You’ve gone and done it. You’ve acquired a new customer. Your marketing and sales team are celebrating, and thinking up strategies to acquire more customers. All’s well in your company. Now, what happens to the newly acquired customer? After being convinced by sales and marketing, they now meet the real you. The point is, the sale is never the end of a customer journey. It’s only the beginning.
After the initial conversion, your customers meet you again and again. Be it service and support interactions, billing queries, store visits, or installations and returns.
The quality of these repetitive interactions decide whether you will
So, providing an effortlessly delightful experience at these touchpoints is the glue that holds your business together.
“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”
– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction
An excellent customer experience that lasts the entire journey is the only effective way to retain existing customers. Customer retention is a good indicator of business health. In fact,
Clearly, customer retention pays off.
The traditional, linear customer journey doesn’t exist anymore.
Now, customer journeys are non-linear, multi-channel and spread across several devices.
The journey doesn’t stop after conversion. In fact, we would argue that the most important parts of the customer journey begin after the first conversion.
This is what a modern customer journey looks like.
Stage 1. Awareness: A prospective customer becomes aware of your brand: They stumble upon your product/service through an ad, social media, website, or word of mouth.
Stage 2. Engagement: They consume your content, chat with your bot, sign up for more details, and request a callback from you. Your sales team explains the product further and makes them aware of benefits.
Offline, they visit your store and talk to the store executives.
Stage 3. Conversion: They get convinced that your product is a fit for them and buy.
Stage 4. Onboarding: You onboard the customer, set up the product for them and give them a demo (in case of consumer durables)
Stage 5. Service and support: As the customer uses your product, they contact customer care for resolving upcoming queries. For automobiles and consumer durables, they periodically visit the contact center for servicing.
Stage 6. Retention and Referral: The customer keeps using your product. They are so delighted by your product that they recommend it to their friends and family.
As shown by the above journey, a customer’s opinion about a business is formed after a series of interactions. If you look at those interactions in silos, you miss the big pictures.
For instance, analyzing the satisfaction with the purchase experience separately from the satisfaction with other touchpoints (support, service, query resolution) only shows half of the story.
Now that we’ve covered what a modern customer journey looks like, here’s how you can map it-
The first step is to select the touchpoints you want to measure. These touchpoints will broadly fall into 4 categories.
Once you’ve selected your touchpoints, the next step is to monitor customer behavior around these touchpoints. This basically means listening to what your customers are saying at each of these touchpoints.
The next step is to define the metrics you wish to measure. These metrics define the customer journey analysis and will be displayed on the dashboard.
Monitor the entire customer journey in real-time to know what’s going on.
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Create automated real-time alerts for important physical and digital touchpoints. This will empower your team to take immediate action on customer feedback. By prioritizing Close Looping and closure of Hot Tickets, you can improve customer experience and your retention rate.
While it’s important to have a bird’s eye view of what’s happening with your customers, high-value insights usually hide in individual customer journeys.
With Numr, you can view individual journeys for actionable, granular insights that can not be obtained any other way. This attention to detail is what makes your customer experience truly the best in the market.
Customer Journey Mapping gives you the power to understand your customer's mind and predict future behavior. Predict renewal and churn to stay one step ahead of your customers.
In this ‘new’ world, product differentiation is almost dead. There is virtually no difference between an Uber and Lyft, or a Doordash and Skip-the-Dishes or a Citi and Chase.
The ONLY way a company can differentiate itself is through customer experience. Most companies measure customer spends, support interactions, website visits, but do not look at the entire customer journey.
Your customers don’t view your company in parts. For them- ads, social media posts, in-store experience, support interaction, online reviews - come together to form one experience.
Analyzing one portion of the customer journey in isolation will never show you the real picture. The whole story is a combination of numerous, minute interactions over a period of time that can only be understood by looking at the entire customer journey, in all its chaos and glory.
Want to join the dots on your customer journey?
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