You have their attention. What will you do with it next? If you play your cards right, you can turn casual browsers into customers and customers into brand advocates through customer journey optimisation. What you’re looking for is a way to offer people who are navigating your sales funnel a smooth and engaging customer experience.
Make supporting your business a pleasure, and your customers will be pleased to be back. Beginning with the basics, we’ll share our experience and the inspirations we’ve uncovered to help you make customer journey optimisation work for your business.
What is Customer Journey Optimisation?
It is what it says it is, but it says a mouthful. It’s a process that begins with analysing how customers experience your business, finding ways to improve it, and adding personal touches that matter to them.
Understanding and improving customer journeys help you market your business better and may improve your sales, but it does much more than that. Understand customer needs better; discover the emotions that drive them; get a deep understanding of their preferences; and make every touchpoint a pleasurable experience.
Why is it Important to Optimise Customer Journeys?
Need we say it? It’s a competitive world out there. Even if your product is unique, there are other things people can spend their time and money on. The truth is, almost all businesses need their customers far more than their customers need them. Give them a great journey with you, and you can:
- Increase conversions: Reduce the number of people who drop off at every stage of your sales funnel.
- Boost customer satisfaction: Make your customers glad they found you and eager to return.
- Improve customer retention: Leave them reluctant to so much as consider taking their business elsewhere.
- Build your brand’s reputation: Get referrals and glowing reviews.
- Invest where it matters: Use your marketing budget profitably.
Customer journey optimisation isn’t a minor consideration or just a term that sounds pretty. It’s a strategy that could become your competitive edge. Plus, your customers will love it, so you have a win-win situation in which everybody benefits.
How to Optimise Customer Journeys
So far, so good. Everything sounds lovely, but how do you actually do this? It’s a process, and we have a roadmap. The only complexity is that you’ll keep circling back, taking new information on board, refining, adapting, and improving it as you go. Presented as a linear process, here’s what you will do.
Assess the Customer Journey as it is Now
You can’t improve what you don’t understand, so this is your starting point. You should have all the data to answer a few key questions, and that gives you guidance on what to do next. Find out:
- Where customers commonly begin their interactions with you.
- What steps do they follow as they move toward making a purchase?
- Where they appear to become confused, frustrated, or walk away.
The first of these points tells you how customers arrive at your virtual “door,” and should give you insights into what their expectations are. The second helps you to spot the most important steps on their journeys, and the third uncovers pain points that may surprise you.
Define Your Ideal Customer
You can sell to everybody, but you can’t optimise every journey for every possible type of person. Your ideal customers are the people who spend the most money on your products, and you’re almost sure to find they have some things in common.
For example, if your top customers are busy thirty-something professionals shopping for attractive products in their leisure time, they will likely value presentation, speed, and convenience over in-depth product information.
If they are executives looking for solutions that boost company efficiency, on the other hand, they will be more information-driven, more inclined to take their time over purchasing decisions, and more likely to want personal attention.
Ask Your Current Customers For Feedback
Customers can give you better insights than any amount of introspection can. Get their points of view from short post-purchase surveys and customer experience metrics like net promoter scores. If they are willing to share more, allow them to opt in for a phone call or invite them to write some notes about what worked for them, what they loved, and why, and anything they would like to see improved.
Your customer support teams will have gathered excellent data, too. Don’t miss the opportunity to ask them for their overall impressions, and analyse data on what customers needed help with.
Offer Optimised Omnichannel Touchpoints – But Only If You Can Do It Well
Every touchpoint on the customer journey, from landing pages to checkouts, should be optimised for positive customer experiences. Points of contact are extra important. Different customers prefer different channels, and they will connect with your business based on their preferences. Some love email, others prefer social media, and others prefer phone calls or live chat. Omnichannel experiences reach a wide audience, and from awareness to purchase, your channels should offer a smooth and pleasant journey.
Every interaction, even when customers don’t communicate, offers you valuable insights. When customers reach out, regardless of channel, don’t leave them waiting. If you don’t have the people or the tech to do this, consider outsourcing. The more channels customers have to gain impressions, make enquiries, and have their feedback acknowledged, the more you can learn about their journeys and perfect them.
Personalise and Make it Easy for Customers to Talk to You
It’s not just a matter of data gathering; it’s a matter of service. If people do get stuck, need advice, or want more information they can’t find, having informed people available to give them the service is a huge plus.
Too many businesses seem to think that sending out emails with a customer’s name in the subject line amounts to “personalisation.” What customers want is human contact. For example, a survey found that 78 percent of customers see automated experiences as impersonal, while 80 percent of chief marketing officers saw them as a solution.
While automation can work for routine transactions and queries, it should still be possible for customers to get in-person assistance quickly and easily, a challenge that can easily be overcome with the right partnerships.
Blending tech with connection, customers see true personalisation as being “recognised” when they talk to agents. They expect them to know about previous interactions, and if they do not, “personal” service falls flat and is seen as impersonal – a big bugbear for financial services customers that applies across industries.
Extra Tips to Optimise Customer Journeys
Watch Your Checkout
You can do everything right, but if your checkout process isn’t easy, doesn’t offer preferred payment methods, or customers discover hidden charges when they reach checkout, you may lose them. See whether you are getting this deal-clinching part of the customer journey right by keeping an eye on cart abandonment.
Stay on Top of Analytics
Monitor your analytics to get extra insights. Learn how customers navigate transactions and eliminate unnecessary or confusing steps. The silent majority that never reaches out for support may be leaving your sales funnel for easily-rectifiable reasons. Work to spot them.
Get Everyone on Board
Make sure everyone on your team understands your commitment to customer journey optimisation. Encourage them to share insights and ideas, and be ready to test new approaches. Customers don’t always think and behave according to our expectations, so be ready for some surprises.
Optimise Beyond Conversion
Carry customer journey optimisation through to customer lifecycle management. Winning a customer is a victory. Keeping them is a triumph. Ensure customer success, and let them know you are there for them throughout.
Customer Journey Optimisation Partnerships and How We Help
It’s rare for businesses to do everything in-house. Outsourcing often offers scalable solutions and access to expertise you can’t afford to provide for. For example, most companies outsource marketing functions. Ensure that these partners are aligned with your goals so that customers have consistent experiences.
Many businesses are hesitant to outsource customer service and customer lifecycle management. Limited capacity in these areas could be the downfall of your customer journey optimisation strategies. That’s where RSVP can help.
Our London-based business process outsourcing service partners with brands, trains agents, and gathers the data you need to win and keep more customers. We work for measurable improvements, beginning with in-house equivalence as a starting point.
Read our case studies to see how this could look for your business, and get in touch to discuss your customer journey optimisation goals. We look forward to generating a tailor-made proposal showing how we can help you achieve your aims. Start today. Grow tomorrow.