How To Build a Better Customer Journey

A better customer journey is essential to a thriving business. It’s how you bring in a consistent stream of leads and delight them as they get to know you. It’s also how you turn strangers into happy customers that have such a positive experience with your brand they talk about you everywhere they go.

Sound like a dream? It doesn’t have to be – as long as you take the time to build a better (and more efficient) customer journey.

In today’s post that’s exactly what we are diving into: what a customer journey is, why it’s important, and our top tips for creating a better one that works on autopilot.

What Is A Customer Journey?

Let’s first cover exactly what a customer journey is. While there are a number of definitions you can use, here is how we would define it:

The entire lifecycle of interactions that a customer has with your brand, everything from first hearing about you to post-purchase support. 

As you can see, a customer journey is a broad concept, and can be applied to just about every stage of interaction you have with your audience. 

This has a number of implications. Here are a few you should keep in mind at all stages:

• Because a customer journey encompasses all touchpoints, nothing should be considered too “unimportant” for consideration
• Depending on the type of business, the journey that a customer goes through can include both online and offline interactions
• A true customer journey never really stops, even after someone has purchased one of your products

Understanding and optimizing the entire process that somebody goes through with your company is crucial. Not only does it make it more likely that each interaction a prospect has with your brand is positive, but by doing so, increases the odds that they become a paying customer. 

Taking the time to craft a better experience for your audience is well worth the investment. Let’s now see how to approach the process. 

5 Tips For A Better Customer Journey

Making a better customer journey involves a number of steps, and different businesses will start at very different points with the process. 

That said, here are five tips that will apply to just about any company.

Create Customer Personas

This is the first and most common step when working towards a better customer journey. Customer personas are profiles you create that represent your target audience segments. What your customer needs, how they prefer to shop, where they work, what demographic groups they belong to – these should all be considered when creating customer personas. 

Only by going through this first step will you be able to understand the exact kind of customer journey you should be aiming for.

Map Out Your Current Customer Journey

Once you have your customer personas set up, it’s time to map out what your current customer journey looks like. This will allow you to see what exactly you are working with, as well as where you can change things. What exactly this step entails? 

To get the best results, make this as tangible as possible. Create a visual representation of the journey, highlighting each stage and touchpoint. Where do people first become a member of your audience? Where do they most commonly consume your content? What sort of email automations might they be entered into? These are all areas of consideration, and they should all be mapped out. 

Provide Consistent Omnichannel Experiences

Once you know what your current customer journey looks like, it’s time to dive into the kinds of channels you should be active on. Ideally, your company wants an omnichannel presence. This ensures you meet your ideal customer where they are – not simply where it’s “most convenient” for you. 

Of course, customers expect a consistent experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. The way you speak to them on Twitter, for example, should be consistent with the tone you take in welcome email sequences.

Leverage Data And Analytics

If you are striving for a better customer experience, it pays (literally) to go by the data. No use building your customer journey based on a “hunch” – follow the analytics! Paying attention to data gives you insight into your audience’s behavior, preferences, and pain points. Actually acting on it creates a journey that they love, mapping out a seamless transition from “just heard about you” to “happy paying customer.”

That’s not to say that you need to measure every possible statistic, however. In fact, trying to do that can often lead to analysis paralysis. Better to measure only what you need in order to act. Be sure to check out some of the most important analytics you need.

Collect And Act on Feedback

As you go through the process of creating a better customer journey, it’s worth periodically collecting feedback from your audience. What do they like about interacting with your organization? Do they enjoy the kinds of content you produce? Is the onboarding process for your products relatively easy to follow?

These are all questions you can ask your audience, and their answers can be essential in crafting a customer journey. As for how you go about getting this feedback? There are really a number of ways – anything from sending out direct surveys to your email list to reading customer reviews online. Regardless of the method, just remember this: your customers are the ones you are building a better experience for. Their opinion should be treated like gold.

…

Are you an enterprise, nonprofit or small business looking for help on your website? Give us a shout! We provide a free consultation. Email us at info@lughstudio.com or call us at (718) 855-1919!