It’s becoming more difficult for businesses to improve customer experience, as it’s a key way to make or break a brand. But in order to set your brand apart from the competition, improving the customer journey must be your top priority.
In today’s high-tech world, it’s not enough to create a stellar website and hope that your audience discovers it. The secret to reaching your potential customers is to be proactive when it comes to promoting your products and services.
One way to start is by creating a customer journey strategy.
By implementing a customer journey strategy, you get to know your customers on a deeper level, which in turn leads to better products and services.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a few strategies that could help improve your company’s customer journey.
Customer experience vs. customer journey
First, let’s define the difference between customer journey and customer experience.
A customer journey is the sequence of actions they take from beginning to end while attempting to purchase a product or service from a company. Simply put, it’s the various touchpoints a specific brand has with customers throughout the buying process.
It includes everything from the customer’s initial interest in a company to the actual purchasing process.
Customer experience, on the other hand, involves a set of conscious and unconscious attitudes, feelings, and beliefs from a customer about said touch points with a specific brand.
It encompasses all thoughts, experiences, feelings, reactions, and attitudes customers will have regarding the actual use of your product or service. This can be everything from the layout of your website to your calls to action, checkout page, and media.
Simply put, customer journey is the overall process, while customer experience includes feelings toward specific instances during the process.
To understand the customer experience, it is necessary to get a clear and detailed picture of the customer journey. One way to accomplish this is through customer journey mapping.
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What is customer journey mapping?
Customers come into contact with your brand in many different ways on their way to making a purchase. This is often represented visually with a customer journey map.
The data illustrates the multiple touchpoints customers have with your brand both online and offline. Using a customer journey map enables your company to visualize the brand from a customer’s point of view.
These maps are crucial in your sales pipeline because they help you measure how your customers actually feel about your brand without bias. You can better meet your customers' expectations if you understand their needs.
Once you know what your customers are expecting, you can properly plan your content and implement it more efficiently. It’s important to properly plan your content so that you can cater to your intended audience.
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at some strategies to help with your customer journey.
First off, build a customer-centric culture
Before we get into digital strategies, here are two things to implement first.
Perhaps the greatest barrier to quality customer journeys is a lack of customer-centric organizational culture within a company.
Customers are not generally considered a priority within most companies, as product-focused or sales-driven cultures still dominate.
Being customer-centered means having a clear focus on the customer’s needs throughout the customer journey and delivering positive experiences accordingly. By switching your focus to improving the customer journey, you can drive repeat business and increase loyalty.
Customers expect a company's operating model and strategy to reflect who they are as a brand. For this to happen, a company must cultivate a culture aligned with its values and mindset.
One way to do this is by utilizing customer empathy.
Customer empathy speaks to the practice of understanding a customer's emotional needs, the reasons behind those needs, and responding effectively.
Leadership needs to do much more than simply sing the praises of empathy to make it the guiding principle of everything the organization does. In order for it to be implemented effectively, everything done within the company must be centered around satisfying the customers’ needs.
Next, train your teams to improve customer experience
Your front-line support staff are the first people customers will interact with. They act as a lasting first impression of your brand.
Businesses need to establish a standard for customer interaction, then establish processes to make sure the standard is maintained.
One way to achieve this is through regular employee training programs. These training programs can enable your sales, support, and marketing teams to offer quality content and assistance that improves multiple facets of your business.
You can also teach them about useful tools that will help them communicate effectively. A tool such as Grammarly will ensure that your content is error-free. It keeps your brand consistent and professional throughout all departments.
When dealing with customers, your teams need to have a firm understanding of your business and products inside and out. This will help them communicate effectively when faced with customers.
Training employees on your products and services can help them grasp the facts and help with communication in a more efficient way.
Knowing the needs of your audience and offering fast solutions will build confidence in your team and help them deal with customer complaints promptly and efficiently.
Now let’s take a look at some digital strategies to further improve the customer journey.
Automate customer contact
Interacting with your clients becomes significantly easier when your digital services are automated. It also results in increased customer satisfaction and quicker customer service.
Automation of customer service processes is best accomplished by using CRM software. Customer relationship management is a strategy used by organizations to look after their relationships with current customers and potential prospects.
By using a CRM, it becomes much easier to monitor and cultivate these relationships.
CRM software assists with automated interaction via chatbots, emailing, and appointment scheduling, among many other vital features. Moreover, it holds data regarding customer interactions, which can reveal how your product is intended to resolve problems.
Thus, CRM tools contribute greatly to improving your customer journey.
Implement customer feedback
The more you know about how your customers perceive your brand, the easier it becomes to optimize the customer journey for maximum conversions.
The main focus of improving the overall customer journey should be collecting, analyzing, and integrating customer feedback. It is important to understand which clients have a positive or negative experience with your brand so that you may solve their problems effectively.
You can request feedback after every interaction through channels like live chat, in-app, or chatbots or with the help of customer feedback tools.
The feedback you collect also helps you see the sales process from an outsider’s perspective. Correcting these problems will improve the customer experience and prevent customer obstacles.
Once you’ve collected enough feedback, it may be feasible to create a FAQ page, which helps eliminate some labor for your company. If you have an easily accessible page for your customers to reference, they won’t feel the need to contact you directly.
It's important to address questions in advance so that it doesn't turn into a complaint.
Take advantage of customer journey analytics
By using customer analytics, you will have real-time access to detailed customer metrics, such as behavioral and demographics, to name a few.
With artificial intelligence on the rise, businesses have the ability to collect valuable insights from customer analytics. You will need to create a single view of the customer's behaviors as they engage with your brand across all channels over time in order to quantify customer journey.
Utilizing customer analytics is imperative if you want to achieve behavioral-driven engagement, retain your customer, and deliver improved customer experiences. Journey analytics can give you actionable data on customers who are most likely to churn, which will enable you to improve customer retention.
Furthermore, by utilizing customer journey analytics, your efforts to win back your former customers are much more likely to succeed. Your customers will receive the right message in the right format in a timely manner through their preferred channel.
Even if you fail to bring back that customer, the information you gather will teach you how to prevent customer churn in the future.
Utilize content marketing
Marketers use content marketing as a strategic approach to increase customer acquisition and retention through creating and disseminating relevant content. You can rely on blogging service or learn it by yourself.
The level of brand awareness is determined by more than just whether the audience has heard of your digital marketing company or not. You need to emphasize the qualities of your brand that set it apart from its competitors through content.
By providing strong content, you can tell your customers what your brand represents and what your company’s values are. Even though the content is important, how you present it is also essential.
When you implement link building into your sites, there’s a better chance that your audience will spend more time exploring your brand. 40.7% of business owners say content marketing provides the strongest passive link building results.
This means more traffic to your site, resulting in more revenue for your business.
Additional resources: Top Explainer Video Companies to Craft Your Video Marketing
It’s not the destination
When it comes to customers, it’s all about the journey.
Consumers today rely on companies to deliver great user experiences. It's possible to meet their expectations by understanding a customer's decision-making process.
The more you understand where your customers are on their journey, the better you can provide an outstanding experience at every step.