In the context of today’s trends such as personalization and digitization, companies must consider measures to remain competitive. As a strategy for long-term customer retention, consulting firms often focus on the customer journey. This consulting concept refers to the customer’s journey through the various touchpoints up to their decision to buy a product. As a rule, a customer does not decide to buy immediately, especially in the case of expensive matters, but looks at a product several times first. In marketing, these points through which a customer journey passes are referred to as digital touchpoints. In non-digital advertising, which was predominantly used in the past, it is very difficult to map the customer journey. New approaches in the course of digitization, on the other hand, make it easier to reconstruct the customer journey in a digital way. Many consulting companies are therefore focusing on analyzing customer behavior with the help of digital data sets.
What is Customer Journey?
The customer journey maps the path to purchasing a product and to customer loyalty, showing all points of contact with the company. It can be divided into five phases, which are often examined in more detail as part of strategy consulting.
– Awareness: initially, customers become aware of your product, which can happen through a variety of channels. Social media and reviews from family members or friends, influencer advice, or search engine suggestions are just a few channels that can generate this awareness. In addition, marketing emails, blog posts and affiliate marketing strategies are all in this category. Consequently, in this discovery phase, the customer realizes they don’t have something and need something.
– Consideration: If a customer likes the product he sees, he most likely starts thinking about the product and researching it further. In this context, he visits the company website, for example, or signs up for free trials. Interaction with the chatbot also represents another touchpoint in the customer journey. Many customers also read testimonials on online advice portals to find out more about the product, its ecological footprint and its origin.
– Purchase: To finally buy the product, the customer usually logs on to the website or buys it via any online marketplace. After the digital purchase, many customers leave a review, which significantly increases the number of digital touchpoints in the purchase phase for other prospective customers.
– Experience: this includes shipping, delivery, tracking, exchanges, returns, and a variety of digital interactions and information.
– Loyalty: Finally, there is the question of loyalty. Even if the shopping and service experience was easy and successful for the customer, it is important to ensure long-term emotional connection. This aspect after the actual purchase is just as much part of the customer journey and must therefore not be forgotten in the consultation.
Ideally, all touchpoints are optimally supported by innovative product digitization and are thus even better accepted and used by customers. Not least because of this, new business models can be positioned and marketed more easily.
Through targeted consulting, your company can take advantage of the opportunities offered by digitization and use a wide range of touchpoints along the customer journey to acquire new customers and create long-term customer loyalty.
