customer journey management
Marketing & Advertising

Get Your Customers to Love You With Customer Journey Management

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Your entire business success is dependent on your customer’s journey. If you ask yourself what that means, then this guide to customer journey management will help you. You can learn to deliver the customer experience that your customers expect from your brand.

Customer journey management is not a marketing campaign. It’s a strategy that seeks to improve the customer journey by establishing value and trust in your company.

This strategy is vital to all customer-centric organizations. Those who master it will see an increase in satisfied customers.

What Is Customer Journey Management?

Journey management is an approach that researches, monitors, measures, and optimizes the journey. The three primary journey management capabilities are journey mapping, journey analytics, and journey orchestration.

Customer journey management focuses on the bigger picture for the customer experience. It isn’t about the single transaction but the customer lifetime value.

Even if your company has adopted customer feedback management, it doesn’t include the entire customer experience with increased customer satisfaction.

customer journey management map
Customer Journey Road from Thematic

The Closed Loop Approach

Customer journey management is a closed-loop approach. It provides journey owners with actionable insights, allowing them to optimize the customer experience.

There are four elements to this journey. It all starts with customer data which companies use to get a good idea of who their customers are.

Next, the customer journey data gets segmented into different buckets to identify what phase of the journey they are in. Marketing partners then take over. These teams use internal processes for customer engagement to send out emails, push notifications, and SMS offers.

If your business is unfamiliar with these forms of marketing, consider hiring the services from a specialised email marketing agency.

Finally, the loop closes as the company uses journey analytics to see what customers respond to messages and where they are in the journey.

What Is Successful Journey Management?

A successful journey management-driven company will align its company around the customer experience. Your management team will know what customer journey is and what types of journeys to manage.

The company will have a proven track record of success by setting goals and achieving them.

Success starts with customer journey mapping.

What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping is the key to journey optimization. The customer journey map is a visual of your customer’s experience.

The map tells a story, across all touchpoints, of what your customer’s experience with your brand has been like. This puts journey managers into the shoes of their journey management customers.

There are seven steps to mapping the journey. Each step is essential for both your customers’ satisfaction and your brand’s success.

What Are The Seven Steps To Map The Customer Journey?

The term customer journey refers to not a single interaction but the customer’s entire experience. It’s every experience the customer goes through when interacting with your company or brand.

This is a crucial journey that starts from the first contact and lasts until the customer leaves.

An organization focused on customer goals will want to control the customer flow. They will need to prioritize underperforming journeys to maximize the experience.

Creating this map is the first step to drive and support journey success scores.

Know Your Journey Metrics

You don’t get in your car without knowing where you are going. The first step to mapping your journey is to set goals and targets. When you start your map, you should know the answers to the who, what, where, and why.

Define Your Personas, Know Your Target Customer

Your journey management team will spend some time creating fictional customer profiles. These personas should consider demographics, personality, and shopping trends.

Personas of Sortlist Clients

Interviews, surveys, and other market research are invaluable in creating these profiles.

They should include many ‘why’ questions. You want as much insight into customer behavior and motivation as you can get.

Find Motivations And Pain Points

While this is still part of creating a buyer persona, it’s important to highlight it in more depth. The management customer journey is different from the customer’s journey.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand what motivates them and stops them from buying. It is an important step in the mapping journey.

Know the Four Elements Of The Journey

What are the four elements of the customer journey? They are awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. This flows with the creation of the buyer persona.

By this point, you should ask and answer the question: What stage of the buying journey is my customer in?

Optimize Your Touchpoints

Your touchpoints are the way a customer encounters your product or service. These are all the moments of interaction that can impact the journey performance.

You can predict journey success by mapping out potential customer experiences across all touchpoints. This will ensure you leave the best impression.

The rate of abandonment on mobile shopping carts is near 85%.

Knowing why customers abandon those carts allows you to optimize the experience and convert those carts. It could be optimizing the speed of your site or changing the interface to be more intuitive; either way, you need to know!

Embrace The Feedback

64% of customers want a meaningful interaction with their brands.

Moments of truth are significant points in the journey that drive better business outcomes. Your customers learn to trust your brand when their experience influences their opinion. One of the keys to creating that positive influence lies in your customer’s feedback.

A telecom provider striving to learn more about their customers’ demand may include surveys with their bills. This data collection can then be used on the customer journey map to improve the experience.

Optimization Is An Ongoing Process

If your map isn’t working out and your business outcomes haven’t been met, go back and revise. You must be ready to adapt to changes in customer journeys and expectations.

Even if you see success on your map, you should always be looking for improvements in the journey.

The Benefits and Value Of Using Customer Journey Management

By mapping the journey of your customers, your business can optimize journeys that will improve your customer’s overall experience, which will positively impact overall customer loyalty and retention

Did you know that nine out of ten consumers read online reviews before purchasing a product or service?

Customers today have plenty of choices on not just where to shop, but how to shop. In 2020 alone, 80% of consumers across the world shopped online.

Your customer’s feedback is important and should be used to improve their experience. That’s why customer journey management is so important.

If you can map out your journey, you can identify customers with the highest lifetime value. Once you identify them you can keep engaging them as they move through the marketing funnel.

Optimize Your Customer Experience

Journey management allows you to identify parts of customer journeys that need improvement. This will enable you to prove a consistent and positive experience across all customers’ journeys.

For example, let’s look at what a mortgage journey encompasses.

A financial services institution attempting to make it easier for customers to make payments can look for in journey signals that indicate customers’ challenges with making loan payments on time.

When the insights are reviewed, the institution may better understand customer behavior and roll out a process that focuses on initiating automatic loan payments with existing customers.

AI Machine Learning Make It Easy For You To Track

Machine learning is a data analysis method that can imitate the way humans learn and simulate experience based on that. AI will generate journey insights.

Those insights will aid you in the customer journey management approach. CX and marketing teams can use these insights to offer customers the right offer at the right moment for your customers.

Increase Revenue While Improving Customer Journeys

Customer-centric enterprises use customer journey management software to analyze journey data. This software is needed to track journey success. By analyzing customer behavior data, you know what your customer expectations are.

Many data consulting agencies team up with various business’ to help them with this task.

Become empowered to support your customers better with a customer journey management program.

The Final Step Of Your Journey

You want your business to be unique against your competitors, and to achieve that goal you need customer journey management. Success lies in data and analytics and how you bring these together to optimize the experience of your customers.

Today’s consumers rely on experiences and are ready to shout them out on social media for all to see. It isn’t about the single experience, but the entire journey. Businesses should focus on creating a customer base filled with loyal, long-term customers who keep coming back to you for what they need.

Focus on improving your customer interactions with journey management. As CX evolves, your company needs to pivot to meet changing demands and expectations. Your customer is the most important part of your business, the focus will always be on them if you’re using this approach.

Your customers will thank you for it.

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