Do you understand your customer’s journey?
From the first time they saw your company to what made them buy and what keeps them as a customer.
Most companies want the outcome of understanding their customer’s journey without doing the leg work. Sure that will take you somewhere, but it won’t be far.
Our advice – spend the time and understand this.
We sat down with Adam Saad, CEO & Founder of Tech Stack Advising, to learn more about how he helps his clients go through this process.
First takeaway
Learn how to navigate a new customer journey as the buying process has changed.
Trust is the most important aspect right now.
Your company has to be number one when it comes to navigating the environment and building trust with your customers.
How do you do that?
Start at the top of the funnel.
What do your prospects assume when they see your website or hear about your company?
What do your reviews say about your company?
This is the first step in understanding the customer journey.
Then dive into what they are saying when you’re in negotiation mode. How do they describe what you do to others that they are bringing into the conversations? Take note of that and keep track of it.
Skipping a few steps ahead, but when you ask for testimonials or customer stories from your current customers, ask open-ended questions to see how they describe your product or service. It will be eye-opening compared to what prospects say.
From the top of the funnel through full lifecycle customers. Every step is important.
Hubspot put together some ideas on how to start mapping the journey.
Second Takeaway
Who is your customer?
Is your customer going through pain? What are they experiencing when searching for your solution?
The biggest piece of advice we can give to companies is to have their team give empathy to their customers.
It’s hard. You are dealing with people experiencing the same problems over and over again all day, but your customer doesn’t know this. They want you to be empathetic to their situation.
Devin Reed put together a great example of what it means to really understand your customers & audience.
Here they are again, ten questions that can set your company apart from the competition when understanding your buyer.
- What motivates them more than money?
- What do they fear?
- What pisses them off more than getting cut off on the freeway?
- What beliefs do they hold that don’t make sense to anyone else? (the weirder the better)
- What seasonal changes affect their business?
- What’s a successful day look like?
- What current trends are affecting their business and/or livelihood?
- How have they been burned in the past?
- Who do they aspire to be?
- What’s the *exact language* they use to describe all the above?
Level up your customer service
Let’s dive into the hospitality industry for a minute. We could all take a page out of their book and apply it to our company’s customer service.
Take the Ritz Carlton for example.
The level of service is immaculate. You walk in and you’re treated like royalty. But they even extend this digitally. When you call the front desk or book a reservation online, it’s a different type of experience.
If we just extend this level of service, even just a little bit, onto our customer base. I promise you will see an increase in sales, customer satisfaction, and most important customer loyalty.
Third takeaway
When every call matters, you need to find ways to increase efficiency with the team you have.
Now more than ever, teams are smaller and expected to create the same output as before.
This means it’s time to be scrappy, but in a way that can be sustained long-term.
We’re talking about training, coaching, and using technology to your advantage.
Training
Prioritize training. Add it to your weekly schedule and stick to it. If you don’t prioritize this, then it will continue to be forgotten about and you’ll have the same problems occur over and over again.
Additionally, now is the time to emphasize hands-on training. Enable your employees to see measurable results from what they learn during the training time.
Coaching
Identify both the strengths and weaknesses your team has and then segment your coaching from there.
Enable peer-to-peer coaching based on their strengths and weaknesses, plus this gives your team more buy-in which in turn results in a better customer experience.
Conduct shorter coaching sessions that focus on one thing at a time. Most of it won’t be retained if you provide too much information. Each coaching session should have one focus and that’s it.
Technology
If you’re not already recording phone calls, now is a great time to start.
And instead of listening to random calls because you don’t know which to listen to, this is exactly why you should leverage technology.
Call coaching technology, like Abstrakt, can help identify which calls you need to listen to and which need feedback. Plus you can give your team the power to request feedback when they need it. This will double down on your coaching and training sessions.
Plus you should be able to see an overview of how each rep or agent is performing and the history of their performance.
Fourth takeaway:
It’s time to upgrade your KPIs and tie them to the outcome of the company (aka revenue)!
Based on exactly what was talked about before, technology helps you upgrade your KPIs. If your team knows exactly what they are contributing to help the company grow, I promise it will make a difference in their long-term success.
For example, if your team is only focused on average handle time – how are they seeing the big picture? What happens when they decrease their average handle time by 30 seconds? What impact are they making on the company?
In turn, this improves the customer journey. Exactly what we started talking about in the post.
Everything goes together, but only if you see the bigger picture.
Interested to see how technology can help your team?
Check out this post that has everything you need to know about real-time call coaching software.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
If we can help, great! If not, at least we hope we pointed you in the direction of what to do next to focus your customer’s journey.