Strive to Create Consistent Customer Journeys
There are now significantly more platforms where customers can interact with brands than the previous quarter-century. What this means is that it is more challenging for organizations to craft a consistent Customer Experience between these different channels. In addition to the different arenas these individual interactions occur, there are also more total steps within the customer journey consumers are completing before they decide to purchase a product or service. Rather than viewing different each step as individual Customer Experiences, the most effective brands are those that view the customer journey as one larger interaction, and adjust their Customer Experience within these individual interactions to address the over-arching goal. Customers should feel they are receiving a consistent level of service whether they are researching your brand online, interacting with a customer before purchasing in-store, or attempting to solve a problem with customer service reps after a purchase.
Before this consistency can be established, the customer journey needs to be defined and established by brand leadership. In doing so, employees will have a clearer picture about the level of service and engagement expected from leadership, making it easier to encourage consistency across different steps of the path to purchase. Measurement is the key factor in determining an accurate and effective customer journey, which can be accomplished through programs like mystery shopping and voice of customer surveys. These programs can help provide unbiased, specific insights into the journey consumers take to reach your brand.
Once the average customer journey is defined and employees are aware of what is expected of them, the next step is ensuring that this is actually happening within these established customer interactions. Pivot existing mystery shopping and voice of customer survey programs to analyze this data by segmenting them across these different interactions. Take the time to figure out as much as possible about the way customers are reaching your brand, and then do the same thing for all the following steps of the customer journey. Once this data is collected, brands will have a better idea of how each step is performing as part of the overall customer journey. While this may seem over-the-top, the more data collected about these individual interactions will help brands adjust them to create a more consistent cumulative customer journey.
From a broad perspective, it is easy to understand why consistency is so important to creating an industry-leading Customer Experience. If customers are forced to constantly adjust their expectations as they travel through the customer journey, it requires more effort on their part than necessary. The overarching goal of any Customer Experience program is to reduce the amount effort it takes for a customer to complete a desired action, and consistency across the customer journey accomplishes just that. Beyond customer interactions, it is important that brands maintain a consistent brand identity as part of the customer journey, meaning all marketing materials, social media posts, product packaging, etc. should share an overarching theme and perception. Utilize programs like mystery shopping to collect the kind of data that helps influence brands to convert each individual customer interaction into a better, more consistent overall customer journey.
Customer Journey Optimization
Why is creating consistent customer journeys important?
Consistent customer journeys ensure that every interaction with your brand is seamless and reliable, building trust and enhancing customer satisfaction across all channels.
How can brands create consistent customer journeys?
Brands can achieve consistency by aligning messaging, experiences, and services across online, in-store, and mobile touchpoints.
What are the benefits of a consistent customer experience?
A consistent experience fosters loyalty, improves retention, and creates a cohesive brand image.
Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.
We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.