Someone enters keywords on a search engine. Your business and products appear. They visit your website and browse through your information. They check out your social media accounts and follow a few. They see a sale you post while they are out shopping and decide to visit. Your staff welcomes them and helps them find what they need. They make a purchase, take the product home and tell all their friends about it. What they say and how they feel about their interactions with your company makes up their Customer Experience. Every part of those interactions could make it positive, negative or have no impact at all. If you are going to understand the context of their Customer Experience, you need to build a Customer Journey.
Think of your customer journey like the story we told above. It’s not always complicated, though it can be. It details how a potential customer finds you, purchases products/services, and how they come back to purchase again or refer a friend.
A Customer Journey is vital in the world of Customer Experience because, without it, it’s hard to find context in the feedback you might receive. Building your Customer Journey helps you identify the touchpoints along your customer’s path that would be most valuable for you to gain their feedback as it happens.
A touchpoint is a defined experience or interaction common to most of your customers. They can be general that most businesses will have in their Customer Journey’s like a visit to your website, or be very industry-specific, like using a self-checkout at a retail location.
If you only asked the question “Did you like shopping with us?” at the end of a customer’s purchase experience, the feedback they provide might be about the product they purchase or how hard it was to find a parking space. It’s a very open question that without the context of the specific touchpoint you want to know about, it’s challenging to know what they mean.
A great place to start with your customer journey is by mapping out the points in your operation that are important to you to gain feedback from your customer. The real advantage we like to offer with our solution is that we have Collectors that can be added in many different ways along the customer journey you define.
Yes, definitely. We’ve chosen to detail some example, Customer Journey paths by industry, complete with the types of touchpoint and collectors that can be used.
Do you have a Customer Journey built for your business? Is there another industry you’d like to see listed on our website? Connect with us to let us know how we can help.
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