Transcript Customer Journey Mapping.docx

Transcript Customer Journey Mapping Start with a journey map Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video - On a morning walk with my good friend, I mentioned that I wanted to put wood flooring in my house. My friend told me that her friend recently had a contra...

Transcript Customer Journey Mapping Start with a journey map Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video - On a morning walk with my good friend, I mentioned that I wanted to put wood flooring in my house. My friend told me that her friend recently had a contractor install wood floors in her home, and that she was happy with the job. I visited this person's home and was impressed with the flooring. Three months later, a satisfied customer, I recommended the company to another friend who now also has new wood floors by the same contractor. I've just given you the perfect example of a customer journey. Before you create personas, you have to be clear on your customer's journey. The customer journey is six steps: awareness, consideration, action, experience, repeat, loyalty. How people find out about you is the first step, awareness. For me, and the wood floor installer, it was word of mouth. Awareness can be from TV or social media ads, signage, celebrity endorsement, and influencer. In my business, people become aware of me through LinkedIn Learning, a YouTube video, or while searching a topic that leads them to my blog. Asking your customers how they heard of you is an important question, but you also want to know how people who are curious about you, but who don't go through with a purchase, find out about you. Step two is consideration. Wanting to pull up old stain carpet and upgrade my home made me consider talking to flooring companies. What are potential customers considering with you? Are they trying to solve a problem? Are they intrigued? Step three is the point when the person takes action. For example, sign the contract for flooring, checkout or abandon the cart, ask for references or decide to not take any action. Experience, step four, is when the person becomes a customer. They buy the product, attend the workshop, come into the store or get the flooring. Step five is definitely the goal. Repeat. The customer tries the product or service again. My husband and I recently had an exquisite dining experience at a downtown restaurant. We loved it so much that we went back a second time. Loyalty, step six, is when the customer keeps repeating the behavior, returning again and again, telling others, which starts the customer journey over again with new customers who've heard of you through word of mouth. Creating personas begins with you understanding and mapping out your customer's journey. So start with journey mapping. Step one: Conduct research Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video - You need to know who your customers are. You need to understand purchase behavior. You need to know what channels and contact formats grab the attention of your target customers. You need to know what elements impact purchasing decisions the most. You need to research. In this lesson, we're looking at consumer behavior research, the what, how, and where. Start by collecting a list of your customers. You want to look at demographics, revenue, and engagement details. For example, demographic information for a B2B, or business to business company, would include company name, industry, company revenue, number of employees, country, and city. Revenue research looks at things like average spend per transaction and annual spend value. Engagement is about how much your customers engage with your services or products. It includes how many times a month they visit your store or website, how active they are on your social pages, or how often they download a white paper from your site. Interview customers. The traditional way to research personas is to interview customers and prospects. You can do this over the phone or in person. Ask questions to find out what customers like, what they want, and what they don't like. Look through CRM data. A complaint is a gift. When customers complain, they tell you what they don't like, what doesn't work for them. When customers give you feedback about defects and significant issues, they give you a chance to correct the problem early. So listen. Pull data from your customer relationship management system, also known as CRM, and look for trends with issues. Talk to the front line. Contact center representatives and retail sales associates are a gold mine of customer data. Sit down with them to discuss trends about what customers like and don't like. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best? Surveys. Surveys are great for learning about your customers. Surveys can capture demographics, engagement levels, likes, and dislikes. The three most important things about creating customer personas are research, research, and research. buying behavior evolves, so you'll continue researching to make sure your marketing is relevant to the current needs and trends. Step two: Identify your customer motivations and pain points Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video - A person decides to buy a used car. The decision to purchase a car brings lots of emotions. Think about the fear people experience when buying a car, fear of being pressured, overpaying, getting a lemon, frustration over everything, from price to selection, to financing, to timing. Any of these emotions can be a roadblock that keeps your customer from moving forward. You need to understand your customers' pain points and their buying motivations. Start with pain points. What are the things that can stop your customer from considering your product to moving to purchase? Once a person decides to purchase, what might stop them from completing the sale? Look at the entire customer journey, from becoming aware of your product or service to consideration, to action, every step, and consider every decision, barrier, roadblock, and the effort it takes to do business with you. To learn about motivations and pain points, you need to make it easy for your customers to give you real-time feedback throughout the customer journey. Don't wait until you convert a shopper into a customer to get feedback. Prompt users to give you real-time website or product feedback. Integrate feedback points into your website or your brick-and-mortar without disrupting the browsing or shopping experience. Now let's look at motivations. What can nudge a person to move to the next step in the customer journey? I bought a lamp online recently. At checkout, I got an invitation to tell the company why I chose this specific lamp. Before I entered my payment details, a message read: "Very briefly, why did you decide to buy this product?" That's smart research. The company wants to know my motivation. When looking for motivators, I want you to focus on urgency, based on a special occasion, a problem the customers need to solve, or emotions. What you're looking for is what motivates a person to make the decision to purchase. Now, don't rush the process of learning your persona's motivations and pain points. You want to be thorough, gathering data from every touch point in every contact channel. Step three: Name and personify your customers Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video - Once you do the research to know who your customers are, you'll take your findings and personify them. That is, you give the research data feelings and names. In my business, I have four customer segments that I've named the meeting planner, the content manager, the do it for me director and the training manager. From my interviews, surveys, market research and day-to-day interactions, I know the motivations, pain points and expectations of each of my segments. The training manager needs to be in the loop on every part of my workshop. They want to see a detailed outline right down to how much time I spend on each topic. They want to review my slides and speaker's notes before the training. They need to know exactly how I'll engage participants in the workshop. They must look through the workbook before the big day, and they want to see a reinforcement plan. My meeting planner wants to know the fortune 500 companies I've worked with. They need to see logos and reviews on my website, and they want to see videos of me delivering a high energy keynote in front of a large group. The do it for me director needs to know my fees and availability, and they want to hand over the project to me and my team, my content manager persona is a marketing professional who has hired me to drive traffic to their website, period. They're not really interested in my expertise. They want the audience I can influence. They need a lot of my time to create a message that sells their product. Now that you have your customer segments, you'll create personas using your research findings and these five steps. First, name your personas. You can give your persona a name like Lauren, call your persona she, or use a description. Frontline Frieda, lawyer Lauren, or wealthy Warren. Second, identify your persona's goals. You'll get this detail from your research. What is your persona trying to accomplish? Third, what does your persona need? Fourth, what are your persona's pain points? Finally, what is your persona's personality? I've given you a cheat sheet of one of my customer personas in the exercise files that shows you each of these steps. Make sure you download the sheet before you go to the next video.