Perfecting Customer Journeys: Actionable Steps

Most companies utilize customer journey maps as a means of improving their understanding of customers, yet only a few manage to create an exceptional customer experience.

If your business goals include making your customers’ journey better, you should focus on the factors that directly impact them and learn some customer experience strategies that can help you. 

Continue reading to gain insights on how you can optimize customer journeys and business outcomes.

The Importance of Improving the Customer Journey

Businesses use customer journey mapping to enhance their understanding of users and improve customer experiences. Mastering their journeys can be achieved by optimizing each touchpoint along the way and earning their trust by offering customer experiences that lead to strong relationships, enhanced customer loyalty, and long-term retention.

The customer journey will help identify expectations and needs among your target market. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. So, it is important to optimize the customer journey because it will encourage existing customers to stay loyal and also help your company compete for new clients.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action during customer interactions with your brand will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a customer’s perspective, you’re better positioned to support their needs.

Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many companies invest in multichannel advertising, but some of the touchpoints may not be valuable. Focus on the customer’s journey, and then you will be able to determine which channels generate the highest sales. By focusing solely on the best channels, businesses can save both time and money.

Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. When leads bail before buying, that could be an indicator something is amiss with either your product/service or customer experience in general. Being mindful of customer journeys can assist in solving product and service-related problems before they become costly problems for both businesses and customers alike.

Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with all of your customer segments. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.

Increase customer engagement. Recognizing customer journeys will allow your business to more accurately target relevant audiences for its product or service and enhance customer experiences and engagement rates—with 29.6% of clients refusing branded digital channels following poor experiences, this strategy cannot be underestimated as positive customer touchpoints have never been more vitally important than now!

Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.

Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Research suggests that 94% of consumers say a customer positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.

So, let’s focus on some incredibly effective methods you can implement to enhance the customer journey with your brand or service.

10 Ways to Improve Your Customer Journey

Use customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is the process of visual representation of the customer’s journey from the moment they become aware of your products to the point of first purchase. A customer journey map shows exactly where customers go during this process for both your company and website. You can use customer touchpoints and your own research of the purchase history to map the exact steps a client takes. This will help you make things easier for them. Customer journey maps will give you greater insight into where potential customers may be dropping off as well as where your business could meet customer needs more easily.

Enhancing the customer journey will allow your customers to learn about your company, products, and services more easily while seamlessly moving them through to the purchase stage. But ultimately, your customer journey map can help you improve your entire customer experience. Your customers can enjoy the ease and support your company offers them.

Identify touchpoints

Touchpoints are created every time prospective customers interact directly with your brand. You can have touchpoints in the form of ads, your home page, a storefront or physical location, testimonials, emails, phone sales, and newsletters. You can identify the barriers that could cause customers to abandon the purchase or make it difficult for them. Unset voicemails, broken links on the website or unclear advertising could lead to unnecessary difficulties and loss of customers. Keep track of the touchpoints you use to ensure customers are moving smoothly through their entire customer journey.

Embrace an omnichannel mindset

The days when people had to sit down in front of a computer and connect with brands are over. Multi-device customer journeys have become the norm, with more than half of all web traffic now coming from mobile devices.

It’s important to maintain a consistent customer experience across devices, but it is not the only thing that matters. Customer experience leaders today understand consumers use multiple channels, offline and online, switching between them often to interact with brands. Every part of their journey, however unpredictable and meandering, needs to be seamless and consistent.

Customer experience is a priority for all businesses, so embracing omnichannel must be a major shift in the way you think.

Personalize the experience

Personalization is not an option anymore. It’s a necessity. The personalization of service, customer experience, and their journey is what makes a brand so special. It allows you to interact with each customer individually and not as part of a large group. By providing a personalized experience for your customers, you can increase their satisfaction and loyalty. To achieve perfect personalization, you must focus on every stage of your customer’s journey and make it special.

You should start by creating personalized content for your website. This means home page content personalization, blog post optimization, message optimization, etc. Other personalization techniques include:

• using data to personalize survey questions 
• using geolocation technology to personalize based on location
• offering recommendations based on purchase history
• personally follow up with survey responses

Improve your customer service

Customers will remember you for the good customer service. People don’t only buy from you because the product is right for them—they also buy because they are confident that they will get assistance when needed.

It takes a number of things to create great customer service. The first and most important is employee behavior. You need to hire, train, coach, and support your employees to improve their customer service abilities and behaviors. You need to create a business culture that promotes quality over speed and efficiency. The entire organization should follow this principle. Your business’s infrastructure, which includes CRM software and an experience management platform, needs to be scalable and flexible.

Create self-service options to improve customer experience

Undoubtedly, it is vital to have a dedicated customer support team. But being reactive to your customers’ needs can only get you so far. The solution? Give them the means to become proactive.

Customers need to be able to find answers to their questions on their own. In fact, 70% of clients expect a company’s website to include customer self-service options such as customer support content, FAQs, helpful guides, case studies, etc. Self-service provides a few perks that traditional customer service teams simply cannot offer, thus providing an improved customer experience.

Deepen your relationship with your customers

You can do this by highlighting a particular user for some “special treatment,” based on your analysis and the way you perceive your customers to be using your product or service. Such a company-wide initiative is a fantastic way to strengthen your relationship with customers and make them feel valued.

For example, invite a few VIP customers to a drinks reception as a way of saying thank you. By going offline to the “real world” with your customers, you can show them how much you value their contribution. This is a powerful strategy that will a hundred percent make a positive customer experience.

Monitor your customer journey analytics

The improvement of customer experience is a data-driven effort. Customer journey analytics, testing, etc., are essential for any business to determine customer satisfaction and to identify areas that need improvement. You should spend a considerable amount of time gathering and analyzing information about your customers. It will give you a holistic view of what elements are driving today’s consumers toward success and those that cause them to leave. Without collecting and analyzing data, you will not know the obstacles to your customer experience strategy.

So, determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll measure at which time. The information you collect will guide your future customer experience strategy.

Take advantage of surveys and feedback

You can also enhance the customer journey by using surveys and feedback. Customer feedback refers to any comments your clients make about your brand or product, while surveys provide you with questions designed to collect feedback from both potential and actual clients. Both methods offer effective ways of gathering valuable information about customer demands, habits, and wants, while personal encounters and taking notes provide another effective approach. You can use surveys as a way to learn more about the user preferences and any expectations and touchpoints your customers have. Feedback, on the other hand, helps you better understand your customers’ experience. In general, it can help you identify unhappy customers and the reasons for that.

Social media, websites, and surveys provide great tools to gather customer insights. You should take any customer complaints into consideration immediately to start improving. Providing a positive customer experience will lead to customer loyalty—and, thus, business sustainability.

Proactively shape and control customer journeys

The goal of customer experience management is not to “pave cow paths.” The fact that customers often follow a particular journey to resolve issues does not necessarily mean this is the most effective path. Companies need to direct customers on the most effective path and encourage them to complete the journey.

Moreover, companies should also be proactive in their approach to designing journeys for customers. The goal of journey optimization should not be to fix pain points. Businesses can reimagine common journeys to delight and surprise their customers.

How FuseBase Can Help Improve Customer Journeys

Selecting the right platform to improve the customer journey is pivotal, and FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) emerges as an exceptional choice for companies seeking to redefine customer interactions. Its versatility and comprehensive suite of features transform the way businesses engage with their clients.

Start your business relationships with customers by creating the client portal. It works as a centralized hub that facilitates communication, project updates, and approvals between the team and a client. It has simple one-link access and an intuitive user interface that makes navigating the portal very easy, boosting the customer experience. You can also set up knowledge base and FAQs for greater customer support. In addition, the White Label solution gives the opportunity to brand the entire environment. In such a way, you will enhance personalization and reinforce your brand identity. 

FuseBase’s capabilities for better understanding your client and their journeys go further. You can use in-portal analytics to monitor customer behavior and create surveys to collect feedback. Doing this helps to identify patterns, pain points, and areas for improvement. Honest feedback and insights on customer interactions with the portal can be used to improve services and develop client-centric solutions that are adapted to changing customer expectations.

Also, for a more effective customer journey optimization process, our robust collaborative features will make cohesive teamwork possible. Communicate with your team via integrated chats and comments to share customer data and discuss new strategies. After that, FuseBase AI can help you analyze what you’ve discussed with your team and turn it into tasks. 

So, be confident in unlocking FuseBase today and leveraging all it offers! Make the customer journey truly exceptional!

Final thoughts

You might think this is a huge amount of effort to put into a specific area of your company. However, it’s important that you don’t ignore the customer experience but make it a top priority.

You can have the best product in the world, but if your clients don’t enjoy their interactions with you from the early stages of the customer relationship, then they won’t be happy. It doesn’t really matter whether you run the world’s most successful business or have an incredible product if you can’t create a good customer experience. This is a key ingredient that will allow your company to achieve the heights you believe it can.