What is Customer Journey? Definitions and Examples

The definition says that the Customer Journey is primarily about changing the perspective of the company and analyzing its activities from the point of view of our customers. This approach makes it possible to create new, improved sales processes that will place greater emphasis on the satisfaction of our customers, and attract more potential customers, and thus generate sales growth.

The customer journey is a set of activities and interactions that our customer participates in during the purchasing process. The customer journey path can go through many different sales channels, departments of your company, as well as third parties, such as your business partners or offices.

The term Customer Journey is gaining more and more popularity in Poland and as we can see in Google Trends, for several years the number of searches for this phrase has been growing steadily and linearly. In times of conscious customer, feedback about our company is very important. Therefore, it is worth implementing solutions to analyze and improve the Customer Journey in order to provide services at the highest level and collect flattering opinions and reviews.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map (CJM) is an extraordinary approach to understanding and delivering a product or service to a customer. This is a guide to the customer experience with your company. At the same time, it is an excellent optimization tool that will help you eliminate the weak points and obstacles between you and your client.

To begin the process of creating a CJM you need to determine the goals you want to achieve, research the customer experience or find bottlenecks in the business process. CJM will not solve all your problems, but it will show you the issues that need to be addressed. The next step is to collect information about customers, determine the main points and opinions about the product or service. The final step in the preparation is the choice of the tool with which we will work.

Now let's move on to the process of creating a customer journey map:

• Select a client;
• Establish the phases of interaction with the client;
• Select the appropriate communication channel;
• Examine the customer experience;
• Analyze weak points and ways to optimize them;
• Test and implement best practices.

Follow the customer journey with Creatio

Modern CRM systems are so equipped with functionality suitable for CJM that most people can use them. However, not all of them are able to follow the path of the customer from the very beginning of his interest in the product to the moment when he becomes a loyal customer. However, there is a way for Creatio to provide a platform that can support sales, marketing and service functionality on the same platform, maintaining the same database and preventing data loss.

So let's start by observing the customer's journey within the system.

As we understand it, the customer journey is the other side of the sales pipeline. So this journey begins in the marketing department. There, creative marketers capture and cultivate prospectuses to pass them on for sale. Tireless sales professionals do everything in their power to turn a prospect into a customer. After this key point, the customer becomes the responsibility of the customer service department, who does everything in their power to retain them and provide them with the best experience in the customer lifecycle.

Now that we know the milestones, let's move on to the stage of defining how the Creatio system can make improvements and the analysis we need.

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing is the starting point for attracting a customer. The first point is usually the registration of the client on the website, so here the behavior tracker on the Creatio website comes to the rescue, which will collect all the information about the client and automatically place it in the system. It will not stop there, but along the way it will update information about the interests of the customer on your page. In the event of gaps in customer information, the intelligent data enrichment tool will try to fill in the missing parts with information from open sources. All this information will be available in a single contact database for as long as you need it. This concludes our preparation of the CJM.

Establish the following business phases in customer interactions

1

An amazing business process management tool will allow you to design the process you want to follow with each client. The system gives you the opportunity to segment and group customers according to their needs and direct various activities to them. At the same time, it provides a high level of personalization of email campaigns, not to mention the possibility of adapting them to your own needs. Plan trigger campaigns and organize events with a system that will be able to capture every detail and remind you of the need to contact a given customer. All data in the system will be analyzed and given in an understandable form of graphs and tables to check the result of each step.

2

Once you have prepared prospects with all the information in place the sales department will be on, it is their part to be in the spotlight. From the information already collected, the sales representative has all types of communication available in the system for contacting the customer - emails, calls and messages. All this can be done from the system level. Lead, opportunity, product, contract, project management — all this is at their disposal. They can control every interaction and have the entire history accessible with all documents neatly attached and accounted for. Not to mention the field sales opportunities that allow you to update from wherever they are. The analytics system also works to analyze each step, showing efficiency and checking the customer experience. If this step is successfully completed, the newly acquired customer passes into the hands of the service department.

3

At this stage, first of all, experience counts. A single contact database with the entire history of previous interactions, omnichannel communication with the client to help and solve any problem. Managing cases, reports, issues, service levels, changes, and releases will ensure you're at the top of your business's performance, solving problems before they even arise. The system prevents recurring problems. Because the system maintains a catalog of services with all cases of any problems registered and resolved along with a knowledge base that will help solve any request in a short time. A simple case of finding a solution in an instant.

Thus, the system can help you track a customer from the first contact to becoming a loyal customer. All parts of the platform act as parts of the same organism, providing data integrity, purchase history, and analytics that are always useful for monitoring efficiency and success rates. At every step of the way, you have a highly customizable system that can be customized to your every wish and designed according to your aesthetic needs.

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