Whose Journey?

We imagine the customer journey as that well-crafted pathway we create for consumers to slide frictionlessly through to transacting with us. But that’s our journey, our funnel; it’s not the customer’s journey.

The customer’s journey starts from where they are right now; blissfully unaware of your existence and yet somehow coping just fine.

However slick our pathway may be, the customer’s journey is long and faltering, marked by inertia and uncertainty at every step, beset by the distracting realities of busy lives, with irrationalities and biases we can’t predict. B2B is just as bad: the internal politics, the layers of authorisation, the competing priorities. It’s a miracle anything ever gets done.

What’s Our Role?

Well, not just to optimise our preferred pathway.

Our role is to provide reassurance, information, guidance, and space, to equip our customers to decide, and then to advocate for us, and provide them with the ability to step away and still to come back in their own time.

And if you think our role is to “Always Be Closing”, I’ll let you get back to Glengarry Glen Ross (which is always worth rewatching… but not emulating).

OK, So How?

Map the Journey.

We mustn’t fall into the easy trap of just mapping our preferred pathway, nor should we just focus on the ‘successful’ steps. Rather, let’s put ourselves in our customers’ positions and think about how they react at every step of their journey.

Consider their whole journey. It doesn’t start when they land on your web site or receive a proposal, it starts where they are now… in blissful, if hectic, ignorance. They might not even notice the first few steps, as they hear your name dropped in conversation or skip past it in print, but it may be preparing them to react to that first, meaningful touchpoint. And perhaps they only react and don’t yet act, they’re still on a journey. Capture it all.

Determine the Options.

For each step, we can then take a view on what the customers’ options are, and see what they’re actually doing (somebody deferring an action to tomorrow is very different from somebody writing off their interest altogether). Inertia and the realities of a busy life mean that doing absolutely nothing is almost always a compelling option, and generally the default.

There are likely to be more actions we don’t like, than actions we do, so we should see how we can encourage and support our customer into taking the step we want. Keep in mind that people will have diverse ways of undertaking their journeys — some may be data-driven, some may need to hear how it’ll feel to be involved, others may just need a clear action to perform.

Give Them What They Need.

We need to provide them with the experience, options, and materials they need to move forward. This isn’t a sales function, it’s not objective-handling, it’s problem-solving. If we understand their problem and we’ve created a good solution, this is our opportunity to explain how their life will be improved. (If we don’t understand their problem or haven’t created a good solution, it’s back to the drawing board!) If we’re not demonstrating how we’re solving their problems, nobody will care what the features are, however proud we may be of our own cleverness in creating them. We can do this through web copy, a range of options for them to engage with us (call, chat and video), materials to take away and digest, emails to sign up to, reminders to set… the options are boundless and the answers can be iterative. We need to figure out what works best for your range of customers?

Ultimately, we need our customers to advocate for us, firstly in their own deliberations, then hopefully with other potential customers too. How can we equip them to do that? How can we empower them?

Recruit the Guides.

Other than us and the customer, who else benefits from this happening? Whatever the answer to that is, those are our natural distribution channels. Some may already be inherently incentivised, others may require it, all of them will need to be equipped to help guide customers to us. Do they need training or some written collateral, or do they need comfort that their valued contacts will have an excellent experience as our customers? Perhaps they just need to hear they’ll be kept in the loop (and I’m sure a reciprocal referral wouldn’t hurt).

Who aren’t yet natural allies, but could be? Who are the trusted contacts of our customers, or the ‘indifferent needed’? People and organisations the customer may have to interact with, in order to transact with us; maybe they’re accountants or bankers, registrars, licensors or other advisors and service providers. They may start off as indifferent to the transaction but how can we move them to being allies?