How Improving Your Customer Journey Can Increase Your Sales

So, why should you worry about the journey a customer takes with your business?

Quite simply, if they have a bad experience then they are unlikely to return. Worse than that, they will tell all their friends and family about the bad experience they had. Suddenly, your reputation is in hot water.

The customer journey is a vital thing to get right. Luckily there are lots of ways you can do that. Let’s take a look...

Creating The Right Customer Journey

The journey a customer takes with your business can be straightforward or more complicated. It depends on how they find you, how well they know your business already, and what happens in the process.

A key thing to remember is that each touch point is an opportunity to interact with, and improve the experience of your customers.

These touch points don’t have to involve a direct interaction with someone in your business. It could be when someone comes across your advertising either in print or online, when they visit your website, when they access online support, or when they sign up for a promotions list or loyalty scheme while checking out.

Interactions can happen at any time of the day or night. You may or may not be working at the time they happen. That is why it is important to make every client facing interaction easy and valuable for the customer.

It is also worth noting that not all of your customers will have the same journey. Some will engage exclusively online or exclusively in person. Some might start their journey by engaging with ads or promotions, and others might start from word-of-mouth or just stumbling across a shop.

Understanding The Customer Journey

In order to understand your customer journey, you have to know what it is! Spend some time mapping the customer journey process for your business. It begins with the first interaction they have with your business, and should not end there. Hopefully, it continues on towards the delivery of a product or service, and then repeat business and staying in touch long term.

Think about what your customer is experiencing with each interaction. Then, look at your opportunities for improvement. Is there anything in your current process that is actually acting as an obstacle to the delivery of good service?

To ensure the best customer journey possible, your service should be cohesive and synchronised across all channels. The key to doing this is by effectively managing and monitoring the process. Check your analytics and ensure each piece of the puzzle is operating as it should.

A customer requires consistent connection and feedback to feel comfortable with your brand. This is leading up to their purchase, during the buying process, and after they have taken delivery. Ongoing connection with them establishes brand recognition, targets their interests, and offers rewards for their engagement.

Using The Tools At Your Disposal

Streamlining and automating the tasks involved is important for offering a great and cohesive service. It is unrealistic to personally contact every customer at each point in the journey. So automation is the key to efficiently staying in touch.

Automation itself can be a difficult thing to master, especially when you have a number of different processes and providers feeding into the same journey. That's why it's is better to have a complete approach, where all the automation components are designed to work together.

There are lots of ways that you can use automation in your business. It definitely makes it easier for you to keep in touch with your customers. You can utilise certain “triggers” to prompt connection opportunities, for example:

• “We haven’t seen you log in for a while! How are things going?”. Including a feedback survey or customer support details would be useful here.
• Abandoned cart messages - “You have left something in your cart for over 48 hours”. A discount code or free shipping voucher could entice them to complete the purchase. Sometimes they just need a simple reminder to get them to re-engage with the process.
• “Are you satisfied with your last purchase?”. Send this after a week or two with a simple “sentiment feedback” option such as selecting a happy or sad face emoticon.
• “Thank you for your feedback on your purchase – we can see that something went wrong”. If your customer highlights an issue in their feedback, a response can be automated to provide steps and/or contact details for remedying the situation.
• You can also use this automation to upsell. For example, promote products that relate to items they have previously purchased, or send a monthly recap of items they previously searched for with relevant discounts or specials.

As you can see, the customer journey can support the purchase process, seamlessly directing your customers own the path to buying, or it can obstruct it. Understanding your customer journey, ensuring all touch points are positive, and always looking to improve your processes will ensure a great experience with your brand.

Here at Fuel, we specialise in website software that puts all of this customer journey automation in one place. This makes it easier for you to manage the customer journey and automation process and keep in touch with customers. That in turn, creates more satisfaction and repeat business.

If you are interested in knowing how this software could work for growing your business, then get in touch with us today.