Why Small Businesses Need Customer Journey Orchestration
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The complexity of the customer journey has reached an all-time high, making customer journey orchestration increasingly difficult.
Consumers visit multiple touchpoints before even deciding to purchase. Those touchpoints include emails, text messages, social media, comparison sites, review sites, mobile apps, websites, and more.
As a business owner, you need to deliver value at every stage of the customer’s journey. Each interaction should delight and never disappoint.
The problem is that there’s an exact science to following (and delighting) consumers. That’s from the first touch to where they are gushing to their friends about how much they love your product. And most small businesses don’t have the expertise or resources to get the process done correctly.
But have no fear!
We’re here to help you attract, engage, and keep your customers’ attention. We’ll do it by orchestrating a customer value journey across all channels and in-person touchpoints.
This blog post will discuss why this topic is critical for small businesses looking to scale up. We’ll also show you how to start customer journey orchestration today. Let’s get to it!
What Is Customer Journey Orchestration? How Does It Benefit Brands?
Today’s marketers have to be superheroes to boost lifetime value and provide amazing customer experiences.
They have not only to understand their target audience’s behaviors, characteristics, and preferences. They also have to follow their prospects throughout their journey and delight them at every touchpoint.
Sounds complex? Well, it is. Nearly 30% of B2B buyers research 4-7 e-commerce sites before making a purchasing decision. And that doesn’t include your emails, review sites, social profiles, and website touchpoints. These can all deter (or boost) a consumer’s purchase.
How do you keep track of it all?
We won’t candy coat this. Executing customer journey orchestration, the right way is not easy. And the more avenues the internet provides for brands to connect with customers, the more difficult it becomes.
But it’s well worth it, and we wouldn’t be dedicating an entire blog post to it if it weren’t critical to business growth. Here’s why…
4 Benefits of Customer Journey Orchestration
Every customer journey touchpoint is an opportunity for your brand to listen to your customers, deepen your connections with them, and help them achieve their goals.
1) Be in Control
When orchestrating your customer’s journey, you control how customers perceive your brand and guide the conversation. You remove the consumer’s sticking points that could make them ditch the buying process. That way, you help them complete their journey with ease and happiness.
2) Enjoy Long-Term Growth
When customers enjoy their interactions with your brand, they leave positive reviews, come back for more, and tell their friends about your company. This creates an exponential growth effect behind the scenes without any marketing or coercion. So, you’re setting yourself up for long-term scalable growth.
3) Stand Out from the Competition
Your customers will know you went the extra mile to delight them, and they will reciprocate. They’ve likely been frustrated purchasing from other brands that don’t take the time to ensure their satisfaction. If you orchestrate and improve their journey, you will stand out.
Bottom line: You can’t ignore the customer journey if you want to scale your business. The more you grow, the more opportunities to solidify your market standing and prove you’re a brand to contend with.
4) Have an Advantage
You might think that large brands such as Amazon have a distinct advantage over smaller businesses when orchestrating customer journeys. But while they have more budget and resources, they will experience more bottlenecks. Their improvements will be slower to market.
Smaller companies can operate faster and more easily align with customers to accelerate growth.
How to Orchestrate Customer Journeys (Tips for Success)
Before or during the process of gathering data and mapping out your customers’ journeys, we recommend reading this section. It will help you avoid unnecessary mistakes.
Change Your Thinking
We’ve been talking about customer touchpoints and business goals, as they are integral to business success. But focusing too much on business-centric outcomes during this process can short-circuit what you’re trying to do.
We talk a lot about sales funnels, which have a goal of coercing consumers down the funnel to get to the sale. That’s the ultimate goal, right? Well, yes, and no.
Companies that focus too much on their own goals might try to manipulate the customer journey to guide prospects to where they want them to go. But the purpose of customer journey orchestration is to find out what your customer wants and how to give it to them. It’s not how to fulfill your business goals.
Remember that this is about the customer, and you must have a customer-oriented attitude. When you emphasize customer experience, you’ll delight your customers and inadvertently fulfill your business goals.
If your customer journey map creates too many drop-down menus and sales messages, you won’t reap the rewards. That’s because you are prompting customers to buy before they are ready.
Customer journey orchestration is tedious, research-intensive, customer-focused, and deliberate. If the process feels anything less than that, it might not be leading you in the right direction.
Make the Journey Seamless
Everywhere your customer interacts with your brand should be frictionless for your target audience. Creating stellar and effortless experiences at every touchpoint promotes a healthy relationship between the customer and brand. It will encourage consumers to choose you over the competition.
How? It starts with customer journey mapping. Be warned. This process can be a little tedious. But it’s necessary to grasp where your customers interact with your brand. You’ll find out how you’re delighting them (and removing friction) at every turn.
Start by mapping out a typical customer journey, from the first touch to the sale. Identify all places a customer would interact with you, whether on your website, via email, social media, or other locations.
Note that just one location could include several touchpoints. Your website could consist of live chat, contact forms, and your visitors could visit several pages before deciding. When mapping out customer journeys, get more granular with these more detailed nuances.
As an example, here’s a simplified customer journey.
The image above details steps a consumer might take, from learning about your brand to becoming a customer advocate. It seems pretty straightforward, but, unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
While prospects were on your website, maybe they searched for the term “sizing,” but they didn’t get any results from their search. Have you made sizing information easily accessible?
Maybe a customer wanted expedited shipping. But once they spent an hour shopping at your store and arrived at your checkout, they realized you didn’t offer this express service. Ask yourself:
- How can you remove the friction from that process?
- How can you delight customers who might have that same profile in the future?
As you can see, customers can take numerous steps. And you couldn’t possibly think of every scenario. This is where research and data play a role.
Your website data should tell you the actions website visitors take on your site. If you see multiple searches or behaviors from many people, map it as a touchpoint that needs attention.
The key is to understand customer expectations:
- Did they arrive on your website expecting to speak to a live person?
- Did they hope to see a package comparison chart?
Let’s take this one step further.
When compiling your data and understanding your users’ expectations, match this data to where they are on the journey.
This is especially important for B2B sales. As prospects proceed down the sales funnel, they will learn more about your products and services. Your messaging should evolve to reflect how their mindset shifts during this journey.
For example, if you are introducing your brand for the first-time then direct sales messaging might turn away B2B prospects. You should give them time to learn about you and your offerings before bombarding them with messaging to make a final purchase.
Give them time to read your blog, emails, and positive customer reviews and talk with support. They then might be ready for more bottom-of-the-funnel messaging that invites them to buy.
Once you’ve analyzed the data and prospects’ interactions, your customer journey map might look like this:
This map might look overwhelming, but it’s highly doable. Creating a comprehensive map requires collecting the right data and getting granular in your focus.
Final Thoughts: Customer Journey Orchestration—You Are Not Alone
Customer journey orchestration is not an easy task. It requires expertise in data mining, research, and leveraging the right software.
But the benefits outweigh the time and resource investment. In fact, avoiding the customer journey will set your brand up for a slow decline.
We want you to invest in a growth-producing strategy. Customer journey orchestration is an excellent place to invest because it’s one of the most critical steps for growth-focused businesses. If you do it right, your loyal customers will become your closest ally in creating exponential growth for your business.
We Can Help
As the landscape of retail and marketing changes, it’s more important than ever to make sure you have a customer journey plan.
Viral Solutions can help by auditing your digital value proposition, so you discover opportunities to improve both content and execution. We don’t just focus on onetime customer interactions—we offer an outside-in approach. That means listening to customers’ intentions through their entire experience with your brand.
What steps is your company taking now? Let us show you how to audit the customer journey on social media, as this channel has become increasingly complex over the past few years. Start by requesting a FREE Marketing Audit today!
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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