Customer Journey

The customer journey encompasses all of the interactions a customer has with an organization and brand through their experience. When we talk about the customer journey, we’re not talking about touchpoints and transactions. Instead, we’re looking at how the sum of those touchpoints and transactions intertwine to demonstrate an overall experience with your team and your business.

The Traditional Customer Journey Funnel Doesn’t Work

Crack open a marketing textbook and you’ll likely see a funnel that looks like this. You get leads, you give them a call to action, then you move them through the possible opportunities and towards the close.

This type of funnel treats the customer journey more like a machine moving cogs down a conveyor belt rather than honoring the modern approach to finding, researching and working with a business. It also lends itself to internal constraints, causing more departments to operate in silos and more communication breakdowns to occur. Ultimately, everyone’s experience — the customer’s and the employee’s — suffers.

Today’s Customers Expect More Throughout Their Journey

Poor experiences stifle the success of a company. By understanding the customer journey, organizations are able to create mechanisms that will align internal departments and external market needs in a way that tugs on the emotional and logical heart strings of buyers.

The challenge is, many organizations struggle to reach customers along their journey. That’s because so many of the insights needed to properly honor and address the modern customer journey are locked up in individual departments. By breaking down silo walls internally, teams can ensure that the customer journey feels more contiguous and fluid, honoring the way the modern consumer shops. It becomes less mechanical and more meaningful. In doing so, the customer is put back in the driver’s seat of their own journey and given the ability to get choosy about which brands to work with based on experiences alone.

Flipping the Customer Journey

With the evolution of the modern customer journey, brands have seen the need to flip the traditional model on its side and address the full experience with the brand. Today’s customer journey is split between pre- and post-purchase paths, taking the shape of a bow tie instead of a cone.

Every stage of the journey matters here. Because each part is equally important and no customer’s journey is linear, organizations must continuously nurture and engage customers no matter whether they’ve bought before, bought one time, or are a loyal brand ambassador. Understanding the customer journey and experience increases the lifetime value of the customer by focusing on incremental growth via sophisticated operations and predictive loyalty loops.

Why the Customer Journey is So Critical to Today’s Organizations

Without understanding the modern customer journey, organizations will not be able to deliver the kind of experiences that not only get buyers to purchase for a first time, but build retention for many more repeat purchases.

Lower Your LTV:CAC Ratio

When you understand the customer’s journey, you’re better able to predict what they need and when they need it. By showing up with the right message in their journey, you can increase the lifetime value of the customer, and maximize the cost of acquisition.

Improve the Employee Journey

In order for your employees to show up and wow your customer at every stage of their journey, you must have a vested team in place who can act with empathy. Understanding the customer’s journey allows your team to better understand how their work fits into the bigger organizational and consumer goals.

A More Modern Tech Stack

Modern marketing technology moves at the speed of light these days. By getting a better understanding of how your customer traverses their journey towards working with your brand and well beyond, you can ensure they’re met with a smooth experience with each platform they use to work with your business. You’ll also be better equipped to show up on the right platforms and avoid wasting time on the wrong ones, amplifying your efforts and running more efficiently.

Operate More Intelligently

you’ll be able to better understand how all of the moving parts inside your organization fit together to develop a more cohesive experience. You can put the systems in place at every stage of the customer journey to better predict shifts in behaviors, emerging demands and stumbling blocks that could stop a buyer from continuing their journey with your brand.

Customer Experience (CX) Terms

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