At any one time, your customers are all at different stages of their journey. They might be new customers, just signing-on, returning customers, making a repeat purchase, or customers that have churned and left for a competitor.
Customer Emotions Change at Each Stage of their Journey
People become loyal to a brand because of the experiences they have through their whole customer journey. It isn’t about a single interaction; it’s the cumulative effect of every engagement that they have with a brand.
By measuring customer journeys, rather than individual interaction, we can start to create a picture of how customers are likely to feel at each stage. Then, using this insight, we can start to deliver the right support to the right people at the right time in the journey.
Understand the Hurdles Customers Face in their Journey
With a complete picture of a customer journey, it’s possible to start identifying the choke points in this journey. Are there common drop-off points, where people fail to move onto the next stage? Or lengthy delays in the progress of their journey
These choke points could be minor frustrations, such as slow responses to a question. But they could be more serious and could even prevent customers from completing a purchase. Using analysis of your customer journeys can help you to remove friction for the customer?
Recognise the Most Emotive Parts of a Customer’s Journey
If you know when the most emotive points are for the customer, then you can pre-empt the most important moments. Don’t put yourself in the reactive position – instead, try to smooth out the journey by being proactive in these highly emotive moments.
Here’s an example from Harvard Business Review, which explains how the emotional drivers change: ‘In banking, the desire to “feel secure” is a critical motivator when attracting and retaining customers early on. When cross-selling products later, the wish to “succeed in life” becomes more important. To maximise results, companies must align their emotional-connection strategies with their specific customer engagement objectives: acquisition, retention, cross-selling, and so on’.
Recognise the Needs of Different Customer Segments
While analysing customer journeys shows the overall behavioural trends, segmenting this data by different customer groups will give greater insight. For example, if you use demographic information to segment this customer data, you may find that different age groups have different expectations during their journey.
Using this information, you can start to change your processes to meet their needs. For example, you might find that younger customers are more comfortable using email or text to communicate with a brand but older customers prefer to use the phone. It might sound obvious, but many brands still force customers to engage using the channel that is easiest for them - not for the customer.
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