Four tips to driving the customer journey with CRM

What is the customer journey?

Why is it important?

How do I know if my customer journey is effective?

4 tips to driving your customer journey

Optimiser’s customer journey tools

 

Your customer journey is the most influential factor in your successes in sales growth and maintenance, and it all begins with Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM tools are the key ingredient to perfecting your customer experience, optimising your onboarding techniques and nailing client nurturing. Read on to find out more.

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What is the customer journey?

The definition of a customer journey encompasses every interaction a customer has with your brand and company. Where business departments are separated according to their specific role in the customer’s experience with your product or service, the customer journey refers to the full experience from discovery to retention.

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Why is it important?

The customer journey is important because studies have found just one negative customer experience is enough to put them off returning to do business again with that brand. Similarly, good customer service provision was more of an indicator that a customer would remain loyal to a brand than the value of their service or product.

 

Understanding the customer journey is the first step in identifying and meeting customer expectations, driving higher engagement numbers and moving larger volumes of customers from the discovery stage to retention.

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How do I know if my customer journey is effective?

Creating a customer journey map is the best and most transparent way of understanding what the customer experiences as they travel through your brand’s omni-channel presence and through your sales funnel. 

Often depicted chronologically, it encompasses each interaction and decision a customer makes, which can include but is not limited to:

• Which platforms they use
• How often they interact with your brand
• The customer’s potential motivations
• “Offline” activity
• What purchases they make
• Purchase frequency

Each of these points on the customer journey map is sometimes referred to as a touchpoint. For each type of consumer there will be a different journey, and the way you choose to interact with these different journeys, manipulate your user pathways and target different audience segments each brings about a drive in a different part of your customer journey: it is up to you to decide what is most important.

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4 tips to driving your customer journey

Tip 1- Collect and analyse your audience data

Collect data throughout the full customer journey from discovery to retention. By understanding which customers are interacting with your brand, in what format and when, you can cater your customer handling at each stage to best fit the needs of your audience at that stage. Excellent technique for customer retention and to encourage repeat sales!

Tip 2- Retrain reps on digital customer service provision

Since 2020, companies have seen a rapid shift to digital customer services, and even though certain offices have a return date planned for themselves it seems as though things will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Digital sales and customer experience handling is different, because reps need to rely on techniques other than body language and facial expressions to build brand relationships.

Tip 3- Monitor your omnichannel presence

Just because one technique works for a particular platform, doesn’t mean it will work for others. As any sales person or customer experience rep will know, the audience differs wildly in demographic and geographic factors. By monitoring who is reaching out to you and via which platform, you can save time by implementing tailored strategies and meet the needs of your customers faster.

Tip 4- Collate all audience data in a single place

One of the main purposes of managing your customer journey with a CRM is that all of your collected data from multiple streams is funneled into a single place. This allows for better, more accurate and reliable analytics into all aspects of the customer journey, letting you:

• Make decisions with more confidence
• Understand the customer’s journey with your brand as a whole
• Save time on manual analysis and data handling
• Manage the full spectrum of the customer journey from a single platform

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Optimiser’s customer journey tools

Pipeline

Pipeline is the original customer journey tool. Laid out in the style of a timeline, it maps the unique touchpoint journey of a single client across your brand and marks significant areas of contact such as phone and email communication or a purchase.

Analytics

Analytics ensures that once you have collected data on the customer journey, you can build enactable, data-led strategies from it. Analytics module integrates with your other core CRM tools to create easy to read charts and graphs about custom sets of data that you wish to understand further.

Gone are the days where sales reps would have to spend time reporting on large data spreadsheets: analytics generates live business intelligence in an instant, allowing reps to focus on the more important task of providing excellent customer service throughout the pipeline.

Accounts

Equally as important, if not more so, than the customer’s onboarding journey is what happens to an account once it can be marked in your business system as Closed Won. Customer retention is one of the single biggest growth strategies for a business. 

On average it costs 10x more in financial and time resources to onboard a new customer than to nurture an existing one. By storing comprehensive information about the history of all of your accounts, you can effectively:

• Customise tags
• Segment customers
• Personalise communications

These are all proven methods of driving a faster, cheaper and more successful customer cycle.
 

Try out Optimiser’s full Enterprise Licence for a FREE 30 day trial to see how the powerful and integrated customer journey tools can begin to optimise the way you run your customer experience. 

Optimiser is a comprehensive CRM software company, providing businesses a customisable solution to their personal goals for sales, productivity, and growth. Powerful integrated modules include lead management software, a B2B sales toolkit, automated marketing suite and more for sale under a single subscription. Try Optimiser’s CRM software demo with access to the full Enterprise Licence FREE for 30 days, and find out how you can skyrocket productivity in just one month!