The Customer Journey is an essential element of the marketing and sales strategies of every business. In an increasingly competitive market, using this tool correctly differentiates a brand from the competition, impacts sales, and determines customer’s feedback. Find out what it is, and how to implement it.
What is the Customer Journey?
The term Customer Journey refers to the customer’s complete experience with a brand, from the moment they first meet the company, to the moment they purchase use its products or services. The visual representation of this experience is called the Customer Journey Map.
The purpose of this tool is precisely to improve the customer experience with the company, optimizing interactions at each step of the process, either physical or digital. In this way, and by implementing the identified improvements, the company builds a loyal consumer base.
Why is it important to create a Customer Journey?
The Customer Journey has a single purpose: to improve the percentage of leads that make it to returning customers. Each step within the marketing funnel has potential pitfalls, and friction along this process can block a new sale.
This type of map puts customers at the center of the business, helps build long-term relationships, and boosts sales. It also keeps decision making focused on what customers value the most.
Understanding the journey followed by customers allows you to zoom in on each step within the buying experience and uncover obstacles that prevent customers from moving on to the next stage of the “journey.”
What are the main stages of the Customer Journey?
Typically, Customer Journey maps divide the customer journey 5 stages, which are:
1. Awareness
In the early stage of the Customer Journey, the customer identifies a specific problem and need. He does not yet have a brand or product preference and does not know the details of the solution. At this stage, brands can help create awareness with relevant content, on social media and blogs, to connect with customers.
2. Consideration
In this stage, the customer evaluates different options and suppliers, compares features, opinions, and prices. For brands, the information available online is essential, including product pages with detailed descriptions, reviews, and appealing photos and videos.
3. Conversion
At this stage, the customer takes the action desired by the brand, whether that means a purchase, or subscribing to a service, registering for a mailing list, or downloading an app. Brands can encourage conversion with simple information about the expected action, and visible buttons or call-to-actions.
4. Retention
Loyal customers bring a steady stream of business and require fewer resources than converting new customers. For brands, this phase includes keeping customers happy with a dedicated and well-trained support team.
5. Advocacy
In the last phase of the Customer Journey, the customer becomes a brand ambassador. To do this, brands can encourage continued purchases with new value offers, reminders, special dates, or related products.
The Customer Journey map allows you to summarize all this information in a visual and simple way, so that it can be shared and discussed with the rest of the team. Find out how to do it.
How to create a Customer Journey?
Creating a Customer Journey is a very simple process that should be done together with the marketing and sales team. Follow these steps:
1. Define the scope of the Customer Journey – The first step is to select the most valuable customer segment and the most representative product family to design the Customer Journey. For example, if you run a bakery, the scope of the Customer Journey would be white bread and morning customers. Leave the remaining segments for later.
2. Identify the touch points – Check what steps this customer segment follows from the time they discover the brand until they make a purchase. For example, for an online store, the interaction starts with the desire to buy a product, which is followed by visiting several websites, comparing features and prices, analyzing reviews, and so on until the purchase. Listing these steps is the basis of the Customer Journey.
3. Evaluate the customer experience – At each step, evaluate the customer experience as positive, negative, or neutral. To do this, you will need to collect information. Contact users of the website and ask questions to understand the process they followed and how they felt at each step. Use your team’s experiences as well, and visually represent the responses on the map.
4. Describe the customers’ action – What motivates the customers’ reaction? If they gave a negative rating, is it because the website is difficult to use? Or because waiting times were too long? To find out the answer, ask. Real feedback from customers is key.
5. Identify customer’s expectations – What did customers expect to happen at each step? How would they like the process to have gone? Write down the customer expectation for each stage.
6. Solve the problems identified – Now that you know what customers expect at each stage, you can work to improve the Customer Journey.
Easypay with your brand, to create a better Customer Journey
At easypay, we develop payment solutions that simplify the user experience when buying a product or service. With nearly 19000 customers, at easypay we work every day to innovate in the payments industry and help brands go further. We provide modules and plugins for the most popular platforms such as Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce or Prestashop. All this with a single membership. Start today to increase your online sales.