Digital customer journey optimization: A holistic approach

A customer journey is a path taken towards buying any goods or services. Digital customer journeys are used as a tool to help map questions and pain points that consumers have before they can move forward with their purchasing journey. 

Customer journey is a concept that focuses on the path customers take through a funnel, starting with an awareness of a brand and ending with a purchase. Understanding customer journeys can help optimize them so that they align with a brand’s marketing strategy. 

Digital customer journey maps are visual representations of the process by which customers interact with your brand (or products). They can be used to identify opportunities for refining customer experience or improving customer satisfaction. The digital customer journey is the process that any internet user follows starting from the internet stage all the way to retention.

4 Stages of digital customer journey experience

This journey is a series of steps that your customers take, and each step can be optimized to increase the effectiveness of your overall digital presence. In order for you to optimize your digital customer journey, you need to identify the key stages of this journey. These stages are; awareness, engagement, transaction/fulfillment, and retention. 

Awareness: 

Customer awareness is the first step of any customer journey. This is the discovery stage where your customer realizes that something is missing from their lives and they need something. For example, it could be anything from buying a new phone to replacing a broken window. 

It’s the awareness stage that leads the customer to you, knowing that your brand exists. Any internet user in need of something goes online and conducts research for a product or service they need. So this means you need to have a strong internet presence for them to find you and that you need to have customer service available ready to answer any questions they might ask you. 

Engagement:

After the awareness stage comes engagement. By this point, the consumer already knows what they want and what your brand has to offer. Engaging with customers means giving them a reason to stay interested in what you have to say, in what you have to offer. For this to happen, brands need to focus on providing content that is relevant and valuable for their target audience. By providing them content such as tutorials, blog posts, ebooks, or e-guides you allow them to engage with you. You might not be selling to them yet but you have to be there to answer their questions so it’s your brand they think of when they require your product or service. 

Use data analytics and social listening tools like Lucidya to understand what sort of content your target audience interacts better with. Tools like these can help you understand what content generates a higher engagement and can help you tailor future content accordingly. 

Transaction/Fulfillment: 

The transaction or the fulfillment stage is the third stage and that’s where the customer makes a purchase and creates a record in your system. This is also the stage where you can ask for reviews, initiate support requests, and keep them further engaged with your brand by recommending products.

Once the consumer has made the decision to move forward with buying something from you, they may make additional purchases in the same session or during future sessions (remember: customers come back!). Fulfillment can mean different things for different brands, it’s important to define what it means for your business. 

No matter how you describe fulfillment this is the stage where customers truly become customers and commit to your product or service. 

Retention: 

Getting new businesses is always great but as a brand that wants to prosper, you want to make sure that your customers stay loyal and continue using your products or services. In this final stage of the customer journey, it's important that you maintain connections with customers by ensuring they're satisfied with their experience and don't lose interest.

Retention can be thought of as a measure of how well your brand is able to retain its customers. It's often viewed as the most important stage in the customer journey because it determines whether or not there will be any future business from these individuals.

Digital customer journey related to customer experience: 

Digital customer journey is crucial for a great customer experience as any customer  experience starts with being aware of a brand or need and ends with loyalty. Providing a great customer experience is all about listening to the wants and needs of the consumer. When customers feel heard, not only are they more likely to keep buying your product, they're also more likely to share how great your product or service is with others.

Customer experience can also help you understand why customers don’t move on from different stages in their digital customer journey. Customers may decide to view your products and services but not move on to the transaction or even the engagement stage. Through surveys or questionnaires you can better understand why customers are behaving differently than you expected them to and how to ensure they proceed to the purchase stage. 

Understanding the customer's digital journey and how it works for any brand is important to build a loyal customer base. In addition to focusing on the customer journey overall, we have listed a few ways for optimizing your customers’ digital journey. 

Omnichannel approach: 

In today’s fast paced and digital world the customer journey needs to meet customer  demands on multiple channels. So instead of focusing on channels brands should focus on their customer by adopting an omnichannel approach which strikes the right balance of importance at all stages of the customer journey.  This will ensure that consumers are not missing out on opportunities because they're focusing too closely on one channel over another. This will also ensure a seamless customer journey and a great customer experience as your customer support team will be getting alerts at the same time from every channel instead of missing out on customer queries. 

All hands on deck: 

Optimizing and improving your customer journey is a huge task and could require a lot of manpower and effort. It can also lead to big changes within the organization and that is why it’s important to involve your employees in the process. 

Your team should be made up of people who are dedicated to the customer experience and to the customer journey. This means that everyone in your organization should have a basic understanding of how customers interact with your brand, where they are in the journey when they do so, and what changes need to be made based on that information.

Optimizing customer journeys means it's time for everyone within the organization: marketers, developers, designers—even finance to get involved, provide feedback and contribute to the development of a palpable path based on reliable data.

Personalize the experience: 

Personalization is a major part of today's digital customer journey. Personalization can help make a huge difference and make sure that your brand stands out in the market.  It's important to remember that one-size-fits-all approaches don't work, and that you need to use the right kind of data for different consumers. 

Personalizing customer journeys require you to have perfect knowledge of your own business and its goals and a clear understanding of your target market. 

Make sure your approach is scalable enough so it doesn’t get out of hand when you start scaling up and make sure you are not being too intrusive with your scalable methods. 

With all of this covered, you’ll know what sort of content you should be displaying on your website and social media according to your market demographic. 

Conclusion:

Digital customer journeys are becoming more and more important to businesses, both in terms of how they’re designed and how they’re optimized. While there are many different ways that a digital customer journey can be optimized, the most important thing to remember is that it must always take into account your customers’ needs and preferences. Optimizing customer journey is about creating an overall brand experience for your customers and making sure that they feel valued and heard every step of the way. You need to think about every possible touchpoint, from emails to social media posts or even when someone calls you on the phone. 

If you can do this well enough so that it feels like an organic experience for them rather than a series of tactics meant for your benefit it will ensure they never feel like they’re just another number in a database.