The customer journey is all the actions a customer takes before purchasing a product or service. The customer journey describes all the user's steps, starting from becoming familiar with the brand and ending with their post-purchase interaction with the company. It is extremely important for a company to understand what steps customers take before performing the desired action. This information will allow the company to optimize its workflow, eliminate shortcomings, and improve the user experience.
Each customer journey is unique. Some people may decide to make a purchase immediately after clicking on an advertisement banner on the website, while others go through a series of deliberations and doubts before finally deciding to make a purchase. These two customers will go through completely different stages of the journey to achieve the same result. However, the company can determine the average customer journey and use it as a guide for their work. For example, let's consider the customer journey of someone searching for sneakers.
- The customer makes a search query, specifying the desired sneaker model.
- The customer visits the website and studies the range of the online store.
- The customer leaves the site and opens another online store in the search results to compare range and prices.
- The customer finds a model they like, but the price seems too high, so he returns to the first online store where the prices were lower.
- The customer finds the desired model at a lower price than the previous online store, but he sees that the required size is not in stock.
- The customer calls the online store and finds out that the model in the required size will be available within a week.
- The customers sign up for the email newsletter on the website to receive a notification when the desired size of the sneakers is available.
- After a few days, The customer receives an email about the arrival of the product at the online store and places an order.
As can be seen from the example, the customer journey can be convoluted and full of obstacles. Moreover, our example is quite simple and favorable for the seller, while in reality, things can be even more complicated. If the online store from the example studies this customer journey, it can make several valuable conclusions. Firstly, the store has lower prices than its competitors, and this should be emphasized in its promotion. Secondly, the store needs to increase the depth of its product range, so that customers do not have to wait for deliveries. This is why the customer journey is so valuable—it helps every company to improve its work.
There are different ways to recreate the customer journey. The easiest way is to put yourself in the customer's shoes and become a customer of your own store. This will be enough to notice obvious problems. Knowing the basic customer journey, the company can refine it. To do this, it is necessary to take into account the target audience's profile and the requests with which customers come to the company. Use web analytics to detail the customer journey. For example, it will tell you about entry and exit points on the site, as well as visitors' interactions with site elements. As a result, you will get the customer journey that will allow you to become better.
