customer journey Archives

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When brand strategy fails: 4 ways to use customer journey mapping for brand alignment

November 6, 2023 No Comments

Known’s Liz Hess describes a world where linear customer journeys have given way to a complex matrix of platforms and routes. Worse, attempts to map them too often fall short with internal misalignment.

In today’s fiercely competitive and optimization-obsessed market, understanding and enhancing the customer journey has emerged as a crucial aspect of success. Customers have come to expect personalized, proactive, and anticipatory experiences. Delivering exceptional customer experiences throughout the entire journey is the key to building strong relationships, fostering loyalty, and driving sustainable growth.

The customer journey has become a pivotal concept that empowers organizations. With marketers embracing the idea that excellent customer experiences can be the best advertisement for a brand, customer journey mapping has become an obligatory aspect of go-to-market planning.

To create the seamless experiences that customers have come to expect, marketers dissect customer needs and aggregate an amalgamation of data: marketing metrics to define the details of how customers have been acquired, user research for a step-by-step analysis of the shopper journey, market research gleaned by interviews with customers and survey data, and details on how a buyer persona uses a product. There’s also a treasure trove that can be gleaned from customer touchpoints including email interactions, social media engagement, abandonment of part-filled shopping carts, returns to the site after abandonment, or chats with sales or support representatives.

Welcome to the matrix

The customer journey, once linear, has been replaced by a complex matrix of touchpoints with the customer at the centre. Somewhere along the way, customer journeys have gotten so fluid that we’ve forgotten who and what we’re serving. Marketers need to strive for a dynamic, collaborative, and socialized customer journey that works harder and smarter.

As brand marketers, we often witness clients invest significant time and resources into (and apply painstaking detail to) defining a brand strategy, only to hit a crossroads when socializing the direction among other departments. They fall in love with a vision but struggle to evangelize colleagues with the same energy, vigour, and inspiration.

For companies to live up to their brand promise and keep up with ever-evolving consumer demands, they need to be aligned and involve each division and department. While completely breaking down silos isn’t realistic, a collective journey map can be an effective bridge to connect teams and disciplines. Still, there are a few principles to position the customer journey as a tool for internal alignment.

1. Make it universal

The customer journey shouldn’t live within one department. A customer journey is best used as a tool for building consensus, and a contract between each discipline as to what they’re ultimately working towards.

The map should provide the business with a common language and understanding of how all efforts intersect. All initiatives should stem from the journey by translating customer needs into business rationale.

2. Make it personal

A customer journey map should outline not only how disciplines intersect but also how specific individuals in the company support customers’ needs. This is particularly impactful in healthcare marketing, where it’s been shown that when employees understand how they impact patients’ lives directly, it leads to higher job satisfaction, employee retention, and overall marketing and sales effectiveness. Naming clear roles and responsibilities, escalation protocol, and internal systems creates a sense of collective ownership.

3. Make it actionable

Brand strategies can often fail in implementation. Your brand is everything that you do, so it’s crucial to thread foundational brand elements into the journey. Beyond characterizing your customer, you can also use a journey map to humanize the brand. For instance, we can imagine and define how a brand archetype would behave at critical moments that matter, based on its values and focuses.

4. Make it holistic

Remove the purchase funnel and think about what a customer is really doing before they’re engaging with or thinking about the category. Customers enter and re-enter the funnel at various points, and with different states of mind and needs. Designing these pre-entry points helps us to imagine what motivates a customer, and when.

At times, imagining a category-agnostic customer journey can help widen the aperture to identify moments and touchpoints that can bring a customer into the journey at various stages.

While there are many schools of thought, training courses, and step-by-step guides to creating customer journeys, marketers and brands looking to create a competitive advantage and win need to break convention in favour of utility. Want to create customer journey maps that are enlightening, inspiring, and effective? Flexibility is the key to success.

Feature Image Credit: Amirali Mirhashemian via Unsplash

By Liz Hess

Sourced from The Drum

In News

The messy middle and infinite choice: hacking the complex new consumer journey

June 20, 2022 No Comments

By Annie Little

With the Covid-19 pandemic transforming shopping habits, journey orchestration matters now more than ever before. Digital commerce has shifted the journey stage balance. Annie Little, strategy director at agency Initials, asks whether there is, now, such thing as ‘the’ consumer journey for any given category and explains the complex maze of touchpoints that brands must carefully navigate.

The stakes have never been higher.

Brands need to get a firm grip on how the consumer journey has evolved and update traditional linear purchase funnels from their marketing agenda as a strategic priority.

Here, we’ll look at the evolution of the purchasing journey, the impact this has on consumer behaviour, and how to ensure that (in a sea of endless consumer choice) your brand gets chosen first.

Decision paralysis

The ease with which consumers can access product information has changed the landscape forever.

Gone are the days of a linear purchase journey. With more options and far greater accessibility than ever before, consumers today are spoiled for choice.

While this new world offers countless benefits for brands and retailers, it also adds a new layer of complexity to consumer decision-making. When this complexity reaches a tipping point, it can spiral into ‘decision paralysis’: too much choice, too many options, too hard to decide.

Such an overwhelming wealth of information for consumers to wade through has done the opposite of streamlining the consumer journey. In many ways, these extra touchpoints and decision-factors have created a more complex and cumbersome path to purchase.

A new model for the consumer journey

Some of the savviest brands and retailers have quickly pivoted their consumer engagement strategies, adopting prevailing shoppable touchpoints to remove any immediate friction or pain points for their target audience.

Creating a high-converting omnichannel purchase journey can’t be a checkbox exercise. A more holistic and strategic approach is required, spanning the entire consumer journey and incorporating reciprocal actions at every experience encounter.

This requires, first, an understanding of how the consumer journey has evolved; and, second, insight into how consumers are navigating their way through it.

Let’s start with the former. The ‘messy middle’, coined by Google, is a space of abundant choice and unlimited content. Here, consumers explore and evaluate product information, research brands, and weigh up their options. This is happening across an ever-expanding digital ecosystem, from online channels to social media to search engines, aggregators, review website and much more.

This exposure is not a stage or step in the buying process, but an ‘always-on’ experience. Consumers will traverse the loop between exploration and evaluation many times before making a purchasing decision.

So, how can brands show up at the right moment and win consumer preference?

How to address cognitive biases and win consumer preference

While the initial trigger and purchasing moments still stand in today’s journey, the middle area between the trigger and purchase has become messy and complex.

Due to the constant bombardment that consumers now face, they are turning to a range of coping mechanisms (including cognitive biases) to shortcut indecision and make purchase conclusions.

Cognitive biases are often a result of the brain’s attempt to simplify information processing. In this case, they help consumers make sense of the world and reach decisions with relative speed.

These cognitive biases shape shopping behaviour and influence why we choose one product over another.

By responding to the cognitive biases at play intelligently, responsibly, and at the right moment in the consumer journey, brands can effectively shorten the gap between trigger and purchase and emerge victorious at the point of conversion.

But how do brands pinpoint which biases are at play during a typical purchase journey in their category?

At Initials, we’ve developed a strategic model to help brands hack the consumer journey and win the moments that matter. Since the path to purchase is no longer linear, we can’t afford to think in linear terms.

Our Consumer Journey Hacker is a data-driven and behavioural science-based strategy that helps brands plan for the right stimuli that will impact buyers in key moments.

Understanding behavioural biases does more than just increase advertising effectiveness; it can encourage a deeper psychological understanding of consumers and their cultural norms and nuances. It can inspire new business strategies and products.

These behavioural science principles (and the behavioural and informational needs they align with) are powerful tools for winning and defending consumer preference in the new complex consumer journey.

The goal is close the gap between trigger and purchase. This means consumers spend less time exposed to competitor brands and transition to your basket faster and with greater confidence.

In a sea of overwhelming choice, this is how your brand can emerge victorious.

By Annie Little

Sourced from The Drum

In News

A Look at the Way Organizations Are Using Voice of the Customer

January 25, 2022 No Comments

By Phil Britt

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are evolving from basic survey and customer feedback programs to more comprehensive programs that companies are using in a variety of ways for a mix of benefits.

In the 2021 Insight Voice of the Customer Survey, global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners found that half of the companies it surveyed had VoC programs.

Those that aren’t could be missing out because VoC programs have the potential to drive considerable company ROI by driving product innovation, demand gen, and higher rates of retention, Insight Partners said in a blog. “As a company’s customer base grows, VoC offers a scalable customer engagement platform that doubles up to generate rich customer insights while also fostering customer-centricity, brand affinity, and product stickiness.”

According to Levi Kugel, Quantum Metric director of customer success strategy, accelerating customer satisfaction is a key element but what’s going on in the trenches out there in organization’s. In a recent roundtable, a couple of Insight’s portfolio companies discussed their uses of VoC programs.

Using Voice of the Customer to Influence Strategy

VoC was in the founding DNA of the company with simple customer onboarding and exit surveys, said Real CMO Lynda Radosevich. “Then we started doing qualitative surveys to get more insight into what people were happy or unhappy with. Our VoC influences our product direction and strategy. What I most appreciate is that we have data going back to the beginning. Don’t be afraid to start gathering, even if you don’t have a strategy yet. You will find uses for it. We’ve used data for investors, we’ve used it for product roadmaps, we’ve used it to completely change our quarterly goals.”

Beyond the different VoC uses discussed by Quantum Metric and Real, other organizations are deploying VoC programs for other uses.

Creating and Organizing Comprehensive VoC Feedback

“VoC is an ‘essential’ — brands need to meet their customers where they are, whether that’s SMS, web, mobile app, social, or other digital channels, in order to fully capture the right insights at the right moment across the right channel,” said Jonathan D’Sousa, Emplifi vice president, product, social commerce cloud and service cloud. “It’s increasingly important to have VoC platforms support omnichannel feedback, and to be able to scale and support new channels on the horizon. This is especially the case with social media channels and their constant evolution.

VoC is becoming an integrated capability, D’Sousa added. “Customers are moving away from stand-alone survey tools, and look to VoC capabilities integrated within their marketing, customer service, and social commerce software tools and platforms. This is because ‘customer experience’ is relevant throughout the customer journey from marketing to sale to service to loyalty, and these touchpoints (and associated data) help shape VoC research.”

Many tools now provide templated surveys and feedback frameworks on everything from website design, product design, employee response surveys to typical service representative or brand experience feedback — this allows organizations to focus more on analysis and less on survey design.

Better Organization of Customer Journey Feedback

Too often feedback is merely thrown at executives without the proper context of who gave it, when it was received and where along the customer journey the feedback came in, according to David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.

To better organize such feedback, whoever is leading the VoC program needs to distill the customer journey into four or five steps, Ciccarelli said. “By keeping it high level and everyone agrees that those are the critical touch points, then plotting feedback along the journey will provide the missing context. By doing this it’s easier for executives to see and understand where the issues are and the volume of feedback at key touch points.”

Companies are then organizing the customer journey and highlighting comments in speech bubbles, coloured red, yellow or green depending on the sentiment.

Voice of the Customer Is Helping to Replace Cookies

“As the death of the cookie slowly overtakes advertisers and developers’ plans, first-party data has taken on a role of increased importance –– with the Voice of the Customer leading the charge,” said Anatoly Sharifulin, AppFollow CEO and founder. “Average rating and reviews are the most honest source of feedback from users and should be considered as the window to the voice of the customer. Understanding how users are feeling, and how they are communicating their ideas and perceptions is key to opening important conversations about your product.

Final Thoughts

Your customers hold the key to your business’ success. Voice of the Customer is an essential way of cracking that customer code to help improve your product, services and support.

Feature Image Credit: Unsplash/Roman Kraft

By Phil Britt

Sourced from CMSWire

In News

The Inevitable Convergence of Social Media, Commerce, and Visual Content

July 6, 2021 No Comments

By Paul Melcher,

You walk through the supermarket aisle until you face various choices for the product you wish to eat. In the case of cereals, it can be 20 or more different options. You reach out and pick one, which you feel is the right decision based on a well-educated process.

In fact, when you make that decision, you are executing on thousands of messages received during most of your entire lifetime—each one with the sole purpose of influencing that decision. In commerce, that purchasing act is called the second moment of truth. The moment when millions of dollars of marketing (at least for cereal companies) is converted into a purchase decision.

Traditionally, the two have been geographically and historically separated. You receive marketing messages at breakfast while reading your daily digest on your phone, and you will be buying in the late afternoon.

Ecommerce, for most of its brief existence, has followed the same schema. Advertising here, shopping there. But not anymore. Everything is converging to one all-encompassing moment of truth at one place and one time, with visual content at its core. The customer journey is now reduced to an instant and one visual.

There are three main steps in a customer journey:

The awareness of the product
The consideration of the product
The purchase of the product

Up to now, they all happened at different places and over time. Now, it’s all converging at one place and time and all within one visual content.

Nowhere can this be experienced more than on social media since we spent most of our time. All platform owe their success and operate with visual content as their core interface. Stage one was to use those visuals to capture audiences. Stage 2 two was to transform those views into advertising; stage three adds a “buy” button: Discovery, conversion, purchase, now all in one image or video.

Instagram displays an ad every 3 to 4 posts and uses retargeting profusely. Each ad contains multiple visuals introducing a product you have shown interest in and leading to a shop now button. That one image or video contains the whole customer journey.

The numbers confirm the story: 81% of people out of over 1 billion use Instagram every month to help research products and services. With an average conversion rate of 1.85 percent, that’s 14 million clicks on a “buy” button of an image every month.

Identical scenario for Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snap. Photography has a new role, one much harder to master. It has to introduce, convince, and sell all within one frame. It has to capitalize on the instant attention span. With video, it’s an identical challenge, all within the maximum of 60 seconds granted by most social media platforms. For brands, the bar is making the brutal journey feel seamless, which is why they rely on influencers’ expertise. They have mastered converting content into captive audiences and come with built-in trust. All that is needed is the “buy” button.

The product now comes to you, fully packaged with all the information you might need to make a purchase decision, including the cash register. Everything is transformed into an impulse buy, one carefully vetted via retargeting by your shown interest. All compressed in one frame or 60-second video, right next to those party pix of last night shared by you BFF.

Shop and share. The lines are blurred. Your friends, brands, product, purchase, parties are all part of the same flow. Click Like here, click buy there; who is that at my front door? A delivery or a friend? The beginning and end of your buyer journey are all in here, in one frame.

By Paul Melcher

Paul Melcher is a photography and technology entrepreneur based in New York, and the founder of Kaptur, a news magazine about the visual tech space. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his writings on his blog, Thoughts of a Bohemian. Melcher offers his services as a consultant as well. This article was also published here.

Sourced from PetaPixel