The customer journey is one of the most important aspects of your Go-to-Market strategy. We’re talking about the journey your customer goes on from first finding out about your brand, to purchasing your product, to being a lifelong advocate of your business. That’s the journey you want, in an ideal world, every customer to take.
Getting a 100% success rate isn’t realistic, but to get as many customers to that ‘advocate’ stage as possible, you’ll need to pay attention to everything that comes before.
Read on to find out:
- The stages of the customer journey.
- Why the customer journey is important.
- How to make the customer journey as successful as possible.
The stages of the customer journey
Product development
The customer journey starts far earlier than you might realize. It doesn’t begin the first time they get a call from a sales rep, or even the first time you send them a marketing email. The customer journey starts when product, marketing and your company stakeholders sit around a table and decide what product or capability you’re building next.
Because you’re not just designing products in isolation, or at least, you shouldn’t be. For a successful customer journey, you need a customer-centric approach to your product development. And that means designing products that address customer pain points and progress your customer’s relationship with your brand.
What’s your brand’s story? Where are you taking your customers next? That’s what you should be thinking about when you’re planning for your next product launch.
With time, the customer journey can become cyclical as you establish feedback loops to ensure your customer is always present when you sit down to develop products and decide where you’re going next.
Marketing
Once you’ve got your product, the next stage of your customer’s journey will be the first interaction they have with it. You don’t start with the hard sell. You get your messaging out there and you make sure it finds the right customers at the right time.
Identifying customer personas, ideal customer profiles (ICP) and your total addressable market (TAM) is an essential step in the customer journey. You don’t want your marketing outreach to be random because you’ll waste or miss opportunities entirely.
For example, you’re marketing a new smartwatch and you have two potential customers. Customer A is looking for a smartwatch because they care about fitness and want to track their gym sessions. Customer B wants the convenience of using their watch to control their music, pay for groceries, make phone calls, etc.
But if customer B only sees messaging about fitness, will it capture their imagination? Will they think this is the product that’s going to solve their problems? Short answer, no.
So when it comes to positioning and messaging, you need to make sure you’re targeting the right customers with the right information. And you need to sell them the narrative that with this smartwatch, or this tech solution, all their problems will be solved. The life they’re imagining with your product will be realized.
You also need to keep track of what kind of customer you’re dealing with, so if they’ve gone to your website or a sales rep based on an ad about how convenient smartwatches are, they don’t only see information about fitness or sleep tracking.
Sales
For many, this might be mistaken for the start of the customer journey, but as we’ve seen, a lot goes into a customer’s experience before they come face to face with a sales rep. This means that the sales rep needs to know what the customer’s experience has been up to this point so their journey can be as seamless as possible.
The sale is obviously a very important step in the customer journey and it's important to get it right. Your sales reps need to be enabled to talk about a customer’s pain points, how your product can resolve them and why your product is better than the competition.
If you want to find out more about sales enablement, you can check out our article here. 👇
Kate Onley-Gregson
You want your customers to feel like they’re having a unique experience, not that they’re just one in a chain of sales calls. No one wants to feel like a statistic. A sales call can’t all be about numbers and data. Those things are important, but not as important as establishing a relationship with your client.
Customer success
The customer journey doesn’t end when they purchase your product. In fact, it's only just beginning. Customers that don’t know how to get the most out of your product, find it difficult to use, or don’t find that their problems are resolved by it will churn. Meaning, they’ll stop using your product and most likely defect to a competitor.
Customers must be properly onboarded to get the most out of your product and continue to use it for an extended time. Beyond customer onboarding, you’ll want to check in with your customers with some regularity, ensure they’re satisfied with the product and find out if they have any feedback about what you can do better.
You can also reward customers for sticking around with discounts, loyalty programs and early access to new products and releases.
What you’re looking to do here, is to get the maximum lifetime value from each of your customers. And when that happens, you reap the benefits of customers repeatedly purchasing your product, subscribing to memberships and recommending your products to others.
Why the customer journey is important
Did you know 86% of people are willing to pay more for a great customer experience? That means if you provide an exceptional customer experience, you’ll set yourself apart from competitors.
A customer’s experience with your brand will make or break the length of their journey with you. Will they make a purchase? Will they buy a subscription? Will they continue to purchase your products and services in the future?
If your website is hard to navigate, calls with sales reps are repetitive or irrelevant to a customer’s pain points, or they have a poor customer service experience after purchase, their journey with your business will be cut short.
As we all know, old customers are far more cost-effective than new customers. You don’t have to spend acquisition costs on them, so the profits you make aren’t mitigated.
The best way to maximize the lifetime value of your customers and make your relationships with them as profitable as possible, is to put the effort in when it comes to the customer experience.
Whatsmore, customer reviews and testimonials are one of the best ways to bring in new customers. If you push your customers further down the sales funnel from buyer to advocate, they’ll recommend your brand to others and you’ll start to grow your customer base organically.
We all have that product or company that we stand by and would sing the praises of, even if we know it's not entirely rational. That’s the kind of loyalty you want to inspire for your brand.
Take care of your loyal customers, look after them, and they’ll do your marketing for you.
Making the most of your customer journeys
So you want to make your customer journeys as successful as possible? You’ve come to the right place. Here’re a few ways you can improve the customer journey and reap the benefits we’ve discussed above.
Align your teams
The most important thing for customers is consistency. They don’t want repetitive conversations, gaps in knowledge or mismatched messaging. To avoid these things, you need all your teams working together. That includes internal teams, not just the customer-facing ones.
If you want market positioning to be consistent with the pain points that a product was designed to address, you need product to work with marketing. If you want a customer’s onboarding process to target the reasons they purchased a product, you need customer success to work with sales. You get the idea.
Make a customer’s journey as seamless and beneficial to them as possible by avoiding siloing and keeping your teams in conversation with one another.
Get some perspective
It's easy to just focus on the big milestones in a customer’s journey, like the initial sale, onboarding or upselling. But customers aren’t only experiencing your product when you reach those markers, they’re (hopefully) using your product all the time.
That means you need to shift your perspective to not just focus on the big wins. Take a step back, and identify the gaps in your customer journey. Where might you be missing opportunities to add value to a customer? Check in with your customers regularly and make sure you’re supporting them beyond the obvious steps.
Manage expectations
Don't make promises you can’t keep. If you offer your customers the world but don’t deliver they’re going to be disappointed and think of your business as unreliable. Demonstrate your trustworthiness to your customers by setting manageable goals and achieving them.
If customers know they can rely on you to deliver on promises they’ll trust you when you roll out new products. Earn their trust and their dollars will follow.
Establish feedback loops
There’s always room for improvement. Once you have a relationship with a customer, you can ask them for feedback on their experience with your brand and your products.
If you see patterns in feedback or the same issue keeps cropping up, you can identify where you need to make adjustments in your customer strategy to deliver a better experience.
This will also encourage more loyalty to your brand in your customers, as you’ll have demonstrated that you value their opinions and concerns. It’s important to show that your customers matter to you and collecting and implementing feedback is a really easy way to do so.
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