Nine times out of ten, the simplest customer journey is the most desirable. After all, it provides a fast track to the desired destination.
As humans, from the moment we wake up, we’re making decisions. What to wear. What to eat. How to get to work.
It can ultimately lead to a phenomenon called decision fatigue.
Speaking on the condition, President Barack Obama famously shared how…
“You’ll see I wear only grey or blue suits.
I’m trying to pare down decisions.
I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing, because I have too many other decisions to make.”
Forbes
Now, your customers may not have to make as many decisions as the leader of the free world, but the principle remains.
If you can minimise the number of choice points required to engage with your business, and simplify your customer journey, you’ll stand out as the most desirable option.
Why Simplify?
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and imagine you’re evaluating vendor options.
Company A has a clear process with insightful communication and Company B presents a convoluted pathway, with disparate points of contact and limited updates.
It quickly becomes a no brainer who you’re going to go for.
Experience, time and again, trumps product as the true competitive differentiator.
“Brands perceived as providing the simplest, most seamless experiences boasted both the strongest performance and the most loyal customers.”
Siegel & Gale
To stay ahead of the competition, you need to make buying from you as straightforward as possible.
You need to simplify your customer journey.
How To Simplify Your Customer Journey
“More often than not, simplification is the best strategy across the board.”
International Journal Of Management
So how to go about simplifying? We’ve assembled five top tips to help you streamline your experience operations…
Determine Simplicity
Simplicity can mean many things to many different people.
Therefore, each organisation must determine which areas of the customer journey would benefit most from simplification. This depends entirely on their unique context and circumstances.
Once you’ve identified those top priority areas, it’s essential for leadership to clearly communicate them across the organisation.
Importantly, don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Small, manageable change, which is well implemented, will reap greater rewards than a complete overhaul which runs wildly out of control.
Apple are renowned for their effective and efficient simplification principles. Identifying and communicating the areas in which simplicity is most important for your business is the critical first step.
Create Personas & Segment Your Audience
Don’t tar every customer with the same brush.
For example, if you’re talking to a new and inexperienced customer, taking a high-level, simplified approach can be effective.
But if you’re working with a more experienced customer, such an approach could come off as condescending or unhelpful.
By creating customer personas, you’ll be better able to understand the emotional motivators of your typical customers.
Likewise, how these customers engage with your brand can influence how many trigger points they require to convert from observer to purchaser.
In practice, that means reaching customers where they spend their time, across every available platform or outlet.
There’s no point gearing your entire customer experience toward an online driven journey if the majority of your customers engage with your company in store.
By segmenting your audience, you can reach each potential buyer with the right communications, on the right channel, at the right time.
Consider The Whole Journey
A modern customer journey often begins long before a face to face interaction.
Design your sales and marketing efforts to make it as easy as possible to find, purchase, and start using your product.
Harvard Business Review outlined four key bullet points to ask yourself when considering your wider customer experience:
- How can we make it easier for customers to understand and evaluate our offerings?
- Are we speaking to customers in their language, at the time and place that is most useful to them?
- Is our pricing transparent and consistent?
- How can we optimise in-store layout or leverage point-of-sale technologies to create a frictionless purchasing experience?
These are just a few examples, but anything you can do to reduce your customers’ mental load will improve their experience and their perception of your brand.
For the vast majority of organisations, there will be simplification opportunities across the board.
Unify Your Process
A lot of what we have discussed is externally focussed, but that doesn’t mean your greatest simplification efforts can’t come from within.
A failure to outline and implement your best practice workflow, throughout your whole organisation, immediately creates a more complicated customer journey.
Differences in process, variations between stores and staff doing things in a variety of ways will generate serious confusion for customers the second they engage with more than one member of your team.
To truly simplify your customer journey, align your teams to sing from the same hymn sheet to guarantee consistency in experience from the outset and throughout.
Review & Evolve
When 83% of consumers say convenience is the most important factor in the buying process, your journey must make things easy for them.
And what works at first, may not continue to be convenient in the future.
By keeping your customer journey as simple as possible, you’ll help yourself be agile to any unpredictable events.
Adapting your customer experience to show that you care about the wellbeing of your customers will also go a long way.
Not only are you continue to provide a quality experience and simplify your customer journey, you’re able to review the process and outline areas to make even more enhancements.
Ready to explore how Anthill can revolutionise your customer experience? Schedule a demo today.
Intrigued to learn more? Check out our Insights Hub to keep your business at the cutting edge.
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- September 2nd, 2021