As a matter of fact, 56% of customer service leaders said they plan to invest more into their customer journey, which would be a first-time investment for 45% of them. These investments highlight how crucial the customer journey is to a great customer experience and creating lifelong customer relationships.

What Is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through from awareness to purchasing and beyond. To provide an exceptional customer journey, you need to understand your customers—how they interact with your website and what they’re looking for. It’s important to point out that the customer journey is different from the customer experience. Customer journeys are what your customers are doing, while the experience is how they’re feeling. A fully optimized customer journey can help improve your customer experience. 

Why Is the Customer Journey Important?

The customer journey is so important because it is the foundation on which customer acquisition and customer loyalty are built. Most consumers express a desire to interact with a brand across multiple channels, but 77% of brands admit they struggle to create a cohesive customer journey across those channels. 

If a customer chooses to interact with your organization, it is your responsibility to have a customer journey that gives them a stress-free experience. Without a customer journey, you could have low acquisition rates or increased customer churn rates. 

Benefits of Understanding the Customer Journey

When your organization understands the customer journey and can give your customers what they need at the right time, you will realize benefits that will improve your overall business performance. Some of the benefits include: 

• Improved Customer Experience: Understanding the customer journey will give your customers a better end-to-end customer experience, which will result in increased customer satisfaction. 
• Increased Customer Retention: An understanding of the customer journey allows your business to proactively address issues and provide timely support, which will increase the likelihood of repeat business and long-term customer retention.
• Increased Conversion Rates: By identifying and removing friction points, your business can guide potential customers through the sales process more smoothly. 

What are the Principles of Customer Journey?

While there are no set principles of the customer journey, an important step to understanding and designing the customer journey in your organization is to create your own set of customer journey principles that represent an effort to develop long-term customer relationships. Some possible principles include: 

Customer Empathy 

Customer empathy refers to working to understand the emotional states of customers at each stage of the customer journey. By understanding how customers will feel at certain points, rather than focusing on what action you want them to take, you will create a journey that is easier and less stressful. 

Customer Empowerment

Give customers the ability to manage their journey by offering self-service options and transparent processes. Empowered customers feel more in control and satisfied with their experience.

Proactive Engagement

At some point in the customer journey, your customers will connect with you. When they do, be sure to be equipped with the right information in a timely manner to assist them during the customer journey. 

These principles are an example of what the principles of customer journey could look like in your organization. The exact principles you choose will depend on your business and the journey you build for your customers. However, they should be customer-focused and put your organization in a position to make the customer experience better. 

What Are the Customer Journey Phases?

While the exact steps in the customer journey can vary, these are the six most important parts of the journey for any business: 

The Problem

First, customers need to realize they have a problem, a need, or a want that must be solved. Once they recognize a problem, they can begin looking for solutions, which should hopefully lead them to your company. 

Awareness

During this stage, the customer is gathering information, researching, and looking for options to solve the problem. Hopefully, with your marketing efforts and channels, the customer will come across your company and become aware of your solution to their problem. They’ll still be weighing options and researching what suits them best, but this stage is a great place to use content to showcase your brand. 

Consideration

During this stage, your customer will be considering using your product or service. They may be deciding between you and another option debating pricing options, prioritizing features, and weighing drawbacks. When a customer is considering, brand recognition is crucial. Having a trusted and well-established brand could be what sways a customer toward your product during this stage. 

Purchase

The customer decides on your product and makes the purchase. Even once they’ve purchased your product, companies benefit from reaching out to customers and acknowledging the purchase. 

Retention

Once a customer has bought a product or service, it doesn’t mean they will return to your company again. A key part of the customer journey is retaining the customer for future purchases. Providing support is important to improve customer retention. You want customers to come back repeatedly and look for your product or service when faced with a problem. 

Loyalty

Once your customer comes back to you a few times, they’ll start to develop loyalty to your brand. Loyal customers will almost always come to your company if they can because they trust your products, services, and customer experience. Getting to the loyalty stage takes effort, but loyal customers are the goal of every company. 

Understanding the Digital Customer Journey

Businesses such as restaurants, hotels, and retailers have to consider certain aspects of their locations when creating a customer journey such as signage, lighting, walkways, and more. Most other businesses, however, will only ever interact with their customers through digital channels. The digital customer journey is just as important as any customer journey and is crucial to a positive digital experience. 

A successful digital customer journey can be difficult to create because you need to make your customers feel understood and wanted, without being able to talk to them in person. This can be done by creating easy self-service options and being readily available through support channels in case they have any questions or concerns. 

A Customer Journey Example

To see what the customer journey looks like in action, let’s walk through the journey a manager might take to improve operations. 

1. Recognizing the Problem

A hypothetical manager at a finance company recognizes an ongoing issue with managing data for customers. Realizing that this is affecting their efficiency, they start looking for a data management solution. 

2. Researching Potential Solutions

The manager starts exploring different data management tools. A friend in the industry recommends a solution they use, while another contact from networking suggests a different option. The manager also conducts internet searches and reads online reviews to find more potential solutions. Meanwhile, targeted ads on Google and social media bring additional products to their attention. Using reviews and priorities, they narrow the list down to two companies. 

3. Comparing Final Options

Once they have their two favorites, they use the companies’ software demos and pricing packages to consider each one. They make their selection based on which one works best for their company and is the most affordable.

4. Making the Purchase

After purchasing the data management software, the company immediately acknowledges and thanks the manager for their business. This gesture makes the manager feel valued, reinforcing a positive customer experience.

5. Returning for Future Purchases 

A few months later, this same manager is looking for data architecture solutions that will provide security and big data management. They remember their experience with the data management company and start their search on that particular website. When they see they offer software for their needs, they spend less time in the consideration stage and move quickly into purchasing. They also begin recommending the company to other people in the industry when they’re looking for similar products.

The Importance of Improving the Customer Journey 

Spending time and resources focusing on the customer journey may seem like a luxury, but the benefits it can have for your organization are a necessity in today’s business environment. Here are some statistics about the importance of focusing on the customer journey:

• 87% of companies use their understanding of the customer journey as a decision-making tool
• 89% of companies can identify gaps in their service by looking at the customer journey
• 91% of companies say an improved customer journey led to increased sales

Overall, this shows that companies that focus on customer journeys can benefit in revenue and profitability. Optimizing the customer journey also helps decision-makers at the company to stay focused on customers. It also helps improve the customer experience and your brand. A well-optimized customer journey makes the purchasing process easier and more enjoyable for the customers, which improves their experience. 

Customer Journey Management Best Practices

Successful customer journey management requires every interaction a customer has with your brand to be satisfying while also aligning with business goals. To have an effective customer journey management strategy, you will need to consider these best practices:

1. Map the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is a great way to visualize every expected touchpoint a customer will have with your brand. A customer journey map can help you understand the flow of the customer experience. 

2. Segment Your Customers

Not every consumer will have the same customer journey, nor will they want to. By segmenting your customers based on demographics, behaviors, preferences, and buying habits, you can create tailored versions of the customer journey to meet the specific needs of these different customers. 

3. Utilize Data and Analytics

Customer journey analytics are important to gain insight into how customers interact with your organization. You can start to use customer journey analytics by identifying customer journey touchpoints. Your touchpoints could be ads, your website homepage, a physical storefront, reviews, newsletters, phone calls with sales, or emails. 

Once you identify all the touchpoints, you can start to measure how customers interact with them. By keeping track of your customer journey touchpoints, you can optimize them to keep your customers moving through your customer journey seamlessly. 

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a method of tracking and analyzing every interaction a customer has with your brand across various customer journey touchpoints. By leveraging customer journey analytics, businesses can measure each phase of the customer journey in a detailed and data-driven manner. This includes understanding how customers discover your brand, how they interact with your content, their decision-making process, and the quality of their post-purchase experiences.
This approach provides insights into the effectiveness of your overall customer experience strategy. By evaluating key metrics at every stage, such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and customer satisfaction scores, businesses can pinpoint areas of success and identify potential bottlenecks or pain points.

Customer Journey Metrics to Track

Once you have created your customer journey, you should be able to track where a customer is based on what checkpoints they hit. This may include a free trial, demo appointment, payment, or other points. Since you can track where customers are, you should also be tracking metrics that give you an insight into how effectively your customers move through those stages. Here are some common customer journey metrics you can track:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer, including marketing, sales, and advertising expenses. Tracking CAC can help you evaluate how efficient your customer journey is and help you identify the most cost-effective paths that customers take. 

2. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate shows the percentage of potential customers who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or completing a demo. By monitoring your conversion rates, you can identify any possible bottlenecks that may be hindering customers from moving forward in the customer journey. 

3. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a given period. This is an important metric to track because it reminds businesses that the customer journey does not end with a purchase. A high churn rate indicates that you may need to improve your customer retention efforts. On the other hand, a low churn rate suggests that your customers value your brand. 

4. Customer Satisfaction 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a key metric for evaluating how happy customers are with their overall experience. This metric can be used to track satisfaction levels at various stages of the customer journey or track overall satisfaction. 

5. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to others. NPS provides insight into whether or not your customer journey is producing strong advocates of your brand that will promote your products or services. 

Customer Journey Software

Customer journey software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to map, track, and optimize the interactions customers have with their brands throughout the entire customer journey. Customer journey software platforms provide valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points, which allow companies to create more personalized experiences. Here’s how customer journey software can benefit your business:

1. Visual Journey Mapping

Customer journey software gives you the tools needed to create a customer journey map. This feature helps you visualize the customer journey and understand what metrics can be tracked and where. It can also be a useful sharing tool to get the rest of your CX team on board with the customer journey improvement process. 

2. Multi-Channel Tracking

Modern digital customer journeys are often non-linear and span multiple channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and in-store interactions With customer journey software, you can integrate data from various channels to get a unified view of the customer journey. This helps deliver a cohesive and consistent experience to the customer regardless of where or how they engaged with your business. 

3. Behavioral Analytics

Customer journey software can track user behaviors such as click paths, product views, time spent on site, and more. This will help your business identify patterns and behaviors that indicate customer intent. 

Improve the Customer Journey with Pearl-Plaza

Improving your customer journey will help your customers learn about your company, products, and services. It will also help you keep your customers moving seamlessly through to the purchasing stage. But ultimately, your customer journey can help you improve your customer experience. 

Your customers can enjoy the ease and support your company offers them.
To improve your customers’ journey, you’ll need tools to understand your customers and to utilize your customer journey touchpoints. Pearl-Plaza CX solutions provide feedback and active listening tools to help you understand where to tighten your process and bring more customers to your brand. Schedule a demo today to see how Pearl-Plaza can help you improve the customer journey. 

It’s clear that executives need to put customer loyalty at the center of their company’s values, but how do you actually go about doing building customer trust and loyalty? Let’s jump right in!

3 Ways to Build Customer Trust and Customer Loyalty

1. Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust
2. Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand
3. Quality, Quality, Quality

Action #1: Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust

Throughout the customer journey, your brand should meet customers where they are. The more personal you make the customer experience, the more trust you’ll cultivate. 

For instance, in the pre-purchase stage, in-store employees should have substantial knowledge about products and understand what customers need. Employees should be trained to create positive interactions from the beginning all the way up to the final moment of purchase. Asking small questions like if a customer found everything they needed—and stepping in if they didn’t—can make a huge impact. Little actions like that help add a nice personal touch to a customer’s experience—and lead to a stronger level of trust!

Action #2: Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand 

Trust often leads to loyalty, but your brand has to make the first move. To cement a longstanding relationship of trust, your business needs to show loyalty to customers first. 

An effective approach here would be to engage with and respond to customers, because engaged customers are more likely to promote your company than unengaged customers. Actively responding to customer questions, comments, and complaints can grow loyalty by putting a human voice to a brand. 

One best practice for engaging with customers in this way is to design an open communication and feedback channel. Of course, we recommend utilizing not just a help center as a method to reach out, but any adequate resource, from employees on the front line to digital surveys. Additionally, you should look to other indirect forms of feedback to understand your customers such as review site data and social media mentions.

Action #3:  Quality, Quality, Quality

At the end of the day, even if their customer experience was amazing, if the product doesn’t meet a customer’s expectations, all that work you did to build trust and loyalty is in vain. Customers expect value for what they pay for and no amount of sales gimmicks can hide the truth of your product, so it’s key to know customers’ expectations and develop your product/service to meet or exceed that. After all, loyal customers are coming back for a quality purchase; the positive customer experience is an additional element encouraging that return. 

Your customer experience platform is essential to identifying friction points and remedying them to improve customer trust and customer loyalty. We discussed in the section above how it’s important to keep tabs on what your customers are saying about their experience. Once you’ve collected all this feedback data across every channel, you can leverage your customer experience (CX) platform to analyze all that customer feedback and identify the areas in your business that need some attention. Check out this video below to learn how global banking giant, Virgin Money, worked with Pearl-Plaza to understand the most impactful moments in the customer journey.

Now that you’ve learned how to build customer trust and loyalty, read our eBook to learn about how that trust and loyalty can drive cross-sell and upsell opportunities!

However, they are not enough. They might make an impact, but creating customer loyalty is something that must be the center of the company. Fostering true loyalty and engagement with customers starts with the basics—and we’re laying those out for you in our top tips, listed below!

1. Aim Toward Ideal Business Outcomes, but Stay Agile
2. Have the Right Data Collection Tools in Place
3. Act on the Data You Receive
4. Continuously Improve Your Processes Based on Market Changes

Customer Loyalty Tip #1: Aim Toward Ideal Business Outcomes, but Stay Agile

Ideally, you’ll know where your business is heading in 12 months, three years, and five years. But, since the onset of the pandemic, we have learned the hard way that everything can change in a heartbeat. For these reasons, an agile customer listening strategy is critical to survive and thrive. 

Providing your customers with an open channel for communication and feedback engages your customers and strengthens your relationship with them. Engaged customers are more satisfied, more loyal, and more likely to promote your company than unengaged customers. They go out of their way to show their association with your company. An engaged customer also supports you during both good and bad times, because they believe that what you have to offer is superior to what your competitors have to offer. 

Engagement takes your customers beyond passive loyalty to become active participants and promoters of your product. Engaged customers will want to give you more feedback—and you should be ready to handle it! All this translates into more engaged customers who will spend more money with you over time.

Loyalty Tip #2: Have the Right Data Collection Tools in Place 

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is more than just collecting data. EFM adopts a strategic approach to building dialogues with your customers. By wrapping customer dialogues with technology, your company creates a structured, searchable, and quantifiable body of information that can be used to drive critical business decisions. 

By having the right feedback collection tools in place, you:

• Empower customers to give feedback through common advertised channels
• Centralise reporting for proactive surveys and complaint management solutions
• Structure quantitative feedback into a drill-down or rollup report
• Make open-ended feedback intuitively searchable

Loyalty Tip #3 Act on the Data You Receive 

Collecting data is a great start—but taking action on customer feedback is the next and most important step for creating loyal customers. Once you’ve validated the data against your program goals and established trends and patterns, it’s time to make a plan. 

Businesses use a variety of statistical techniques to make predictions about the potential for future events. Furthermore, predictive analytics may be used to ascertain the degree to which answers from a survey relate to particular goals (such as loyalty and engagement). Tactical knowledge of action items that impact an outcome preserves resources wasted on ineffective programs, and competent statistical modeling reveals which tactical options have the most impact.

Analyse data using a statistical technique to reveal the most important areas of focus. Then, ask your analyst about common statistical methods including correlation, multiple regression, factor analysis, and logit models. Finally, recognise that the important areas of focus may change over time to respond with changes in the economic, competitive, and demographic environment of your business.

Loyalty Tip #4: Continuously Improve Your Processes Based on Market Changes 

Whether you are applying lean principles, 6Sigma, Kaizen, or a combination, a continually improving experience program is what we are all striving for when it comes to best practice. Every time you seek to optimise your program, you have the opportunity to eliminate non value adds and other waste components which get in the way of operational processes. Every improvement should have a “customer first” approach, which will help customers feel valuable and more loyal with every action. 

Want to learn more about what it means to continuously improve your customer experience, customer loyalty, and your bottomline? Check out this paper which outlines the Continuous Improvement Framework, Pearl-Plaza’s unique approach to truly value drive experience programs.

None of this is to say that metrics aren’t important, but companies should remember that they can only reveal so much about why customers may be experiencing an issue or even why they remain loyal to the brand. With that in mind, we’re going to dive into a few things to bear in mind while creating more human and more connective customer relationships!

Numbers Alone Can’t Tell a Story

Before we get into how to humanize and improve customer experiences, we first need to understand why structured data can’t give us all the answers. For instance, it’s common to send out Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT/OSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys after a customer interacts with a brand, but what do these scores actually tell us? A higher ease-of-use score, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean you made the customer happier or that you improved that customer relationship. You can speculate about numbers, but they don’t reveal the exact, organic reason why customers feel one way or another.

So, how can companies compensate for this lack of context? The answer lies in unstructured data and the Experience Improvement (XI) solutions that can turn it into actionable intelligence. That actionable intelligence, in turn, gives brands the chance to create a more organic, more connective, and more human customer experience.

How to Humanize and Improve Customer Experiences

Only when a business listens to human feedback can it respond with a more human customer experience. This means tapping into the voice of the customer by allowing customers to express feedback in their own words. 

Consider platforms like Instagram, Yelp, and YouTube. People can use these platforms to freely (and frankly) express themselves in a way that numbers cannot allow. The result is a form of unstructured feedback that your brand can not only use to trace the root causes of experience breakages, but also to empathize with your customers.

After accumulating enough unstructured data, the next step is to analyze and act on what you’ve learned. However, that’s easier said than done, especially if your CX resources are limited. That’s why it’s important to desilo data and share customer intelligence with your entire company. Then, you can get multiple departments to collaborate and act on their role in humanizing the customer experience (this approach also creates a single, holistic view of the customer for your organization).

If your brand can offer experiences that are far more human, that’s far more valuable than achieving any high metric score. And it goes hand in hand with customer loyalty. When a customer feels empathized with and known as a person, that customer will return to your brand—even if there’s a lot of competition—because their relationship with you has transcended mere transactions. This is the heart of Experience Improvement—answering customers’ search for meaning while strengthening both your bottom line and your marketplace leadership!
To learn more about what makes doing business so dehumanizing and why brands need to challenge themselves to humanize and improve customer experiences, watch this video!

However, as foundational as operational excellence is to a company and its experiences, there’s more that brands can do to build a bridge between operations and Experience Improvement. Today’s conversation focuses on that bridge’s two main elements: optimization and innovation.

Element to Connect Operations with Experience Improvement

1. Optimization
2. Innovation

XI Element #1: Optimization

Creating operational excellence isn’t a one-and-done. It’s a process that requires constant attention and tweaking. Your experience initiatives can help here by shining a light on systemic issues that might need a closer look. That spotlight can also be used to help come up with fixes for those problems. Of course, a tried-and-true process for identifying and then responding to problems like these is a must here.

Fortunately for brands and organizations everywhere, a lot of the optimizing work has already been completed by the time you hit a stride with your operational excellence! Being good at ops means skillfully gathering the deep analyses and intel your brand uses to be better. This means you’ll already have some idea of what your north star should be as you begin the optimization phase. Desiloing data and sharing it with every team in the organization is also key here.

XI Element #2: Innovation

Innovation is what optimizing your operations builds toward. It’s what allows brands to actually implement their proposed solutions, study how they go, and realize their benefits. Having operational excellence in place makes it easier for brands to forecast market trends and, ultimately, predict exactly what their customers will want. In other words, ops-fueled innovation keeps your company robust and ahead of the curve.

Staying ahead of the curve is a major part of Experience Improvement, and it can only be enabled by:

1. Operational excellence
2. Optimization
3. Innovation

Anticipating what your customers want before they may even know goes a long way toward building the relationships that cause them to ignore the competition (and that let them know you care about them as people). Unstructured feedback, especially from Voice of Customer (VoC) programs, is one of the best sources of additional intel on how to stay ahead of the curve and keep pleasantly surprising your customers.

Click here to learn more about how operational excellence leads to Experience Improvement. Expert Jennifer Passini, Ph.D., goes over additional means of using ops to better your experience and how it all feeds into the grander goal of meaningful transformation for your bottom line and your customer relationships.