Are you ready for next year’s Customer Journey?
Year after year, retailers struggle to keep up with the ever-changing customer behavior. In a world with a vast number of digital channels, it is essential for retailers to understand how the typical shopper progresses from discovery to purchase. In the last years, technology has completely changed the way consumers shop today. There are more and more customer touchpoints for brands and retailers, enabling them to target customers on a highly individual level. This trend will not come to a halt in 2017. New technologies will enable new forms of engagement in and outside the store: Retargeting, Beacons, Digital Signage, and Electronic Shelf Labeling, to name a few, are able to elevate the customer experience to the next level.
Retail brands are increasingly focusing on creating a differentiating customer experience (CX), in order to stay relevant and competitive. The following studies by McKinsey & Company, Gartner and IBM highlight the importance of CX:
- Customer experience is one of the top three priorities for 90% of CEOs
- 89% of companies undertaking marketing efforts have customer experience as one of their main focus points for 2017
- 51% of customers who left companies blamed their exits on bad online experiences
Mapping out the sequential customer touchpoints is an effective way for understanding critical decision points along the customer journey.
Mapping your customer journey proves difficult? It sure is.
Mapping your brand-specific customer journey is less of a straightforward task than you might assume. Marketers often struggle to connect online and offline touchpoints, especially because they need to acquire, assess and use the right customer data in the first place.
The Customer Journey Infographic
Our example shows how a Millennial consumer proceeds through the six stages of the customer journey: From brand awareness to interest, evaluation, decision, pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. Our consumer is influenced across different online channels like Facebook, Google or Instagram throughout his journey. He gathers advice and is subconsciously exposed to online retargeting ads after visiting the brand’s websites. After making the decision to purchase the product, he assesses suitable retail channels. He benchmarks prices, availability, as well as offline and online sourcing options. When entering a local shop, he is able to navigate the store and to locate the product with the help of his smartphone. Despite a good experience, our customer has not yet purchased. Through offline-to-online retargeting the brand is now able to re-engage the consumer through relevant communication across his personal devices and bring him back to the retail store, online shop, or app. But the process does not stop with the purchase: Brand engagement should be an on-going process. Depending on the personal experience with the product, he will not only review or recommend it, but will also share his experiences on social networks, replace the product, or resell it on online marketplaces. Ideally, the brand experience will have exceeded his expectations making him want to come back for more.
Key Takeaways
- Retail brands need to fully understand the customer journey in order to stay on top of the consumer’s mind.
- The best solution for identifying all critical touchpoints is building a map of the entire decision making progress.
- Main challenges when mapping the customer journey occur because of a lack of consumer data and a missing link between online and offline channels.
- The consumer needs to be guided with clear communication throughout the journey and across all channels, in order to create a consistent customer experience.
