Boost your customer experience this holiday season by acknowledging bottlenecks and improving your customer’s journey.
It all starts with a question: where in the journey are leads getting stuck or disengaging? If you and your team are not asking this question, it is time to start.
When customers choose a brand and its service or products, to access it, the customer goes through what is known as the customer’s journey (or buyer’s journey). What does it mean? It is the hypothetical process a potential customer goes through to get to the point of sale. Many businesses trust their marketing teams to use this hypothetical journey to build content and interaction points that facilitate each journey stage. The goal is to bring the prospect closer and closer to purchasing the product or service.
Customer journeys can be very dynamic and fast, resulting in satisfied customers. Challenges arise for businesses during busy times of the year. These challenges might include delays, long lines, and anxiousness in the customers. As a consequence, they may abandon the purchase and seek a competitor.
Bottlenecks are among the major reasons purchases get delayed, budgets burst from the added cost of those delays, and the whole process becomes unpredictable and irritating for both customers and brands.
Instead of fighting the process, all that businesses need to do is analyze their customer journey (in other words, put themselves in the customer’s shoes). Through making a bottleneck analysis, the team will be able to identify what’s working and what it is not.
Ready, Set, Go! The Holiday Season is Around the Corner!
To identify the problem and be able to solve it before one of the busiest seasons of the year, it is important to know what a bottleneck is, in which part of the customer’s journey this is happening, and how a customer’s journey works.
To illustrate the customer’s journey, Amber Kemmis, COO at Revenue River, created this visual:
At the same time, bottlenecks refer to a work stage that gets more work requests than it can process at its maximum throughput capacity. Consequently, this causes an interruption to the flow of sales and delays the whole process.
How does a business identify which part of the journey is being affected by bottlenecks? Easy, by navigating through the sales process as if they were the customers.
Some things you have to consider if you want to improve your customer experience (CX) and the journey:
Understand Your Customer’s Journey
Knowing your audience is crucial. By understanding their demographics, like age, location, and browsing habits, you can engage with your potential customers by providing them with a personalized experience.
Do not skip critical steps in the process of developing the journey, and think about how the content that you are using works. Is it helping your customers or making them feel they are wasting their time?
Customers May Not Be as Ready as They Think They Are
One of the most common bottlenecks or reasons why leads get stuck, is because they are not ready to move further. The content creation may be excellent, and the journey easy to navigate, but that does not mean that the customer is ready to commit.
The clarity and friendly content creation that you develop will inspire your customer’s journey. However, there are times that the customer is only curious and is not ready to commit to what the brand is offering. There will always be leads who enter the funnel but are not ready to buy or don’t have the decision-making power to do so. Customers might leave the journey for uncountable reasons, but not all is lost.
First, you can ask your customers why they haven’t purchased your services or products, yet. Through a survey, a form, or a friendly email to determine where they stand in the journey. This will help you to better understand your audience and what tools and content you can develop to avoid or remove future bottlenecks.
On the other hand, customers might not be ready to purchase if there’s no urgency or necessity. At this point, focusing on engaging the customer takes precedence while they consider their options. Showing patience in their journey will help boost their loyalty to your brand.
Avoid Long Sales Cycles
Another common bottleneck in the customer’s journey, mainly during the holidays season, are the long sales cycles. These can be problematic if the supporting content and nurturing campaigns are failing.
Your customer’s journey, associated content, and campaigns have to support all the sales cycle length. Whether the cycle is long or short, it is important to recognize the first signs of a bottleneck along the journey and to consider how much time it takes your customer to purchase the product or service.
Your Product or Service Can Be a Bottleneck
Even big-name brands with a great proposal end up failing because they are not validated by customers. 90% of the startups fail, even when they are well established to succed. Most of the time, this is because the products or services offered do not meet customer’s needs. Or, it might do so, but the supporting content has not made the impact the business needs.
It is important to navigate your customer journey as if you were the customer. But, it is as essential to recognize the product or service that you are offering and how its reputation is being built.
By doing so, you can overcome the challenge and improve your brand’s service.
Q-Anywhere to be Everywhere
The holiday season is a crowded time of the year, and sometimes bottlenecks will form due to the demand your business may be receiving. By recognizing the bottlenecks and addressing them as soon as possible your business will further enhance the customer journey.
By implementing Q-Anywhere, the customer journey will be revamped.
ACF Technologies can help your business, no matter the type or size, this holiday season. To learn more about our highly adaptable solutions, contact us or schedule a demo.
