When working with customers, knowing what they want so that we get to know them individually is imperative. We want to focus on not only what they want to achieve, but also what they expect from us to help them to get to these goals, whichever field, or industry they may be in.
Specific and individualized communications is key when working with a customer. To produce this targeted interaction, we need to find out where they are in their journey and where they would ultimately like that journey to go.
Each customer has a unique and different experience and will be at various stages and points along their path: no two journeys are the same.
Assessing Your Customer
A customer journey encompasses a series of steps that a customer must make in order to achieve a goal or satisfy a need. You can monitor and, hopefully, engage with your customer in real time to find out exactly what are their goals, where they believe they are on their journey, and what they are doing right now to achieve these goals.
Your customer’s goal might be remodeling and therefore needs a home improvement loan or home equity line of credit. Or. perhaps they just need to file an auto claim.
A good starting point to figure these scenarios out is to engage your team and map out the most critical parts of your customer journeys; it provides a concrete visualization for them as to where the customer wants end up, and where on the journey the customer currently is.
Mapping these journeys helps your team realize where the critical touchpoints are. By doing so, you begin mapping out which parts of each journey they should prioritize for improvements and perhaps tightening up the areas in which you are losing revenue or wasting resources.
Know where customers are in their journey so you can help them achieve their goals.
Setting Your Customer Up for Success
Communication is one of the most important aspects of the customer experience (CX) and client success. Your customers want to feel that the businesses with which they engage know them as individuals—they want the reassurance that aren’t just a number lost in the jumble.
Weaving a customer communication management (CCM) solution into a customer journey helps with this. CCM provides the ability to personalize communications, automate processes, and provide transparency for the customer, enhancing the overall interaction to provide a great CX.
Topdown can help you to uncover these opportunities to facilitate processes, allowing the customer to get what they want, or need, fast and with less effort.
In addition to helping organize and provide a better CX, Topdown solutions can also help improve your operational efficiency. For example, by using our CCM solution, the New York State Office of Unclaimed Funds (NY OUF) saw a significant cost savings in the first year, with a 40% increase in efficiency and a 42% decrease in error rates.
Just as every customer has different journeys, each organization also has different metrics for customer success. Even within one company the metrics could be different: executives may look at the amount of money coming in, whereas customer service managers might be looking at call volume and resolution times.
Whatever the customer may consider as successful, you want to ensure that you put them on the right path through at the onset of their customer journey, guiding them with an invisible hand (think targeted, curated communications) through the various touchpoints so that you set them up for success.
Walking with Your Customer on Their Journey
By assessing your customers and mapping out their journey, you gain better insights into their goals, where they want to go, and what they are doing now to accomplish those objectives.
With the help of the right solution, such as CCM software, you can provide customers with personalized experiences that run more efficiently, culminating in a better and improved CX.
Topdown has been helping companies across a multitude of industries to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of customer communication across all touchpoints. If you’re not sure where your company could improve your customer journeys, get in touch with us today!
Image: Pixabay
