7 Effective Hacks to Research and Improve Customer Journey Effectiveness
Every single interaction, the most minute details of the interaction you have with your customer, is an opportunity for you to create something remarkable.
— Joey Coleman (CX-Expert)
What is a Customer Journey?
The sum total of all the experiences a customer goes through while interacting with your product/brand right from the awareness to the advocacy stage is called Customer Journey.
It can be considered as a detailed road map of the customers — from gaining awareness of your brand via social media, through to them talking about you in forums/communities.
The bottom line of coming up with a customer journey is to deepen our understanding of the customers’ behaviors, thoughts, and feelings across multiple touchpoints in their journey.
We had come up with an interesting poll in our Facebook Community Growth Folks and these were the best 7 hacks to research and improve customer journey effectiveness that our experienced Growth Marketers/ Hackers use real-time in their businesses!
- Customer Persona
- Path Analysis in Analytics
- Customer Journey Mapping
- A/B Testing
- Customer Surveys
- Multivariate Testing
- Usability Studies of Digital experiences
Customer Persona:
(35% of our Growth Marketers agreed on Customer Personas to improve/research customer journey effectiveness.)
Customer Personas play an integral part in providing data-driven insights on who your ideal/actual customers are. Personas are often fictional characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. While customer personas act as a starting point to building the customer journey it could also be used as a tool to help you take a customer-centric approach for the same.
Path Analysis in Analytics:
(24% of our Growth Marketers agreed on Path Analysis in GA to improve/research customer journey effectiveness.)
Google Analytics is a gold mine for gaining insights on how prospects/customers are experiencing your website. It gives detailed reports on the devices that they are using, page loading speed, and whether they are engaging with elements within your pages(like scrolling through content, watching videos). Google Analytics even lets you comprehend people’s navigation paths providing a clear picture for understanding their journey and if at all making some subtle changes to improve it.
Customer Journey Mapping: The Customer Journey map is nothing but a tool to visualize the customer interactions with the brand from their point of view. It gives us a logical outlook on how they actually experience the brand versus how you think they do. By better understanding your customers, you can deliver better on their expectations.
A/B Testing: A/B testing is practically a great way to experiment with your data to determine what works — and what doesn’t. Whether it is finding the right copy on your landing page, the most engaging Fb-ads, or most action-inciting giveaways, you’ll be able to make smart, impactful decisions that will indeed refine your customer journey.
Customer Surveys: Customer Surveys can be one of the best ways to reach out and understand how our customers actually felt during their entire buying journey. On the contrary, forms can be really boring at times and not everyone will be wanting to fill-up the form. Incentivizing them with an extended free trial or an upgraded version can help.
Multivariate Testing: Multivariate testing is similar to A/B testing only for the fact that several variables can be modified for testing a single hypothesis and determining which is the best combination of all possible ones. This indeed can come in handy while improving the customer journey as it could save us a lot of time and also determine the contribution of each variable.
Usability studies of Digital experiences: The key intent of Usability Testing is to test the functionality of designs with real users in order to analyze the ease of use, navigation, and other parameters. This could be a highly recommended method while researching the Customer Journey as customer experiences define business success today. This technique is also increasingly being adopted by enterprises to minimize risks and validate product features before launch.
It’s all about visualizing how your customers/prospects interact with your brand and by determining why they stay or leave, you can achieve a better experience for current and future customers.
A big thanks to Karan, Manan Trivedi, Abbas Shaikh, Zakir Sunasara, Shathyan Raja, Gaurav Gururaj, Umar Salman, Piyush Agarwal, Vikas Rathore, Marvin Diaz, Kritika Kamra, Rohith Darisa, Karthik B R, Siddharth Dwivedi, Ramprasad Vinayagamoorthy, Prasad Lingawar, Bharath Kashyap, Nishit Malhotra, Anand Vatsya, Asim Virani, Nitthin Chandran, Ayush, Soumyadip, Sneha Tikoo, Megha Gulati, Piyush Bansal, Niranjan Ayyar, Amit Sharma for sharing your views and contributing to the poll.
These were the highlights which summarise the discussion that happened in our GrowthFolks group. The folks who have shared their views are themselves the Growth Marketers/Hackers. We would like to thank all of them for sharing these valuable growth learnings. And a big thanks to Sujith Ayyappan who has helped me to put down these points and made it a successful blog.
Are we missing any important point here? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything to add, do put down your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here.
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Growth Folks is a community of Growth Marketers, Growth Hackers, and everyone who is enthusiastic about Growth. Started off in 2017, Growth Folks has an offline presence in 8+ cities of India and has 650+ growth enthusiasts as part of their Facebook community which makes them one of the fastest growing and successful communities in growth space. You can join the community here.
