In a nutshell: The customer journey is the process through which a customer interacts with a company to achieve a goal. This guide covers: Set clear goals, Examples of goals based on customer profiles, Survey your customers, List all touchpoints.
The customer journey is the process through which a customer interacts with a company to achieve a goal. From becoming aware of a brand through marketing channels to receiving an email after a successful transaction, the steps involved are generally numerous and varied.
These journeys are not linear paths from point A to point B. Buyers often follow a round-trip, cyclical, and multichannel journey that encompasses the purchasing process, user actions, emotions, pain points, and solutions.
To create the ideal customer journey that protects your brand’s image and leads to sustained sales, it’s important to follow a methodical process that incorporates the following tips.
1. Set clear goals for yourself
The first step is to define the goals you're currently working toward so you don't feel overwhelmed by the wide range of potential improvements.
Here are a few examples of objectives based on the profile:
IT → Are you looking to accelerate your move to production and ensure that the various technical components function properly during acceptance testing and in production?
Role → You want to develop new features to boost sales, enhance your company’s brand image, improve the user experience, and identify bugs in your customer journeys before your customers notice them.
QA → You want to identify quality issues and gain better control over processes and deadlines.
2. Survey your customers
What you know about the customer experience and what users actually experience can be two very different things.
Ask your customers directly what it's like to do business with your company to gain a clearer picture of the customer journey. One way to do this is by using surveys.
You want to get feedback from people who are genuinely interested in purchasing your products and services and who have already interacted with your company or are considering doing so.
3. List all points of contact
A touchpoint in a customer journey is an instance where your customer can form an opinion about your company. Touchpoints can be found wherever your company comes into direct contact with a potential or existing customer.
Your brand extends beyond your website and mobile app. It is therefore important to consider the various types of touchpoints in your customer journey, as they can help you identify opportunities for improvement.
For example, other touchpoints might include your display ads, interactions with employees, a 404 error, and even a Google review.
4. Ask customer service representatives what questions they receive most frequently
Sometimes, customers aren't aware of specific weaknesses—they just feel that something isn't working for them.
That's where your customer service representatives come in. They can help fill in the gaps and translate customers' pain points into business terms that you and your team can understand and put into practice.
5. Create buyer personas and define their goals
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
It’s easy to assume that every customer behaves the same way, but nothing could be further from the truth. Demographic and psychographic data—and even how long someone has been a customer—can influence how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.
Group the general themes into buyer personas and map out the customer journey for each one.
When creating your buyer personas, be sure to include customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
Highlight your target customer personas
Once you’ve identified the different customer personas who interact with your business, you should focus on one or two of them and think about the path they typically take when they first interact with your business.
6. Determine which tools are needed to improve the customer journey
Your customer journey touches on nearly every aspect of your business. It’s important to take stock of the resources you have available and those you’ll need to improve the customer journey.
For example, your customer journey may have shortcomings in terms of customer service, and you may notice that your team lacks the tools needed to properly follow up with customers after a service interaction. You can recommend that management invest in customer service tools that will help your team manage customer requests.
7. Run automated tests for technical and functional issues
A ready-to-use, no-code automated testing tool lets you detect bugs on your website, mobile apps, and APIs by simulating user journeys—no technical skills required.
With these SaaS solutions, issues that can severely disrupt your user journey are easily identified, ensuring high value and saving your team time.
8. Follow the customer journey yourself
The entire process of improving the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it for yourself. For each of your personas, follow the path they take—from their social media activity to reading their emails to conducting online searches.
9. Make the necessary changes clearly
Your data analysis should identify what changes need to be made and where. In addition to fixing obvious bugs, this could also include adding call-to-action links or writing better product descriptions to avoid potential misunderstandings.
Instead of making changes blindly and hoping they'll improve the customer experience, you can now be certain that they will.
10. Don't wait until your solution goes live to identify friction points in your user journeys
Whenever your product or service changes, the customer's purchasing process changes as well. Even a minor change, such as adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant obstacle for customers.
It is important to review the customer journey before and after the changes are implemented and to conduct end-to-end tests.
Need help improving your user experience?
Creating a seamless and efficient customer journey requires careful planning, but when it comes to improving your customer journey, you don’t have to go it alone at every step!
There are several factors to consider when improving the user journey: identifying your customers’ journeys through your applications using methods such as A/B testing, and ensuring that at a minimum, “highway”-type customer journeys (the most critical ones) are secure. Mr Suricate a turnkey SaaS solution that allows you to easily automate testing of your customer journeys to provide your customers with a bug-free experience.
FAQ
Here are a few examples of goals based on the profile: ?
IT → Are you looking to accelerate your move to production and ensure that the various technical components function properly during acceptance testing and in production?
Need help improving your user experience?
Creating a seamless and efficient customer journey requires careful planning, but when it comes to improving your customer journey, you don’t have to go it alone at every step!