To grow your business, you’ll need more than just good products or services. You’ll also need to consider the customer journey.
According to Forrester, the customer journey is the “series of interactions between a customer and a company that occur as the customer pursues a specific goal.” Simply put, it’s a roadmap of all the customer’s transactions with the company, from the moment of brand awareness until they attain their desired outcome.
It contemplates how customers feel as the company works alongside them to get to their goals. This provides your company the opportunity to:
- Pinpoint your customers’ pain points
- Evaluate whether or not you’re treating your customers right
- Determine if your customers are getting what they want in the way that they wanted it
Even if you have an innovative product, you won’t be able to convert your customers if they feel that their interactions with your business have been subpar. By keeping customers happy, you’ll be able to build a loyal customer base.
What is the Customer Journey Map?
When you can see the customer journey in its entirety, you can get a bird’s eye view of how you’re getting customers from Point A to Point B, Point C, and so on. It gives you insights into how your customers feel about your business, and shows you where your customers are interacting with you (e.g. via social media, live chat, etc.) — these are also called “touchpoints”.
It’s worth noting that touchpoints vary by buyer persona. For instance, if your customers are millennials, they’ll probably become aware of your brand through social media, so it would make sense to use social media marketing. When you know where your customers are, you can change how your company interacts with them accordingly.
Why Should You Map Out the Customer Journey?
Business growth is driven by a deep understanding of your customers’ expectations and experiences. Let’s take a look at why the customer roadmap matters:
1. It Improves the Customer Experience
At the core of the customer journey is the customer experience. This refers to how your customers feel about their transactions with your business as a whole.
With the customer journey roadmap, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where you aren’t meeting your customers’ expectations. It’s important to meet customers’ expectations as 59 percent of customers say that they’d walk away from a business if they had a bad experience.
And according to Glance, 78 percent of customers don’t complete a purchase due to poor customer service. With that said, if you don’t improve how your brand handles customer escalations or complaints, you will inevitably lose your customers’ loyalty.
2. It Gives You a Competitive Edge
Consider these statistics:
- Companies that put customer experience on priority can increase their revenue by about 4-8% (Bain and Company)
- Companies that provide a positive customer experience can see 5.7 times more revenue than competitors with poor customer service (Forrester)
- Customer-centric companies are 60 percent more profitable than companies that don’t consider customer experience (Deloitte and Touche)
If your company invests in your customers’ overall experience, they will prefer you over your competitors. You’ll be able to understand their needs better, and in turn, offer them what they expect from the brands they do business with.
3. It Increases a Customers’ Willingness to Pay More
According to PWC, 86 percent of customers are willing to pay more if they’re getting a great customer experience in return. This can also pave the way toward customer loyalty, as customers are more likely to purchase a second (or even third) time around if the company adopts a customer-centric culture.
When customers pay and purchase more, this will increase your revenue over time. And because a loyal customer base is more likely to tell others about your business, as a bonus, you’ll be able to obtain more customers, too!
4. It Ensures That Your Customers Attain Their Desired Results
Your goal should be to get your customers to their goals. To do that, you need to meet their expectations at every stage, starting from pre-purchase to post-purchase. If you discover that their needs aren’t met at a certain stage, you can still change your strategy to ensure they get what they want effectively and efficiently.
Let’s say that the reason why your customers aren’t purchasing your product is that they don’t know how it works. They want to buy it, but before they do, they want to be sure it’s what they want — but unfortunately, they can’t find information about it on your website.
When you use a roadmap, you can see the exact stage where your customers get “stuck”, so you can adapt to their expectations. With a customer journey, you no longer need to let customers go just because you couldn’t pinpoint what their problem was.
5. It Allows You to Provide Value at Every Stage
Just because you have the best product doesn’t mean people will buy it immediately. You should be able to convince your customers that your products (and your business) are worth their time and money. To do that, you have to consistently provide value to your customers.
By creating a roadmap of the customer journey, you’ll be able to gain invaluable insights into what your customers want at every stage. For instance, if your customers are still at the “awareness” stage, it wouldn’t be ideal to create content that would be better suited for the “decision” stage. Instead, they’d probably find content such as how-tos more valuable.
Wrapping Up
The best way to grow your business is to be aligned with your customer’s goals at each stage of the customer journey. By doing so, you’ll be able to give your customers what they want and grow your business in the way you want.
