The customer journey is an integral part of business efforts that runs deep in the unrelenting pursuit to achieve a truly satisfactory customer experience.
Businesses know that having sufficient knowledge of how customers gain exposure to their products up until their post-purchase experiences is more than 50% success in the direction of giving their customers excellent experiences while they also make profit.
It's therefore important that this subject matter is clearly understood. What should you expect from this guide?
It offers business leaders and executives the necessary information on the phases, benefits, and challenges of the customer journey and how they can use it to achieve success in their businesses.
What is a customer journey?
A customer journey refers to the complete experience a person has with a business or brand from the moment the person is aware of the product or service until he or she becomes a loyal customer.It involves every step the customer takes along the way: becoming aware of the product, making a purchase, and then the relationship that's built after they make the purchase.
Businesses are keen on understanding their customers' journeys so that they can improve while effectively meeting their needs.
Phases of the Customer Journey
The customer's journey is a complete process that's made up of segments called phases. These phases are important, and they give context to the journey itself. The phases are:1. Awareness
Every customer journey begins with awareness. This can be the outcome of marketing strategies, one-on-one advertising, or any other form of exposure that companies use to help them reach their prospects.Aside from these efforts by companies, potential customers take "awareness" to another level.
Some of the actions customers take to improve their personal knowledge of a product or service include conducting research, learning about the product, and most importantly, identifying the problems the product or service can help them solve.
After they pass the awareness phase, they go on to the next.
2. Consideration
In this phase, customers begin to consider whether they should choose your product or service. The fact that your business may not be the only one they visit gives them variations and multiple options to choose from.They will often compare your pricing with those of your competitors, read reviews by other customers, seek recommendations before making a decision, etc.
Businesses must pay attention to the value their products bring to their customers because they may not be there to explain to them why they should prefer theirs to those of their competitors.
After customers consider what you're offering, the next step they take is very crucial.
3. Purchase
This is the decision-making phase. This phase is where a business is said to score its maximum point in the customer journey.The purchase phase spans from selecting the product to buy, going through the purchase process itself, and finally making sales. At this point, the transaction is complete.
Making sales is very important to businesses because this is a key performance indicator for their growth. In fact, effectively making sales is one of the main reasons they focus on the customer journey.
When a customer buys a product, it's a win-win situation, but this journey is only halfway through. The next phase is up ahead.
4. Experience
Just as the "purchase phase" is the most important part of a customer's journey to businesses, the "experience phase" is also important to customers.This will determine whether they stay with your brand or look for another. This is why businesses seek customer feedback through review sections on their websites or apps, if they have any.
These reviews go a long way toward showing the experiences customers get from their products. Most times, businesses have review ratings, usually from 1 to 5, where 1 shows least satisfaction and 5 shows maximum satisfaction.
The success of the first three phases depends on reviews from other customers with prior experience of the products or services they've used.
An excellent customer experience will attract other customers, who will eventually bring more customers. These reviews could cause ripple effects from either positive or negative experiences.
The fact is, having more customer patronage is an indication that your products are valuable, but the ultimate indicator is the loyalty of your customers.
Read also: Customer experience specialist
5. Loyalty
This is the last phase in the customer journey. Loyalty from customers is the ultimate indicator of how valuable you are to them.A loyal customer is one that can be your unpaid marketer. They can publicize your products to other people, both customers and prospects, for free without you even being aware of their actions.
One notable proof of their loyalty is their repetitive purchases. When this happens, a business can say that they've been successful in helping a customer complete his or her journey.
The more successful customer journeys businesses have, the more credibility they gain. More success comes to businesses that can repeat this process as many times as possible.
Benefits of Understanding the Customer Journey
Understanding the customer journey offers businesses several benefits. Let's consider four benefits you'll get when you understand your customers' journey:1. Improved customer satisfaction
Being able to understand the customer journey is a huge success on its own.This helps you identify touch points within their journey that you can improve to give better satisfaction to your customers.
The impact of your action is having customers that are loyal, and their loyalty can bring you more benefits than you can possibly think of; hence, you'll have to give them the very best.
2. Better customer relationship
A deep understanding of your customers' journey can help you effectively meet their needs. This can enable you to build stronger and healthier relationships with them.The impact of this action is many, from repetitive purchases to being your brand's advocate for free, and so on. Their relationship with your business will be an active contributor to its long-term success and stability.
3. Effective targeting and marketing
By understanding the customer journey, you can know where your customers are in their journeys, which will allow you to implement precise strategies when targeting and marketing to them.This is important as it will guide you in properly channeling your marketing resources to areas that bring a higher return on your investment.
4. Optimized business processes
The customer journey offers businesses lots of insight into what customers do and how they behave with products.This can help businesses improve certain areas while making adjustments to other areas with low ROI.
This helps businesses streamline their processes all through the journey based on feedback from customers, leading to improved overall business performance.
Challenges faced in Managing the customer Journey
There are common challenges that businesses often face when managing their customer journey. Let's consider three of them:1. Changing customer expectations
As times change, so do the expectations of customers. Their changing expectations are grossly influenced by the latest trends, technological advancements, and offers from your competitors.To keep up with these changes, you will need to make constant adaptations, which may not be easy. Not being able to meet these evolving needs may bring about dissatisfaction among your customers.
This should not happen, because if it does, you risk their loyalty, and that means you may loose them as well.
2. Variations in customer behavior
The customer journey speaks of the individual experience of each customer all through their personal journeys.Because this is based on individuals and also because they behave differently in their journeys, it is usually complex to manage, especially in industries with more complex purchase cycles.
Not being able to accurately predict customer behavior in their journeys may lead to inconsistencies in the overall customer experience.
3. Integration and analysis of customer data
Gathering and integrating customer data from different channels, such as websites, ad campaigns, interviews, cohort groups, etc., may not be easy.Analyzing the data from these different channels, with their complexities, may pose another challenge in itself.
With different views of the data gathered and analyzed, coming to a conclusion that helps in decision-making towards making the customer journey better will be a challenge.
Conclusion
The benefits of understanding the customer journey have been clearly shown in the course of this guide. Business leaders and executives must invest in and closely monitor the process.Remember that you're not just trying to achieve sales alone, but also, and most importantly, the loyalty of your customers. Achieving customer loyalty and consistently repeating the whole process will make you better at offering value to your wide range of customers.
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Marketing