Whether you have a business in technology, or you are selling machinery or a beauty product, no matter whatever your product or services are, your customers are a treasure for your business. They are an asset, and you should take good care of them if you want your business to grow. Providing your customers with the best customer experience should be a high priority and if you are not considering working on customer journeys, then you are definitely missing out on something indispensable!
If you wish your customers to have a long-lasting relationship with your brand, you need to put extra effort into enhancing the journeys and adding value. You need to identify your customers’ requirements and, based on their expectations, fulfill their needs. All that your customers would expect from you is a highly personalized experience across the channels that they use. But how would you do that? How’d you know what their expectations are and how can you specifically cater to their needs?
Here’s where the data and insights play a crucial role in providing you with all the information across every touchpoint. And if you meticulously analyze the customer journeys and every stage of it, it will help you uncover potential roadblocks in the sea of growing opportunities.
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With customer journey analysis, you can make better decisions and explore so much more.
- Find the path through which they found you
- Identify the campaigns that worked
- Discover the needs of your customers
- Explore the customer profile and their persona
What are the stages of a Customer Journey?
When you want to sell something, you cannot do that with just a sales department. You got to have all other domains working in tandem to bring out great results. But when it comes to your customer’s perspective, they experience that in every touchpoint as a single flow. Ensure that these interaction touchpoints are trouble-free for your customers.
Awareness
When your customer first hears about your brand as a potential solution for what they are looking for, or for the things they wish to buy, this becomes the first stage. This can happen through social media, newspaper advertisements, or even through word-of-mouth.
Acquisition
When your customer interacts with your brand for the first time, it becomes the second step of the journey. This could either be through clicking the link on your website, opting for a free trial, subscribing to your newsletters or downloading your app.
Onboarding
Your customers have purchased your product or services and you want to establish a long-lasting relationship with them. You need not be intrusive at this stage but you must retain the relevance of your content.
Engagement
This is the stage where you can put all your effort into making your audience stick to your brand by ensuring them the best services or offers, they can ever get. You have to keep them engaged in multiple ways and make this work longer.
Retention
This is the stage where you get a hint that your customers are no longer staying and you have to identify why they are leaving. If you are missing something all along the journey, find and implement ways in which you can win your losing customers back. Run an exit survey exit to reach out, find the reason, and then try retaining them.
Advocacy
Make space for your customers to express their thoughts about your brand. Whether it is feedback or a review, nothing can add more value to your brand than a customer speaking about it. This will also help you strengthen your brand and boost the image in the customer journey.
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As a brand, you should always remember that the customers will continue to share their feedback and thoughts in multiple ways even when they are not associated with your brand anymore. Giving them the right experience will ensure a good customer journey even if you don’t retain them in the long run.
What makes Salesforce the best fit to optimize customer journeys?
- You get various representative tools like templates, custom keyboard shortcuts, and many more to get a 360-degree view of every customer you are dealing with.
- It helps you streamline processes for quick resolution of cases by giving you all the details from the first interaction of your customer to the purchase and post-sales inquiries.
- Helps you enhance agent productivity by providing relevant articles and smart article search
- You can customize or automate service or approval procedures using Lightning flow options
- Gives you smart services through omnichannel routing ensuring quick resolutions
- You can work smarter using comprehensive dashboards and user-friendly apps. You can also find insights and predictions by artificial intelligence.
- To make the representatives handle calls within the console, instant call logging and integration with Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) are available.
- Helps you automate redundant tasks and enables agents to address customer issues effectively
- A unified view of customer history with all the details from assets to orders helps in tracking the customer journey in a better way
How to optimize customer journeys using Salesforce Marketing cloud?
With Salesforce marketing cloud, you can customize and automate emails, messages, advertisements, social media, and push notifications. Along with this, there are tools available in the platform that can help you optimize your customer’s journey in every step. Here’s a sneak peek at all the super powerful functions that are available in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform that can keep your customers in the spotlight!
Salesforce Journey Builder application
With this easy drag and drop interface, you can easily view your customer’s journey. Whether it is a campaign or any other activity, you can easily measure metrics, optimize the customer journey and track them throughout using Journey Builder. You can also seek guidance using the journey templates that are available on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform.
Salesforce Email studio
Since email is the most important aspect of every stage in the customer journey, there are advanced email techs incorporated into the marketing suite. You get a drag and drop option with an automated and intuitive interface. You can also easily customize the content, and with the help of Einstein AI, you can predict consumer behavior for pushing the right content at the right time. On the whole, it gives you an omnichannel experience!
Salesforce Audience Studio
This helps you connect and collect data from all the departments like Sales, services, communities, and other information into a single data source. With Einstein AI, you can analyze all the collected data and create campaigns based on the patterns that you find across multiple channels.
Salesforce Data studio
With this, you can sell or buy data within a safe environment. It helps you optimize the customer journeys, refine your target audience profile, create a better brand, also find more leads using this data management platform.
Salesforce Social studio
You can leverage the power of social media using this platform. With Einstein AI, you can track your customer’s preferences even when there are no hashtags for tracking. You can track and find more insights based on your customer’s social media activities.
Salesforce Advertising studio
Whether it is for a search engine or social media or any other platform, you can create advertisements using this single platform. While creating the advertisements, you can focus on various stages of your customer’s journey and re-engage with them. You can also coordinate the campaigns across various channels and increase your ROI.
Salesforce Interactive studio
Whichever channel you are using for interactions with your customer, you can record them using this feature. You can go back, and listen to the recording to get more insights into your customer’s requirements and expectations. You can connect the offline activity with online interactions too. With this, you can build customer engagement profile, tailor made to your customer’s needs through their preferred channel and time.
Salesforce Mobile studio
Send messages, chats, and push notifications while improving your customer engagements. Make use of the templates available for creating appropriate messages for customer engagement at the right time. When you combine this feature with the Journey builder, you can customize and personalize the content across channels for your customers.
How to leverage Salesforce CRM tool to optimize customer journeys?
- Use the high-end mobile interface in Salesforce and keep your files updated in real-time.
- Have an easy-to-navigate, mobile-centric self-service portal with FAQs, videos, and informative resources.
- Add these self-service segments into your website so it becomes easy for your customers to look out for answers to their questions.
- Provide scheduling appointment, paying bills and other such relation options easily available on the website.
- Streamline customer grievances resolve complex issues using agents.
- Store the data and convert every stage’s data into rich insights using Einstein AI.
- Use reports for automating the workflows, personalizing the customer’s journey and deliver personalized services for your customers.
- Let your sales team rely on strong data rather than doing guesswork. Check patterns and predictions from the reports collected.
Best practices for creating the ideal customer journey using Salesforce
Have a clear objective on what you want to achieve. Every customer’s journey should have a single objective and it could be re-engagement to even reducing cart abandonments.
Before building a personalized customer journey, have your content pillars ready. It can be emails, social media posts, messages, articles, and blogs focusing on a specific objective.
Use data to better understand your customers, their needs, and their expectations from your brand. The data is collected from various departments and you can make the most of it.
Start small and optimize the customer journey based on the metrics you receive. Gradually, expand and work on various touchpoints of your customers as you proceed further.
Monitor your analytics constantly and let the optimizing task be an ongoing process. Identify the gaps and find ways to improve engagement with your customers.
We all know that optimizing customer journeys is very important for a successful business. But what’s more important is creating customer journey mapping for laying a clear path with a clear objective. Salesforce has been instrumental in leveraging the businesses and helping in enhancing the customer journey for customer retention, better ROI, and increased retention.
If you have a complicated or a detailed customer journey and you do not have the Salesforce product expertise, reach out to us! We are a registered Salesforce partner and have a deep understanding of this powerful CRM tool that works magic for any business.
