The key to long-term company success is all about unearthing how to turn leads into loyal clients.
As customer expectations are constantly evolving due to ongoing digital transformation and technological advancements, obtaining this key might be more challenging than ever for businesses.
From the starting point to the extreme point, businesses need to have full authority over their customers’ interaction with their brand to ease and simplify the process.
To achieve this aim, navigating the customer journey in the right way plays a vital role.
What is a Customer Journey?
Customer journey refers to all direct and indirect interactions a customer has with a brand, goods, or services.
Each customer’s journey is specific to that customer alone, which makes the whole process of navigating the customers’ journeys more challenging and complex for businesses.
Therefore, companies need to understand the stages of the customer journey to map out each customer’s journey, subsequently putting forward potential weak points and optimizing each stage to strengthen customer satisfaction, retention, and as the final point, business growth.
5 Stages of the Customer Journey 
There are generally 5 steps a potential customer takes while interacting with a brand.
These 5 stages constitute the customer journey, and therefore understanding these steps fully and putting forward strategies accordingly are crucial for businesses.
Let’s take a look at these steps and discover the actions businesses could take to further optimize each stage.
Awareness
This is the point where your potential clients learn about your company, line of goods, or services for the first time.
There are several ways it could occur, including online searches, social media platforms, word-of-mouth, or advertising.
Businesses might strengthen their marketing efforts to make a greater impact on customers in this step of the customer journey. This might include content marketing, e-mail marketing, or social media marketing.
Consideration
In this phase, the potential customer begins to actively explore if your service could satisfy their demands or provide a solution to their problems.
To make up their minds, potential customers might read reviews, take a look at your website and compare your product to those of your rivals, or look for further details about your brand or service.
Businesses need to ensure that their websites provide detailed information on their services or products and offer high-quality customer service for any questions potential customers might have during this process.
It would be also beneficial for businesses to have affirmative reviews of their service or product on their website.
In this way, the potential customers might start having a good impression of the brand or the service and move on to the next step of the customer journey with positive feelings.
Decision
In this step of the customer journey, the potential clients are now gearing up to make the final call – to purchase or not to purchase.
This step might feature reducing the number of options and looking for the best price/performance ratio offer or user-friendly terms.
In order not to lose customers in this step, businesses might consider following a series of pricing strategies – such as providing special offers to new customers or offering free shipping for the first purchase.
Purchase
If the potential customer reaches this point, that means your business is on the right track.
In this exact stage, the potential customer transforms into one of your customers officially as they complete their purchase of your service or product.
Businesses might ease and simplify the purchasing process by offering a clear and simple purchase process with various payment options as the customer’s overall experience in this stage has a huge effect on the final step of the customer journey.
Businesses must ensure that the customers will come back for more after buying the product or service in this step.
Businesses would benefit from having an AI-based chatbot that gives customers the knowledge they need on a particular topic in case customers are having trouble making the purchase and are unable to contact customer support.
Loyalty/Advocacy
Providing that your customers are happy and content, they turn into devoted brand ambassadors who spread the word about your company to others in addition to becoming loyal customers themselves at this stage of the customer journey.
At this point, it is possible to say that your brand has established a solid relationship with its clients and has marked the end of a fruitful customer journey.
Businesses might have this ideal scenario if they continue their interactions with their clients after the purchase stage.
There are various ways for businesses to follow in this case, such as sending thank you and follow-up emails to their customers or providing them with personalized offers and promotions through e-mails or even phone calls.
Strategies for Retaining Customers through the Customer Journey
There are various techniques businesses might benefit from when it comes to converting leads to loyal customers from the beginning to the end of the customer journey.
Let’s take a look at the most impactful strategies for retaining customers through the customer journey!
Create Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps are graphic depictions that show all of the touchpoints, stages, and experiences a customer has with a business or brand.
Creating customer journey maps is a great way to comprehend and examine the interactions, feelings, and reasons of a client at every stage of their customer journey – from the first awareness stage to the loyalty and advocacy stage after the sale.
By analyzing these interactions through customer journey maps, businesses can identify weak points and areas for improvement along with specifying goals and objectives for their clients.
Thanks to the deep insight provided by customer journey maps, it becomes possible to provide a much more comfortable journey to potential customers and make the way for them to become loyal customers.
Additionally, businesses also have the chance to prioritize efforts that have the biggest effects on enhancing the customer experience and fostering business success by taking into account all of the information gathered from the customer journey maps.
Offer a Customized Experience to Clients
Companies need to personalize their way of communication depending on the preferences, actions, and demographics of their customers starting at the awareness stage.
To customize offers and personalize e-mails, businesses might utilize data analytics or benefit from CRM systems.
As you offer a customized experience to your clients through the customer journey, they will be more likely to develop positive feelings towards your brand or company.
It is also a nice idea to offer specific solutions to clients depending on their job titles or personal preferences. This will make your customers feel valued and special, and they will be highly likely to become loyal customers of your brand.
Provide Exceptional Customer Service
Customers must have constant support throughout their customer journey.
Therefore, delivering excellent customer care throughout the entire process is significant in terms of satisfying your customers and marking the beginning of a strong relationship with them.
It is important to always be present at each stage, ready to give support at any time, answer questions right away, and find effective solutions to problems – in short, to go above and beyond to satisfy customers.
As the customers become satisfied and develop positive feelings for your brand, there is a high possibility that they will become devoted brand ambassadors of your business.
Get Customer Feedback Regularly
Customers like it when brands spare time to listen to their words, and they even love it when the brands take these words into account and make necessary improvements.
Asking clients for feedback on various aspects of their experience or a specific aspect of your brand, service or product is a nice idea to both engage with your audience and have your audience connect with your business.
So, companies need to actively listen to the feedback and comments that consumers provide on social media and make the required adjustments to meet their needs.
It is also a good idea to create polls to learn about customers’ opinions on a specific subject have an insight into their levels of satisfaction, and subsequently pinpoint areas for improvement.
Present Exceptional Offers to Your Customers
It is a nice and fun idea for businesses to surprise their customers with birthday discounts or samples of their new product or service from time to time – especially when they feel like the customers are growing away from their brand after the purchase stage of the customer journey.
In this way, they can make the customers feel valued as well as make the way for the customers to develop positive feelings about their brand once again.
Surfing on social media platforms and presenting unsatisfied customers with new and improved versions of their products or services is also a good way for businesses to make their brand stand out.
Continuously Improve Your Business
Regularly updating client journey maps is just as important as creating these maps in the first place.
Businesses need to regularly review and refine their customer journey maps to further develop their strategies based on data and insights from these maps.
In this way, they have the chance to remain relevant and competitive in response to shifting consumer expectations and market conditions.
Navigate Your Customer Journey with OCTAPULL Products!
OCTAPULL’s OctaMeet, a new-generation video conferencing tool, and Octapull SFA, a sales force automation software, offer you excellent assistance as you navigate the customer journey.
Try OctaMeet for Free Now!
OctaMeet’s user-friendly interface design and exceptional collaboration capabilities empower your business to build strong relationships with your customers throughout all the phases of the customer journey through online video conferences.
You can set up a demo meeting with our product team to discover OctaMeet’s outstanding features along with the most effective ways to manage the customer journey with the power of video conferencing.
Benefit from Octapull SFA’s Campaign Management Module!
With Octapull SFA’s multi-faceted campaign management, you can both satisfy your customers and drive sales by making use of customized campaign scenarios throughout the customer journey.
You can plan a demo meeting with our product team to obtain more information on Octapull SFA’s numerous advantageous modules to improve customer satisfaction and maximize your sales as a result of successful customer journey management.
