The Modernized Customer Journey
- Jan 5, 2022
- 3 min read
Written by: Kiesha King-Brown, Senior Level Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
While marketers and companies understand a connected customer journey is a priority for both customer experience and profitable growth, much less than half have found a way to leverage data in a way that helps them do that.
Customers expect consistent, but not annoying communication. They also want hyper-personalized experiences. Each stage on the journey can strengthen the relationship and loyalty in a personalized way, or it can cause a brand to lose credibility and impact retention and customer lifetime value.
This very important journey begins with Awareness where the customer first becomes aware of or gains interest in your brand, products, and services. The awareness is triggered by a need or problem the customer needs to solve. Your company has the opportunity to be found and give the customer a reason to connect in this stage.
The journey will continue with the Consideration stage where the customer transitions from just identifying a problem to considering options based on research, recommendations, options, etc.
As the customer continues, they enter Decision or Purchase stage. This is actually where they will have the most interest in your brand. The role of your business is to encourage conversion through differentiated customer service, testimonials, and clearly communicating and demonstrating how your product or service solves their problem…and does it better.
If the customer makes the purchase, they continue to the Retention stage. Post-purchase is when the relationship with the customer should grow, not end. There should be systems in place to keep a pulse on when customers are at risk and strategies in place to drive customer lifetime value. For those that chose not to make a purchase, there should be systems in place to touch base with them at a future date and re-engage them with the brand.
Beyond Retention is the Advocacy stage prioritizing the way customers speak about their experience with your brand, the impact your product/service has had on their problem or their lives.
But let’s take a step back. Before you can take a customer on a meaningful journey with your brand you have to understand who they are, how they interact, their pain points, behaviors, preferences, needs, wants, expectations, dislikes, frustrations, how they make buying decisions, etc.
True clarity and understanding are data-driven, human enhanced. Data must be used to improve and modernize the journey.
Behavioral data can help companies proactively identify potential cart abandonment by tracking bounce rate patterns and sending notifications to encourage customers to return to their shopping journey and/or re-engage with their cart or checkout. It can identify customer behavior and then use triggers to send surveys, automate and publish testimonials, enable cross-sell/upsell pop-ups, or email special offers to existing customers. Behavioral data can be used to track reasons for unsubscribes, returns, and cancels.
Even in companies with favorable KPI’s and positive customer experience, success is often not maximized without predictive data that informs beyond demographics and persona. Data at a scale that is behavior based can enable better personalization, better customized products and services, more effective and consistent communication and follow up to nurture leads, increased conversion, improved customer lifetime value, and more.
This type of data…the data that enables the modernized customer journey, is powered by Ai.
It’s Ai that takes the guesswork out of both growth and the customer journey.
It’s automation coupled with machine learning that fuels consistent growth.
It’s factual, data-based insight reverse engineered and designed specific to your customer and your brand for unrivaled results.
Upgrade to the modernized customer journey, meet customers where they plan to be, maximize results.
Kiesha King-Brown, Senior Level Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Kiesha King-Brown is a business savvy, customer centric tech enthusiast. She is EVP of AI Strategy for Enterprise Retail/eCommerce at ADMD Solutions and Chief Operations Officer at iDo Systems. Kiesha partners to maximize the effectiveness of branding, marketing, and strategy with the power of AI. She also helps Start-ups and businesses with intuitive go-to-market strategies and the only smart platform, Pillar Five, that functions like a Smart GPS to get businesses from Seed stage through maturity successfully and supports a technology-based ecosystem. Kiesha has a Bachelor’s in Marketing, an MBA in Management, is a member of the AI Academy for Marketers and a Certified Executive Coach. Kiesha has held Sr. Leadership positions in Fortune 200 Retail Companies serving up to the Territory Level and working on company level strategy. She has also helped small businesses improve strategy and profit in own her consulting business.
