If you run a business then you likely have customers (fingers crossed, right?).
And if you have customers, then they had a “journey” – even if you don’t call it that.
The customer journey is essentially the sum total of the interactions and experiences they have with your business, from the time they first hear about you, through to the point of purchase and beyond.
The single most important lesson I’ve learned in growing a successful small business is to take ownership of that journey – their experience should be strategic and intentional – something you or your team planned for them.
And there are countless ways to plan and enrich this journey and a number of tools that can standardize or accelerate it. So, if your head is spinning thinking about how you should get started, we’ve distilled the most important lessons down into this crash course – enjoy.
Here are the key things to remember:
1. The customer journey already exists. If you have customers, they had a journey. So what we’re talking about here is really just refining what already exists to make sure it’s intentional and strategic.
2. The journey spans the lifecycle of the customer – it starts when they first hear about and interact with your business, through to the purchase, and into the delivery of your products or services. There are opportunities throughout every juncture to make things easier for them and more predictable for you.
3. Automation can help with the heavy lifting. If the idea of delivering top notch customer experience feels daunting, the secret sauce is to introduce automation to the process. Automation might feel like a technical term, but the concept really just means helping things happen in a standardized and repeatable way.
What should I automate?
If you’re on board with the idea of automation but aren’t sure where it would fit – we’ve built a course specifically designed to help you identify opportunities in the customer journey where we’ve seen automation solve problems and create momentum.
