Users of digital platforms are legitimately becoming more and more demanding. As a company, ensuring a smooth and satisfying digital experience has become a major challenge. This requirement involves the ability to offer a seamless digital experience, without disruption or friction throughout the entire journey.
Your customers are no longer just amazed by the technical prowess of your website or mobile app; they also care about the experience you provide them on your various digital platforms.
In this context, the customer journey takes center stage. How can we ensure that we have optimized every step of the digital journey taken by our customers or visitors? How can we ensure that they are satisfied? First and foremost, this means measuring customer satisfaction at each key stage of the digital journey.
In short, is the door to your point of sale open? Is the navigation inside pleasant? Does the consumer quickly identify the product they are looking for?
This is what we propose to discuss in this article.
What is the customer journey?
The customer journey is a concept that initially comes from marketing, to help companies better understand the purchasing behaviors of their customers. In recent years, thanks to the rise of digital technology and in the face of a multitude of possibilities, customers have seen their purchasing behaviors become more complex. There are more players, more competition, more points of entry and possible contacts, etc.
To better understand these new behaviors, it has become useful to model them through the customer journey. To give a general definition, the customer journey will cover all the steps that a customer will go through, from identifying their need to purchasing a product or service. It is, in fact, the sum of the contact points between your brand and your customers.
This is a general definition of the term, but if we focus on a definition of the customer journey for a website or a mobile application, we could define the customer journey as follows:
The customer journey includes all the steps taken by a visitor, from connecting to the platform to achieving their objective. On a digital platform, the objective is not only the purchase, it can be very varied. For example, a visitor may simply be looking for information, may want support from your teams, consult their customer area, or carry out a transaction.
Some examples of customer journeys
To make this notion of customer journey a little more concrete, here are some examples of journeys that we usually monitor:
- In the banking sector, a classic journey is the "transfer order" journey. In this journey, a visitor will generally carry out the following steps: access to the website, connection to their customer area, balance consultation, initiation of the transfer order, completion of information, validation of information and transfer, and then disconnection.
- For an e-commerce site, a common journey is that of "ordering an item," which can be broken down as follows: access to the website, search for the item, completion of quantity/size, addition to the basket, validation of the basket, completion of delivery information, access to the payment interface, completion of the form, and validation.
- For mutual insurance companies, the "request for a quote" journey is one of the most common customer journeys. This journey generally follows these steps: access to the website, completion of a form, validation of information, access to the comparison result.
The importance of having an optimized customer journey
Beyond helping you better understand your visitors' purchasing journey, mapping the customer journey is essential to ensuring an optimal user experience. This optimization also relies on good digital performance of the site, which determines engagement, conversion, and loyalty.
In our white paper: "Trends in the website and mobile application monitoring market," it is indicated that digital technology is establishing itself as a lever for growth in all sectors of activity and that ensuring an optimal user experience on all digital media is becoming essential to attract and retain customers. Indeed, 88% of users do not return to a website that has given them an unpleasant online experience*. *journaldunet.com
Optimizing your customer journey on your website or mobile application means concretely working to improve the feeling and satisfaction of your users. Neglecting these aspects can have significant impacts for your company.
1. Decrease in user satisfaction and therefore their loyalty
An optimized customer journey is a journey that makes it easier for the user to achieve their objective. The faster and easier your user can perform the action they want to do, the more likely they are to return to the platform for future searches or purchases.
The customer relationship, online, begins with the confidence of having a smooth experience, without malfunctions and therefore without frustration for your visitor.
It is reinforced by loyalty programs, social networks, personalized emails, exceptional discounts, etc.
2. Decrease in conversion rate
Being able to guide visitors through the entire process ensures a significant increase in the conversion rate.
But how can this be possible if your user cannot validate a step because the page is unavailable, or the 'validate' button does not work?
All these malfunctions tarnish the work provided, even on sites or mobile applications with the best designs.
Your users will probably not bother to tell you that completing the journey is impossible on your platform, but they will turn, for the sake of speed or simplicity, to a platform with a fully operational customer journey.
3. Decline in the company's brand image
Just browse the online reviews to understand that one of the main sources of dissatisfaction for online customers is frustration with a digital service that does not function correctly: a platform that is too slow, unintuitive interactions, the inability to perform an action, difficulty in contacting support teams, significant bugs, etc.
These are all reasons that lead users to share negative feedback on the digital services offered by a company. Your brand image and your (e-) reputation can quickly become tarnished, in an era where purchasing based on customer recommendations, especially online, remains important.
Tips for an optimized customer journey
So how can you ensure that you have an optimized digital customer journey that increases user satisfaction? Here is a non-exhaustive list of our customer journey optimization tips.
Ensure that the journey is user-centered
Too often, visitors are lost by creating customer journeys that are far too complex. The objective is to facilitate the transition between the different stages that make up the customer journey. Particular attention must therefore be paid to ensuring that the journey respects the user's logic and a balance between meeting their expectations and ease of completion.
This work often involves internal collaboration between the marketing, customer relations or user experience teams and the technical teams.
Reduce technical friction points
One of the major criteria for ensuring that the customer can navigate the entire journey without difficulty is to guarantee functional platforms. If the platforms on which the journeys are defined are dysfunctional, then customer satisfaction is directly impacted.
Web performance is the technical foundation of the customer journey: speed, stability, and availability directly influence the user experience. Certain technical monitoring indicators can help you maintain control over the technical availability of your digital platforms:
- The availability rate allows you to ensure that your digital platforms are operational and reliable. A high availability rate indicates that your users have access to the platforms when they need them. However, do not limit yourself to monitoring the availability rate. Indeed, a user may have access to your platforms without being able to complete their customer journey.
- The response time allows you to measure how quickly your platform responds to a user's request. A response time that is too long when displaying a page or validating a form can discourage the user from continuing their actions, and therefore encourage them to interrupt their progress on the defined customer journey.
- Technical errors: The presence of error pages with incomplete content or links that do not redirect to the target page are all technical errors that can increase user dissatisfaction.
- Defective links with third-party applications: Sometimes what can penalize your customer journey is not your platform but that of a partner. If, as part of your journey, a link is required with another application (for validation, for example) and it is defective, the user will be tempted to attribute responsibility for these malfunctions to you, because it is part of your overall journey. Ensuring that your partners are not also experiencing malfunctions is important to ensure a smooth and optimized customer journey.
Being able to anticipate malfunctions before your users notice them.
In a user-experience-centric approach, what we seek to avoid at all costs is having dissatisfied customers. And this approach requires a great deal of anticipation of all the elements that could lead to this potential dissatisfaction.
We very often see platforms that anticipate the slightest questions or concerns of customers, by implementing, for example: help content, FAQs, chatbots pre-programmed to respond to all objections.
This anticipation approach is an approach that must also be integrated when you want to ensure that the digital journey of your website or mobile application does not encounter any malfunctions.
Rather than waiting for your users to report issues (in the best-case scenario) or abandon their journey in the event of technical difficulties, you can set up a tailored monitoring system to anticipate potential failures. That's what our solution offers.
2Be-FFICIENT has developed automated systems that visit your site at regular intervals and behave like a user. Like mystery shoppers, they use all the functionalities of your site or applications and inform you in real time of any malfunctions, slowness, lack of content or incorrect content, by sending you an alert.
This alert includes a diagnosis that tells you the nature of the incident, on which step of the customer journey it occurred, allowing you to make the necessary corrections very quickly so that your users are not confronted with it.
This proactive monitoring contributes to user satisfaction. It is fully in line with our approach to continuously improving customer satisfaction.
