How to Redesign your Customer Journey

The customer journey involves a person's complete path from being a prospect to becoming a loyal customer. The journey starts when a person needs a product/service and comes across your brand, collects information about your offering, and eventually makes a purchase. From the moment the customer starts using your product, your ability to offer a satisfying experience will determine whether a customer is gonna become a brand advocate or will not repurchase from you again.

The customer journey that most of the companies are offering misses linearity and clearness. From the beginning of the journey, even before the purchase, the touchpoints with the brand are disconnected and confused. This lack of linearity creates dissatisfaction in customers who feel overwhelmed and do not know where to go when they are in need.

During the post-sales period, customers likely encounter problems with the product they have purchased. In that case, they will start looking for sources they can use to effectively fix the problem as soon as possible. Most companies use a wide range of channels to communicate with customers and have created different sources of self-service. For this reason, customers spend a long time looking for a solution, and sometimes this research doesn't even become fruitful.

This is how the current journey looks like:

Customers need one place where they can easily find answers to their questions as quickly as possible. The fact that customers have to search around to find a solution is time-consuming and makes them feel frustrated. Companies have to create one customer support platform where users can always be supported in a way that problems can be prevented from arising instead of solved.

What is the customer journey?

“The customer journey is the process by which a customer interacts with a company in order to achieve a goal”. The customer journey can be defined as a progression of touchpoints that define the user experience with the brand.

The customer journey can be best visualized using a map. This tool assists you in narrating the story of your client's interactions with your brand at every point of contact. An ideal customer journey should include all the actions your customer takes and your team's response.

There are different benefits to visualizing the customer journey:

It will help you design the customer onboarding process,

You can start creating strategies to improve the customer experience,

Your team can create customized experiences across every touch point and increase customer satisfaction.

Why is a good customer journey essential for a company's success?

Companies should use the customer journey as a tool to boost their customer experience and increase customer retention. When companies are offering an excellent customer experience, in fact, they have a higher probability of success in the market.

It is interesting to notice that 80% of brands think they deliver a superior customer experience but only 8% of their customers agree. This highlights the misalignment between what a company is offering and what a customer is expecting to receive.

Most companies fail in creating superior customer experiences because they focus their effort on opening as many options as possible for the customers to fix their problems, who then get lost during the journey. Companies should rather focus on creating an intuitive journey where customers don’t even need to search for solutions because problems are prevented from happening thanks to timely information and real-time support.

The post-sales period plays a crucial role in the customer journey as the customer, based on his/her experience during this stage, will either turn into a loyal customer or will just leave. Always remember that retaining customers is far cheaper than acquiring them, so you should focus on offering superior customer service to your existing customers and creating an overall enjoyable experience.

As a brand, you are only successful as long as you can meet your customer's demands.

Redesigning your customer journey with Layerise

These days, the customer journey most companies are offering to their customers is messy and not systematic. Our goal is to help companies create a simple journey where well-orchestrated touch-points are leading the end customer through a pleasant journey with instant gratifications.

There are 5 important stages of the customer journey:

Need

Adoption

Advocacy

Retention

Expansion

Brands must create a proper strategy for each of these stages to make the whole journey nice and easy to go through. This way you can increase customer satisfaction, thus increasing the overall performance of your business. Let’s get into each phase.

Need

The journey starts when customers have an immediate need that a company can satisfy with its product. As soon as customers perceive the need, they start looking for a product that can solve their exigency. In this stage, customers can easily get overwhelmed by the incredibly high amount of options available on the market.

In this phase, you have to design the journey and manage the different touch points in a way that:

It is easier for customers to find your products among the others;

They get all the information they need to assess the different options;

It is intuitive and convenient for them to buy the product.

Even if customers successfully land on your website, when they don’t find the way to buy the product they need, they will quickly leave the web page. For a seamless purchasing experience, make sure you have a product description, price, and easy but secure payment methods.

Layerise can help you satisfy the needs of your existing customers. Thanks to our tools, you can easily get to know your customers better and communicate with them. Layerise will make it easier for you to satisfy these customers who are already under the umbrella of your brand.

Adoption

Once customers complete the purchase, they need all the information to set up your product and start using it effectively. The onboarding process will significantly influence whether a customer will make secondary purchases, become loyal, provide a great product review, or none of the above.

It is important to make it easy and intuitive for the customer to learn how to use the product, how to maintain it, and how to solve potential problems. In this stage, the approach should be to prevent the customer from getting stuck while using the product and make the set-up and learning process easy and enjoyable. If you want to learn more about the onboarding process, click here.

Layerise ensures your customers have the right information at their fingertips and never have any problem using your product. A consumer can simply scan the QR code on the product and be redirected to Layerise platform, where they can find easy video tutorials for setting up and information about the most common problems. Our chat feature can extend better assistance to people with more complex problems. Layerise also provides maintenance reminders.

Instead of sending bulky and inconvenient product manuals, companies can provide a digital and centralized information system.

To conclude, from the moment the customer adopts the product, Layerise starts collecting data about each user. This will help you understand who your primary customer is and create an experience that is always more suitable for your target market.

Advocacy

If you manage to offer a great onboarding experience and customer support throughout the user journey, your customers will most likely be very satisfied with your product. When customers are satisfied with the experience you are providing they will start sharing it with their family and friends. In fact, according to research, 72% of customers will share their satisfactory experience with six or more people.

Word of mouth promotion is the most effective form of marketing. It is estimated that word-of-mouth marketing accounts for 13% of consumer sales, which amounts to a staggering $6Trillion annually. On top of that, Nielsen reports that 92% of consumers trust personal recommendations more than advertising. 88% of individuals trust online reviews written by other consumers.

Thus, you can understand how essential it is to keep your customers happy and satisfied. But how do you increase their satisfaction level, and what can you do to ensure they remain content with your services?

Thanks to Layerise, you can provide them with the comprehensive support needed to leverage it to its maximum potential. On top of that, by collecting essential data and monitoring their activities on the platform, Layerise can help brands create personalized suggestions to the consumer, enabling them to feel understood and valued, thus increasing the overall satisfaction level.

Retention

If you can create an excellent customer experience and support your customers throughout the journey, the customer retention rate will likely increase. Contrarily, if you don't have a well-designed and managed user journey, your customers will switch to competitors.

Customer retention is always better than new customer acquisition as customer acquisition takes lots of effort, time, and money. With the data you can collect through Layerise, you can retain your customers by providing them with the resources they need.

A good tool that can help you increase customer satisfaction, thus retaining your customers is Layerise Chat. This tool makes it effortless for you to support your customers and monitor their satisfaction. Chat has the highest customer satisfaction rating of all communication channels, enables voice, video, and image sharing, and is rich in communication.

Expansion

When your customers are satisfied with the experience you offer, they will more likely buy from you again. Loyal customers are key to sustaining your business and boosting growth. They not only re-purchase from you, but they also help you to acquire new customers through word-of-mouth.

To stimulate cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, a good idea is to provide personalized suggestions to your existing customers about complementors that could improve their product’s functionalities.

72% of consumers claim that they respond to marketing messages exclusively crafted to their preferences. According to BCG, businesses with exceptional personalization strategies achieve enhanced marketing effectiveness, increased digital sales, and long-lasting customer relationships. In addition, their growth rates increase from 6% to 10%.

With Layerise you can collect relevant information about your customers from the onboarding process. Thanks to this data, you can both build automated marketing campaigns based on your audience and create personal and relevant send-outs to increase conversions.

If you want to learn more about how Layerise can help your business, book a free demo now!