According to Chris Pemberton, Gartner, “Customer Experience is the new battlefield.”
Present-day customers are whimsical, and they behave in a certain way that often baffles marketers and businesses. So, winning them via top-notch buying experience is a battle strategy for businesses and owning a band of loyal buyers is the trophy.
However, the inability to foresee buyers’ journeys can prove costly for companies. That’s because the latter is spending billions of dollars on market acquisition. Even then, when customers fail to take the expected call-to-action from the webpage, all the efforts put behind pushing customers to that point get flushed down the gutter.
Providing a spot-on customer experience, which is nothing short of a battlefield to win against competitors, come much later. After all, the journey begins much earlier than that – starting right from where your customers first checked in to your website.
How do customers interact with your brand? Or why do customers behave the way they do while interacting with your web pages? – These are important questions that can seriously make or break the game for your business. And, companies wouldn’t mind spending dollars on finding the answers. Well! If not dollars, what companies can at the max do or are doing already is – mapping the customer journey.
What is Customer Journey Mapping?
In simple words, customer journey mapping refers to the path a customer follows through when interacting with your brand and all the actions the former takes along the path. This serves as a roadmap for businesses to follow, retracing the steps taken by their prospects and understanding business from a buyer’s perspective. Sounds simple? It is, actually.
A simple example to elucidate the point here – consider yourself running an eCommerce portal selling beauty products to the female target market. How would you understand whether your services align with your customers’ whims or not? Try to step into their shoes and wear your customers’ hats for a day. This exercise can open your eyes to various breakpoints that your customers are probably experiencing while interacting with your page. However, this simple exercise is not feasible when you handle more buyers at a time.
So, what should be your next best bet? First, have a proper customer journey mapping strategy in place.
Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping
Needless to say, customer journey mapping has its own set of perks and benefits. First, identifying customer touchpoints and addressing their pain points go a long way to maintaining a band of loyal buyers. The latter then works as a silent marketing channel for you, bringing more buyers on board through word-of-mouth. So, ignoring this part will be the worst decision in the history of bad decisions.
Hence, without much ado, let’s understand the benefits in brief
Target your customers more accurately
It is important to have a flair idea of who your customers are and their expectations. And also gaining a clear vision of their journey to help you build customer personas accurately. A good image of your potential buyers will help you target them with a high degree of precision.
Shift your focus on inbound marketing
Inbound marketing refers to creating content useful to your target audience. With the help of blogs, articles, and other forms of content, you can establish yourself as the knowledge leader in that niche. Once you capture their attention, they want to keep coming back to you for more knowledge. Converting them into ultimate buyers becomes easy than the traditional marketing approaches. Hence, mapping your customers or leads will help you easily grasp what interests the former and what drives them away from your site. Work on these areas more to capture more leads.
Be more proactive about customer service
Customer experience happens all along their journey. So, proper mapping can help your business to strategize accordingly. This allows you to take care of your customers at every stage of their interaction with your business.
Identify areas to focus more on
Customer journey mapping also helps you identify areas that leave your customers unsatisfied. Mapping several customers’ journeys and pinpointing common areas of concern will drive your concentrated efforts there and improve them accordingly to fill those gaps.
Improve customer retention rate
Mapping your customer journey pinpoint contributing factors of customer churning earlier on. That leaves you with enough bandwidth to re-engage customers before they leave and retain them for a longer duration.
Understanding the Role of AI in Customer Mapping
Obviously, there are various tools to conduct your customer journey mapping – Google and Adobe Analytics being two of them. However, digital journey maps powered by AI and Machine Learning capabilities supersede traditional mapping tools in fetching accurate results. They pinpoint every digital interaction and event occurring during a buyer’s digital journey and why. These reliable real-time data help businesses identify what is preventing buyers’ forward progress faster than traditional mapping tools.
Today, these digital journey maps are about living, breathing information that companies need to capture in real-time and analyze accurately. An effective digital journey map of a customer pays off in more ways than one – right from fetching higher ROI on marketing, lowering customer service costs, higher cross-selling or upselling rates to more positive social media mentions, among other benefits mentioned above.
Incorporating the power of AI at every point in the customer journey improves businesses’ customer services and enhances customer experience manifold. Surveys show 32% of major companies pan world are already using AI customer service technologies.
But, as we mentioned earlier, customer experience comes much later. Hence, companies should invest heavily in AI tools to fetch improved results from where your customers first landed on your web page.
How to Discover Customer Touchpoints using AI
Now, there are various touchpoints in a customer’s entire buying journey. Identifying these touchpoints at various stages before, during, and after purchase is vital to delivering a greater experience across all touchpoints. This helps businesses meet customer expectations throughout their journey.
But, using a traditional approach for the same leaves enough room for errors. This is where AI and ML can make some real difference. Let’s dive deeper –
1. AI Helps with More Accurate Decisions
Traditional approaches involve humans and a tad amount of guesswork. Most prefer to rely on their intuitions. But these intuitions or guesswork are shrouded in errors because humans are prone to making biased judgements. That will never paint an accurate picture. On the other hand, an AI-driven approach keeps these biased judgements and guesswork out of the equation and provide real-time facts and figures. Using such real data can help businesses make accurate decisions.
2. Pinpointing Customer Intent & Pain Points Better
Analyzing billions of customer data points across myriad owned and third-party channels is no child’s play. But, capturing them in real-time helps businesses identify buying patterns, preferences, gaps, and customer pain points. Also, these data shed light on the likelihood of conversions. For example, evaluating the recency and frequency of customer activities online pinpoint customer habits and preferences. Such information is valuable to address buyers’ needs and grievances in real-time at every step of their journey. Using AI-powered tools like deep learning can make this cumbersome task simple and fast. You cannot afford to falter in your steps at any given point because that will cost you a valuable lead.
3. Personalize Market & Product Recommendations
Here, AI leverage captured data to aid businesses better understand their end-buyers behaviour and interests during their entire journey. Again, such information is vital to tailoring marketing activities or sharing product recommendations that align with buyers’ needs. In addition, creating bespoke content on an individual level is likely to generate a higher level of customer engagement even while the buyer is still travelling through the website. Only AI-powered tools can help companies to lay hands on such crucial information faster and in real-time to provide the same services at the exact time when customers need them.
4. Optimizing Best Timings for Engagement
As mentioned earlier, engaging customers in real-time can increase the effectiveness of your marketing and promotional efforts alongside boosting conversions. Unlike humans, AI will only redirect its efforts to those customers who are most likely to convert. But, if you use a human brain to guess when should you send a friendly reminder to the buyer whose chosen items are lying on the cart untouched, you are either turning off the buyer with a hasty approach or driving them away for a prolonged wait. Contrary to that, an AI tool will figure out the optimum time by analyzing historical behavioural data in real-time.
5. Continuous Testing & Improving Efforts
Today customer behavior is changing at lightning speed. Top it up with ‘n’ number of options available in the market; buyers will hesitate a little before switching their brands. Hence, it becomes imperative for businesses to continuously keep a tab of these changes and adapt them accordingly. Here, the beauty of using Ai-optimized models lies in the fact that they are constantly learning and refining their data-collecting strategies to offer more accurate results at lightning speed.
Hence, your customer journey mapping, including the touchpoints, become a reliable source for an improved customer experience.
6. Creating a Seamless Customer Experience
All of the efforts mentioned above boil down to rendering seamless customer experiences, which gives a competitive edge to businesses in the market. Companies can never go wrong with their efforts if they wish to survive and win the rat race. But, offering an improved customer experience is not easy. A few factors should be considered, one of them being knowing customers preferred channels for different actions. For example, a customer might use a laptop to conduct research but a mobile phone to complete the purchase. Hence, their interactions on either device should be equally seamless and hurdle-free. Else, you can kiss your prospects goodbye. As a business owner, it falls in your KRA to ensure your customer-centric approach should work fluidly together across channels and serve them exactly where they are and where they need. Who do you think locate a customer’s presence in which device real-time and for what reasons? This task is humanely not possible, especially when you have to map multiple buyers’ journeys at a time. Only an AI tool holds the potential to tackle such challenges single-handedly and helps you to deliver a spot-on customer experience.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and others falling under the broader spectrum of AI have proved their capabilities time and again. Leveraging them to improve your business, especially your buyers’ journey, keeps you ahead in the competitive curve. Your strategies can never falter in serving your customers better than your competitors. The reason being, the customer is always king. Hence, automation and AI can save your day, unburden your pain, and make buyers’ journeys spectacular.