Are you looking to improve your customer's experience?  A great customer journey is the key to creating loyal customers and driving business growth. Here are 4 tips to help you create a memorable customer journey.

• Understand your customer's needs
• Map the customer journey
• Continuously improve
• Provide excellent customer service

Understand your customer's needs

To create a great customer journey, you need to know what your customer wants. Conduct market research, analyse customer feedback. Talk to your sales and support team - have them tell you what kind of questions your customers are asking

Don’t forget to put yourself in their shoes.

What do you usually want to know before you buy something?

1. Cost and pricing
2. Problems
3. Comparisons and versus
4. Best of (list of best in class)
5. Reviews
   

Map the customer journey

Once you have a clear understanding of your customer's needs, map the customer journey from start to finish. Identify touch points and pain points along the way, and always focus on how you can improve each interaction.

Make sure to be a friction hunter and create a smooth customer journey.

Few examples:

• Do you have an interactive chat?
• Is your value proposition understandable?
• Can they easily find the cost?
• Do you have videos to show the product/service you deliver?
• Have you explained what will happen when they leave their contact info with you? Or after they buy a product/service?

What happens after they have bought from you? Have you written this journey, step by step, down on your webpage?

Provide excellent customer service

Your customer journey is only as good as your customer service. Ensure that your team is trained to handle customer inquiries and complaints with empathy and efficiency.

Pro tip: Smile when you talk on the phone, they can't see it but they can definitely hear it!

Here are a few examples:

• Use a system where you can gather info from chats, emails and calls, for instance HubSpot.
• Look for possible future problems and how this can be prevented or vanguarded.
• Show them that you want to be helpful by giving practical help and assistance, and by following through.

Continuously improve

Creating a great customer journey is an ongoing process. Use customer feedback and data analytics to continuously improve the journey and stay ahead of the competition.

We all chase for those 5 star reviews, but all reviews are important because it shows where we are and where we should be headed!

Here are a few examples:

• Look at your reviews. What has costumers said about your company? How can this be improved? Make the changes. And remember to ALWAYS reply to reviews, good or bad, no matter how long ago it was written.

• Go through your competitors websites and see: What are they missing? What could be a friction here? And make sure you don’t make the same mistakes.
• Do the opposite! What here really works and is something that we are missing on our page?
  
  

By following these tips, you can create a customer journey that will leave a lasting impression and build customer loyalty.

This article was originally posted on Tamarah Hovland's LinkedIn page.