8 mins read
Customer journey is the deciding factor between making a purchase from your business or choosing a competitor. Think back to your own experiences when purchasing, you are much more likely to opt for a provider with a smooth customer journey, rather than one which is disjointed and difficult to navigate.
It is important for businesses to constantly analyse their customer journey so that they can identify customer pain points and make improvements. So, the next customer journey can be streamlined.
This article will look at the ways in which you can ensure a fluid customer journey—by using the power of analytics correctly to identify all areas that might need improvement.
Set up customer analytics
A very important step in your customer journey improvement strategy is to implement and use analytics. Analytics (such as Google Analytics) can help you identify where your customers are leaving the buying process and give you vital insights into how customers interact with your customer journey.
With the knowledge gained from your customer’s behaviour, you can modify how you respond to complaints or suggestions. Being proactive will improve your relationship with customers and will in turn boost customer journey.
For example, if you see customers are interacting more with one particular product, you could try adding this product to your homepage so it is easier for customers to spot and buy.
Such analytics give you a unique opportunity to ease your customer’s journey. As a business, whatever you can do to make your customers journey more effective is sure to have a reflection on your sales!
According to Forbes:
Scaling real-time customer analytics cross-functionally (69%) is the leading growth driver with enterprises creating real-time marketing technologies stacks to scale.
This shows that real-time customer journey analytics is the leading way for businesses to create bespoke marketing campaigns and enhance their customer journeys.
With analytics in place, there are a host of new ways you can target your customers—your products can follow them from device to device as a reminder, you can also send them personalised discount codes via email as a follow-up and do so much more.
You can also use these analytics to inform them of your stock and ensure that you always have what your customers are looking for; giving them no reason to abandon your website midway through their customer journey.
Using analytics is an important part of your customer strategy which should be carefully implemented and checked regularly to stay on top of changes so you can respond accordingly.
Understand your customer’s goals
Once you have the analytics, you need to understand your customer’s goals to improve their customer experience. It is advisable to research who your customers are and what they want from their experience or purchase.
If when profiling your customers you find that they are price orientated, you can use this information to test different presentations of the price on your items. For example, you could use different fonts or different placements. Furthermore, by following up with your customer journey analytics you can discover exactly which element works the best for you.
By doing your research and using your analytics, you can dig deep into what your customers really want and can tweak their journey to match their goals. In doing so, you will be making things easier for your customers.
Try using Social Media to enhance your customer journey
Most of your customers will be active on social media, and using it in the right way can help boost your customer journey and enhance your customer’s experience. By having meaningful conversations and posting relevant content to intrigue and entice your customers, you can provide a whole new touchpoint for your customers to interact with you.
Customers on social media do not want sales posts clogging up their feed, they want interesting content which is relevant and easy to connect with. For example, a fashion brand could provide inspiration on how to wear their latest pieces. Simple interactions like these add a new layer to your business and help in opening up conversations with customers.
Social media is also a great tool to offer customer support, as it is quick for customers to contact you. With customers often on their devices with access to social media, it is much more likely they will have a conversation with you over than on a phone call or email thread.
So using this is a great way to offer support throughout the customer journey. With so many channels available, you should be selective on what works for your business—it is better to do one social media channel well than all of them poorly!
On social media, your efforts must be consistent if it has to be effective in enhancing your customer journey strategy. That’s why Acefone offers an online portal with our hosted phone systems, to make sure that all messages and communications are stored safely in one central place.
Use omnichannel marketing campaigns
Customers rarely use only one channel during their buying journey. They are much more likely to use their phone and take a look at social media, and then maybe call you to get more detailed information. It can be hard for businesses to keep track of the messages and ensure consistency.
With a hosted phone system, this is a cakewalk. You can connect your CRM system, social media messaging and of course your phone system into one simple application.
This means that each time a customer gets in touch, it is logged and available on an online portal to any staff member who might pick it up. This feature means you can provide a consistent message across all of your channels.
Nothing interrupts a customer journey like an inconsistent message. A customer may be looking at an offer, and if someone running your social media is unaware but your email and phone team know about it then the wrong information could be shared with the customer.
This means that the customer journey is interrupted and the customer is likely to look elsewhere as this business may come across as unprofessional or unorganised.
With the help of your hosted phone system, it is easy to run a consistent and effective campaign by keeping track of all the messages between a customer and business within the phone system.
This also gives you a great opportunity to build a relationship with that customer too, and offer them personalised discounts based on their activity or interests.
Ensure it is easy for customers to find what they need
Another important part of your customer journey strategy is to ensure that customers can easily find what they are looking for. Check your site carefully for broken links, and review products regularly to see everything is categorised correctly.
Your website should be easy to navigate, for anything difficult to use may send customers to a competitor.
To make the customer journey even more seamless, you can use your customer journey analytics combined with information on your hosted phone system to send customers personalised offers.
Alternatively, you could follow up with customers if they have previously bought from you, to see whether they need a replacement product or to recommend new products to them based on their interests.
With everything saved securely in your hosted phone system, from customer preferences to buying and communication history—it is really easy for your team to contact customers to make recommendations.
This makes the customer’s life easier and increases trust, so you are sure to enhance that all-important customer journey by personalising your service.
There are plenty more ways to enhance your customer journey and make sure it is really simple for customers to buy from you.
The insights from your analytics can help you with targeted offers and marketing campaigns. You can even modify the structure of your website!
Using analytics is a great way to ensure great customer journeys.
To find out more about how to improve your customer journey strategy with the help of analytics and your hosted phone system, call us today on 1888-859-0450 .
