Customer Journey: How to Drive Profitable Business Growth
It’s easy to lose track of your vision when building a business or product. You spend numerous hours thinking about various innovative features and product nuances while being a part of the process. But having a solid business plan or product only guarantees winning half the marathon. Creating a supporting customer journey to guide your potential customers becomes an imminent requirement to start a sustainable business.
Let’s take, for example, that you have built a great weather app with many cool features. Suppose your potential customers aren’t bothered about the updated features and are only looking to check the weather status. In that case, the real focus of the customer journey needs to be re-evaluated. On your weather app, customers might be least bothered about the new trending features and more focused on the product. They might likely just want to know if it’s going to rain on their commute home. Since the target audience has come to the weather forecast app for one specific thing, the weather status. It is crucial to uncover this information preemptively through a constructive customer journey map.
Since customers are the lifeline of your business, empathizing with your customer’s challenges, pain points, and needs is vital for success. It is a challenge turning first-time users into long-term loyal customers. Since this requires a deep understanding of where your customers are coming from and what they want to do. User journey mapping helps uncover user motivation and intent to create a UX flow that gets users where they want to go. With user journey mapping, you can make many critical changes that help users accomplish their goals faster. Understanding user behavior patterns is an integral part of the process.
Mapping out your customer’s experiences allows you to understand several significant factors that shape the overall perception they will walk away with. Some questions you might ask about your customer’s journey mapping could involve:
- Why did they come onto your website or download the app?
- How easy are the website and app to understand and navigate immediately?
- How long does it take them to accomplish what they came there to do?
- How well does the experience extend across various channels, and where do they run into gaps?
At Tekhne Agency, we look at optimizing the customer journey through 5 core digital consumer behaviors that create a strong impact on your website’s digital transformation.
5 Core Digital Customer Behaviours
- Access
This behavioral pattern focuses more on providing faster and on-demand access to products, services, and experiences. Putting the customer in complete control.
Access Behaviour Pattern Can Include :
- On-Demand Video
- Branchless Banking
- Location Specific Services
- Voice-Activated Devices
If done right, it can result in:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Customer Retention
- Increase in Sales
2. Engage
Engage as a behavioral pattern focuses on gripping content, creating a strong brand connection with the audience. It is now more important to create valuable content in the age of abundance.
Engage Behaviour Pattern Can Include:
- How to Connect Strategies
- Using Data Journalism: which helps to increase engagement with the audience.
If done right, it can result in:
- Increased Website Visits
- Increased Sales
3. Personalize Customer Experience
Providing your customers with a personalized, curated experience can uplift brand confidence and recall. Visitors find customized experiences more memorable as it provides them with a sense of belonging. To customize the user journey, you would need to focus on first-party data, automation, and customer insights.
Personalized Behaviour Pattern Can Include:
- Personalized Ads: Remarketing Ads
- Chatbot Interaction
- First-Party Data Use
- Providing Multiple Product Options
If done right, it can result in:
- Increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Increased Conversion Rate (CRO)
- Increased Average Order Value
4. Connect
The connect behavior pattern helps bridge the gap between customers and the brand, making it a two-way communication channel. This pattern helps build brand loyal customers as they find their recommendations heard and validated by the brand.
Connect Behaviour Pattern Can Include:
- Influencer Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Community Management
If done right, it can result in:
- Increased Word of Mouth
- Increased Customer Loyalty
5. Collaborate
Collaborating behavioral patterns focus on customers who help build and create a brand. Collaboration can result in creative and out-of-the-box ideas and suggestions. This pattern also allows businesses to share a more parallel vision with their customers, empowering both in the process.
Connect Behaviour Pattern Can Include:
- Crowdsourcing
- Rating & Reviews
If done right, it can result in:
- Increased Engagement
- Increased Customer Retention
Behavioral patterns can be essential discovery moments for businesses. It helps shape the crux of customer engagement and customer journey mapping. Digging deeper into your customer’s shoes promises a more personalized experience for the customer and, in turn, becomes beneficial for your business. Let’s look at the benefits of mapping a clear and accurate customer journey.
Benefits of using a customer journey map
1. Possibility to create multiple customer pathways
Since each visitor has a different journey, it becomes imperative to map down various customer personas. This helps plot individual customer journey maps towards your destination pages ( product pages, information pages). By understanding different customer journeys and pathways, you can better anticipate the journey and create a more decisive path for the customer. This helps decrease the bounce rate of the visitors as they can be directed in a conclusive direction.
2. Digging deep into understanding the customer’s perspective
It’s significantly essential to businesses today to understand what a customer wants. Addressing the customer’s needs can make a truly delightful experience through the user journey. Mapping the customer journey guides customers to take a more informed decision and provides an opportunity to the businesses to provide valuable information to the user along the journey.
3. Keeping users informed & updated on new products and features
Knowing your customer journey helps businesses create a more opportunistic pathway leading the customer from new features to updated products. Having a mapped-out journey brings customer delight, and business confidence as probabilities of confusion on the website are drastically reduced. This helps the customer understand the business and vice versa.
4. Target customer personas more intently & accurately
Starting your user journey by creating customer personas is crucial for all businesses. This makes sense of direction to create unique pathways for different users, providing a personalized experience.
5. Improves customer service & brand recall value
Understanding customer requirements provides a sense of certainty and surety to improve customer service. Customer journey mapping will help identify at which points in the journey customers need the most assistance, and then target your customer support efforts towards those aspects. Having a strong customer journey can also bring a sense of delight to the customer, adding brand recall or recognition value to the experience.
Creating a phase-wise plan to make a successful customer journey
It’s important to understand that creating a journey is not enough to promise customer satisfaction and delight. Businesses need to plan the discovery process to create an effective action plan. It’s crucial to develop a phase-wise plan to help monitor and execute the customer journey planning process.
1. Phase One: Create A Visual Customer Experience Map
Creating a visual map is the first step of starting the customer journey discovery process; the visualization process creates a very strong direction plan aiding different aspects of the online journey.
User interface and user experience become a part of the process in a much later stage, supporting this customer journey. A user’s journey map helps you focus on the most significant channels and touchpoints of the overall journey. One can then plan to make different improvements to the UI and UX to customize the experiential aspect of the journey.
2. Phase Two: Focus On Solving A Specific Problem
Many digital businesses face specific pain points and challenges regarding their website experience. Knowing what problems the customer faces helps remove roadblocks and other irritants, providing a smooth journey toward the conversion or completion goal. A smooth journey is directly proportional to a reduction in visitor bounce rate and churn rate.
3. Phase Three: Improve goal alignment
Creating a unique user experience should be a collective effort. It is essential to involve all the stakeholders and create an open environment to collaborate and create. Crossfunctional team collaborations work well as different pain points, gain points, opportunities, and challenges are uncovered. This provides a more expansive approach to customer engagement and journey creation. Align responsibility for specific tasks to stakeholders and create ownership of certain metrics and KPIs. Creating a visual sales funnel also helps optimize your business goals in connecting with customers at different stages of the customer sales funnel.
Customer Journey Mapping is a process that provides a clear view of the user experience by uncovering moments and experiences of both frustration and delight throughout a series of user engagements. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ challenges, roadblocks, and opportunities. CJM helps alleviate fragmentation, distortion of information and, ultimately, create a memorable experience for your website visitors.
Connect with Tekhné Agency to transform your business today.
Written By Anisha Chaudhari
