The New Non-linear Customer Journey
Note: This is the English version of a guest post appeared on the Zero12 blog.
For decades, the customer journey has been metaphorically represented as a funnel where people with an intention to buy start to evaluate tens of brands and then reduce the choice to a shortlist to ultimately pick one. In this simplistic representation customers are methodical, informed and linear in their process. They systematically narrowing down the options and deep dive only the products they ultimately purchase. The post-sale experience is then used to validate the choice and build some kind of loyalty with the brand.
Purchasing decisions today
Consumers today form impressions based on multiple touchpoints and each one of them can trigger the impulse to buy. Counter-intuitively the plethora of choices available in today’s market, for almost every product, reduces the number of brands and products being considered to those readily available and more alternatives lead to less choice. Reaching consumers at the moments that most influence their decisions is now paramount and should become marketers’ top priority.
Too much data is too little information
Brands need to collect more data to understand exactly where customers are in their journey and how close they are to the moment when they’re ready to buy. Context, content, products and actions should be intertwined to paint a vivid picture.
Unfortunately, too much data poses the same old problem as finding a needle in a haystack. Too much is too little. Marketers now have at their disposal sophisticated technologies to track and measure everything, but yet, this is rarely put to good use. According to InformationWeek, Big Data Success Remains Elusive and customers struggle to get good returns of investment on the so-called “Big data” initiatives.
A roadmap to succeed
Software vendors trying to simplify the landscape are emerging daily, but technology alone is not the answer. To be successful in following the journey and be there when your consumers need you, brands need to rely on a blend of technology, process and expertise.
There are a few concrete steps to increase the likelihood of success:
- Define your business goals: It’s fine at this stage to have something as wide as “reduce customer churn by an <unknown %>” but at least that’s something you can use to drive your efforts. Goals drive behaviour and drive data as well.
- Design a customer-centric data processing platform: Track and document every touch point in the data refinery and clarify how it adds value.
- Store everything first: Data gathers importance when correlated. Never discard information before conducting a full correlation analysis to see how it impacts your customer journey.
- Enrich your dataset: Correlate first party data with information coming from independent partners. Throwing people movement, weather, currencies or any other meaningful dataset into the mix could give unexpected insights.
- Address a problem at a time: It might be tempting to embarque into a company-wide transformation to solve mankind’s problems, but that’s a recipe for failure. Identify some quick wins first to get the ball rolling and then move to wider objectives.
A profound transformation is needed across the board to connect the dots and use every touch point to learn more, tell a story and trigger consumers’ intention to buy. Track results and act upon. Passive bystanders of this digital transformation will see their customers lured away by new entrants or incumbents that are faster to change skin and adapt.
Originally published at dataandco.expertly.io.
