Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Customer Journey
A customer journey is a visual representation of the overall process a prospective customer takes to complete a goal with your company. This goal could be learning more about your brand, following you on social media, searching your business on a search engine, or completing a purchase, amongst other things.
In our latest article, Building a Successful Customer Journey, we shared the overall idea of how to identify the steps of your customer journey and what to look for.
If mapped correctly, a customer journey maps the current process from the very first touchpoint to the final touchpoint to clearly identify if your prospects are reaching their goals and how you can improve the distance from start to finish.
Now, we have our top 10 tips on how to improve your customer journey.
Approach it from the perspective of your target prospective customers. These are the customers who have never searched for your nor shopped your brand before but fit within your target market. They are the best starting place because then you have a clearer, unbiased view.
Approach it from the perspective of your target prospective customers. These are the customers who have never searched for your nor shopped your brand before but fit within your target market. They are the best starting place because then you have a clearer, unbiased view.
Set clear objectives for your customer journey map. As you walk through the journey, start at awareness and go all the way through sale finalization.
Utilize your user personas and define their goals. If you have already built your user personas, you understand who your target market is at their core, including how and why they shop. Use this information to help identify what their overall goal is with your brand and how you can best meet their needs.
Highlight your target consumer personas. It is likely that you will have multiple user personas that fit the customer profile of your demographic. Identify your top ones within your target market so you know who your likely first movers and brand advocates would be.
List out each touchpoint clearly. Every step in the journey is considered a touchpoint. From entering your business name into a search engine or seeing a digital ad, landing on the web page, searching through products, adding an item to the shopping cart, completing the sale, etc. List each touchpoint out so you have a definitive map of the customer journey.
Classify each element you want your map to depict. If you want your map to focus on improving the add to cart process or reduce time of sale finalization, list that out and identify each of the items that either get in the way or show positive progression.
Identify your current available resources and the ones you will need. As you map this out, you will see what resources you have at your disposal (i.e. CRM software like Salesforce, newsletter, a sales team, etc.) and which ones you may need to add to help meet your objectives.
Walk yourself through the customer journey from start to finish as each user persona you identified earlier. Now that you have the customer journey touchpoints mapped out, walk yourself through as each target user persona to validate your mapping. Is it different for each user persona or the same? Will they find frustration in an individual step? These are the types of questions you would want to answer as them during this step.
Improve the customer journey to reduce the number of touchpoints to benefit the customer. Now that you have identified the touchpoints and what needs to change to make it easier for them to actualize their goal, fix it and fix it fast. Don’t be afraid to share with your customers what you have changed so they know that you are looking out for them as well.
Do this consistently (i.e. annually) or as you make major brand changes. Consistency is key. As you launch a new product line, revamp your website, or re-segment your audience, revisit your customer journey to ensure that you are providing the most optimal customer experience.