The customer journey is a map of how a customer interacts with your business from the first time they encounter it to when they make a purchase and becoming a recurring customer. Unlike the tighter and more rigid market funnel, the customer journey is typically a little less straightforward. This is because customers often interact with a business in a distinct way, and not all customer journeys resemble each other. This more holistic approach is called the customer success journey, and it is used to interact with customers at different stages of the customer lifecycle and meet them where they are at in their customer journey. With that in mind, here’s how businesses can use the customer success journey to improve their sales conversion rates.
Differentiating the Customer Success Journey from the Traditional Sales Funnel
Unlike the traditional sales funnel, which is concentrated on a customer’s stage of interest in your business, the customer success journey tracks an individual’s touchpoints with your business. These touchpoints are not always in a particular order or sequence. Rather, they need to be considered holistically and as a part of an overall interaction with your business. Every interaction, from opening a marketing email, reading a piece of content, or interacting with your social media channels, is considered a touchpoint.
In fact, many potential customers and clients go back to earlier touchpoints, and won’t be convinced by a single marketing email or piece of content to purchase your products or engage with your service offerings. Rather, the customer success journey considered the overall amount of interaction a potential customer or client has with your business, and what they are thinking and feeling at various stages of the customer journey. For example, it may eight pieces of content drip-fed through paid advertising or email to a lead to convince them that you have expertise and that your company is worth transacting. However, another customer that interacts with the same eight pieces of content may feel differently, and many not even transact with you at all.
You can view all of this is a data-driven way to improve your sales conversion rates. Because you are using touchpoints to soften up your customer, you won’t have to make cold calls and reach out to people who may not be interested in your product and service offerings. However, you need to be able to track the customer journey effectively and set both you and your customers up for success. You’ll need to gather enough data to know what makes your customers happy – and what turns them off.
Once you have enough data, you can create a customer journey map, which is a touchpoint model of creating an understanding of how leads interact with your business both before, during, and after making a purchase with your business. Of course, creating a customer journey map is not a one size fits all approach. You’ll have to interact with a huge variety of potential customer and clients, and create maps around them rather than creating a pre-set sales funnel that is based on your assumptions and not gathered customer data.
Ultimately, a customer success journey is about meeting customers where they are at and connecting with them. By showing empathy through your sales process and genuinely trying to solve their problems, you will easily be able to up your sales conversion rates while better satisfying your customers.