When courting new customers and clients, it is important that you understand the steps that they take to transact with your business. This is especially relevant when you are running an online business, where physical interactions with potential customers and client are not possible. Rather than using a pre-made funnel and assuming that is the only way that a customer can interact with your online business, you should make create a holistic customer journey to set up your new customers and clients for success with your business. This is called a customer success journey. With that in mind, here’s how you map out a customer success journey for your online business.
Creating Roadmaps for Customer and Client Interaction
Creating roadmaps for your business is important. However, the customer success journey map goes beyond the typical business roadmap process and uses a customer centered approach. In doing so, you’ll be able to interact with your customers more holistically and meet their pain points and challenges with your product and service offerings. There are several types of customer success journey maps you should follow. These include current state maps, day in the life maps, future state maps, and service blueprint maps.
None of these, of course, need to be created from scratch. All you need to do is use a template and modify it for your needs. When modifying these templates, you need to be able to describe their thoughts and feelings, and have a strong and empathetic understanding of what they’re going through. This should be both in how they are interacting with your company and beyond. You can also use these customer success journey maps to create a blueprint for your ideal objectives at each stage of the customer journey. While having a very mapped out process does not leave room for flexibility, you do want to have a strong understanding of what you want to accomplish with your customers and when you want to accomplish it.
For example, if you run an online PPC agency, you know that you ultimately want your customers to use you to buy and bid on paid ads on their behalf. However, if they have no experience with this, you’ll want to add a value-added proposition to your initial offer. You can also schedule discovery calls with them to see why they feel they need this service. You can then pitch how you’d like to help them based on their needs and your understanding of their challenges as a business.
Creating an effective customer success journey requires empathy and understanding. It does not allow for you to be lazy with your online business and fit all of your customers into one unsubstantiated customer profile. To make things effective and path-breaking, business owners need to come up with robust strategies that would not only resolve the issues but will also help in getting desired results. Let’s have a look at some useful and proven tips that would ensure the smooth functioning of the business and increasing its efficiency. Rather, you need to gain a holistic view of your potential customers and clients and give them a reason to use you over the competition. While there are many ways to do this, such as strong initial offerings, personalization, and a strong sales team, the best way to do this is through having empathy for your customers. Mapping out the potential stages they will go through with your online business is a strong start to gaining greater insight into your customers and what they will ultimately want from your online business.
