Customer journey and touchpoints
The marketing term Customer Journey, also called Buyer’s Journey or Users Journey, defines the individual phases that a customer goes through before deciding to buy a product or service and beyond. As an optimal tool, customer journey analysis can perfectly align communication and user experience with individual touchpoints to meet the needs of your different target groups.
Customer journey mapping describes the way of working within customer experience management, i.e. the complete customer journey to the product.
In doing so, you look at your company from the customer’s perspective and can better understand the customer relationship. This visualizes in detail the entire customer journey map represented by specific personas. The goal of the Customer Journey Map is to recognize positive moments in the user experience (UX), to build on them, and to identify and resolve negative experiences in the customer relationship.
Touchpoint is the interface in communication, which can be both B2C and B2B. These are the moments of interaction of companies with their customers. Customer communication touchpoints online: e.g., via the website, apps, or social media.
Offline: e.g. on site in the branch or at the service counter.
Successful touchpoint management recognizes the most important touchpoints between customers and companies in order to optimally accompany customers through the customer journey. It is the task of companies to know and manage these fundamental touch points. Customer touchpoint management refers to corporate measures aimed at providing customers with the most positive experience possible across all touchpoints with a company. Touchpoint management initiatives are primarily aimed at strengthening customer relationships, generating new customers, and optimizing customer purchasing processes.
Define target groups and personas
Defining target groups is about figuring out the characteristics of your target group. Characteristics such as gender, age, income or place of residence play just as important a role as the question of what wishes, problems or needs your target group has.
Make use of the creation of different personas.
Products, services and communication should offer your customers real added value. Persona creation helps you get to know customers better, understand their needs and question what their expectations are at different stages of the customer journey.
The persona extends far beyond an abstract target group definition and also clarifies the usage behavior of specific individuals.
Personas can be located not only in marketing, but in all areas of the company.
As a company, you want to convince people. This can only be achieved if you know these people and their personal needs, goals and challenges as well as possible. Personas are therefore a central component for getting to know customer needs, challenges and goals, so that these can be taken into account in marketing or product development, for example.
First, determine the goal for which the personas are to be created. Then determine the elements that should describe the persona such as age, gender, needs, problems, etc.. It is recommended to always define the personas qualitatively and quantitatively and to validate them later. Customer surveys, mystery shopping, market studies and, of course, data collection and analysis are suitable for this.
Customer Experience, Design Thinking and more
Customer experience – customer experience – focuses on the question of perception, interactions of a customer with a company, a service or a brand and what emotions they associate with it. The consumer journey is divided into different phases: from initial information to the purchase decision. All touchpoints of a consumer with a brand, a product or a service are recorded on a customer journey map.
With customer experience management, a company controls and orchestrates customer interactions. With coordinated measures, CEM pursues the goal of improving the customer experience via the contact points (touchpoints) and creating memorable experiences. In developing and designing a comprehensive customer experience, you will secure a competitive advantage and unique market differentiation in the future.
With customer experience design, a company designs its offerings and interactions with customers from an “outside in” perspective, that is, from the customer’s perception.
The goal of CED is to increase customer loyalty through recommendations and provide for future growth (sales / profit).
User experience extends the term usability to include aesthetic and emotional factors such as an attractive, “desirable” design, aspects of confidence-building or the joy of use.
This holistic approach considers the entire user experience during the use of a product. Depending on the area of application, users should not only reach their destination quickly and easily, but also feel good about it.
Usability: from the English for usability or user-friendliness.
This term refers to the extent to which a product, system, or service can be used by a user in a specific application area to successfully, effectively, and satisfactorily achieve specific goals.
While good usability is usually not even clearly perceived, this is not true of poor usability.
Ease of use is important for all products with a technical interface between man and machine. This includes software, websites, mobile devices, medical devices or complex systems for professional machine control.
Design thinking is a customer-centric and iterative method to solve complex problems and drive new ideas. In doing so, you will weigh cost effectiveness, feasibility and desirability and develop a solution that is superior from the customer’s perspective.
Marketing strategy and concepts
Through efficient marketing, you can contribute greatly to the success of the company. Used correctly, you will not only reach new customers, but also consistently higher profitability.
The marketing and the corresponding marketing measures are always directed at the target group. Targets, strategy and marketing instruments are all geared to the target customers. The marketing concept describes all marketing measures in detail.
A well thought-out marketing concept defines which channels and marketing initiatives are to be used to achieve the set corporate goals. It also determines the time, moreover, which measures will take place.
It includes defining the persona(s), pricing, and how your business differs from the competition. A holistic marketing concept thus forms the basis for the design of your entire marketing.
Customer focus and customer centric
When it comes to customer focus, you strive to prioritize the needs of your customers. You can recognize a company that values customer focus by the way it promotes a certain corporate culture. The goal is to improve customer satisfaction and build and deepen stronger relationships with customers.
Customer focus is about building genuine relationships with clientele. Above all, value is placed on an ongoing dialog based on trust. In addition, the maintenance of communication with the customer is characterized by
Acceptance, appreciation and positive attention.
The Net Promoter Score, or NPS for short, describes a key figure that provides information about the customer satisfaction of a company. With the help of the NPS, you can calculate a score that shows you how loyal the customer is to a company.