The modern consumer is spoilt for choice when it comes to options for purchasing goods online. Countless businesses are battling it out on search engines to bid for their custom and that has created a need to provide a best in class experience to ensure patrons are not tempted to leave and take their money elsewhere.
A smooth customer journey can ensure visitors traverse from awareness to checkout in as little time as possible with minimum fuss. Here are three points to take into consideration when mapping out your business’ customer journey.
Implement a state-of-the-art Point of Sale offering
There is nothing more irritating than losing a customer at the checkout stage. This can happen for reasons out of your control, but can also happen because of things such as slow loading times, lack of payment options and a poor UX. Businesses can’t afford to slip up at this point and that’s why a best in class Point of Sale (POS) offering is a must in 2020.
Modern POS systems can help avoid all of the listed problems above and can also help in collating and sharing customer insight to wider teams in the business. This insight can also help with mapping out an optimal customer journey, by finding out more about popular products and trends favored by consumers which can then be highlighted by your design and development teams.
Conduct click through experiments
There is no better measure of understanding the usability of your website than taking it for a test drive yourself. Take time frequently to access your website through different points of entry – be this by social media, organic or paid channels – and then make detailed notes about what you like and dislike about your experience.
Expanding participation in this activity will likely uncover further points of interest. By asking the wider team or even focus groups to take part in this research you will enrich your understanding of what really makes your site tick.
While any feedback is likely to have some value, make sure you take into consideration existing biases that could sway opinions concerning specific aspects of the site. For example, if a developer was responsible for the creation of a section, their testimony may gloss over the more negative aspects in terms of customer experience.
Ensure your buyer personas are accurate
The previous points have covered off the importance of keeping customers happy on site, but how do we acquire these customers in the first place and keep them loyal after purchase?
To do this we need to understand the kinds of people who are using your services, so that we can find out where they are hanging out on the web. That way marketing budgets can be spent effectively.
Creating buyer personas is the first step in doing this. These should ideally be built off the back of market research and sales insights. However, they can also be created using surveys and interviews from your customer base. You should have several of these personas. This is because people at different stages of the buying journey will behave differently, and as such need to be catered to differently. With accurate personas, your business can understand your customers likes and dislikes as well as goals and expectancies when it comes to product offerings.
