Picture this — you’re in the process of introducing a product or service into the market. You know the product or service is superior to what else is out there. And you even have a highly competitive price point — 3%-5% below your competitors.

The problem is that you still aren’t generating the revenue you know you are capable of.

You’ve tried advertising, you’ve tried social media, and you’ve even invested a large amount of money in market research — nothing seems to be moving the needle.

But have you tried focusing your efforts on customer experience?

Studies show that features and prices are no longer enough when it comes to a competitive advantage.

There’s been an enormous shift in business and it’s important that your organization starts working now to ensure your prospects and customers have an enjoyable, supportive and understanding experience throughout every step of their journey with your brand.

Consumers are more demanding than ever and are basing their purchases on experience rather than features. Marketing efforts need to capitalize on this shift in the consumer thought process. Companies need to optimize their customer service experience to be more personalized and capable of responding to the needs and wants of each unique buyer.

These consumers are looking for solutions that not only solve their problems but also provide a complete and effortless customer experience along the way.

Why focus on customer experience?

Understanding the customer journey is about learning what customers experience from the moment they begin to consider a product or service, to the final stages of the buyers’ journey.

Think of the customer journey as a fictional tale: things usually start slow and pleasant enough (some interest in your product/service and beginning stages of research).

Then, a conflict may arise along the way. In order for a character to overcome the conflict, the character typically needs help from a friend. Once the conflict has been eliminated, things tend to wrap up happily ever after.

The moral of this story is the consumers, at some point, will have a conflict, question or issue with your product or service. How you help them overcome these conflicts or answer their questions is going to determine the ending of the story.

Will the story end happily ever after, with a completely satisfied customer, or will they move on to the next company where their conflicts are met with more care and understanding.

According to American Express, 74% of consumers say they have spent more money with a company because there was a history of positive customer service experiences.

With stats like that, putting resources into developing a great customer journey is critical to client success.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”74% of consumers say they have spent more money with a company because there was a history of positive customer service experiences. ” quote=”74% of consumers say they have spent more money with a company because there was a history of positive customer service experiences. ” theme=”style2″]

Today’s customers have the power to shape which brands are successful in the market and which brands aren’t.

They are more powerful than ever and have the ability to define a company’s success in the blink of an eye.

They expect consistent and high-value in-person and digital experiences and “they don’t care if building these experiences is hard or requires a complex, multifunction approach from across your business. Buyers want immediate value and will go elsewhere if you can’t provide it.” (Forrester: Age of the Customer).

So, it’s safe to say, actively appealing to the buyers’ needs throughout the customer lifecycle and delivering the right message at the right time is key in providing an exceptional customer experience.

Living in the age of the customer, marketers now face pressing questions that must be addressed. How will you adapt and create the experiences that today’s customer demands? Well, the buyer’s journey is a good place to start.

Buyer’s Journey

So now that you understand the importance of customer service experience for the consumer, we will show you how they go about making a purchase. This is pivotal to understand, it allows you to know the customer’s process and shows you points where you can insert yourself as a guide on their journey.

During the buyer’s journey, customers will go through three stages before their purchase; awareness, consideration, and decision. As more companies look to optimize the customer experience, it is essential to understand and meet the needs of each customer at every point of their journey.

Awareness

This stage is when the customer realizes they have a problem or find an opportunity they want to pursue and will begin early stages of the journey before consideration.

This is a huge touch point for businesses, understanding why a potential buyer participates in this research phase and identifying common patterns is vital to business success.

Anticipate your buyer’s potential needs and wants by utilizing new technology that allows the voice of consumer programs to capture historical data of a specific individual or repeat customer.

Platforms like SentiOne allow you to monitor social conversations and mentions of your brand. Using tools like this allows you to see pain point commonalities for the consumers and also allows you to jump in quickly to help. This will allow you to be proactive in positioning a product or service someone is looking to purchase.

Consideration

This stage occurs when the buyer defines the solution needed to fix the problem and prioritizes their commitment to addressing it.

For companies at this stage, understanding your competitors, your place in the market and the resources available will be critical.

Educating your buyer with videos, online content, in-store promotions, as well as evaluating (qualifying) what kind of customer it is with which you are dealing, is top priority during this stage.

Using product feedback and market research data are actions commonly taken so that the right information is provided to the right person at the right stage.

To incorporate a short anecdote, for example, Little Red Ridinghood, this is the part of the story where the wolf is asking a lot of incriminating questions and you know something is up.

You know something the consumer doesn’t at this stage of the journey. This is a great touch point for you to reach out and show them you can help. Helping to relieve dissonance and also helping the consumer to confirm they made the right choice.

Decision

The final stage occurs once your buyer is well informed on what they need, the offerings available and have decided what solution will be best for them.

Leaning on customer testimonials, use cases, and other proof points that will drive up your product on a comparison list should be the focus here.

Companies will need to understand the driving factors of their particular customer’s wants and position themselves as a partner instead of a salesman.

Zero in on your capabilities that fill in the specific pain points. You know, the ones that you’ve gathered while engaging with your customers to show that you’ve been listening at every touch point.

With that being said, understand time to value, every customer is not a fit. By following the customer journey, being able to say “no” should make your selling a lot easier, so there is no need to pull teeth or completely change your product due to a particular buyer.

As companies look to improve on the customer experience, providing customer service during the buyer’s journey will allow businesses to distinguish themselves from their competition and have a lasting effect on a customer whether they end up purchasing or not.

At this point, we have covered why consumer service is important, how the consumer uses the buyers’ journey before purchasing and incorporated a couple of anecdotes.

Even though those anecdotes were highly educational, let’s talk about something this is truly important and that is holding on to that customer through Customer Relationship Management (CRM), specifically, by using Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM).

Customer Lifecycle Management starts with putting the customer at the center of everything you do.

As previously mentioned, you need to be aware of pain points in the CRM process. CLM offers you a “suite of tools that help ensure that leads and clients are receiving high quality, personalized service.”

Finding these pain points and applying a fix is not all the solution entails. It’s an ongoing process that needs to be implemented at every step, and for that, they (businesses) need customer lifecycle management.

Investing a lot of time up front in this portion of your marketing plan will help you retain customers and lead them to become repeat buyers and hopefully brand advocates.

To implement Customer Lifecycle Management into your marketing strategy, you need to incorporate some key steps in order to create a strong relationship between the brand and customer. These steps will help you foster customer loyalty and turn your buyers into brand advocates.

While different businesses define the process a little differently, the customer lifecycle management model can be broken down into several key steps:

Approach: Businesses locate potential leads, demonstrate the value of the product or service being offered, and show the leads how they can become customers. Don’t forget this can be a conversation, as mentioned before we want to establish a relationship, not just a sale.

Acquisition: The leads enter the sales pipeline. As they progress, businesses will need to be able to continue to demonstrate product value, while also addressing any concerns that may arise. These early touch points can establish a strong foundation as you move forward with your relationship.

Development: Leads that reach the end of the pipeline complete their sales and become customers. Businesses then focus on further developing that relationship, by following up with the customer and soliciting feedback. What are some issues consumers experienced during the process? Be ever changing to combat stale tactics that will leave you in the dust

Retention: As customers provide information, businesses analyze that data so that they can then create a more personalized customer experience. This may lead to further sales, often in the form of cross sales and up sales. No one likes to feel special during the sales process and then dumped after the purchase. Keep in contact with your consumer and offer personalized experiences to develop that relationship, these are not men or women of the night.

Loyalty: The end goal of the customer lifecycle is to create brand advocates who not only continue to do business with the company but also to promote that company in their own social circles.

To get the most from this model, we suggest you incorporate the “always-on” approach when using the CLM strategy in your marketing plan.

Defined by Razorfish as “data-driven, content-led experiences, delivered across channels in real time,” always-on marketing should be your mindset when interacting with your prospective buyers and current customers.

We know this sounds exhausting and frankly a little difficult, but when you invest in your customers they tend to invest in you. The needs and wants of buyers are changing constantly, and an inability to keep up with and adapt to these changes could be bad for business.

In an interview with LinkedIn, Matt Heinz says, “Your prospects are working all hours, and they want access to information in real time. So, your ability to manage that relationship is far more difficult than it used to be, but if you take advantage of the right combination of the right content in the right place with the right psychology, you can ensure that your prospects are researching as they’re learning.”

The messages you serve across your social media platforms won’t be able to be tailored to specific individuals, but be sure to constantly provide helpful resources and information at all times.

“Ideally, you’re creating constant value far earlier in the buying process when they’re simply researching and learning and educating themselves. You have to be ready not just on your own site and your own channels, but be available wherever they may be. It could be searching, it could be on a trade publication, and it could be at an event. It’s all part of a buyer-centric, customer-centric marketing program. Clearly you increase your ability to connect and convert by being always available and always-on.” (Isaac Justesen, www.constant-content.com)

Something you may be wondering is, where are these touch points that could help me start to develop this relationship with my customers?

Not to worry, we’ve incorporated some information below that outlines these touch points, now it’s up to you to personalize them to fit your consumers’ needs.

The graph below (Fig. 1, developed by SmartInsights) shows the buyer’s journey along with the touch points the customer sees or should see at each stage.    

The graph below (Fig.2, also developed by SmartInsights) has similar tactics as Fig.1, but this graph is more focused on the touch points of a B2B marketing strategy in contrast to the B2C model above.

The graph below (Fig. 3, yet again developed by the folks at SmartInsights) shows a gap analysis of the B2B CLM marketing plan.

As you can see, most businesses miss out on many touch points during the buyer’s journey. These missed points could be due to lack of information provided, failure to follow up or even failing to properly engage your customer.

But all are similar in the fact that these missed touch points are all opportunities to turn the customer into a brand advocate or repeat customer.

The best way to optimize this plan is to use these customer touch points in a fluid motion. This is called the “always-on” approach, which entails always testing and changing your CLM marketing strategy to ensure the strategy is staying relevant and changing with each unique customer needs.

“For always-on marketing to be effective, efforts should be made to increase the effectiveness of different digital channels through testing, review, and optimization.” Source: https://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/conversion-optimisation-strategy/always-on-marketing/

Where the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle meet

Upon first glance, the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle appear to be synonymous.

To a degree you are absolutely right, but how do they differ you might ask? The buyers’ journey doesn’t incorporate CLM, but CLM does incorporate the buyers’ journey.

The two different processes work together to inform companies on how their customers purchase and how they can be there for their customer throughout the process.

The buyer’s journey begins once a customer is made aware of your product.  It is incumbent upon the company to give the consumer the opportunity to gather ample information on the customer’s own accord.

It is after the start of the relationship that you must work to ensure a seamless experience from touch point to touch point including your social media, website design, and customer service.

Once the customer determines that your product or service is credible, they will enter your marketing and sales funnel in which you’ll be able to gather important information from them – and from there you can place the buyer in your customer lifecycle.

By providing a potential customer with the information they’re looking for, the customer may choose to enter the company’s sale funnel.

Once in the sales funnel, it is important for the company to then guide them through the customer lifecycle.

The biggest difference is the buyer’s journey is something that the customer embarks upon on their own while the customer lifecycle is the beginning of a relationship that happens when the company helps the customer along.

A focus on putting customer needs at the center of what your business does will help ensure along all the touch points, interactions, and journeys that your customers have a flawless experience.

The important thing to take away here is the journey involves actions that the buyer takes, while the lifecycle involves actions that the marketer takes.

How to get it right:

Hopefully, the headline above provides you with some relief. We aren’t just going to tell you about this process, wash our hands and say good luck. We want you to succeed and we are going to show you how to get it right.

Historically, end-to-end customer journeys have not been optimized for the customer, but instead optimized for the company to show off features or their own success.

For your organization to be truly customer-centric, you must advocate for a shift in perspective so your customers become the center of your organization’s attention.

Here are some guiding principles you can follow to ensure a flawless customer experience:

Shift your thinking from business-to-business (B2B) to person-to-person (P2P). Focus on building relationships with customers because at the end of the day, businesses don’t make decisions – people do. Plus, your customers will appreciate the extra effort you put into humanizing your efforts and connecting with them on a personal level.

Always strive to lead with value. This may require a little more digging into your customer insights through interviews and surveys, but your message is more likely to be heard if it’s in sync with what your customer wants out of a product or service. (Remember: what you think your customer needs is not always what they want.)

Build a personal experience to maximize customer satisfaction by focusing on three main areas – better known as, the “ARC” of happiness:

Autonomy/Control – Empower the customer to feel in control of their experience, with the tools and resources they need to implement and use their product effectively and get questions answered when necessary. Customers should be able to decide when and how they are going to overcome any obstacles they encounter with your product. Sometimes people like to figure things out for themselves and other people like to be taken step by step to solve a problem, let the customer decide and be there when they need you.

Relatedness – Make the customer feel like part of a community or insider group. Send customers special offers, exclusive content, or event invitations that would not be available to them if they weren’t a customer. Community forums or advocacy software like Influitive also help to provide a great way to develop customer groups. Influitive is driving the shift from company-centric marketing to advocate marketing. Influitive’s advocacy platform helps the world’s most successful businesses spark, build and sustain a movement behind their brands with the participation of their greatest marketing asset: their customers.

Competence – Find ways to funnel relevant and educational content into your communications at key stages of the customer journey. Provide the customer with resources to make them feel capable and efficient during their customer lifecycle, as well as rewards that reinforce their feeling of competency/mastery of the product.

Additionally, there are a number of tactics you can use to make the process of gaining customers and moving them along their journey much easier.

Let’s start with intent data.

Marketo defines intent data as “information collected about an individual’s online activities.”

Intent data can help to create context about buyers and where they are in the buyer’s journey. Because intent data shows you visibility what buyers are searching for, it also allows you to deliver relevant messages that speak to their wants and needs; you can even offer a resolution to their pain points.

Also, depending on what stage the buyer is in, you as a marketer can make informed decisions about how to ease them into the customer lifecycle.

The next tactic that can be used is personalization. B2B buyers are looking for content and information that is tailored to their wants and needs. This content also needs to be capable of solving their business problems.

As the digital marketing landscape has become inundated with countless white papers, webinars, and ebooks, it’s become much harder to connect with buyers, and as a result, buyers are now looking for highly relevant and targeted content that assists their decision making.

A great tip is to use these tactics in tandem to continuously provide value to your customer throughout their journey through the funnel. When it relates to the buyer’s journey and the customer lifecycle, use intent data at the beginning of your customer’s journey to see if their online searches align with your product or service.

Once the customer has started a relationship with your brand and has moved further along their journey, use personalization towards the bottom of the funnel to provide meaningful and relevant content along with comprehensive materials that only includes content specific to their needs, business, and industry.

At this point you’ve more than demonstrated how much value your product or service can be to the buyer, you’ve gained a customer, and you can now begin the steps of the CLM model. Once you’ve begun to roll out the steps of the CLM model, your marketing automation platform can be used to help nurture the relationship even further – which is the third tactic we’ll cover.

Managing customer experience with marketing automation:

As you work to identify and target prospects at each stage of the cycle, facilitate appropriate interactions with your customers by using automation to help you deliver the right messages at the right times.

We know this sounds easier said than done, but here are some simple ways you can introduce marketing automation in each stage of the customer lifecycle:

Onboarding – The first stage of the life cycle occurs right after the transaction ends and the customer is able to get to first value. During this cycle, work on building a strong relationship with your customer through a targeted nurture that helps to guide them throughout their experience. Use the onboarding stage of the cycle to lay the groundwork for a long and successful relationship between you and your customer.

Engagement – In this stage, focus on adding value to your customer through useful resources or learning opportunities. Provide opportunities for deeper engagement through specific messaging that might include email nurturing, premium content, and special offers that encourage adoption and optimization.

Growth – Growth can happen at any point during the customer lifecycle. Organic creation of upselling or cross-sell opportunities will stem from quality engagements throughout the cycle and understanding your customer’s business priorities. Use your automation platform to prime customers for cross/upsell with information along with their journey.

Renew – The renewal stage is where the customer will decide whether or not they will continue to use your product or services. Automate renewal reminders and education throughout the nurture on the benefits of your product or service.

Consider these four stages to be more than a single customer transaction, and rather a long-term relationship that will last as long as your product or services continue to provide value to your customers.

So, what does a great customer journey look like?

So now you’ve got a full understanding of the buyer’s journey, the customer lifecycle management model, and how the two work together.

The important thing to remember is the buyer’s journey is the primer for entering a lifelong relationship with your customer. The stronger impression you make early on, the better off you’ll be with your customer further down the funnel.

According to Salesforce, it is 4 to 10 times less expensive to sell to repeat customers than it is to acquire new ones, and repeat customers generate up to 10 times as much revenue.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”According to Salesforce, it is 4 to 10 times less expensive to sell to repeat customers than it is to acquire new ones, and repeat customers generate up to 10 times as much revenue.” quote=”According to Salesforce, it is 4 to 10 times less expensive to sell to repeat customers than it is to acquire new ones, and repeat customers generate up to 10 times as much revenue.” theme=”style2″]

To keep these repeat customers, it is your responsibility as a marketer, to ensure a quality experience via content, support, and other tools during each stage of the buyer’s journey and your lifecycle management activities.

A great customer experience can be as simple as finding and filling in any information gaps your customer may have or it may be as significant as eradicating one of their pain points and paving the way for industry innovation in doing so.

But all in all, no matter how you define a great customer experience, at the end of the day a great customer experience is what your customer thinks it is. According to B2B International’s Research, your customer’s opinion of your brand is largely based on how committed and enthusiastic you are about satisfying their needs and making them feel valued.

An incredibly important part of providing great customer service is gathering all of the important data points around each customer and then using that information to apply a human touch in an expert manner.

The foundation of an excellent B2B customer experience is a commitment to putting the customer at the core of what your company does, how it does it, and ultimately why it does it.

Your efforts should enhance the customer journey and lead to an experience that drives growth, retention, and loyalty. Upon successfully cultivating brand loyalty throughout the journey, especially at the renewal stage of the lifecycle, you are left with advocates who are willing to publicly support, endorse, or recommend your company, products, or services.

About the Authors: Special thanks goes out to four graduate students from the University of Texas who did the research, analysis, and content for this post — Miles Onyegbule, Jaren Nickleson, Krysta Wilkins, and Corey Hilton.