Is your customer journey any good – 6 steps to be sure!
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone who came across your product or service bought from you!
Instead, as small business owners, we have to create moments that will entice people to do business with us.
These moments form a customer journey to doing business with you. Do you know your customers’ journey before they do business with you?
Here are some steps you can take to map out how people are interacting with your business and how you can improve each step along the way. You can then decide if your customer journey is any good or if you need to take steps to improve it.
The alignment
What are the goals that you have for your business? How can you align your goals with your customers’ goals?
E.g., You want to sell a range of cushions that you have with an excellent profit margin. At the same time, customers are looking for cushions that will match their home styling.
How can you create content to market your high-profit cushions and align with your customers’ styling goals?
The touchpoints
How do you currently get in front of your customers? Make a list of the moments at pre-purchase, purchase and after purchase.
- Are you doing enough
- What are you missing
- Are your touchpoints leading to transactions, or are people exiting along the path before doing business with you?
The pains
There will be people who choose not to proceed along all the touchpoints – why!
- Is your website old
- Is your website difficult to navigate
- Are you slow to reply to emails, calls or direct messages
- Is your pricing confusing
- Do you have consistency across your advertising, website and customer service?
What pain points are your customers experiencing that may lead them to go elsewhere? How can you alleviate this?
The road-test
If you are self-employed and the only one who works in your business, sometimes it can be difficult to step outside your company. However, if you can imagine what it feels like for your customers, you can uncover incredible insights.
Using a trusted friend/s, you may get them to road-test your business and provide you with helpful feedback.
Creating a mystery shopping experience can show you what may be missing when trying to do business with you.
Have you ever road-tested your competition?
What are they doing, and are you offering a better or preferred experience?
The visual experience
Some people can create visuals in their minds; however, one of the best ways to look at something from all angles is to write it down. Now I do not mean that you need to create a perfect piece of art; grab a pen and paper.
Create a visual representation of what happens along the way, during and after doing business with you.
- Use sticky notes on a wall
- Pin items to a corkboard
- Use a whiteboard
- Just do whatever makes sense to you
The brainstorm
Now it is time to come up with ways to improve things every step of the way.
Test these new methods and ideas, gain feedback and improve accordingly.
You don’t need to have a big team to make this work, and it is just as helpful for solo business operators to review their processes. This should be done regularly (annually) as what worked last year may not work as well this year.
So – Is your customer journey any good.
After reviewing the steps people take to do business with you, what do you think? What are the areas that you can improve, and how will you improve them?
For example, even the smallest of changes, Abandoned cart emails for e-commerce stores, typically show 30% of them are a recovered sale for that store.
Do you need help implementing changes to improve your customer journey? Contact Kelly @ My Sassy Business and improve your business outcomes today.
