With consumers traversing websites and mobile apps over every device imaginable, the traditional customer journey model is no longer enough to deliver a positive online experience. Considering the fact that 73% of online shoppers will avoid brands and retailers after a single negative experience, a relevant and engaging digital customer journey is vital to deliver a 5-star online experience.
What is a Digital Customer Journey?
The digital customer journey refers to the process a customer goes through with a brand — from discovery, to browsing, to purchase, to post-purchase.
An established digital customer journey ensures an online experience that drives sales and loyalty. But this involves more than just recording what your customers do on social media.
In this article, we’ll take you through the right steps to build your digital customer journey.
Create a Persona
The first step in digitizing your customer journey is to create a persona. This is a detailed profile representing your target customer that allows you to understand your customers’ goals and experiences at various touchpoints during their lifecycle with your company. Here are three tips to help you build a proper persona.
Conduct Interviews. Speak to your customers and prospects to understand their digital journey. Keep in mind that you’re looking for the thought processes and motivations that lead customers to discover and choose your company. Details you’d want to capture might include:
- What triggered the customer to begin a search for a new product?
- What was their decision criteria?
- Which other products or vendors did the customer consider?
Also, speak with your internal teams to gather insights about your customers and prospects.
Be Specific. Add fictional first-person statements to bring your persona to life. Give your personas names and assign them psychographic and socioeconomic attributes such as income, education, interests, and lifestyle aspects that impact their purchase decisions. These details will help you understand the differences between your customers and allocate your digital resources accordingly.
Know Your Touchpoints
A digital customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints that add up to the total experience customers have when they interact with your brand. These touchpoints can include your website, social media, and online ads.
Knowing the exact digital touchpoints where customers engage with your brand can help you deliver consistent experiences regardless of where they take place. Here are some steps to better understand these touchpoints.
Outline Touchpoints. Make a list of the places customers engage your brand and categorize them as ‘before purchase,’ ‘during purchase,’ and ‘after purchase.’ Include external touchpoints such as review sites and communities. Identify which touchpoints are important to your customers as they move along the path to purchase and see how you can digitize them.
Integrate Your Digital and Non-Digital Touchpoints. Merge data from all touchpoints to get a full view of your customers’ interactions across all channels. This will help you bridge the offline and online gap as well as put strategies in place to deliver a consistent omnichannel experience.
Identify Roadblocks. Identify touchpoints in your digital customer journey where customers may encounter obstacles such as shipping costs or unclear messaging — and fix them. Use the research data you employed to create your buyer personas to identify difficulties your customers face when interacting with your brand online, and come up with ways to overcome these barriers.
Understand Your Customers
You can’t digitize your customer journey accurately without a comprehensive understanding of your customers. Having an in-depth knowledge of them allows you to create personalized online experiences. Below are some tips to help you better understand your digital customers.
Goals. Review your customer persona and leverage customer engagement analytical solutions to understand the goals they’re aiming for at each stage of the journey. Once you’ve identified the goals, use digital triggers to push your customers closer to conversion.
Relate to How They Feel. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and consider the thoughts and emotions they might be experiencing at interaction points with your brand. Knowing how your customers feel will enable you to create messaging that appeals to them wherever they are in their journey.
Anticipate Expectations. Take time to figure out what customers might need as they navigate across touchpoints. Develop content that eliminates concerns before they surface. Leverage customer data to anticipate what your online customers want and deliver personalized interactions.
Design a Customer-Centered Solution
Whether an app or website experience, keep your customer in mind throughout the development process. Below are three tips to employ when designing your solutions.
Understand Their Needs. Keep your customers’ needs in mind when designing your solutions. Understand what makes your customers tick — and ticks them off — in order to provide useful digital features along their customer journey.
Don’t Do Everything at Once. Rather than taking on A-Z digitization all at once, focus on improving the parts of the customer journey that are most important to your key segments.
Leverage Psychology. Use behavioral psychology in your design process to improve customer interactions and satisfaction. For instance, allowing users to manage their journey gives them a positive feeling of control. Amazon’s one-click ordering reduces the aggravation of entering payment details each time buyers check out.
Get Customer Feedback
You probably won’t nail your digital customer journey right away at first. Customer feedback will help identify areas where you need to redesign or improve the customer journey. Things to keep in mind when collecting customer feedback include:
Collect All Feedback from All Touchpoints. Negative feedback highlights where you need to improve, and positive feedback can help indicate which elements to amplify. While feedback around one touchpoint is essential, it only offers a snapshot of what is happening. Collect feedback from all digital touchpoints to get a complete picture of how customers experience your brand.
Gather Feedback in Real Time. Use digital technologies to collect customer feedback in real time as customers interact with your brand via your website or mobile app.
Conclusion
Building a digital customer journey is the starting point to delivering a positive customer experience. Build a cross-functional team to theorize a digitized customer journey and use agile processes to move toward it. Continuously improve your digital journey to consistently deliver a superior customer experience.