The customer journey: become the tour guide for your customers

Warning: If you're in dire need of a vacation right now, this article could have a triggering effect.

Because now it's about traveling. Okay, maybe not that kind of traveling that wistfully recalls to us the smell of sunscreen and the feeling of sand under our feet.

But it's an important kind of journey. One that companies organize day in, day out and on which, unfortunately, far too often passengers get left behind. Or aren't even picked up in the first place.

We're talking about the customer journey. That adventure customers embark on when they get in touch with your company.
And which automatically makes you the tour guide. After all, organizing the course of the journey lies with you.

That puts you before an important decision: Do you leave your customers to themselves at the first opportunity? Or do you offer them an all-around great experience? One they return home happy from and tell family and friends about?

If you prefer the second variant, then in the following lines you'll learn more about the significance of a successful customer journey. But careful, further vacation puns are included. With this topic, they simply impose themselves too much.

We start our excursion into the topic with the decisive question:

What actually is the customer journey?

Translated literally from English, customer journey stands for the customer's journey. Equivalent terms like buyer's journey or user journey are also readily used for it.

What at first moment sounds like a sales-trip-with-subsequent-mattress-sale is actually an element from design thinking. Companies here quite deliberately imagine which steps a customer goes through until they decide on a product or a service. This development from prospect to consumer is the customer journey.

The logic behind it is simple: If you really want to understand your customers and ideally respond to their needs, then you have to embark on their journey.

View the experience of your consumers from their perspective, from the beginning to the end of your relationship. With the help of this analysis, you gain valuable insights and can identify potentials for improvement in your marketing and sales process.

The phases of a customer journey

Various models exist to depict the customer journey. The number and names of the phases listed vary depending on the approach.

Basically, most modern versions of the customer journey are based on the following steps:

• Awareness – A person becomes aware of your product or your service for the first time.
  Example: You're a tour operator and a backpacker learns of your offer of a round trip through Asia.
• Consideration – Once you've sparked the potential customer's interest, the phase of consideration begins. In this, the prospect informs themselves via various sources, researches pros and cons and compares different providers.
  Example: The backpacker first reads up on the internet and compares your offer with that of other travel agencies.
• Conversion/Purchase – The prospect decides on the purchase and thus becomes your customer.
  Example: The backpacker books your round trip through Asia.
• Gathering experiences (Retention) – In the next step, the customer receives their product or takes the service. This phase is essential for the buyer's satisfaction with their decision, which is why contact and customer service take on a special role here.
  Example: The backpacker travels to Asia and you're available to them before, during and after the trip with your support.
• Sharing experiences (Advocacy) – If the customer is satisfied with their experience, they can transform into an important advocate for your organization. That increases your chances of new customers through recommendations as well as of additional or repeat sales with existing customers.
  Example: The backpacker tells their friends in the highest tones about the round trip through Asia. They book with you too.

Many models try to depict the complexity of the customer journey. As a basis, these five stages mostly serve for all models.

The phases differ from company to company with regard to their complexity, duration and also individual shaping. One section can, for example, last seconds, while another stretches over months.

Influences on the process are, among other things, the type of product or service and the addressed target group (B2C or B2B). A customer journey when buying important groceries has completely different properties than booking a luxury cruise.

The customer journey as a key element for marketing and sales

With the help of analyzing your own customer journey, your marketing and sales teams can gain valuable insights for the right address of your target groups. In addition, potentials for improvement in your sales process and your customer service thereby become visible. The customer journey is thus part of customer experience management.

But to put all these facts in relation and be able to draw important conclusions, further, related concepts are needed:

Buyer persona

The buyer persona is a fictional archetype of the ideal customer, so to speak your passenger. It's based on personal data like age, gender and profession as well as on information about buying behavior.

This model image helps you to comprehend how a target person behaves during the customer journey. This also includes aspects like wishes, fears and motivations that drive them. The better you know your buyer persona, the more efficiently you can shape their customer journey.

Customer experience

With the customer experience, it's about the experience customers have with your company. In other words, the perception consumers have of all interactions with your organization. The logic behind it is simple: positive customer experiences are of enormous value, while a negative customer experience can be harmful.

The customer experience is consequently the result of a customer journey. And what should be the greatest goal of a tour operator? Right, that their guests have a great time and go home satisfied. Bonus points on top if the guests attract new prospects with their positive reports.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the points of contact a customer has with your company. These include all means and ways via which a person can come into contact with you directly or indirectly. These can be assigned to the various phases of the customer journey.

Thus, for example, advertisements or social media posts help as direct touchpoints to win attention for a brand in the awareness phase. If a potential customer is already weighing a purchase, the contact could happen via a phone call or an email exchange with customer service.

Indirect points of contact like reviews or word of mouth, on the other hand, can't be influenced by companies.

Broadly, touchpoints are every possible point of contact between the customer and the company. The contact can happen directly or indirectly.

Customer journey map

When it comes to implementing the elaboration of your customer journey, there's no getting around customer journey mapping.

The customer journey map is a visual representation of all steps a customer goes through in the buying process with your company. For this, however, there's no universal solution; instead, the depiction will look completely different for every organization and even for every product.

Typical elements are the phases a customer goes through as well as the touchpoints and experiences arising in the process. How exactly you implement this information graphically is completely up to you. What's important is that you can, with the help of the map, better comprehend the customer journey visually and identify possible critical points.

What significance does elaborating a customer journey have for your company?

By this point it should have become clear that the customer journey isn't a weekend trip and that you should give this method your attention.

Now is a good moment to question why that is. Why is it actually sensible to elaborate the customer journey?

The short answer to this is that customer journey management opens up decisive advantages and potentials in marketing and sales for you.

Viewed in more detail, the benefit of the customer journey lies in the following aspects:

• Through the approach, you break up accustomed silos and obtain overarching insights into the areas of marketing, sales, support and management.
• You obtain a completely transparent overview of the experience customers have with your company and your product from the first moment on.
• That allows you to better understand the wishes and needs of your customers and identify various target groups.
• In addition, you can identify the differences between your idea of a customer journey and the actual circumstances.
• With the help of customer journey mapping, you can identify potentials for improvement in your sales process as well as in your product and service quality.
• In addition, based on the identified touchpoints, you can optimize your marketing measures, recognize tracking possibilities and reduce wastage.
• You can specifically strengthen the bond with your customers and win your customers as fans or advocates for your offer.

Customer journey management is ultimately the answer to the paradigm shift currently taking place. Earlier, the buying process ran rather linearly. Today, a different consumer behavior and changed conditions through digitalization and oversupply lead to the customer journey often being very extensive and widely branched.

With a strategic shaping and control of the customer journey, you make sure that customers decide on your offer even under these aggravated conditions. And don't regret this decision.

This is how your customer journey becomes an unforgettable journey…

… into paradise. Okay, a bit exaggerated.

But the conclusion of this introduction to the customer journey is ultimately exactly that: If you define and steer the journey of your customers in the buying process, that has a positive effect on your results. Be it through more efficient strategies in marketing and sales or in the form of many happy customers through better product and service quality. Who in turn tell others about your great offer.

And as the US entrepreneur Warren Buffett so nicely put it: “No business that has happy customers ever failed.”

You see, it's worth it to actively take the journey of your customers into your own hands. If you'd like to know how you can plan and improve your very own customer journey, then feel free to contact us.