Controlling the Customer Journey in a Digital Age

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Today, companies have more challenges than ever when it comes to controlling the customer journey, simply because the majority of consumers create their own. As brands are forced to embrace connectivity across multiple channels and platforms, the customer can then view their journey as a series of stepping stones that they can interact with and jump on or off board at any stage. The modern consumer interacts and aligns with brands in ways that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago, and that means that companies of all sizes need to prioritize transparency while tackling the issues of shorter attention spans and omnichannel fatigue. To create a customer journey that is intuitive, responsive, and seamless, challenges must first be identified and then tackled.

Identifying the Customer Journey

It’s beneficial to think of the customer journey as a map. Your journey map will need to be designed and planned with the average customer in mind, and it will need to address the customer’s ability to make their thoughts known and their opinions heard. The customer journey is you taking control of the user experience with your brand, and managing their experience at every touchpoint in the buying cycle. That means integrating and aligning your different channels for a more seamless and easily controlled journey to a purchase. The right customer journey can influence just how your company is perceived.

Locating Gaps and Roadblocks

When a customer journey is not mapped out well, then there will be key stages where the average consumer will leave the route you have in place and head elsewhere. This leads to higher bounce rates and a drop in conversion rates. Examples of common journey gaps include:

• Difficulties moving from device to device
• Channel differences
• Siloed department gaps
• Communication gaps (both B2C and in-house)

Monitoring your analytics can help you to identify those points in the customer journey where mistakes are being made. Being able to identify exactly where the problems are means that you can start thinking of improvements that can be made using actionable insights to drive up your conversion rates and improve your search engine rankings simultaneously.

Real-Time Journey Mapping

By using your analytics, you can keep up to date on the issues with your customer journey as they happen. If you have a well-designed journey, then you can better understand the sequence of events that leads to a departure from the pathways that you have to a sale. By tackling a flawed customer journey, you make it easier to:

• Build trust

When consumers trust you, they will be more likely to spend with you. Most purchases start with a Google search of a product or company, and taking control over your customer journey means making this initial stage flawless. That means ensuring that you know how to rank higher on search engines and about pushing down Google search results that are negative about your business.

• Provide Value

Consumers want to buy, and they want the process to be as easy and painless as possible. Proactive customer journey mapping makes it easier to provide the right information and advice at the right stage in the individual journey. You can provide all of the help that your customer needs with detailed FAQ pages, which will highlight the different ways that customers can contact you. Combine this with content in the form of written posts and video tutorials that will keep those customers on your pages for longer, and you will be on a winning streak.

• Upselling and Cross-selling

The value of upselling isn’t just in making more profits. Rather, upselling should be viewed as an opportunity to provide even more value to customers by ensuring that they have all of the products that they need. If you can identify commonly linked purchases, or understand when someone may be prepared to spend a little more for a better product, then you will make them feel that they have made a positive decision. This kind of proactive approach means that you are taking control of a customer journey that would otherwise have been missed out on.

Journey Awareness

If you don’t know how your customers are going from a search engine query to a purchase, then you will lack the ability to improve your services and generate more income. That’s why you need to monitor the statistics on every interaction that your company has with every customer. This accumulation and use of data is one of the keys to brand growth in the modern age. You will need to collect and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data, and that can be a challenge in itself. It will mean:

• Acquiring the data
• Accessing that data in a central location
• Using the data that you have gathered to understand more about the good and the bad of your customer journey

Departmental Alignment

No single member of your team, and no individual department, should be responsible for improving and managing the customer journey. The customer experience is the responsibility of every member of your team, from the CEO to the customer-facing staff. A siloed approach will only lead to a greater chance of journey gaps. This will mean:

• Establishing customer experience objectives and metrics
• Committing time to understand and improve the customer journey continuously
• Designing a customer journey that takes cross-device experiences and multiple channels into account

In order to achieve this, companies have to:

• Understand a segmented audience
• Use operational strategies
• Have a clear representation of the customer journey that is updated in real-time
• Be aware of customer pain points and how to resolve them
• Identify roadblocks and gaps, with solutions in place to eradicate them
• Ensure that journey maps are responsive and agile and can be adjusted as needed should issues arise
• Identify the responsibilities of each team member in the delivery of a positive customer experience
• Learn to spot future issues by keeping up with consumer trends and emerging technologies

For brands that want to grow, the creation of an engaging, responsive, and actionable customer journey is critical. The alignment of your customer service team, marketing department, and sales teams is vital. By being more proactive and responsive to the customer journey, you empower both your business and your customers. As consumers only continue to grow more connected and more aligned with the brands that they trust, designing and ensuring a strategic customer journey and a seamless experience for every customer should be the goal of every business owner.