The buzzword ‘customer-centric approach’ has successfully become a prerequisite for brands to take the step in offering any products or services to customers. Especially with startups, more and more companies are employing using a customer-centric approach, trying to deliver brand experiences to be more than ‘good enough’. In a customer-centric approach, brands go to extensive efforts to enhance the experiences for their customers. After all, there’s nothing better than knowing your customers just like family. Selling things will be much more exciting once we know our customers’ preferences, behaviour and attitudes towards our product. When defining your customer persona, usage and attitude research is one of the ways to see from your customer’s perspective. Brands should also create its customer journey.
Customer journey captures the whole (end-to-end) interaction between a brand and its customers. By mapping and creating the customer journey will it help brands in identifying how their customers interact and also help them in finding ways to improve their customer’s experience with them. Whenever customers purchase your product or service, usually we know it as just the tip of the iceberg, right?
Long before before they purchase, customers do know and are aware of the product from various touch points, even on how a brand’s product or service will solve their pain points. Only after they have collected enough information and are convinced that the product or service will help solve their problem, will they purchase it. Even after so, a bad experience with a product or service will impact negatively to a customer’s sentiment, causing them to influence their future purchases.
There are hands-on learnings and benefits that brands could get from developing the customer journey. In short, customer journey will help you to:
Developing a customer journey is only the first step, the next thing is to have an actionable plan from it. Adam Richardson from HBR explained that there are few questions that you need to answer in order to improve your customer experiences in the customer journey:
Actions: What are customers doing at each stage? What actions are they taking to move themselves onto the next stage? (Don’t list what your company or partners such as retailers are doing here. That will come later when we look at touchpoints)
Motivations: Why is the customer motivated to keep going to the next stage? What emotions are they feeling? Why do they care?
Questions: What are the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues preventing the customer from moving towards the next stage?
Barriers: What structural, process, cost, implementation, or other barriers stand in the way of moving on to the next stage?