People Are Now Buying Experiences, Not Products: Why Creating A Cohesive Customer Journey Is Crucial

Before anything else, let’s first take a look at some statistics:

• 96% of buyers believe that a company’s customer service is crucial in their choice of loyalty
• Companies with above-average customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors
• 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience

There are countless surveys and studies like these that are available on the Internet – accessible to all, anyone can easily find hundreds of points of data and scientific explanations on why customers should always be your top priority.

But let’s be real here – even without all of these, we all know how important customer service is.

However, making them feel satisfied and engaged isn’t always that easy! You have a bunch of competitors offering products cheaper than yours, there are those who have their banner ads on almost every social media platform, and others who even have celebrities and influencers as their brand ambassadors.

While these are all great for promotion, it’s important to remember that they are useless when they can’t offer a better customer journey. This is why a study suggests that by the end of 2020, customer experience will be a brand’s key differentiator, overtaking price, and product!

If consumers are bound to prioritize customer experience over anything else, isn’t it clear that this is where you need to improve and stand out?

A cohesive customer journey is one of the tools that you can focus on creating that will serve as your company’s edge over the others. To make things clear, let’s first define what a cohesive customer journey is.

According to Vocabulary.com, the word “cohesive” is when the parts of the whole work or fit together well or when things stick together so they are unified. The customer journey, on the other hand, is the overall experience a prospect has to undergo before deciding on a purchase.

Combine these two words together and it’s exactly what a cohesive customer journey is – a well-integrated interaction between buyers and sellers.

It can be tricky to visualize this so let’s make this simple by using the concept of marketing funnels. If you are not yet familiar with this, we recommend reading this short but very helpful blog post.

According to the AIDA model, a typical customer goes through four stages before buying something. Traditionally, the process looks like this: A prospect notices your store signage and walks in. After being greeted by your employee, he then looks through the displayed shirts and tries some of them in the fitting room. The prospect then asks for a different size and color and upon doing so was immediately assisted by your staff. After several minutes, he then purchased the shirt and left the store.

 

However, this isn’t the case now. What was once a simple customer journey became more complicated than ever. Nowadays, a prospect will search online, compare various brands, look for reviews and testimonials, check the company’s social media pages, ask for recommendations, and do other stuff to ensure that the purchase will be worth their money.
 

Not only that but with our shorter attention span, it’s easier for everyone to be distracted. A person may be scrolling through your website when he receives a Facebook notification. It then takes him less than two seconds to open Facebook, scroll through his timeline, and watch funny videos. Thirty minutes later and he completely forgets everything about your brand!

Situations like these are common which is why a cohesive customer journey is getting more necessary and crucial for businesses. A cohesive customer journey reduces the barriers to conversion and looks at the whole potential relationship from casually browsing social media to telling their friends about you.

When a company has its customers as the top priority, it’s easier for buyers to trust them.

This can include having a FAQs page ready for them, an automated scheduling system, customer testimonials on your website, providing a warranty, creating educational and helpful content, and being open to feedback. How you improve their experience when interacting with your brand depends on what you offer, who your target audience is, and what their needs are. If you don’t know where to start, consider reading this blog post for tips.

No matter how great your product is or how many discounts and freebies you offer, those who have an engaging customer experience will always be one step ahead. At the end of the day, we are all looking for a company that can quickly recognize our needs, answer our questions, educate us to make an informed decision, appreciate our feedback, and responds to us when we encounter problems even after purchase.