in the right place. These phases are:
Awareness:
This is the initial phase in which customers identify a need and begin searching for information to find a solution to this problem. During this phase, their actions help raise awareness among the target audience about your product or service.
Consideration:
The second phase brings with it the possibility of providing more information to potential customers, who at that time 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 up.
Retention:
Although it may seem like a cliché, we all know that there is no better advertising than a satisfied customer and that customer retention is of great importance, since acquiring a customer is a costly process. Therefore, this aspect cannot be overlooked in the phases outlined; in a company that operates based on customer centricity, retention will always be a key factor.
Defense:
The defense phase brings with it the result of a well-executed previous job, in which we find a satisfied customer who repeats their purchases and communicates their positive experiences to others, sharing opinions through word of mouth, which is more valuable to many potential customers 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
Every company has its own personality and therefore each journey is different, so knowing your own journey will allow you to evaluate and anticipate the behavior of your customers or potential customers, by identifying the possible path they take you will increase your chances of successful interactions.
Among the many advantages that having a customer journey map can offer, we present the following:
Greater measurement and improvement in the experience we deliver
By analyzing the customer journey, you will find opportunities to improve your service and the marketing strategies employed, achieving greater efficiency in obtaining results.
Reduce costs and increase efficiency
Understanding the customer journey will make it easier to identify areas of inefficiency and thus find the best way to optimize them, reducing effort for our customer and decreasing costs.
Maximize customer loyalty
Understanding our customers' journey, including the most relevant points, will keep us aware of when there is a high probability of abandonment, leading us to take prompt action to improve from our areas of expertise involved and thus promote retention and loyalty.
Leverage income
Once we understand our customers and their journey within our company, whether in person, through the website, or social media, we will have enough information to improve the customer experience, designing and implementing better marketing strategies to increase our effectiveness by boosting additional sales and encouraging cross-selling among our current customers, thus leveraging our revenue.
Design and implement the customer journey
By exploring and analyzing your customer's journey, you can better understand their needs and empathize with them. This will allow you to identify and examine everything they experience during the process to determine how they want to interact with your brand.
In this way, you can identify opportunities that allow you to better position your offers in order to meet the needs of your target audience and, in the best case scenario, achieve customer loyalty so that customers return time and time again.
If you are going to start designing your customer journey framework, we recommend that it should include:
Actions:
We must keep in mind what the first step is that our customers will take to discover our brand and what will lead them to make the decision to move to the next phase of purchase. With this in mind, we must develop strategies to deliver the right content to customers and how to help those who get stuck along the way.
Motivation:
We will identify what leads our customer to buy, what need or desire they seek to satisfy.
Questions:
What answers should we provide according to the client's needs that will allow them to see our product or service as the best option?.
Friction points:
We need to know very well what obstacles prevent the customer from making the purchase.
Having a customer journey framework will help us think from their perspective and better understand their behavior in certain circumstances, making it easier to meet their expectations.
Fountain: iKono Telecommunications supported by AI
#We invite you to read our blog post «"Trends to increase your sales"»
Learn about our Corporate Solutions
Learn about the IP telephony, multi-agent chat, and mass text and voice messaging solutions for your business.
English 
Spanish
One Response