Great customer journeys don’t happen by chance.
They’re the result of paying attention to how customers interact with your brand, improving each touchpoint based on valuable data insights, and continuously measuring and iterating your efforts for higher customer satisfaction. This is customer journey optimization.
What Is Customer Journey Optimization?
Customer journey optimization means analyzing and improving the interaction experience with your brand at every stage. This makes it easier for the customer to complete the desired action and proceed to the next stage of their journey. Done right, it leads to higher retention and conversion rates, driving increased revenue for your business.
Understanding Your Customer Journey
Customer journey optimization starts with understanding your existing touchpoints. You need to know the entire process customers go through when engaging with your organization and what the experience looks like at each step.
Here’s how to go about it:
1. Set a specific goal
Set one goal to serve as the North Star for your customer journey. You will evaluate every step of the journey against this goal to see which processes align with it and what you need to change or improve.
For instance, if your goal is to increase the number of repeat purchases, you would assess the customer journey to see if your processes — from initial contact to post-purchase follow-up — are designed to encourage and facilitate repeat buying.
You should tie your customer journey goal to your core business objectives. Suppose your business goal is to increase online sales by 20% over the next six months. In that case, your customer journey goal could be to reduce cart abandonment.
2. Create customer personas
A customer or buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and first-party customer data.
It gives you a better sense of your ideal customers and how they engage with your touchpoints. You can then use this information to optimize each touchpoint to better meet their expectations and cater to their preferences.
Creating customer personas requires extensive research. You’ll need to analyze your existing customer base and segment your customers based on demographic data or buying habits. Then you can survey sample customers from each segment to learn more about their needs and pain points.
Consider analyzing social media reviews and sentiments to gather more customer feedback and uncover behavioral trends and patterns.
3. Map the journey
Once you’ve completed the customer persona surveys, the next step is to create a customer journey map.
This is a visual representation of the process your customers go through from their first contact with your brand to becoming repeat buyers or brand advocates. You’ll need to map each customer journey stage to the corresponding touchpoint.
For example, the awareness stage can include social media and your website, while the consideration stage might cover contact centers.
Customer journey mapping helps you see things as they are, making it easier to identify friction points that your customers might struggle with at every stage. If social media is the first touchpoint, but customers don’t get a quick response to their direct messages, they may drop out at the awareness stage.
Optimizing the Customer Experience
Once you know what your customers expect and how they interact with your brand, it’s time to optimize their customer journey experience. Here’s how to go about it.
1. Prioritize touchpoints
Each customer journey stage has multiple touchpoints, but they’re not weighed equally. You need to find the ones that have the most impact on conversion and customer satisfaction.
You can do this by analyzing customer behavior. Look for the touchpoints where the customer took the action that propelled them to the next stage of the customer journey.
Let’s say potential customers interact with your brand via your website, social media, and third-party review sites first. If most of them fill out the interest form on your website but not on your review site or social media, it shows that your website is the primary awareness touchpoint.
2. Personalize the experience
More than 55% of participants in Segment’s State of Personalization Survey said they would become repeat buyers after a personalized customer experience.
To personalize customer interactions, tailor communication to match customer personas across touchpoints. Let’s say you’re an e-commerce business. In that case, you can install a content recommendation engine on your website to automatically suggest related products based on a visitor’s search history.
You can also use AI-powered chatbots to offer personalized customer support based on purchase history or previous interactions.
3. Seamless omnichannel experience
According to Digiday’s State of Omnichannel Marketing report, “Teams that implement strong omnichannel tactics are three times more likely to see a significant increase in revenue growth.”
A contact center like Nextiva can help you deliver omnichannel customer experiences. It allows you to centralize all your customer touchpoints — from your website to social media platforms and telephone information — into a single channel.
This allows you to monitor customer interactions and deliver a consistent experience, no matter where or when customers interact with your brand.
Let’s say a customer sends a message via live chat and follows up with a call a few hours later. With an omnichannel contact center, you can track and continue the conversation as if it were happening in the same channel without losing context.
4. Reduce friction
Make it as easy as possible for customers and your target audience to complete their desired actions at every touchpoint.
If your website is the primary awareness touchpoint, you’ll need to improve its load time so visitors can access information quickly.
Similarly, reducing friction in the purchase stage could mean simplifying your checkout process, making it easier for customers to complete transactions. In the post-purchase stage, it means having a fast and easy onboarding process to help new customers quickly get used to your product or service.
Measuring Success
You need to measure your customer journey optimization efforts to see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Start by tracking the following customer experience metrics for relevant touchpoints and journey stages:
- Website traffic: Web analytics tools like Google Analytics allow you to see the number of visitors your website receives, the sources of traffic, and user behavior.
- Conversion rates: To calculate the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions (purchases, form submissions, etc.) by the total number of website visitors. Then, multiply the result by 100 to get the conversion rate percentage.
- Customer acquisition cost: Customer acquisition cost is how much you spend to acquire one customer. Divide the total cost of sales and marketing over a specific period by the number of customers acquired.
- Customer lifetime value: This is the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with a business throughout their entire relationship. Subtract the cost of acquiring and serving the customer from the revenue earned from that customer over the customer lifecycle.
- Customer support resolution rates: This is how quickly your support team resolves customer issues. Divide the number of resolved issues by the total number of customer issues and multiply by 100. You can track this information using a customer support system or CRM tool that logs support interactions and outcomes.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): The Net Promoter Score measures customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s based on the question, “On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Customers are then grouped as Promoters (score 9–10), Passives (score 7–8), and Detractors (score 0–6). The NPS is the difference between the percentage of detractors and promoters.
You can also use A/B testing tools like Kameleoon to compare different versions of touchpoints, such as website layouts and ad copy, to see which ones perform better.
Optimizing With Contact Center Software
A contact center platform is all-in-one software for omnichannel customer journey optimization. It gives you a central view of all customer interactions across the entire journey, making it easier to optimize touchpoints and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
A contact center also:
- Uses customer journey analytics to understand customer needs and pain points and suggest improvements
- Offers self-service options like chatbots, reducing the burden on agents and empowering customers
- Improves agent efficiency with features like call routing and real-time data
Nextiva Makes It Easy
Nextiva streamlines customer journey management through proactive, AI-powered workflows, unified customer communication, and reliable customer journey tracking. It’s never been easier to personalize customer engagement and deliver intelligent, intuitive experiences at every interaction.
