Customer Journey Check
Step-by-step plan
With the Customer Journey Check, we identify growth opportunities from the customer’s perspective. We map the customer journey, analyze current marketing efforts and research customer experiences. Then, based on the findings of the Customer Journey Check, we issue a recommendation for optimizing the customer journey. With the Customer Journey Check, we systematically go through the following steps:
Step 1
Mapping the Customer Journey
With customer journey mapping, we map out the customer journey from the moment a potential customer learns about your organization until well after they have purchased a product or service. We keep a number of standard phases that customers normally go through (awareness, consideration, purchase, use, and loyalty) and twitch these phases to match your organization.
Furthermore, we take into account different Buyer Personas, map the contact moments between your organization and customers, and walk through the customer journey itself with a run through.
Before we get started mapping the customer journey, we set up three semi-fictional profiles; the Buyer Personas. These are profiles of your different types of customers. We describe the personas based on goals, behaviors, interests and demographic information. Each Buyer Persona reflects a certain target group. We request statistics and data from you in order to set up these Buyer Personas in the best possible way.
This involves the current contact moments a customer has with you. Examples of contact moments are moments when a customer lands on your website, sees an advertisement or has contact with a service employee. Here we examine the channels through which you reach your customers, and to which phase of the customer journey these contact moments fit. We also consider what tasks a customer needs to perform and what possible emotions customers may experience during these contact moments.
We go through the customer journey several times to find out whether the theoretical customer journey (the sequence of contact moments “by the book”) corresponds to the customer journey we encounter in practice. Are there phases where contact moments fail? For example, because contact moments are not well aligned or because information does not come across well? Then this will surface during the run-through.
All this is neatly visualized in a “Customer Journey Map. This map can later be used as a blueprint for optimizing the customer journey.
Audience research goes hand in hand with the creation of Buyer Personas. After all, a Buyer Persona is a profile of an ideal customer who is in your target audience. What makes our audience research different from setting up buyer personas? When creating Buyer Personas, we analyze customers’ goals, interests, issues and demographic information. We use this information to create different profiles. In audience research, we analyze how large these groups actually are, through which channels these groups can best be reached and in which locations they are located.
With a keyword research, we investigate what potential customers are searching for in search engines such as Google and what they hope to find. We use several tools (Google Keyword Planner, Keywordtool.io, SERanking) to find out which keywords are commonly used. With a dash of common sense and experience, we know that while these tools are useful, it’s more important to figure out for yourself which groups you want to hit, what you want to write about and whether you can help people searching for certain things with your offerings.
This keyword research can then be used as a guide for search engine optimization (SEO), Google Ads Search campaigns and content creation.
As an organization, you want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are in relation to competitors. This competitive analysis is designed to find out the strengths and weaknesses of competitors in relation to your organization. Also, with competitive analysis we find out what prices competitors charge, what marketing strategies are used and how different target groups are reached.
Step 2
Online marketing analysis
During this step, we analyze what opportunities exist for optimizing the customer journey. It is not enough just to gain insights into the current customer journey of your customers. Questions like; which target groups do you reach? How are you found by these target groups? And what opportunities are there in terms of product development and revenue generation? In addition, it is important to know what distinguishes you from other players in the market.
Step 3
Customer experience analysis
After the contact moments between you and your customers have been recorded in the Customer Journey Map and it has become clear who your target groups are and how to reach them, it is important to find out how customers experience the customer journey. In this phase, we discover the customers’ experiences by talking to them and sending out questionnaires.
Unlike customer journey mapping, at this stage of the research we engage with your customers. We do this using online interviews (approx 30 minutes).
One way we find out about customer experiences is by measuring a Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS is a measuring tool that can be used to examine how many customers would recommend your organization to others. We also ask several feedback questions about the various contact moments customers have had with your organization during their customer journey. This way, combined with interviews with customers, we get a clear overview of the experiences customers have with you.
Want to take an extra step in researching customer experiences? Then setting up a focus group is an option. This involves bringing together different customers to discuss their experience with your organization, products and services.