Today, businesses have high expectations for a great experience when working with other businesses to buy products and services. The customer journey is the complete sum of that experience they go through while working with a company or brand. Instead of looking at just one aspect of an experience, such as acquisition, the customer experience journey highlights each aspect of the full experience of being a customer.
The Customer Experience Journey starts when a potential customer discovers your product and continues as they are educated during the sales discovery process.
The Steps of the Customer Journey:
- Awareness - You discover a company that provides needed products and services typically through digital and print ads.
- Discovery - You learn more about the company and its products and services through reviews, blogs and social media.
- Attraction - You like the company and want to know if it’s a good fit by reading blogs and customer reviews.
- Interaction - You fill out a form on the website or talk to a salesperson.
- Purchase - You sign the order and, in the case of web development, you begin planning the new website or portal.
- Use - The product is launched and is meeting its objectives.
- Cultivation - This includes all the tasks associated with continuing the relationship with the company including learning about upgrades and buying additional products.
- Advocacy - You talk about the company to friends and family, and explain how they helped you.
This entire Customer Experience Journey can be managed and optimized with a web portal, or self-serve portal. A portal helps customers interact with a company. It can collect information to be used by a customer to help them solve a problem or advocate for the company. But additionally, it will help initiate any contact method from a phone call, text, live chat or a form fill. The benefit of a CommonPlaces Customer Experience Portal is that it can integrate with best in class software such as HubSpot, Salesforce and more.
As we look at all the steps in the Customer Journey we can match each step with the functionality of a CX portal.
Awareness - Build integrations with a CMS and CRM to track visits to a website or phone calls generated from ads and social media.
Interaction - Track form fills and nurturing new lead in a CRM. Integration with 3rd party software to optimize the acquisition of new customers.
Purchase & Use - Integration with a ticketing system to handle support requests and customizing analytics to measure success.
Cultivation - Create a knowledge base and forums to educate and create a sense of community.
Advocacy - Integration with review sites and build loyalty programs to reward customers.
When designing the ideal Customer Experience Portal, CommonPlaces creates a relevant, personalized product that makes it easy for customers to find what they need. Most importantly, our portals combine automated self-service with the option for human communication.
The ultimate goal of a Customer Experience Portal is to create a sense of community among customers. The more data you can build and share, the more you will enhance the customer experience throughout their journey.
Check back for our next blog post in the series about Customer Experience Portals and how they can help you increase revenue and build loyalty with your customers. If you have questions please reach out!