5 Strategies for Managing the Customer Journey

StartingPoint
POSTED ON
February 4, 2021

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Digital transformation has transformed the way people interact with brands, software, and making buying decisions. Businesses need to find ways to adapt with these changes and manage the customer journey. Businesses have to continue to provide excellent service and a superior customer experience in these times of transformation.

In the case of service-based companies, this requires efficient customer request management. Now, this can pose some serious challenges because there are very few customer service solutions specifically designed for this sector. In fact, most businesses continue to use solutions designed for their product-based counterparts and mess up their workflow.

If you are not sure of doing that on your own, consider hiring the services of specialized professionals who understand industry-specific problems. However, you need to have a fair idea about the intricacies involved in delivering a superior customer experience. Thus, we bring you five strategies to manage the customer journey, manage customer expectations, and provide the level of service your customers expect.

Customer Journey Mapping

1.    Know Your Customer and Their Expectations

Amazon, the world’s largest online marketplace has set a strong example for service-based companies to follow. It has proven what a customer-centric business can achieve by dedicating time and resources to understand customer expectations.

Spend some time understanding what your customers expect and turn those insights into a memorable customer journey. You can also use it to nurture customer relationships and increase the possibilities of doing repeated business.

How to understand customer expectations?

Social Listening

Over 71% buying decisions are influenced by social media, where people discuss and review products and services of various brands. You can collect that data and use it to get a better understanding of what your customers expect.

Open conversations and surveys

Hashtags make it convenient to connect with those who are talking about your brand or service. You can easily look up for such consumers and have open conversations with them or invite them to provide valuable insights through well-planned surveys through the customer journey.

Competitor Research

There is stiff competition in the service sector, which makes it inevitable to keep an eye on your competitor’s performance. Doing this provides valuable insights into what you can do to provide better customer service to gain an edge over your competitors.

2.     Map Customer Journey

The customer journey begins the very moment your brand interacts with a prospect for the very first time and concludes when the individual has made a decision about your offering. Your goal is to influence the prospect into making a positive buying decision, which is only possible when you make this journey short and pleasurable.

This can get tricky, but with some planning, you can do this the right way. To start on the right foot, create a customer journey mapping template that records phase-wise customer experiences and behavior. Segregate them into three different phases — Awareness, Deliberation, and Decision-making phases.

You can then measure their experiences based on how the customer feels and their interaction with the brand. There are innumerable tools that let you track user interaction such as in-page clicks, scroll patterns, mouse movements, etc… By using this data, you can plan and structure your touchpoints to create a pleasurable customer journey.

Useful Tips

·       Map customer journey with a clear objective.

·       Create customer personas to plan the process.

·       Plan actions based on how you structure your touchpoints.

·       Identify your customer’s research sources and lead them to your official website.

·       Find out common technical issues based on user behavior and resolve them to the earliest.

·       Use the data to segregate customers based on behavior and communicate accordingly.

3.    Manage Customer Queries Effectively

The Herculean task before every service-based company is the need to excel at managing customer queries with limited resources. There are basically two things that service-based businesses struggle with — technical execution and prompt communication. Some businesses can technically execute, but do not communicate well. Conversely, some communicate well but miss deliverables, deadlines, and critical steps in the process.

Therefore, businesses need to deploy user-friendly technologies to manage and execute customer requests. Unfortunately, most businesses make use of multiple tools for receiving, assigning, managing, and tracking customer requests. All of this can be managed from a single dashboard through tools like StartingPoint. You can even use it to identify your top-performers and assign priority requests to those resources.

Customer Journey Map

4.    Unleash the Power of AI and Machine Learning

Service-based businesses often receive a disproportionate number of customer queries, which builds excessive pressure on the customer support professionals. You can overcome this by using the right set of technologies, which not only automates the workflow but also reduces the average response time. If used the right way, you can also minimize the number of customer queries by identifying and addressing the common ones.

Wondering how many tools this would require? You don’t need to worry about that because AI-based solutions like StartingPoint let you manage all of this from a single dashboard. It lets you identify common queries to create custom FAQs that take care of common concerns. Also, you can use it to auto-assign queries to resources based on their availability and performance.

Key Benefits of Using AI and ML to Provide Customer Service

·       Gain insights into customer behavior.

·       Automate ticket assignment based on pre-defined conditions.

·       Create and design workflow based on availability.

·       Provide personalized solutions to customers.

·       Reduce waiting time and optimize request scheduling across multiple channels.

5.    Ensure Seamless Communication

As a service-based company, you are going to receive customer queries through multiple channels such as email, live chat, or even through phone calls. All of these channels need to be connected and managed efficiently to ensure seamless communication. So, the challenge here is to find a platform that supports omnichannel request management and can be automated based on certain predefined conditions. Doing this eliminates the delay that comes with the manual assignment of requests, which speeds up the process considerably.

Final Takeaway:

Businesses that understand the pain-points of their customers and address them effectively are bound to succeed. Thus, you need to start by understanding what your customers want. You must then plan the customer journey by structuring touchpoints and planning suitable actions. A lot of this can be made convenient by deploying the right technologies. With some strategic planning and timely implementation, businesses can close more deals and provide better value to their customers.