What are your customers really experiencing?
How often do you ask yourself this question? And how often do you really follow up on that question so that you have a clear understanding of what your customers are experiencing? Whatever that experience is, that’s your brand.
Even though we all try to check in on everything in the business and have meetings about the customer experience, I’m certain that there are things that fall through the cracks. That’s okay. We all feel like we’re moving at lightning speed. That’s just the reality of running a business.
But if we’re not willing to ask these questions, let alone create a framework that helps us ask what’s happening in the business and how we can prioritize improving the customer experience, then we’re just lost as business owners, aren’t we?
Today, we’re going to talk about why you’re losing clients and how we can put a framework in place that helps you keep the customers you have and be better at attracting new customers.
The lens that Cardone Ventures looks through is, does this reflect our brand promise of helping our customers achieve their personal, professional, and financial goals? If it doesn’t we need to adjust. So, when you’re thinking about your customer’s journeys, does their actual journey (not the ideal one) actually reflect your brand promise?
What are your brand awareness touchpoints?
These are the avenues in which people can become aware of your brand. They might be different social media platforms where you’re posting your own content, online branding ads running on Google or other platforms, or even things like local sponsorships or even your business’s signage.
The point is you need to be acutely aware of all of these touchpoints, all of the opportunities that are out there, and you need to know how your brand is being presented.
Also, you need to remember that each social media platform requires a different approach. How users interact with Tik Tok is vastly different than how they use Facebook. Showcase your brand in a way that makes sense in that platform and in a way that helps users understand your brand values.
What are your consideration touchpoints?
You’ve made your potential customers aware of your brand, but what are you offering them? What have you given them to consider? Is what you’re offering competitive with what other businesses are offering? What are you doing to make your business stand out, more appealing, and ultimately the one worth investing in? And where are you doing these things? Are you showing your audience the different sides of your products and services, or are you just hammering away at them with the same static Instagram ad?
When your audience is in the consideration phase, you have the opportunity to teach them about every aspect of what you’re offering. Don’t squander it.
What are your decision making touchpoints?
Okay, a person has finally made a decision and they’ve chosen you. That’s great! But your work isn’t over. You still have a long way to go in making your customers feel great. This is the phase where your communication, whether it be in person, in an email, via text, or whatever makes the most sense for your business, needs to be crystal clear.
Did they make a purchase and you owe them a download link. Make that experience as easy and as enjoyable as you can. Have you committed to sending them a follow up email or phone call? Give them a specific window of time in which you’ll be in contact with them, and for God’s sake, follow through on what you promised.
What are your service touchpoints?
Now, you have something wonderful, which is a new customer relationship.You also have another thing: plenty of opportunities to fuck it up. So don’t! This is where your customer service processes need to be absolutely dialed in, and I mean absolutely every step of the way, including if this customer decides to leave you.
If you can provide them a great experience even when they’re walking away, they’ll remember and they’ll appreciate it, and odds are they might even come back to you. But you don’t really want them to walk away, right? You really want to be able to keep selling to them. Speaking of…
What are your additional sales touch points?
No matter what type of business you have, you should have some strategy in place for continuing to sell to established customers. You might think, “But our business just sells _____” and that might be currently true, but that’s limiting your opportunities, and it’s making your business less adaptable in the instance things go haywire.
The pandemic is a great example of this. We worked with so many businesses whose primary product or service was based in a brick and mortar location, but so many of those same businesses were able to adapt and create digital or no-contact ways of delivering value to their customers. It expanded their businesses at a time when less inventive businesses floundered.
The goal here is to delight your customers over and over again so that they’ll become more than customers. You want them to become advocates.
What are your advocacy touchpoints?
If you’re doing things right, then your clients should want to advocate for your organization. Word of mouth advertising is still one of the most powerful tools in marketing there is, and you can only leverage it if you’re doing things right in your customer journey.
Yes, soliciting reviews online is great. So is requesting referrals. But you need to be even more imaginative than that. What are ten, fifteen, twenty different advocacy touchpoints you could create for your business? What about having a highly influential client’s child or relative intern at your business? Think about the message that sends? These don’t need to be traditional touchpoints, they just have to be effective ones!
The client journey framework should reflect and be a part of your annual planning process.
Understanding your client journey, as well as the touchpoints you’re leveraging at each phase, will give you a clearer picture of your opportunities in the business. This is where you can increase your budget for certain marketing investments, or develop new programs and services to earn more customers or offer a wider range of services. There’s just so much that you can learn and use here.
Are you missing out on lost revenue? If you don’t have your customer journey dialed in, you probably are! Join me and the Cardone Ventures team for our 10X360 Event, where we’ll be exploring ways in which you can improve every aspect of your business!