How to provide an engaging customer journey on your website?
Perhaps this will be a new perspective on sales and marketing. Contrary to what you may think, your sales process is not as important as your customer’s buying process. If you communicate with your customer the way you see it from your perspective, and not the way your customer would expect you to communicate, then customers are likely to continue to look for a supplier that “understands them”.
Companies’ products and services very often have similar parameters. Many companies sell the exact same solutions as their competitors. But for some reason, customers choose one vendor over another when making a purchasing decision.
So if the difference is not in the product, then what is it in?
The short answer is: in the way potential customers interact with the brand.
If we focus on this interaction that takes place through a company’s website, we can certainly highlight a few key aspects of this.
How to change the perspective to the right one?
It’s great if you start by thinking not about “your website” but about “your customers’ website”. What you want to put on it may not be particularly important to your audience.
What is important are the business goals you want to achieve and what your potential customers will want to find there. It is with the customer in mind that all communication and interactions should be designed. Customer relations is one of the nine key areas of any business model and it’s a good idea to think it through.
Go into shopping mode and ask yourself, what are you looking for when you want to make a purchase? How many times do you find yourself digging through company websites looking for the information that is actually important to you? How often do you leave a company website if you don’t quickly find a solution to your problem there?
What if the issues that are important to you were presented in such a way as to lead you like a string? What if you went straight to the content you came there for? What if the value proposition was presented in a thoughtful and accessible way for you as a customer? If the company communicated with you from the perspective of the benefits you care about and the problems you are looking to solve?
Sounds like a perfect world? Not necessarily.
A concrete path to business benefits.
Changing your perspective is an absolute must today if you want to maintain your communication market advantage. The good news is that there are already proven solutions that provide prospects with the right experience and the kind of collaborative journey that will delight them.
Before you start planning your website’s customer journey, consider the following:
- What are your most important products or services and what value do they bring to the customer from a customer perspective?
- Which of these products provide the highest margin or generate the main stream of revenue?
- What would be a precise description of the customer segments/groups you are targeting with your product? How many of these segments are there?
- Who on the customer business side will be the decision makers?
- What will the decision makers be guided by when making their choice? What information will they look for first? What will be their most important objections and concerns?
- How do decision makers view the problems they are looking to solve? Are they looking for “high quality” or are they looking at your product from the perspective of solving a specific problem that affects them?
- How long can the purchasing process take, how many times and what materials should the customer be exposed to in order to be ready to contact your sales department?
- What information will be crucial for the customer at the initial stage of selecting potential suppliers, and what information at the stage of deeper analysis?
- What and whom is he listening to? What does he see in the marketplace? What does he think and feel about the issues that affect him? What does he/she fear and what benefits does your client hope for?
How to change reality?
Designing the customer journey should certainly start with viewing the world from the customer’s perspective. Only the customer’s perspective is the right one.
Meanwhile, it is often difficult to look at our own organisation, our own offer and proposed solutions from the ‘outside’. We usually have a lot of beliefs, limitations and points of view that result from past experiences. They make it hard for us to get the right (customer’s) perspective.
So it’s worth starting the customer journey on the company’s website by talking to current and potential customers. This is a treasure trove of valuable knowledge about ourselves and we can often learn that the real value lies in a different place than we assumed.
Note that above we’ve only touched on those issues that may be relevant from a purely business perspective, yours and the customer’s. Meanwhile, the whole customer experience consists of a number of other factors. Approach from the side of goals which a website is supposed to serve, should be today’s standard and first. Before you commission the design of a new website, it may be worthwhile to take a piece of paper, a phone and ask the above questions to your employees and clients.
