Understanding the impact of Customer Journey in my business success 

Customers are to an organization like the audience to a performer and that is why it’s very important to learn about the audience, what they want, what expectations they have and particularly how they prefer to communicate, specially if brand owners are looking for transaction.   So basically the Customer Journey is what businesses need to learn from customer interactions to provide an exceptional customer experience.   Customer Journey is kind of a map of the life time of a customer and it’s true that sometimes it can be difficult to deploy, to view and to understand. But if you do it right it guarantees you a happier life for a customer.

Where to start with Customer Journey?  

Customer Journey starts from the moment that lead or prospect became an actual consumer of your products or services. When that happens a team, that may be the front desk person, a technical support team or a customer service department, begin to trace the life of that client.  

Identifying what’s unique to a particular customer It is what ultimately builds a personal path across its lifecycle.  One case of example of what we are talking about here it’s purchase preferences: how often purchases are made, what day, at what time, early in the day or late in the night, etc. These preferences constitute specific landmarks in this particular journey.

Let’s say we are an airline; then we can trace the life cycle of traveler by accounting their frequent destinations or the seat preferences.  Say we are a pizza restaurant then we can trace what are the days a client calls the most and what is being ordered.  Eventually one day a returning customer will call the restaurant and a customer service representative will simply greet by saying “Hey Joe, are you ordering three veggie pizzas again for your apartment in Park Place?”.  

Another important aspect of customer journey it’s the communication preferences.  Some customers like to interact through a web chat,  some others via a phone call, or like this post-pandemic days where we see many people like to connect with their brands via WhatsApp or Facebook or social apps.

5 questions that help to build your Customer Journey 

As mentioned above, the reason to build a customer journey is to provide a better customer experience and this is done by identifying details of customer interactions during its life cycle. To begin mapping out the complete customer journey, you need a good grasp of audience demographics like who they are, psychographics like who they want to be, and what it takes to get customers from point A to B.  
Here are some ideas on what information is important to keep and trace:
 

1. Who is your customer? 

Define your buyer person. For example we have Carole Smith. She is a business owner of  healthcare agency.  She is 25 years old, she likes to enjoy healthy food and go to the gym. 

2. Why is your customer contacting you?

Identify why your customers contact you. If you know your customers, you know why they contact you. If it is the first contact you need an introduction to get in touch with them but if it’s an old client you know how to help.

3. How customers contact you? 

Consumers want to engage with your brand when, where, and how they prefer.  It’s not your organization communication preferences that matter; it’s the opposite.  What’s is important is how a customer likes to start a conversation with you.  
These touchpoint are essential in the relationship with your customer and what this means is that if a consumer likes to interact through email, you should not respond using a different channel; if they like to connect via WhatsApp do not attempt to change that preference by making a phone call. Understand this concept and make sure you always communicate with your customers on their preferred channel.


4. What a customer interaction looks like? 

Customer interactions are a chance to prove our brand deserves loyalty. It’s an opportunity to give exceptional customer experiences. So elaborate a list all the actions your team needs to consider during an interaction so they can respond properly.

If it’s the case determine the problem of your customer and offer response promptly.  Identify posible obstacles and teach your how your team how to mitigate those issues. It is helpful to use an effective script for your team members so they are better prepared for their interactions.  Implement all resources for contact center tools for a successful interaction.

5. What needs to be done to ensure interactions are ending positively? 

It’s important to analyze the metrics or data or figure out what is working and what doesn’t.  How can a journey be better? Test your mapping and have your team to keep an eye on the emotions of every interaction.  

Best Practices for Improving your Customer Journey 

If you want to succeed in keeping the best customer journey to offer better customer care experiences some important points need to be considered.  Here are some strategies to do that:
 
  • Create emotional connections with your customers: Create storytelling and personalization while connecting with customers. This contributes to a positive experience that really satisfies.
  •  Decrease customer effort along the journey: Make it always easy for your customers.  Do offer some self-service tools or use Artificial Intelligence with chat bots or voice bots to automate basic or most frequent tasks.    
  • Ask for customer feedback:  Use a survey for providing feedback for your customers. 
  • Invest in customer service training: Train and develop in communications skills, emotional intelligence, adaptability, initiative, work team, integrity and solving problems.
  • Implement the best practices: Use an Omni Channel contact center platform; a Contact Center is not that image that we have of 100 people seating in an office making and receiving calls. A Contact Center is any entity like a customer care department or a sales team that continuously engage with customers, prospects, leads, etc. Carrying a customer journey “by hand” is really complicated.  We recommend a cloud based contact center software that allows you to engage not only via voice but also through email, web chat, SMS, fax and of course social media.
 
 
If you need help in building your organization’s Customer Journey please do not hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.  Contact us at info@linkedip.com or by phone to 1-800-969-0164.