Is it a set of words that may ring true, but you struggle to apply it into your everyday business life?

The most crucial aspect of purpose is that it must be thought about, lived and talked about.

It must come from deep inside you, from your gut, and your heart. Purpose when clearly articulated is motivational and is the central core of all that you do.

Hopefully, you can understand the power of living ‘on purpose’ and why it’s so important.

When we take our purpose and apply it to our business, one of two things can happen:

1. We realise we’re in the wrong business!
2. Our business takes on a whole new life and meaning.

If you fall into the first category, this is exciting: it’s an opportunity to get out and find a new business that aligns with you and your purpose. Reaching this level of clarity is a gift, as it will save you a lot of wasted time staying in a business that doesn’t align with you. A telling sign that this is the case is an internal feeling of relief.

If you fall into the second category, this can be a pivotal turning point in your business life cycle and your life in general.

For example, here’s how this played out for a client, John, who started working with me when his business had been going for 12 years quite successfully. However, he was bored and disengaged with his customers. So he had started to create side hustle projects that weren’t going anywhere fast. Although he didn’t understand the value of identifying his purpose, he accepted the idea. As soon as we’d uncovered his purpose and how his business aligned with it, John became reinvigorated, his passion revived, and he was supercharged on his path again.

In an article in 2017 in Forbes magazine* a purpose driven-business is described as ‘one that has unlimited potential to change the world.’

“With purpose, a company can create positive value that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Some of the greatest purpose-driven companies of our generation, like eBay, Tesla and Airbnb, have also produced some of the largest profits and highest valuations.”

When you’re developing a business, the first thing you need to do is to ensure that it has a mission statement. The mission statement defines what the enterprise is planning to achieve through its efforts. While many companies set up their mission statement before they start working, they, unfortunately, don’t follow through to make their mission into a reality. The result is that the mission statement is a collection of words with no meaning.

Having a purpose-driven business means taking the mission statement and turning it into more than just a motto. Competent leaders can use the mission statement to guide their decisions and direct the company to what it seeks to be. Here, 15 members of Forbes Business Council discuss several ways to create a purpose-driven business in the 21st century.

Purpose is about losing yourself— in something greater than you. Once you know your purpose, you can touch the lives of others in a positive way and leave a legacy. This can be in the form of a product or service that genuinely changes lives. It can also be a foundation you set up and contribute to for future generations.

Ultimately, your purpose is one of the most powerful driving forces you can have in your business. So if you haven’t figured yours out yet, perhaps now is the right time.

Re-examining your customer journey

Building a Relationship During Covid-19 Crisis

Customer journey mapping is all about visualizing the customer’s journey in a way that helps both the business and the customer.  The business owner and all the people inside it will be able to create metrics, touchpoints, and actionable goals or outcomes. This is what the customer journey is made up for. But customer journey has to be innovated to adapt to ever-changing customer behaviour, technology, etc. Here are  top ways to Innovate Your Customer Journey Map:

Step One

The first step in how to Innovate Your Customer Journey Map is to take note that you want to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and in their mind, so that you experience your business as they experience it. Note: this is NOT easy to do because you are so close to your own business from YOUR perspective!  However if you get this right, you’ll be able to see your own business as your customer, as best you can.

The reason we want to do this is because our customers see things differently than we do!

For example: you would be able to navigate your website pages and functionality smoothly and easily because you see it so often, and perhaps you even built it yourself!

This makes it difficult for you to know how your customer would navigate it and where their blocks, issues or confusions are.

All touchpoints are important, but they’re not all equal in importance. Some touchpoints carry more weight because customers experience them at critical moments in the journey that can make or break their experience, including whether they become a customer at all!

The smartphone version of your website landing page would be considered an important touchpoint because if it’s poorly designed, many consumers will click straight off it.

Another example is to have an Author Bio on your blog because it’s still important as it creates a sense of authority and responsibility to your content, but it’s not as important as your contact form.

You can mark the relative importance by creating a weighting scale and assigning a number to each touchpoint. A 1-5 or 1-10 scale will work for most businesses.

You must innovate each of these touchpoints as your customer needs and behaviour changes over time.

Step Two: Remove Their Pain Points

Firstly; you’ve got to identify the points where your customers are having a hard time or disengaging from you. Do your very best to remove these pain points or blocks from your customer journey because these are the ones that your customer will remember and potentially react to in a negative way.

Using the weighting scale above for each touchpoint, start ranking the pain points in your customer journey and then attack them one by one. Not all pain points can be completely removed immediately; so work out what you can do right away, and then create a plan to solve all the others over time.

Reducing the pain points is the most obvious approach when looking at a customer journey map. There are some other things you can do, though, that are just as important: what follows are our favorite ones.

Step Three: Raise the Bar and Extend the Touchpoints

Congratulations! Now your customers are generally happy throughout their experience with your service or product.

Don’t stop there: ask yourself what you can do to raise the bar and deliver an even higher or better experience that exceeds their expectations. Aim for 6 stars!

This will help you to forge a better relationship with your customers.

Usually, the customer journey is mapped from the very start of their journey and also around the various interactions with your product or service.

But what if you could have an impact on what happens immediately before and after the touchpoint with the customer?

By considering this and designing it you will be able to create a much more customer-centric and engaging customer journey.

The design of the journey is much about an end to end experiential solution, so extend your start and finish steps by 1-3 steps before and after the touchpoint and look for the available opportunities to shine.

Example: at their core, banks provide you with an account and various methods of payment.

Many banks extend the their service by offering, for example, statistics on your expenses, hints on how to save money, or ways to cap expenditure on particular days of the week and nights out to reduce alcohol intake and wasted expenditure.

Step Four: Cut the Crap

To Innovate Your Customer Journey Map, you should  remove any unnecessary steps (wherever you can) required to perform an action. Think about the difference between an apple and a banana: eating an apple requires you to go and grab a knife, and peel the apple – it will take you at least 30 seconds.

With a banana, instead, you can skip the knife and reach the pulp more quickly – just 5 seconds. Try to design services and products that resemble more a banana rather than an apple.

How can you minimize the effort (time, cost, number of steps, reasoning) that your customers need to take in order to enjoy the core of your service or product?

Step Five: End With a Bang

The final touchpoint in your customer journey is likely to be vividly remembered by your customers – make sure it’s memorable.  Remember that your customer journey might be relatively short or it could also take a long time, depending on your product or service.

Your goal is to make sure they feel like they had an amazing experience and are a happy, contented, raving fan of yours!

Once you’ve created that, your customer advocacy will be easier and organically bring in more people into your business.

It all starts with stepping into the mind, heart and shoes of your customer, so be sure to start there – you’ll be happy you did!

Feel free to contact us if you need help with your customer journey!

It’s not enough to simply create a customer journey and ‘hope’ it delivers an amazing experience for the long term in your business.  A customer experience needs to be an ongoing process of reviewing, measuring, refining and optimising. Just as people are evolving beings, so is your customer journey.  Here is how you can continually ensure your customer journey experience is an optimal one.

Collecting customer feedback

A good customer experience comes from the basics of creating a foundational customer journey, followed by some very simple yet profoundly important steps (which many people forget to do).  Here are those steps that help to create a foundational customer journey:

• ask questions of your customer
• listen to the responses, and adapt your approach accordingly
• if you don’t already have one, create a system to regularly collect feedback, analyse it, and act on it
• Collect information about your users’ experiences with your product/service, website/app, or business as a whole
• Ask your customer-facing staff about their experiences and what they’ve learnt from interacting with their customers

Even if you don’t realize it, you are already gathering data every single day. Each time a customer calls the support line, sends an email, or leaves a review, that is feedback. It’s up to you to take that feedback and close the loop, using those insights to improve your customer experience.

According to Hotjar, companies with successful customer experience initiatives prioritize old-school methods (rather than focusing on trends like chatbots or AI). They focus on what they know will deliver results, which are the human-oriented methods that they know work! Most companies according to Hotjar stated that customer feedback was the main driver of their overall customer experience strategy. Voice-of-customer (VOC) feedback was the top method used across the board to shape customer journeys. Popular tactics included customer surveys, customer calls, and diving deep into website analytics.  To take it one step further in the complete end-to-end customer experience strategy, you must also listen to the voice of your staff who are speaking with your customers daily. Ensuring that they are empowered and aligned with the values of the organisation, whilst being able to communicate effectively and caringly to customers is paramount. So ensure you include them in your ‘old school’ analysis.

Gather feedback at the right times

It’s crucial to collect feedback at key stages of the customer journey, on your website or app, through email, or other relevant channels. There are three key milestones in particular where this will prove especially helpful.

1. You can prompt feedback at pivotal points prior to purchase, such as when someone has added a product to their cart or viewed a product page. (This is largely online – but could be asked by a human afterwards.)
2. You can also ask for feedback on the confirmation page after they have made an order. (This is largely online – but could be asked by a human afterwards.)
3. And finally, you can ask for feedback after they have had time to try out your product or service.

You can also provide an incentive by offering a reward for responses. This could be in the form of a discount on their next purchase or being entered into a prize draw. Some people do this by asking for the information to be shared on a social media platform, thereby creating some verbal advocacy to their trusted circles.

How to measure the customer experience

Having a measurable indicator means you can track progress over time and evaluate your efforts in this area. These will come in handy when you are running experiments to optimise your customer journey (more on that shortly). Here are four common metrics used to evaluate customer experience.

1. Customer Effort Score (CES)

How easy or hard is it for your customers to complete an action? This is usually measured through a survey that is sent out after the fact asking users to rate the difficulty of carrying out the task on a set scale. Each business will be different according to how it is set up, so ensure you set this up in the most appropriate way.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a customer loyalty score based on asking a simple question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” This then calculates a numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience. Many people have used this survey only for years, but haven’t improved their scores. On it’s own it’s missing key information that other scores and survey measures provide.

3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction as expressed on a scale or through binary yes/no answers. This drills down to specific touchpoints, rather than focusing on their overall experience. This can be delivered automatically after the delivery of a service or product, or at a particular milestone point.

4. Time To Resolution (TTR)

TTR refers to the average length of time it takes for a problem to be resolved. It starts when the issue is first raised by a customer and ends once the ticket is closed. This can be measured in days or business hours. You can work out this metric by adding up the total time spent on resolution and dividing the result by the number of individual cases. If you have customer support teams then this is something your teams should be able to measure if they have the most appropriate tools to be able to support them.

Identify your biggest leaks

Pinpoint the most common drop-off points along your customer journey.  This includes the online and offline steps of your customer journey. These areas of your customer journey represent your main opportunities for improving the overall customer experience. Where are people leaving – and why?

A certain percentage of drop-offs is inevitable. You can’t expect to win over everybody. Not all prospects are ideal customers, and even among those, not all of them will ultimately convert.

That said, if there are patterns showing that numbers significantly plummet at key stages, this is a signal that something is stopping customers from progressing. If web users lap up blog articles but never navigate to product content, consider whether you are effectively communicating how your products might meet their needs. If most people are making it through to your pricing page but then bouncing from there, you have a different problem on your hands.

Test and learn

Running long-term tests and implementing changes as an iterative process is a must when you are working on creating the ideal customer journey. Make use of split testing or multivariate testing to experiment with changes with an eye to shifting the metrics outlined earlier. You want to achieve the optimal customer experience right now, as well as adapt to meet changing expectations and habits over time.

You could have a short term goal for your customer journey, and a long term goal for your customer journey.  Set up short term wins and changes that make sense to implement over the short term, and work towards the longer term overall goal of the customer journey with ‘all the bells and whistles’

Keep doing what works and pour even more time and effort into those metrics and levers mentioned previously. Dial down tactics that aren’t delivering the results you want and consider cutting them out of your strategy entirely. These are just some of the strategies that will make you have a 5 star customer journey.

If you want to create a 6 star customer journey then tune into the 6 Star Business Podcast here. If you want to contact us, click here.

Gone are the days when simply offering a stellar product or service was enough to succeed in business. Competing in today’s market is a very different proposition. Customer-led companies are the brands that are dominating today. If you don’t keep up with this shift and prioritise the customer journey – creating a 5 Star Customer Journey, you risk falling behind.

In the digital age, the customer reigns supreme. They are spoiled by choice and can switch to a competitor in the blink of an eye. That’s why in today’s competitive commercial landscape, customer experience is where the real battles are fought and won.

What is customer experience?

Customer service is only part of the holistic customer experience. Customer experience is about a person’s overall perception of your brand, based on their interactions. The customer journey includes every touchpoint, from the search results they see on Google, through to the time they might call to request a refund. Customer journeys often involve users consuming your content, as increasingly, consumers are researching purchases prior to actually completing their transactions.

Customer experience is the sum total of all of these experiences. Everything you do impacts their perceptions. Your goal should be to ensure their customer journey is better than the equivalent they would experience with another similar brand.

Why is a great customer experience so crucial?

Every single one of your customers has the power to help make or break your business. A satisfied customer will tell others about their experience, and word of mouth is an incredibly powerful channel. An unhappy customer, however, will generally tell even more people about their experience. Obviously, you want to cultivate the former and minimise the latter!

Customer experience is not just a differentiator. It can represent a make-or-break business factor in many industries. It’s no surprise that more and more companies are incorporating customer journey mapping into their planning activities. According to writer, speaker, and strategist Valeria Maltoni: “The way to a customer’s heart is much more than a loyalty program. Making customer evangelists is about creating experiences worth talking about.”

Happy customers will become your most loyal advocates.

The benefits of delivering a great customer journey

Although many companies overlook customer journey optimization in favour of focusing on metrics that directly impact revenue – like conversion rate – this is a mistake. Rest assured that time and money spent on defining and refining customer journeys is never wasted. Companies stand to potentially double their revenue within three years of investing in customer experience.

Customer experience has a major influence on key success measures. Good customer journeys help to move the needle on lifetime value, churn, retention rates, and much more. Business benefits include increased customer loyalty, increased customer satisfaction, reduced customer complaints, and fewer returns.

According to a Forbes Insights study, leaders in using data-driven experience management also cited benefits including faster decision making (67%), a more comprehensive common enterprise view of customers (51%), and greater collaboration between departments (36%).

Common culprits in a bad customer journey

Typically, there are some universal issues that result in a poor customer experience. These include long wait times, impersonal service, staff who don’t understand customer needs, or trouble getting issues resolved/questions answered.

Therefore, you can achieve a superior customer experience if you make listening to customers a priority and use their feedback to build a solid, in-depth understanding of their pain points, needs, and desires. You will need to start with their perspective, viewing your product and brand through their eyes. Focus on your omnichannel reality, reducing friction wherever possible, and ensuring continuity. Having a superior customer experience is an indication that you have a 5 star customer journey.

Collecting customer feedback

A good customer experience comes from asking questions, listening to the responses, and adapting your approach accordingly. So if you don’t already have one, create a system to regularly collect feedback, analyse it, and act on it. Collect information about your users’ experiences with your product/service, website/app, or business as a whole.

Even if you don’t realize it, you are already gathering data every single day. Each time a customer calls the support line, sends an email, or leaves a review, that is feedback. It’s up to you to take that feedback and close the loop, using those insights to improve your customer experience.

According to Hotjar, companies with successful customer experience initiatives prioritize old-school methods (rather than focusing on trends like chatbots or AI). They focus on what they know will deliver results. Most stated that customer feedback was the main driver of their overall customer experience strategy. Voice-of-customer (VOC) feedback was the top method used across the board to shape customer journeys. Popular tactics included customer surveys, customer calls, and diving deep into website analytics.

Gathering feedback is a continuous process

Enter the customer journey map

What is a customer journey map? It’s a visual representation of your customer experience, spanning all potential touchpoints, grouped into stages. This gives you a unique view of how individuals interact with your brand. Given all the ways someone might interact with your business, a customer journey map is usually a very detailed blueprint.

“Mapping is very difficult given the heterogeneity of all markets, and the same consumer may have a totally different journey at different times because of different contexts,” says Wharton marketing professor Jerry Wind.

Nonetheless, it’s important to create a customer journey document if you want to identify opportunities for improvement. Although your teams are working toward the same company vision and mission, there are often disconnects between teams when it comes to day-to-day operations. Mapping the customer journey can help you identify where those weaknesses lie, so you can resolve them.

Going even deeper

Approach this exercise by identifying common user questions and decisions to be made, not just user tasks to be performed. Consider specific emotions that an individual would be feeling at various points in the customer journey.

Some companies tackle customer journey improvement through empathy mapping. These maps usually begin with a specific persona, then builds on this to articulate customer needs, goals, expectations, behaviours, and pain points.

Customer profiles and personas

Buyer personas or customer profiles are the foundation for customer journey optimization. Use these to guide any decision you make that impacts the customer experience. Consider whether a new feature will really solve the specific problem that customers face at a particular point in the customer journey.

Don’t zero in exclusively on your ideal customer. You need to craft personas for all customers, not just your best ones.

Gather feedback at the right times

It’s crucial to collect feedback at key stages of the customer journey, on your website or app, through email, or other relevant channels. There are three key milestones in particular where this will prove especially helpful.

You can prompt feedback at pivotal points prior to purchase, such as when someone has added a product to their cart or viewed a product page. You can also ask for feedback on the confirmation page after they have made an order. And finally, you can ask for feedback after they have had time to try out your product or service.

You can provide an incentive by offering a reward for responses. This could be in the form of a discount on their next purchase or being entered into a prize draw.

How to measure the customer experience

Having a measurable indicator means you can track progress over time and evaluate your efforts in this area. These will come in handy when you are running experiments to optimise your customer journey (more on that shortly). Here are four common metrics used to evaluate customer experience.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

How easy or hard is it for your customers to complete an action? This is usually measured through a survey that is sent out after the fact asking users to rate the difficulty of carrying out the task on a set scale.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a customer loyalty score based on asking a simple question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” This then calculates a numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction as expressed on a scale or through binary yes/no answers. This drills down to specific touchpoints, rather than focusing on their overall experience.

Time To Resolution (TTR)

TTR refers to the average length of time it takes for a problem to be resolved. It starts when the issue is first raised by a customer and ends once the ticket is closed. This can be measured in days or business hours. You can work out this metric by adding up the total time spent on resolution and dividing the result by the number of individual cases.

Identify your biggest leaks

Pinpoint the most common drop-off points along your customer journey. These areas of your customer journey represent your main opportunities for improving the overall customer experience. Where are people leaving – and why?

A certain percentage of drop-offs is inevitable. You can’t expect to win over everybody. Not all prospects are ideal customers, and even among those, not all of them will ultimately convert.

That said, if there are patterns showing that numbers significantly plummet at key stages, this is a signal that something is stopping customers from progressing. If web users lap up blog articles but never navigate to product content, consider whether you are effectively communicating how your products might meet their needs. If most people are making it through to your pricing page but then bouncing from there, you have a different problem on your hands.

Test and learn

Running long-term tests and learning from the results is a must when you are working on optimizing your customer journey. Make use of split testing or multivariate testing to experiment with changes with an eye to shifting the metrics outlined earlier. You want to achieve the optimal customer experience right now, as well as adapt to meet changing expectations and habits over time.

Keep doing what works and pour even more time and effort into those levers. Dial down tactics that aren’t delivering the results you want and consider cutting them out of your strategy entirely. These are just some of the strategies that will make you have a 5 star customer journey.

How to improve your customer experience

Think about key touchpoints along a typical customer journey. These are the points you want to focus on optimizing for you to achieve a 5 star customer journey.

The signup process

The onboarding process sets the tone for your entire customer experience. A simple, customer-focused signup form will go a long way toward creating a positive experience for new users.

Signup forms are often one of the first things you see on a website. An overly long or detailed form will inevitably deter people. Incorporate feedback from both new and existing users to streamline your process and build a more efficient, attractive proposition.

Contextual messaging

Although email is an essential element in your marketing mix, if you have an app, ensure you are making full use of its potential. Using event-driven in-app notifications can deliver even more timely and relevant messaging.

Dynamic messages can help when it comes to familiarizing customers with new features, alerting them to upcoming changes, or simply helping them make the most of existing functionality.

Personalizing the customer experience

When a user visits your website, make it easy for them get the most out of it. Surface relevant suggestions based on their preferences and previous actions. There’s nothing quite as delightful or convenient as returning to a website and immediately being presented with relevant information or products upfront.

If you are shipping physical products, think about how you can go the extra mile to surprise the customer with a personal note, an unexpected twist on packaging, or a bonus freebie.

Every interaction with a customer represents an opportunity to surprise and delight

Self-service options

Nobody wants to sit on the phone waiting to speak to someone. Long customer service wait times invariably drag down customer experience scores – which will definitely affect your 5 star customer journey.

The better your online self-service tools, the more likely your customers are to use them. Today, customers prefer to find answers to their questions through FAQs and online guides on their own. Do whatever you can to empower them to manage things themselves. This has the added benefit of reducing the demands on your staff.

Craft an intuitive mobile experience

Mobile now accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. Clearly, you need a responsive website (and if applicable, mobile app) that caters to the growing proportion of users accessing content on their smartphones. This is not optional!

Take your design cues from sticky social media platforms, which have mastered the art of the eternal scroll, images you can swipe and zoom on, thumb-friendly CTAs, and minimal, uncluttered layouts. The mobile experience should not simply be a scaled-down version of your full desktop site, but a fully-fledged experience in its own right.

Customer experiences and outcomes

In designing your 5 star customer journey, don’t stop at delivering delightful customer experiences. Consider what customer outcomes are being achieved. Ultimately, if you can help customers accomplish their goals, they are much more likely to be satisfied with the encounter.

Dave Duke of MetaCX and Mathew Sweezey of Salesforce recently stated that “outcomes are the new north star of customer experience”.

“The experiences you create are the vehicle for putting the customer in a position, or not in a position, to achieve their outcomes. It’s this convergence that needs to be understood so the customer can be set up for success. Experiences are the method, outcomes the goal.”

Consider the outcomes of your 5 star customer journeys.

Capturing customer experiences and outcomes through 5 star reviews

You might think that happy customers will leave a recommendation if they want to. But the fact is, this is an afterthought for most people. Many people don’t even think to leave a review, or if it does occur to them, they quickly forget about it before they get the chance. It’s up to you to ask and remind them.

To build up as many 5 star reviews as possible, you need to be asking the right people at the right time for feedback. Not all reviews are created equal. If you receive a 1 star review, it will take many more 5 star reviews to cancel it out.

Encourage customers to leave 5 star reviews – these are the highest compliments a business can receive

Strike while the iron is hot

That’s why you need to swiftly follow up with people who are pleased with your service. Although you can do this manually with one-off emails and in-person requests, it pays to invest in an automated solution that integrates seamlessly with your CRM. This way, you will be able to send review requests to the right customers at the right times.

Only a small number of your customers will ever make the effort to write a review, so this is largely a numbers game. The more you ask, the more likely you are to receive.

The two key review platforms to target are Google and Facebook. Google reviews are prominently surfaced when someone Googles your company name, and Facebook reviews pop up in newsfeeds when someone you know writes a review for a business, adding the virality factor. ProductReview and Yelp are also great sites to collect reviews on, as they rank well in search results.

Make it easy for them to leave a review

How often do you ever write reviews for other companies? Probably rarely, or never, unless you had an especially negative experience. And even if the thought occurred to you, it’s a big leap to actually visiting a website, logging in, and typing out a recommendation.

When asking customers to write a review on one of the above websites for you, remove as many steps from the process as possible. For example, provide them with a handy Google Review link that takes them directly to the right page. Add a hyperlink to your business listing in your email signature. You could also consider creating custom QR codes that link to each review site. Place these on your business cards or around your physical locations – so people can scan these and be taken directly to a page where they can leave a review using their smartphone. In addition, consider putting up a physical sign that encourages customers to find your company on Yelp or Facebook.

Respond to reviews in a professional manner

Unfortunately, you can’t please everyone. No matter how hard you try, not every customer will have a positive experience with your brand. You can’t control every possible factor, and you can’t control how a customer feels.

All you can control is your response. By replying quickly to negative comments, you let customers know their feedback matters. They want to feel heard and respected. This might just be enough to nudge them into giving you a second chance.

Note that you can’t typically remove negative reviews on Google. Given the limitations on deletion, it’s important to keep your average rating high by encouraging as many customers as possible to leave a review. It’s a numbers game. The more customers who write 5 star reviews, the higher your overall rating will be.

Conclusion

New players are entering the market every day and the cost of acquiring new customers is rising. This means the customer is king. Focusing on optimizing your customer journey will give you a strong competitive advantage. Customers will reward you in spades – satisfied customers won’t just become repeat customers themselves, but will also spread the word to their families, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and acquaintances.

Creating 5 star customer journey maps will help you pinpoint and remedy any weak spots or gaps in your current processes. This will also give you a clear idea of what tactics are helping you move closer to your goals and which are not. Building a seamless, consistent customer experience across touchpoints and channels will require you to work hard to dismantle any disconnects between teams in your business – but it will be worth the effort.

Now you know what it takes to create a 5 star customer journey and earn a 5 star review – it’s time to start putting these tips into action. Get out there and get implementing!

I want to start talking about digital marketing by being very transparent, and letting you know a bit more about who I am by being frank and a bit vulnerable!

I’ve always trusted people before they’ve proven themselves trustworthy. I’ve always assumed business owners, bosses and authority figures have mine (and others) best interests at heart

And I’ve always believed in the good in people before I look for the bad.

I’m wired that way, and I acknowledge that it’s not exactly the best wiring to have. It can even be perceived to create a whimsical ‘Alice in Wonderland’ perspective that is doomed to result in heartache, disappointment and frustration.

I have experienced all of those outcomes, and I attribute it entirely to my kind nature and my assumption that everyone in this world is good at heart and acting in the best interests of others.  I’ve been hurt, felt slapped in the face and punched in the gut, over and over until I was in real pain.

So, I’ve learnt my lessons, and become a much tougher and more aware person. Nowadays, I’m riding the middle line between kindness and self-respect.  I expect the best and plan for the worst.

Okay, so now you know the experiences that have brought me to this place of ‘balanced awareness’.

Having worked in the digital marketing arena for the best part of 12 years, I can now honestly say that I have encountered all of those feelings and experiences – even though I am a service provider myself.

When I first started in the industry, I didn’t intentionally choose it; the industry chose me for my skills and experience in mapping journeys and using technology.  Just on a smaller scale than the large corporates.

There were a lot of ‘gurus’ and information marketers around especially in digital marketing, and it took me a little while to absorb them all and understand who I was and how I felt about them all.  I have an enquiring and creative mind, so would order their books and material and try out their strategies to see what worked and what didn’t work.

As a student of this new landscape, I was delving into email marketing, marketing automation, digital marketing, customer life cycles and the different tools to manage them all.

Over the first few years, I saw the number of technology tools grow minimally, but in the last five years, the number of tools and platforms has exploded exponentially.  It is overwhelming for any business owner to consider the options and know what the best choice for them is. This is why small business owners rely on experts to assist them in choosing the right tools for them at the right time and using them in the right way.

At the same time as the technology explosion occurred in my industry, so did the number of providers. All of a sudden, there were new ‘experts’ popping up everywhere online.  People built a shopfront (website), hung a sign saying they were an expert, and they were in business.  It was a very challenging period for those of us who had credibility and expertise, but it was terrifying for the customers.

For the customers had no idea who to believe or who to choose. They could keep using their old marketing practices, but the simple fact was that after 2010, (I’m rounding it to 2010 even though the internet exploded our world around 2006) every small business needed to

not only have a website but be utilising some new online marketing practices.

This was when the issues in the industry began to unfold, and why there is so much mistrust today.

With a massive number of providers all shouting out online about how good their product is, the customer became confused and sometimes reacted to the loudest voice or the biggest promise, or the most prominent storefront (think of a large fresh food market with stall owners shouting out their prices to get people to come over to them).

The customers wanted to solve their problems and get results, which they were promised – so they went with the loudest, prettiest, or biggest.  Did it get the results they wanted?  Mostly no.

Many small business owners started with one provider and then after a while, because of poor results, lack of transparency and other frustrations, they would end that arrangement and go back to the marketplace to find someone else. If they had a referral, they would take it up.  A very few got lucky, but most were left to navigate the shouting voices of the store owners, and they got sucked into the nearest shop.

Unfortunately, many of these big and pretty stores were very new. They had been set up by people who may have done one thing well in the past and decided they were an expert – so set up a business and promised they were “The best in the industry” and so on.  But they weren’t, so the results weren’t there.

Many businesses experienced this over and over again.  They had been through many providers and sometimes spent incredibly large amounts of money with agencies and providers who delivered absolutely nothing.

They became jaded and hurt. Business owners would tell me, “I’ve been ripped off before, many times, so how can I avoid this again?”

Last year I met a business owner who said he was happy with his digital marketing provider and he’d been using them for over six years. I was surprised by this and initially impressed, as I wondered who this provider could be if they were able to keep a customer happy for that long?  I hadn’t heard of that before!

After asking a few questions and delving into the details of what this provider was doing for him, I uncovered five years of ‘not very much’ and that he was definitely being ripped off.  He had no idea and thought they were looking after him.  And I thought I was naive!

I provided him with a report of what they should be doing for him, and he took it to them. They promised to do all of that for him.  I wished him all the best as I certainly wouldn’t have left my business with a company who had ripped me off for five years.

But he’s not the only one like that.  Every week I hear stories of businesses which have spent thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing that has produced very little to no results.

With so many businesses having these experiences, is it any wonder that the collective perception of the industry is a negative one?

When I step back and look at this industry and consider who is trustworthy and who isn’t, the scales are very one-sided.  It’s so unfortunate, but this is where we are.

It is not uncommon to see this kind of thing occurring when a shift in our world creates opportunities like the internet did for business.  There’s always a period of massive growth when all types of traders enter the marketplace; good, average, and bad.

It hasn’t changed much over the centuries of doing business; however, what’s new for us is that we are now connecting through the internet not face to face as humans.  Which makes the lack of trust and credibility even more of an issue.

So, this is the state of the industry, and small business owners are wary, jaded, and unimpressed.  Is it any wonder why they take a long time to make a decision and try to ask for full guarantees upfront?

The kind-hearted part of me knows there is good in this industry. The optimist in me knows that there are ways for it to improve.  And the innovative truth-seeking entrepreneur in me is determined to find an honest way to deliver an experience for customers that they can trust.

Contact us if you need further information or assistance…

Any industry and business can have a broken customer journey.  In fact, I would suggest that most industries and businesses have broken customer journeys, and this is what creates the mistrust and fear in people. Discover How Broken Customer Journeys Create Mistrust and Fear…

To understand the concept of the mistrust and fear, you only have to look at an industry such as Real Estate.  Here in Australia this industry has a perception of it being untrustworthy and there is fear associated with dealing with it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask someone who recently purchased a house and how they felt about dealing with the Real Estate agents and the process overall. Ask them if they felt valued and respected, and if their needs were met at all times?

Mostly you will hear people say that they got squeezed for every last cent and that the agents played tricks to jack the sale price up or coerce buyers into spending more money, all to benefit their own pockets.

Unfortunately, the Real Estate industry is filled with broken customer journeys, and this is what creates mistrust and fear.  People do not feel valued and think they are being manoeuvred to extract the highest possible amount of profit from them.  There are the rare exceptions of course, but we are talking about the general rule here.

So, let’s examine what the broken customer journey is, and how that creates the mistrust or fear.

Firstly, the fact that customers go through a series of steps to buy a house means there is a journey.   There is a process they go through to reach their end goal of purchasing that house.

Secondly, the fact that a customer can still achieve their end goal of buying the house but end up with a sense of not being valued, mistrusting of the industry and more, means there are gaps in the journey.

There are many possible paths that we take in life to achieve our goals, and it’s not dissimilar to this example.  We could choose Real Estate Agent A or Real Estate Agent B to achieve our goal of buying a house.  We may go on very different paths with either of these Real Estate Agents, but the end goal is the same.

Which path (or journey) to achieve our goal is the best one? And what makes a journey a ‘more successful’ one if we still achieve our goal of buying the house?

This comes down to the human element of the journey.  The person who is experiencing the process is guided and moved along the touchpoint in that journey by their Real Estate Agent, and others involved.  If their experience is one that doesn’t honour or value their needs as a human – instead of the profit machine – then the journey will not be as successful as it could be.

Furthermore, and this is really crucial; if a person can go through a journey and reach their goal of buying a house AND feels valued throughout that journey – then not only are they going to be happy about the end goal, but they are going to want to share their good experience with others. They may even recommend the Real Estate Agent to others! And – they are going to remember them and may also go back to them if they want to buy another house.

When someone’s expectations are not being met, and they are feeling undervalued and treated as a small cog in a large profit machine, then their journey is broken.  This causes the mistrust in the industry and the feelings of fear in an individual.

Can you imagine what this does to each person who goes through a journey like this? And if there are hundreds and thousands of people experiencing similar journeys and feeling the same levels of mistrust and lack of value?

This situation creates the industry-wide perceptions that we have today. And without people pointing out the gaps (and the issues) with these journeys, it becomes a stagnant elephant in the room that we all know is there – but nobody’s doing anything about it.

Until I came along and started writing about it!

Hopefully, this example has highlighted for you what it means to have gaps in a customer journey, and how those gaps contribute to mistrust and fear.

Let me ask you a few questions:

Think about your own business and your industry. Do you operate in an industry that carries a similar level of mistrust and fear?

Is your own business operating in a way that doesn’t value your customer beyond the amount of profit they’ll make you?

Are you pumping a lot of money into buying new leads and filling your funnel – because you have a high turnover of customers?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you definitely should be looking at your customer journey, mapping the gaps, and fixing it.

The sustainability of your business and your industry deserve it. And most importantly, so do the important people who come into your business and go through your customer journey.

Hopefully, you can now understand how broken customer journeys create mistrust and fear, and why you should do what you can to fix it now!

Not only would you be creating a positive change in your business that will benefit you in many indirect ways (including your profits), but you will be setting a new standard of differentiation and excellence in your market and industry.

Now that’s something worth working towards, isn’t it?

If you need expert’s advice on customer journey mapping, contact us now!

Facebook advertising is not unique in how it influences people to buy. It’s just another platform on which you can use tried and tested marketing techniques. There are many information about this in the internet so we are revealing to you Facebook Advertising Success In 5 Easy Steps.

If you know how to do your numbers and how to set up sales funnels, as we’ll look at in this article, you can pretty much tweak any campaign into being successful.

Facebook advertising works for all businesses, regardless of what they sell or what service they provide. It’s just a matter of learning the basics of a good Facebook advertising campaign and getting started.

Most business owners pride themselves on being unique, so they often ask,  “Will it work for my business?” However, at the end of the day, every business wants the same thing, “more sales”.

And one avenue to get those sales is through Facebook advertising.

Advertising always works by understanding the psychology of the potential customer. And persuading them to buy from Facebook Advertising is no different.

People will always act predictably, according to their human nature, so you don’t really have to create any new strategy for Facebook advertising.

All you need is to understand what triggers your particular audience to buy.

Once you know that, you can use persuasive Facebook advertising to increase their desire to buy and convert more sales.

Here’s how…

1. Make a Big Bold (But Believable) Promise

The Internet is crowded, so you need more than just a big promise to draw attention to your Facebook advertising efforts.

With thousands of marketing messages targeted to consumers daily, people tend to block out hyped-up promises. They’re just not believable anymore.

To get your Facebook advertising noticed, you also have to make your audience believe your big promise.

You can do this by offering them something they haven’t seen before; a unique perspective or a unique solution to their problem.

This will help to get past those jaded consumers who think they’ve seen it all and will help you to stand out from the crowd.

You see, the success of your Facebook advertising is greatly dependent on whether you have the right offers, not just big promises. And your believable offers must also create a desire to buy within your chosen target audience.

You see, people aren’t looking for just anything; they want offers that solve a nagging or urgent problem in their life.

If you can create offers that show how your product or service will solve a problem, you have gone a long way towards closing the deal.

The next aspect is to understand that you not only want to provide a solution…

You also want your solution to appear so valuable that they don’t care how much it costs! After all, they are desperate for a solution aren’t they?

So, don’t fret over the wording or the look of your Facebook advertising at first, (we’ll look at this later). Instead, focus on creating the best offers for your Facebook advertising target audience.

In order to be able to do this, you first have to deeply understand your customers.

But here’s the sad thing…

If you approached most business owners and asked them who buys from them the most, many wouldn’t have a ready answer.

Few business owners understand who their audience is and why they choose their businesses over another.

This is a travesty because this is very important information that every business owner ought to know!

If you don’t know who your ideal target audience is, you won’t be able to target your Facebook advertising to the right people.

2. Your Image or Video Is 75% Of Your Facebook Ad’s Success

Do you remember the last time you clicked on an ad in social media?

What drew you to click on the ad?

Odds are it was the image or a fascinating video that captured your attention.

Pictures (and videos) are the biggest element in any Facebook advertising campaign. The image or video accounts for 75% of the ad’s ability to draw attention.

Pictures aren’t just persuasive, they also deliver loads more information in a single image than text. Studies show that the human brain can process and image’s message up to 60,000 times faster than the written word.

This means it is easier for consumers to find ads they like by simply looking at a visual image.

Add a compelling image or video to your Facebook advertising campaigns and you will see better results.

In our Facebook advertising experience, we’ve discovered that people are drawn to images of other people within unique settings more than any other types of images and even more so when the eyes are visible and engaging.

See more tips here

3. Create The Infrastructure To Support Your Ad

You need a sales funnel!

80% of sales occur after the fifth or more contact with a lead or a prospect.

This means that it’s unlikely that someone will click on your ad and buy straight away.

You ought to look at your Facebook advertising campaigns as campaigns that generate leads for your business, not necessarily sales up front.

There are many funnel models out there, and the good news is that most of them will work. However, not all of them will be suited to your business budget or the goals you have in mind.

For instance, one potential funnel could be something like: Facebook Advertising campaign sends a prospect to a landing page. The landing page sends them to a $7 tripwire. The tripwire leads to a $97 strategy session.  And the goal of the strategy session is to sell a high priced service worth 000’s of dollars.

You must also have utmost in mind that there is no funnel design that will work straight off the bat.

You will have to test, tweak, and optimize whatever funnel you create to get it right.

Most funnels will remain unprofitable for a month or two. You will need to accept that.

You have to be consistent and persistent to make Facebook advertising campaigns profitable by constantly measuring and refining them to raise the conversion rate

4. Ultimately It’s Your Words That Sell

You have created a Facebook advertising campaign using a great image or video, your headline screams out to your audience that you can help and you are different…

You have their attention; they click through to a landing page…

What next?

The only way to influence your prospects further is through your words (Note: You could also use a well-scripted video on your landing page to use the right words).

At this point, the wording of your offers and the way the copy is structured is the single biggest factor that can influence your conversion rate.

The difference between writing your own copy and hiring a professional copywriter to do your Facebook advertising is tremendous.

Well-written copy can help you eliminate time-wasters while at the same time generate even higher desire in those who you want to do business with.

We have seen many Facebook advertising campaigns that were delivering 0% – 1.5% conversions to leads, to as much as 5% – 6%! A 4-5x increase by using a professional copywriter to adjust headlines and copy

5. Do Your Math

You have to work the numbers, but the beauty of Facebook advertising is that you only need basic math skills to figure out whether your campaigns are profitable or not.

The trick is to figure out whether you make more off each customer than it took to generate them in the first place.

It’s as simple as subtracting your cost-per-click (CPC) from your earnings-per-click (EPC).

Once you know how to figure out the numbers, you will have your baseline to work from.

You’ll also learn ways to manipulate different criteria such as images, headlines, sub-headlines, copy, offers, calls to action and so on, to continually improve those numbers.

Do your math, understand your Cost Per Click minus your Earnings per Click and it will be nearly impossible to fail.

So there you have it…

A simple five-step process to ensure all your Facebook Advertising campaigns are successful.