What is customer journey

The customer journey is the complete buying process that a customer must follow to make a purchase, from idea generation to payment and re-ordering. The goal is to interact with customers at every stage and through all possible channels and mediums to better understand their desires and requirements, while identifying their recurring behaviors to create better customer experiences. Here are some pointers on what customer journey is and how to consider it in your SEO strategy.

Why is it important?

Studying the stages of the user journey is particularly useful for discerning positive and negative experiences during interactions with the company. This understanding of the customer experience is beneficial for the different departments of the organization, like the product manager, the service management, the UX designer, or the community manager.

The Customer Life Cycle

This is the most abstract type of information, which should be at the very top of your customer journey map, and in which you will describe the stages or phases of the customer journey. It is interesting and relevant to think of these stages as the main chapters of a movie or book, and they can be simple in their naming with the use of words such as before, during and after.

Defining the target group

The starting point for creating an experience map is based on so-called personas. Personas are fictitious people, a sort of composite of a consumer belonging to a particular target group. A persona includes certain characteristics to make it easier to perceive: last name, first name, age, gender, status, place of residence, occupation, socio-professional category, etc. Other elements are defined: goals, desires, expectations and needs.

The different stages

Pay attention to the different stages of a customer journey: Awareness: recognition of a consumer need by stimulus; favorability: predilection for a particular product or service; consideration: consideration and intent for purchase; intent to Purchase, and the purchase itself.

The satisfaction questionnaire

Try implementing an online satisfaction questionnaire. These questionnaires allow you to evaluate the level of satisfaction and receive feedback from your customers at key moments in their experience (unsubscribing from a newsletter, receiving an order, feedback on the call-center, etc.).

Remember: The Customer Journey Map can be useful for tracking quantitative KPIs, performance indicators useful to marketing and sales teams, as well as product teams, to monitor progress and derive important strategic recommendations.