The Modern Consumer Journey

Picture your all-time favorite business. Now ask yourself: How did you first discover it? How did they communicate with you? What persuaded you to make a purchase? I’m sure the business you chose delivers exceptional products or services, but chances are they also provide top-notch customer service and an overall memorable experience for you along the way.

A business can do this by anticipating your unmet needs, consistently meeting them, and creating positive interactions to convince you to choose their business. And that’s the modern consumer journey in a nutshell. It is the full experience of being a customer from start to finish. It begins at the very first point of contact a consumer has with a brand, which creates awareness, the mix of interactions a consumer has to seek more information, which eventually leads to the final stage of making a purchase decision.

According to Hubspot, the journey is comprised of three stages:

Awareness:

The awareness stage is the first step when the buyer realizes they have a problem or are lacking something. Here, your business should provide valuable information to the consumer and begin your nurturing campaign.

Consideration:

The consideration stage is when the buyer establishes an issue and looks for solutions to resolve it. Research is done and the consumer compares different brands to see which one can best meet their needs. This is the time to show off. You want to impress the consumer and show them that your business is the best solution.

Decision:

The decision stage is the final step where the buyer picks a solution to the problem and makes a purchase decision. It’s critical for your business to show the consumer the value they will get out of choosing your business versus your competitors.

The process works by creating a nurturing campaign to turn a complete stranger into a customer by understanding their journey with your business — and all the touchpoints in between. You can do this by taking a walk in their shoes — try to understand their pain points, needs and thought process in order to appeal to them.

Understanding the Journey

As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to provide an integrated shopping experience across multiple channels and you can only do this by fully understanding the journey. To do this, you need to acknowledge all the stages that each customer must go through to reach their goal and how each piece of the journey fits into the full customer lifecycle.

At each stage, you should ask yourself:

• What do my customers need?
• What goals are my customers trying to accomplish?
• What touchpoints will they encounter?
• What are my customer's feeling?
• What are their pain points or frustrations?
• What can be improved?

It may sound complicated, but when you think about it, it’s quite simple. After all, we are all consumers in some way or another. Consider your own consumer journey. What appeals to you? What draws you in versus what repels you? Now implement that into your nurturing strategy.

In order to understand the journey, first, you need to fully grasp who your customers are and then cater to that specific demographic. Get familiar with your customer personas.

Characteristics to consider:

• Age
• Occupation
• Income
• Education
• Marital status
• Interests

A good way to familiarize yourself with your customer personas is to speak to your sales team or send out some customer surveys to gather more information.

The Influence of Technology

The modern customer journey is comprised of several touchpoints. With new technology and the dawning mobile era, the number of touchpoints a customer encounters has drastically grown. Consumers can interact with your brand across a multitude of available channels crossing in and out of the digital world.

To break it down, a touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with your brand throughout their journey — these can occur on and offline and can be direct or indirect points of contact. Here are some of the most common touchpoints:

• Social media
• Websites
• Review sites
• Email
• Customer service team
• On-location
• Advertisements
• Over the phone
• Word-of-mouth
• Mobile app
• Follow-up customer feedback surveys

Take advantage of every single touchpoint — each one is an opportunity to provide a positive experience to win over the consumer. See it as a chance to turn your prospects into customers, and your customers into loyal promoters for your business.

Much like its impact on touchpoints, modern technology has also largely influenced the customer journey as a whole. Unlike in the past, where consumers only had the old school brick-and-mortar option, we now have unlimited access to the digital world, which has created a reliance on the internet to make purchase decisions. We are in the process of transitioning into a mobile world, which has drastically altered the way consumers interact with your brand.

That’s not to say physical businesses are going anywhere — because they’re not — technology is just changing the process. 87 percent of shoppers now begin their hunt for a new product or service on digital channels. Customers use this technology to research your brand, make price comparisons, explore competitors, and sometimes even make a purchase. Even though there is this undeniable reliance on digital technology, the majority of consumers still prefer making a purchase in-store. That's why it’s critical for your business to provide a seamless bridge between the two realms.

Consumers have access to an extensive list of outlets that enable them to educate themselves on the product or service and gain brand knowledge — without ever stepping foot into the physical store. We aren't strolling down store aisles anymore, we are scrolling on our smartphones — for the most part. We have become a digital-centric society, which has evolved the purchase making process. Today, 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.

With the growing use of smartphones, voice search, online reviews, social media, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality (just to name a few) — making a purchase decision becomes a complex task because there are many factors to consider and a plethora of options to choose from. Understanding the offline consumer journey is no longer enough. Adopting a mobile first strategy to engage with your customers in the digital world is critical.

Taking the time to learn about the interconnection of the online and offline customer journey is vital. Nowadays, it's clear that consumers engage with multiple channels while shopping. Often, the consumers may start on a mobile device and move to the brick-and-mortar location. So, your business has to be a rockstar in the online and offline world and provide the ultimate brick-to-click experience.

With the eCommerce world exponentially growing, many businesses have synced the channels together to optimize both. The idea of fusing the online and offline customer journey into one comprehensive experience is known as omnichannel.

Taking the omnichannel approach requires making the touchpoints within the two channels cohesive and smooth — you need to master how the modern consumer uses devices, technology, and platforms between the two interchanging worlds.

As a business owner, it’s important to understand what your consumers want along their journey and to deliver exactly that. So yes, integrating your business into the digital world can be difficult in the sense that this technology provides a multitude of potential touchpoints that your business must accommodate, but this technology also helps to deliver precisely what consumers are looking for. As a business owner, you should embrace the digital transformation and leverage the digital world to promote your brand and attract more customers by delivering a flawless experience.

Mapping the Customer Journey

The final step in understanding the consumer journey is mapping it out. Mapping the customer journey is a visual representation of everything previously discussed. It illustrates every touchpoint your business has with a typical customer, which helps to envisage the overall journey and discover potential improvement opportunities. The more touchpoints a consumer has, the more complex the map becomes.

It’s important to understand that the map is not meant to capture each customer, but rather a few customer personas. Mapping out the journey allows your business to visualize every path a consumer might take during their journey and all of their potential interactions with your brand. Having this figured out ahead of time prepares you to provide the consumer with a positive experience throughout the entire journey.

By understanding your consumer's journey — every step of the way — you will be able to provide a more effective nurturing strategy, meet your customer's needs and ultimately understand what leads to a purchase and what doesn’t. Find common ground, reflect on your own experiences as a consumer, and learn their journey.

If you don’t understand your consumers’ journey, you can’t even begin to deliver what they want, which could be bad news for your business. Do you know what your customers really want? If not, it's time to find out.