Search engine optimization (SEO) is an excellent way of improving your website's online visibility. However, it takes more than just being on the first page to generate profit. You need your customers to keep visiting and making purchases. One of the ways to achieve this is by improving your customers' online experience.
That said, a customer journey is what many business owners, business development professionals, and sales experts alike are using to understand their customers' behavior. If you'd like to know more, here are three tips for creating a meaningful customer journey
1. Let the customer be your main focus.
You may have heard the saying, "The customer is king." While the statement has become a cliché for many, you can't overemphasize how vital customers are to your business's survival. You'll do well to plan your marketing strategy around your customers' needs. Yes, SEO is essential, but people often forget the customers' position in their SEO strategy.
After you have created a beautiful, fast-loading, and easy-to-use website, include a section that allows your customers to give feedback after interacting with your brand. You can do this by adding a comment section, a survey, and maintaining an active presence on social media, etc.
Also, keep in mind that things won't go well all the time and customers know this. So, it's no surprise they always appreciate a customer service platform that'll listen to them and promptly resolve their challenges whenever they come in contact with your brand. In this regard, having an inbound call center service will go a long way in knowing how satisfied customers are with their visit and resolving customer issues. Remember, not everyone can or likes to initiate a phone call whenever they choose to interact with a customer support service. Therefore, an effective call center service should be both inbound and outbound to ensure customers can choose how they want to interact with you.
It's also worth noting that an automated interactive voice response can also make it quicker to receive customer complaints. However, using trained, human call center agents that'll handle both inbound and outbound calls can go a long way in offering customers comfort when they have complaints.
2. Identify the touch-points of your customers.
From the various avenues put in place for customers to interact, identify any obstacle in their journey on your website. You should know how to use your website's analytics to understand how much time customers spend on your website. It also helps to understand when and how they leave your site.
All this information will help you know where and how to improve their experience. For example, if your online visitors leave at the checkout page without completing their purchase, you might want to improve on a more efficient and customer-accommodating checkout page. For example, people often make mistakes with their card numbers. So it can be annoying starting the entire information-imputing process all over again each time they make a mistake.
3. Create a customer journey map.
At this point, you should have enough information at hand to create a customer journey map. Your custom journey map or story doesn't have to be too complex or sophisticated but should include your analytical and anecdotal data. The former is what your website's analytics tell you, while the latter is data about how your customers feel or think.
Social media platforms, surveys, and the use comment section earlier mentioned can reveal how your customer think and feel. If you run a large online store, there'll likely be countless options when a customer visits to make a purchase. While it may be tricky to predict all possible outcomes or scenarios, capturing the points where your online visitors are becoming frustrated is crucial on the journey map.
Remember, it's not about designing a sophisticated map, the goal is to understand the customer and use the information to make them continuously visit you for their purchases.
