Here Is What You Need To Do To Complete Your Customer Journey
By: Kau Ym
Tags: Branding, Engagement, Customer Experience, Customer Service

You can build better engagement with your customers by understanding your non-customers. Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

A lot has been said and done about the Customer Journey. Mapped out well, it is a powerful tool for you and your team to visualise, empathise and improve engagement with your customers as they move from Awareness to Advocacy.

What is the Customer Journey?

By knowing the profile of your customer and what kind of emotions they experience at different stages, you will be able to address those emotions through the identified touch-points.

A typical Customer Journey has 4 critical components:

Customer Profile — what is the type of customer you are targeting? Different profiles experience different journeys and defining a specific profile helps build a more empathic journey. Your brand can have multiple customer journeys for multiple profiles.

Customer Stages — which stage of the journey is your customer at? There are slight variations depending on who you speak to but the one I use consists of 5 stages — Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy. Each stage represents a progression in the relationship your brand has with the customer, and the end-goal is to get to Advocacy.

Customer Emotions — how does your customer feel at each stage and why? A customer might feel confused at the stage of Consideration, or excited at the stage of Purchase. Ever wonder why Apple designed the packaging of its iPhone the way they did? The entire unboxing experience builds on the excitement at the stage of Purchase. Identifying the right emotions and addressing them well is key to a good customer journey.

Customer Touch-points — who or which channel does your customer engage with? There are multiple ways you can engage with your customers, be it through the phone, online chats, or face-to-face encounters. This relates closely to the emotive state of the customer — a positive emotion can be reinforced with a human touch but a negative emotion can be made worse by engagement through email.

The power of the Customer Journey is putting all this together — By knowing the profile of your customer and what kind of emotions they experience at different stages, you will be able to address those emotions through the identified touch-points.

What Else Is There?

In a bid to truly understand the gaps in our processes and how to bridge them, I’ve used the Customer Journey multiple times in my career. However, I grew increasingly frustrated that something was missing from our Customer Journey mapping. Specifically, the Customer Stages were incomplete as certain stages were not represented. Here’s what a typical journey looks like:

There are some gaps in the assumptions here:

The consumer is already aware of you.

The truth can’t be further from this. Any struggling business or new venture knows that there are always consumers in the market who don’t know about your business. Without the right approach, a significant portion of these consumers will never move into the awareness stage and hence never embark on the Customer Journey you so painstakingly designed. In order to fully optimise the Customer Journey, you need to identify the stage where customers are unaware of you.

Your customer journey is linear.

Any linear journey is a myth. While the transition through each stage happens sequentially, a customer’s journey with your brand is anything but straight-forward. A simplistic customer journey like the one above ignores the fact that customers may “backslide” or exit the journey. Did a consumer move from Consideration to Purchase? If they did not, why and how do we get them back on track?

Your Non-Customer

A Non-Customer is a consumer who has either deliberately chosen not to interact with your brand, or by chance did not have an opportunity to do so. Why is a consumer a Non-Customer is important for your brand to understand how to cover them into a customer.

If they are simply not the target audience of your product, then you can make a conscious decision to ignore this segment. However if they were meant to be the target audience but they are not engaging, then you might have a problem to solve. In order to solve this problem, I suggest we add a few more stages to the Customer Journey.

Do you know how your customer is feeling each time they interact with your brand? Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

The Non-Customer Journey

The Non-Customer Journey isn’t really a journey in the sense that the stages that it consists of do not flow sequentially. However, it compliments the Customer Journey to give you a comprehensive view.

A Non-Customer is any consumer who has not heard of you, has chosen not to purchase your product/service, or has purchased but chosen not to return. This is encapsulated by adding 3 more stages to the original journey:

Unawareness

Every customer starts from this stage — it is where everyone who doesn’t know about your brand resides. Think of it as the potential reach of your brand if you had every ability to connect with them.

This stage is crucial as a starting point of your Customer Journey and more importantly, how to move consumers from Unawareness to Awareness. Focus on the branding message and the channels to get the message across in the most efficient way.

Non Purchase

The critical step to acquiring a customer occurs at the stage of Consideration. A consumer will either choose to purchase your product/service or not. A non-purchase isn’t the end of the world, but neither should it be left unaddressed by your brand. A lot of information can be gleaned from the Non Purchase stage. Was it due to pricing, packaging, poor product/market fit?

A customer in the Non-Purchase stage flows back into Awareness and from there can move into Consideration again. Such opportunities may arise when you have a different product, running a sale or your brand has a media opportunity.

Technically, this group is a subset of Awareness but it is important to identify this as a separate stage due to the different journey the consumer took — bringing consumers from Awareness to Consideration is different from bring them from Non-Purchase to Consideration.

Non Retention

It is important to focus on the non-retention stage as well. In Customer Journeys, Retention is often described as the stage where a customer repeats purchases or continues to engage with your brand. It is sometimes referred to as the Service stage.

As your brand services or engages with your customer, their level of engage may fall over time or may turn dormant. This may be due to dissatisfaction over the product/service, or lack of proactive engagement by your brand. There are clear tactics to approach re-engagement based on these two possibilities.

To complete this view, the consumers in stages of Non-Purchase and Non-Retention will eventually flow back into Awareness — they already know about your brand. The trick is to identify how the customer ended up in Non-Retention/Non-Purchase in the first place and based on that experience, how to re-direct them back to Consideration.

Putting It All Together

What a consumer doesn’t like about your brand may tell you more than what another one who does. However, without a defined scope, it will be challenging to sieve through all the data and derive useful insights.

A focused approach on the Non-Customer will help your brand narrow down to specific areas. Done right, it can be used to complement that of a traditional Customer Journey to give a full 360 view of your brand and products.