From your customer’s first awareness of your product to when they’re finished with it, their experience matters. Their willingness to buy, recommend or purchase again are influenced by all their interactions with your company and products.
Beginning with your Marketing Funnel and perhaps ending with the 5 R’s, your customer relationships will benefit from a holistic approach to their journey. Designing your Customer Journey can be important as developing the Product itself.
Awareness
How your customers’ journey begins will depend on your product and its market. Selling to businesses is very different to consumer markets, but both can benefit from carefully designed messaging for your target customer personas.
First impressions of your product may set perceptions of its value. Making positive associations helps position it within your market. You will need to encourage customers to evaluate your product without applying too much pressure! Modern digital marketing techniques provide many ways to inform and encourage potential customers.
Even before a product has been designed, it can be useful to discuss your concept with a few potential customers. This ‘Customer Discovery’ process can help improve your product development during its earliest stages. You may even ask ‘early adopters’ to evaluate your prototypes before the final product is launched.
Evaluation
Managing how your customers evaluate your product can require careful preparation. Online demonstrations help sell software and services, but many customers need hands-on experience before they are ready to buy. Smaller physical products can be brought to customers for demonstrations or even loaned. If your product is large and expensive, then you may need to bring your customer to see it.
Your customers’ experience of evaluating your product will strongly influence their buying decisions. It’s important they feel respected and not rushed. They will ask difficult questions for which you need good answers. How you handle their objections may make or break a sale.
Adoption
Once a customer has purchased, their experience continues to matter. Unhappy customers can ruin other potential sales by spreading rumours. Whether they are unlocking ‘pro’ software features, unboxing a product or receiving an installation, it’s vital their expectations are managed carefully. Your customer’s satisfaction is key to your reputation as well as revenues.
Listening to customers early on helps to reassure them and provides valuable feedback to your development team. Product issues are inevitable – these may need deeper investigation, or have quick solutions which benefit other customers too.
These days almost every product has a software element. Whether the product contains software or has an associated website or phone app, these can capture customers’ details to keep them supported and connected throughout their journey.
Usage
It’s easy to forget customers who bought some time ago, but they are often more likely to buy again than a new prospect. Maintaining a relationship, whether through newsletters or after-market services helps retain their interest and loyalty. But it’s best to avoid bombarding them with necessarily communications.
Subscriptions and services are opportunities to continue relationships with your customers by providing support, solving their emerging problems, and offering product upgrades. The quality of your service is key to keeping your customers’ loyalty and future business with them.
Some product issues may take a while to appear. A few may not be possible to solve economically. But taking time to understand your customer’s complaints and suggestions also helps inform the design of future product generations. Later products built on these insights are often more successful than their predecessors.
Disposal
Eventually your customer will stop using your product. You can use this opportunity to sell them a new one, or you might lose a sale to a competitor. Either way, ensuring a positive relationship with your customer beyond their usage of your product helps improve your chances of future sales.
Customers may continue to be ‘ambassadors’ for a product long after they cease using it. A business customer contact may move to a new employer, creating additional sales opportunities. So it pays to stay friendly with everyone!
If a physical product has life beyond its first customer, there may be opportunities to grow your revenues from refurbishing and re-selling. Beware hidden costs in doing so, and the potential for ‘cannibalising’ sales of new products.
How you manage your products’ ‘circularity’ will leave a lasting impression with your customers at the end of their journey. Software and digital content rights often prevent reselling. Physical products may be subject to legislation on recycling of their components. As a vendor, you need to know your own responsibilities and what your customers will be expected to do at their journey’s end.
Summary
Each of your Customers’ Journeys will be unique. They may begin any time after the product’s launch and could end long after it is withdrawn. Your customers’ experiences along the way will determine their lasting impressions. A Customers’ Journey deserves to be designed just as carefully as the product or service you sell them.
If you’d like to discuss how to design your Customer’s Journey, please get in touch!