What is a Customer Journey? Definitions and examples

The definitionis that Customer Journey is all about changing a company’s perspective and analyzing its activities from the point of view of our customers. This approach makes it possible to create new and improved sales processes that will place greater emphasis on satisfying our customers, and attracting more leads, thus generating increased sales.

The customer journey is a set of activities and interactions that our customer is involved in during the buying process. The Customer Journey path can go through many different sales channels, your company’s departments, as well as third-party companies, such as your business partners or authorities.

The term Customer Journey is gaining popularity in Poland, and as we can see in Google Trends, searches for this phrase have been growing evenly and linearly for several years. In times of an informed customer, the reputation of our company is very important. That’s why it’s a good idea to implement solutions for analyzing and improving the Customer Journey in order to provide top-notch services and collect flattering feedback and reviews.

What is a customer journey map?

Customer journey map (CJM) is an unusual approach to understanding and delivering a product or service to a customer. It is a guide to the customer experience with your company. At the same time, it is an excellent optimization tool that will help you eliminate weaknesses and obstacles between you and your customer.

To start the process of creating a CJM you need to define the goals you want to achieve, study the customer experience or find bottlenecks in the business process. CJM will not solve all your problems, but it will show you the issues that need to be addressed. The next step is to gather information about customers, identifying the main points and opinions about the product or service. The final step in preparation is to choose the tool we will work with.

Let’s now turn to the process of creating a customer journey map:

Select Customer;
Determine the phases of customer interaction;
Select the appropriate communication channel;
Explore the customer experience;
Analyze weaknesses and ways to optimize them;
Test and implement best practices.

Track the customer journey with Creatio

Today’s CRM systems are so equipped with functionality suitable for CJM that most people can use them. However, not all of them are able to follow the customer’s journey from the very beginning of his interest in the product to the point where he becomes a loyal customer. But there is a way for Creatio to provide a platform that can support sales, marketing and service functionality on the same platform, maintaining the same database and preventing data loss.

So let’s start by observing the customer journey within the system.

As we understand it, the customer journey is the other side of the sales pipeline. This journey thus begins in the marketing department. There, creative marketers capture and nurture prospects to pass on to sales. Tireless sales professionals do everything in their power to convert a potential customer into a client. After this pivotal point, the customer becomes the responsibility of the service department, which does everything in its power to retain them and provide them with the best experience in the customer lifecycle.

Now that we know the milestones, let’s move on to defining how the Creatio system can make the improvements and analysis needed.

Marketing campaigns

Marketing is the starting point for attracting customers. The first point is usually the registration of the customer on the website, so here the Creatio website behavior tracker comes to the rescue, which will collect all the customer information and automatically put it into the system. It won’t stop there, but will update customer interest information on your site along the way. In case of gaps in customer information, the intelligent data enrichment tool will try to fill in the missing parts with information from open sources. All this information will be available in a single contact database for as long as you need it. This concludes our CJM preparation.

Establish the following business phases in interactions with customers

1

An amazing business process management tool will allow you to design the process you want to follow with each customer. The system gives you the ability to segment and group customers according to their needs and target them with different activities. At the same time, it provides a high level of personalization of emailing campaigns, not to mention customization options. Plan trigger campaigns and arrange events with a system that can catch every detail and remind you to contact a particular customer. All the data in the system will be analyzed and given in an understandable form of graphs and tables to check the result of each step.

2

Once the prospects are prepared with all the information in place the sales department will be on, that is their part to be in the spotlight. From the information already gathered, the sales representative has all types of communication available in the system to contact the customer – emails, calls and messages. All this can be done from within the system. Lead, opportunity, product, contract, project management are all at their disposal. They can control every interaction and have the entire history available with all documents carefully attached and accounted for. Not to mention the field sales capabilities that allow them to update from wherever they are. The analytics system also works to analyze each step, showing efficiency and checking the customer experience. If this step is successfully completed, the newly acquired customer moves into the hands of the service department.

3

At this stage, it’s all about experience. A single contact database with all the history of previous interactions, omnichannel communication with the customer to help and solve any problem. Case, ticket, problem, service level, change and release management will make sure you’re on top of your company’s performance, solving problems before they even occur. The system prevents recurring problems. Because the system maintains a service catalog with all cases of any problems registered and solved, along with a knowledge base that will help resolve any request in a short time. A simple case of finding a solution in a moment.

So, the system can help you follow a customer from initial contact to becoming a loyal customer. All parts of the platform work like parts of the same organism, providing data integrity, purchasing history and analytics that are always useful for monitoring performance and success rates. Every step of the way, you have a highly customizable system that can be tailored to your every wish and designed according to your aesthetic needs.

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What is a Customer Journey? Definitions and examples