Here’s Why Your Digital Customer Journey is Costing You Money

When customers walk into a brick-and-mortar store, it’s easy to find out how they got there and what they’re looking for. You can ask them what product they’re interested in, physically see what catches their eye, and advocate for your product or service in real time. But understanding these things about your customers and helping them decide to purchase your services or products isn’t as clear-cut for online businesses. However, online business and the digital customer journey that comes with it allows you to customize and personalize your customers’ experiences in an unparalleled way. Using the data available about their demographics and psychographics, you can tailor your digital customer journey to streamline customers’ journeys from the top of your funnel to the bottom and give them an easy way to share this experience with their network.

By investing in a detailed digital customer journey map, you can anticipate your buyers’ needs at each stage of the funnel. (Source)

In an age where 79% of customers want to see personal investment from companies before buying, a poor experience can frustrate them and create friction when it comes time for them to buy.

And, if your customers have a bad experience caused by a lackluster digital customer journey, more than half of them will never use your company again.

By strategically investing in your digital customer journey, you tailor the steps your customers take from the very top of your funnel all the way through fostering return business. In the process, you’ll gain valuable insight into your customer base, capture new business, and ensure the best outcome for your bottom line. That is, if you avoid these four common ways that businesses waste money with a half-planned digital customer journey.

1. You Don’t Have a Concrete Digital Customer Strategy

If you don’t know the best way for your customers to reach the conversion stage, they won’t know either.

A poorly – or not at all – planned customer journey creates a bad customer experience, increasing the chance that your customers won’t reach the checkout page, or will abandon their carts if they do.

More than 80% of customers value the ability to smoothly move from one stage of the journey to another, particularly between channels.

Furthermore, more than 74% of customers report that a holistic omnichannel experience is important to their experience with a business.

This lack of strategy doesn’t only affect one purchase, either. It causes the loss of customer loyalty and repeat business, forcing you to rely on one-off purchases, rather than benefiting from returning customers.

By improving your customer experience, you can grow your revenue by 5-10% and cut overall costs by 15-20% in three years. A relevant degree in communication or tech at this point would also help your customer service journey.

Make sure that your ads point to the specific products or offers they advertise and that customers can smoothly switch between devices when accessing your site.

2. You’re Not Collecting the Right User Data

Your analytics tools can give you incredible, specific insight into who your customers are and what they want, when used correctly.

Detailed customer data allows you to create comprehensive customer personas and tailor their experience to your site. (Source)

If you’ve limited yourself to just looking at which pages and products on your site get the most traffic and which ads have garnered the most impressions, you’re doing your business a disservice.

Despite privacy concerns, 64% of millennials value a personalized digital customer journey based off their purchase data.

By capturing more in-depth demographic and psychographic data on your customers–such as education levels, income levels, and region–you’re missing a key way to monetize your analytics by segmenting, targeting, and advertising to them more specifically.

3. You’re Not Asking for Customer Referrals at the Right Time

Gone are the days that customers rely solely on Google and Yelp reviews to make purchasing decisions. Instead, your prospective customers rely on the opinions and experiences of your past customers to decide if your product or service is worth their money.

If your customer journey frustrates your clients, you’re setting yourself up for no reviews or bad reviews that impact customers long after the reviewer leaves your site and balloons your customer acquisition costs.

It’s scary, but 20% of customers say they will take revenge on a company for a bad experience by posting a negative review online.

And if you’re not asking your satisfied customers for referrals, you’ll miss a valuable way to offset bad reviews and showcase your value to new customers, too.

Instead, reach out to your customers after they’ve received your product or had a chance to test out your service, asking them to share their experience. If they give a positive review, give them the chance to share it on social media for a discount on future orders. If they share a negative review, connect them with your customer service team to resolve the issue before they take it to their friends.

4. You’re Relying Too Much on Your Customer Support Team

Your customer support team exists to answer your customers’ questions and ease any frustrations and complaints that arise during your digital customer journey.

But, by avoiding strategic investment in your customers’ experience, you’re creating unnecessary work for your customer support team.

In a 2016 study, 36% of calls to customer service centers were caused by hard-to-find information.

This means you’ll spend more money to pay them to answer questions and handle complaints that are entirely avoidable if the digital customer journey is designed well.

Instead, record all the common questions your customer service team receives and make sure they’re answered in a prominent FAQ section on your website. If your team sees patterns in the kind of complaints they’re hearing (such as issues finding advertised promotions or using coupon codes), use this information to fix the gaps in your digital customer journey.

How VoiceSage Fosters Incredible Digital Customer Journeys

At VoiceSage, we know that the key to a great digital customer journey lies in the tools you use to design and support it.

With services like our direct to consumer SMS marketing, contact centre and customer care, and delivery and fulfillment communication services, we help you improve your productivity, customer satisfaction, and response rates.

Contact us today or book a demo to learn more about how VoiceSage can help you improve your digital customer journey and bottom line.