The Importance of Customer Journeys on the Customer Experience
The Importance of Customer Journeys on the Customer Experience
Most companies globally continuously ask themselves how to keep customers engaged. Often, the answer focuses on touchpoints including ads on social media or an inquiry call, because it’s easy to plan and control each of those individual interactions. However, companies fail to consider that the overall experience a customer has is a culmination of those various interactions, and if one interaction is out of sync, then it taints the entire experience. Ultimately, when a customer reflects upon their experience with you, they evaluate their experience based on the entire journey. Focusing on individual touchpoints risks missing the opportunity to truly engage, or worse will leave them disappointed. After all, a satisfied customer is willing to recommend your organization five to eight times more than an unsatisfied customer, according to a McKinsey article. Knowing this, lets discuss 3 ways you can improve customer experiences through journey-based marketing strategies.
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Understand & Adapt
MarTech solutions allow you to build journeys that include all the interactions customers have with your company in real-time based on triggered actions. These journeys can address specific actions taken by the customer to accomplish a goal. More importantly, mapping out customer journeys allows you to proactively adjust course for current and predicted behaviours as customers go through the decision process. By understanding how and why individual customers interact with your website, app, social media, or email, you can readily identify customers’ pain points, and opportunities – affording you the opportunity to actively address them. This understanding and adaptability will allow companies to prioritize customer needs as they change while managing cross-functional interactions.
Looking at an example in the insurance industry, let’s imagine that a client’s home is flooded by a natural disaster. The damage is severe, and the client immediately contacts their insurer to get temporary lodging while the damage to their home is assessed. With customer journeys in place and initiated by this initial contact, the customer should fall into a claims journey. Simultaneously, their previous customer journey will be paused to avoid cross-sell or up-sell marketing messages about unrelated topics.
Create a Seamless Experience
As we know, customers can interact in many ways – visiting a store, website, app, email, phone, and chat. In today’s digital age, the options are becoming increasingly complex and abundant as customers demand flexibility in their touchpoints. This is why building cohesive customer journeys is an integral part of a positive customer experience. It is not longer impressive to send a customized message with the client’s name on it – customers expect personalized offers, on their preferred channel, at their preferred time. Customer journey tools facilitate increased personalization throughout the customer lifecycle by incorporating contact and response data from every touchpoint to truly personalize the customer’s experience.
Let’s visit an example to better understand how to create a seamless experience. A customer is travelling to France from Canada and calls their telco provider to get an international phone plan. Initiated by this phone call, they should be enrolled in a journey around travel. This might include providing resources about local emergency phone numbers or notification reminders to switch to a domestic plan upon return to Canada. By creating a seamless experience, the customer will receive offers related to their current situation, and all other messages are paused. This results in highly relevant offers with an increased likelihood of acceptance, and decreased odds of the customer unsubscribing or ‘tuning-out’ the messaging.
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Help Customers Adapt
With new products and services being launched and technology constantly evolving, it can be a bit overwhelming for customers. Considering the recent COVID-19 outbreak, companies are trying to digitize now more than ever for new reasons we never imagined previously. This is especially important to consider for customer journeys as “the most satisfied customers use digital products multiple times a week”, according to a McKinsey article. We’ve seen this predominantly in the hospitality industry where customers can now check-in through mobile apps and access their travel passes digitally. However, many customers never use mobile apps and are now forced to make the transition. Despite companies’ efforts to launch new tools for customers, adoption rates remain low because of a lack of oversight into the adoption journeys. A well-designed supportive journey can ease customers into new processes/tools that they may find daunting at first, eventually leading to a more positive customer experience.
As demonstrated above, customers don’t travel on a linear path through your company’s touchpoints. Build customer journeys from a holistic point of view with the goal of a satisfied customer from end-to-end. The key to creating successful customer journeys is to provide support to your customer throughout their lifecycle, at every stage.
The team at Munvo helps marketer’s implement and optimize customer journeys within and across MarTech ecosystems. Creating a connected customer experience can be technically challenging, and Munvo can help. Let us show you how. Contact us for a free journey assessment.
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