Most businesses think that a customer’s journey ends after buying a product or service. But this is completely misunderstood. Once a customer has made a purchase, that’s just a single step. A long journey follows after the customer becomes aware of your brand.
Therefore, the customer journey is crucial for every company that wants to grow and remain successful. Here, we’ll discuss the need to understand the customer journey and a few tips for understanding your customer journey.
Importance of Understanding Customer Journey
Mapping the customer journey is essential because it helps businesses view the entire sales process from the customer’s perspective. By doing that, they can identify what’s not working well and improve their sales approach. Also, when you understand your customer journey, you’ll experience benefits like:
- Increased customer engagement
- Increased customer loyalty
- Better marketing strategy
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Smooth customer experience
Most importantly, you’ll understand your customers more. And the more you understand their expectations, the better. It will help you provide tailor-made products to meet their needs.
5 Tips for Understanding Customer Journey
You can apply the following tips to understand the customer journey and improve the overall customer experience of your company.
- Create robust buyer personas
Instead of knowing generic demographics like age, location and profession, take your time to understand your customers deeply. Go the extra mile and create a buyer persona which represents a specific individual in a fictional way.
For example, you can give customers names like a wood contractor, first-time parent, or university tutor. You can also give them problems, goals, preferences and desires.
However, avoid making things up. Every detail about your customer should be informed by real insights. The more accurate these buyer personas are about your clients, the more you comprehend the customer journey. - Identify customer touch-points
People interact with your business in different ways, and every touch-point matters. So, if you want to understand your customer journey better, you need to take inventory of both offline and online channels. The more you’re informed about how they come in contact with your product, the better.
Remember, people might discover your brand from influencers, review sites and retailer’s pages. It doesn’t have to be from your channels. - Pinpoint potential obstacles
Now that you know the various touch-points identify what prevents clients from achieving their preferred goals. For example, it could be a slow website, car park space, fewer details about your products, etc. But, once you know some of these obstacles, you can eliminate them to give your customers the best experience during their journey with what you offer. - Get better visibility into how people buy
Another important thing when it comes to understanding your customer journey is having clear visibility about how people buy. Instead of knowing where and when they purchased your product, also get visibility into other things they bought and the amount of money they spent. It will help you identify goals and problems coinciding with what your brand solves. - Know what prospective buyers search for online
When looking for answers, google is the first place people run to. Thus, brands use search engine optimization tools to discover the topics people are curious about. This can also help you understand your customer journey if the terms they are searching for are related to your brand. You’ll know their motivations, challenges and aspirations.
Now that you understand your customer journey implement the changes. Use the discovered opportunities and insights to improve the customer experience. No matter how small or big the changes are, they will make your customer journey much easier and faster.