Creating Effective Customer Journeys to Drive Business Outcomes

Marketers need to be savvier than ever to attract and retain customers, which is where creating a customer journey map will help. A map allows a business to visualize exactly how a customer interacts with its brand or product through the customer journey, providing them with an invaluable and essential view of their most important asset, says, Amy Walker, Co-founder and Head of Growth at Cooperate.

It’s no secret that the world is changing. It seems inevitable that roles -- and entire careers -- once considered inviolable will, in the foreseeable future, be taken over by robots.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

Download

Technology has totally redefined the ways in which we communicate, sell, buy and do business, and marketers must take stock and evolve too if they want to remain relevant.

We talk to marketers everyday, and a key thing we've noticed is the increasing importance of having a customer-centric culture.

Like it or not, we live in an age of hyper-personalization, and the stakes of getting it wrong when it comes to your customers are higher than ever.

In the last five years alone, we’ve seen exponential growth in the atomization of content and fragmentation of media channels, which means marketers must now think of, and create, many more individual units of marketing content.

Gone are the days of just cutting your 60-second TVC into 30, 15 and six-second variants for digital and social channels and calling it a win: now, it’s all about creating specialized content that can be fed into more and more channels, each with a different variant that suits the medium and context in which the customer is engaging with your brand.

Whether it’s social media profiles, an email series, retail screens or video channels, this fragmentation adds to the marketing challenge because it’s effectively adding branches or offshoots to your customer journey.

This can be difficult to keep up with, as it means that marketers need to be savvier than ever. Knowing how to gather data, where to look for it, understanding the data and also being creative enough to come up with new ways to attract and retain customers is the reality for the 21st century marketer.

This is where creating a customer journey map will help. A map is essentially a tool that allows a business to visualize the experience of how a customer interacts with its brand/product from the first point of contact through to the end (post-sale) stage.

Here’s a basic example of a customer journey: while shopping, a potential customer sees your store and signage (ping). She walks in and sees the the layout of your store (ping). Your employee greets her (ping) and offers her help (ping). The employee is also friendly (ping) and informative (ping) and helps her pick out a powerful computer (ping) that also looks good (ping) and is value for money (ping ping ping).

At the purchase scene, she sees a sign offering a five percent discount if she likes the brand’s Facebook page (ping), and a chance to win another computer if she posts a picture of her purchase on the Instagram page (ping).

Your employee then assures her that if she does change her mind she’s able to return the computer, no questions asked (ping) while simultaneously collecting her email address for future promotions (ping).

Later in the day the customer is so happy with her experience she Instagrams the computer (ping) to which your social media team replies with thanks (ping).

If done properly (and taken seriously) a customer journey map will help provide an invaluable and essential view of potential and existing customers, and will also reveal  predictable impediments at each buying stage, which are so often missed by brands.

An automation platform is a great way to make sure the customer journey comes to life. A clear understanding of how your customers interact with every part of your business is key and a fundamental piece of work for any marketing team.

It’s a critical tool for every marketer, as it forces you to look at how your customers actually experience your brand as opposed to how YOU think they do. And you know what they say: if you assume anything, you make an a** out of you, and me.