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Hi Community members,

 

In one of my posts last week, I listed “understanding your customers” as one of the top qualities of a salesperson. This goes without saying to all of us, of course, and is a golden rule we all live by, but let’s dive into the details and how important that is today.

 

Mapping out the Customer Journey

It is not enough to simply know your customer — your CRM can easily do that, capturing the customer’s history of purchases, service requests, product returns, inquiries, and more. Nowadays, it is crucial to understand the customer through customer experience, or the “customer journey,” as many calls it. The customer experience starts before the point of sale, continues through it, and proceeds after the purchase as well. The actions you take at these touch points all contribute to understanding your customers, which is part of the positive feedback loop with closing sales and delivering customer value.

 

Customer touch points

(Source: SOEG Jobs)

 

Benefits of a Positive Customer Experience

Needless to say, happy customers make a healthy company and keep the revenue flowing. Below are a few more advantages of understanding your customers:

  • Foster customer loyalty and customer retention – When customers feel their needs are met, they are more likely to return because they believe you will deliver and meet their expectations of your products, service, and promise. They are also more willing to accept product updates or changes in your terms and service.
  • Generate valuable data and insights – Data can be analyzed and can be used to design more strategic marketing campaigns with targeted messaging.
  • Build more robust buyer profiles/personas – With the data gathered, you can segment your customers into specific elements of the demographic, such as age groups, locations, gender, nationality, etc., and create more specific marketing. 
  • Anticipate customer pulses and plan for the future – Evaluating how customers utilize certain parts of your product/service allows the product team to plan for updates or retire less popular features.

 

Now, I am curious to know if your company maps out your customer journey/experience and how that looks like. How do you stay connected with your customers and gather insights post purchase? What other benefits have you discovered from understanding your customers and providing a great customer experience? Would love to hear your thoughts from your experience!

 

Thank you and I look forward to the discussion! 😊

Eva C. 

@Eva Chen​ this is a great post. I've been a big advocate of understanding our customer journeys better, and building smart an agile sales processes that match that journey. I can't really share details on our customer journey maps...but I can tell you this: the best workshop I've facilitated so far, meaning the one that I got the most out and left with actionable items after it was all about figuring out the REAL customer journey that one of our segments experiences.

 

I think the best win we had from this was that because we involved actual sales reps and customers, that forced us to change the journey actually. It made it more real. It was really powerful!

Thanks for the feedback and sharing your findings as well, @Alejandro C​! 😊

 

What you mentioned in your last line/paragraph really took it home: You were able to involve both sales reps and customers and that made you guys change the (customer) journey. This also touches another point in understanding your customers that some might not be aware of yet: Involve your customers, get their feedback, ask what they like and don't like about the product/service. Only when we hear from the VOC directly will we be able to understand what drives them to and deters them away from our products and services.

I'll sum it up this way: I have 20+ years of work experience, and most of it in sales. I've also been meddling with Design thinking for the past decade...and never before had I thought I could mix both. That was it. The Design Thinking approach changed it all for me!

I love that, @Alejandro C​! I think we briefly talked about design thinking in a previous post before too. 😄 It has definitely helped me think and come up with solutions in a different (much smarter) way. So glad to hear you're able to mix the two together!

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