In marketing there can often be a wide difference between where we think we are and where the customer says we are. This is why the customer journey, and keeping tabs on how you are delivering value right along the journey, is so crucial when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important key performance indicators in your business. It is easy to find and sell to customers, especially if you decide to price discount, but quite another thing to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction at the same time.
So what’s the best process of understanding how best to use the concept of customer satisfaction to measure how appropriate the customer journey is and how well it is performing?
Firstly begin by plotting the customer journey itself. This will be the three stages: awareness, conversion and retention. Along this journey, or route map you choreograph, decide what are the critical points, that you cannot do without. This is your critical path, in project management speak. These critical points are the most important moments in the customers’ journey and there are likely to be just a few of them, and the rest of the touch-points are the details that add the icing on the cake, so to speak.
You will of course be using your digital insights and analytics to measure the flow of customers moving along the journey, A/B testing content and decision points, and freeing up any roadblocks where there are limited click throughs. This can help to establish what content works best at each point and ensure you continuously improve both the journey and the content that fuels it.
At each of the critical touch-points you could also use a customer satisfaction measurement tool like Net Promoter Score (NPS), the all-important question “how likely are you to recommend us?”
The score is in essence the level of advocacy measure from that customer. This can be either positive, in which case you can evaluate that the level of experience is appropriate to strong, or neutral, in which case you could do better and continue to test both the critical path of the journey as well as the content, messages and communications you are using in it.
The score could also be rather negative, in which case immediate remedial action is required with an in depth analysis of the likely cause(s).
The positive NPS of course, confirming high levels of likely advocacy and a strong performance of customer experience can result in testimonials and case studies that can be shared far and wide. This will be the ultimate reward for your hard work in aligning your customer satisfaction drive within your customer journey mapping.
This process is not necessarily as straight forward as you might think, so do let me know if you need any help.
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