Here’s a common problem we’ve all encountered at some point. You’re trying to resolve an issue with a company, but every time you get in touch with their customer service team — on a call, in an email, or via webchat — you have to start from the beginning and explain the entire story. It’s not just frustrating; it’s incredibly time-consuming, and it makes you doubt if they care about you as a customer (and probably look elsewhere in the future).
This is a classic, and all too common, example of a company stuck in a “touchpoint” mindset. They’re trying to be available on every channel, but they’re too focused on individual interactions instead of the bigger picture: the customer journey.
What does the customer journey look like?
A customer journey is the entire end-to-end experience a customer has with your business or brand. It starts at the moment they first become aware of you, and it continues as long as they keep using your products or services.
It encompasses every touchpoint they encounter along the way, from viewing your ads to reading your emails, unboxing your product, or talking with your support agents on the phone. But it’s much more than just a collection of one-off interactions. In a well-managed customer journey, each interaction builds on the last, deepening the relationship.
Think about the onboarding process for a new customer. It might involve visiting your website, signing up for a trial, interacting with your sales team, receiving onboarding training, and accessing ongoing support. Each of these touchpoints is important, but it's the overall experience of the journey that determines whether the customer feels valued and decides to stick around. Here’s how it should go:
- After signup, the customer gets personalized emails checking in with how the trial is going — based on the features they have used.
- When the sales team gets in touch, they can see what aspects of the product the customer spent the most time on and focus on these in the call.
- The onboarding process is customized with examples of how the customer can use the product in their specific business, perhaps with prefilled data or templates relevant to them.
- If they call up your CX team for support, the agent knows exactly how they’ve been using the product and what their goals are and can get straight down to helping them with their problem.
So, how can you create seamless customer journeys in your own business? It comes down to four key pillars:
1. Consistent Communications
Inconsistent communication creates a barrier with your customers — if the way you speak on the phone is completely different to the style in which you write emails, it’s a constant reminder that they’re dealing with multiple departments rather than a single, well-aligned team. And that creates doubt that their needs will be met.
Ensure your messaging, tone, and branding remain consistent across all channels and touchpoints within a journey. It’s essential to reassure customers that they’re in the right place — and that they’re going to be listened to and understood.
2. Organizational Memory
No one enjoys repeating themselves. Organizational memory is crucial. It means capturing communications across all touchpoints — call records, chat logs, email history — and storing this in a way that makes it easy for any CX agent to retrieve and understand it before their next interaction with the customer.
This way, you prevent customers from having to provide the same information repeatedly and ensure each interaction is personalized and relevant. You also give your team the data they need to guide the conversation and offer proactive advice and support.
3. Getting Closer to Customers
Creating a truly personalized customer experience goes beyond simply addressing customers by their first name — it’s about understanding their needs and preferences throughout their entire journey with your brand.
That means collecting as much data as possible about their preferences, their interactions with your products or services, their goals and objectives, and so on. The better you know them, the more you can anticipate what they might need next and proactively offer solutions, creating a truly tailored experience.
4. Leveraging Technology
We’ve talked about consistency of voice, data gathering, and record-keeping as crucial ingredients — but how can you resource the management of all this information?
It used to be a costly challenge, but in recent years, artificial intelligence has stepped up to help. AI can tie all the disparate pieces of the customer journey together and help you create a seamless experience. That can mean using AI chatbots to handle simple customer inquiries based on their history with the brand or AI-enabled CRMs that can summarize and brief your agents before they get in touch to solve a complex issue.
In the background, AI-powered predictive analytics tools can pull together personalized recommendations based on customer likes and dislikes, while automated
sentiment analysis can scan your communications to triage and address potential issues before they escalate.
Ready to shift your focus from touchpoints to journeys?
Moving away from a fragmented, interaction-based approach to CX to a holistic focus on the entire customer journey might sound daunting. But however mature your CX function is, there are some first steps you can take to get started right away:
- Identify your key customer journeys and map out all the touchpoints involved.
- Collect relevant customer data at each touchpoint and leverage analytics to understand their behavior and preferences.
- Invest in automation platforms and other technologies that support a journey-focused approach.
- Continuously monitor, collect feedback, and make adjustments to optimize your customer journeys over time.
By shifting your focus from individual touchpoints to the entire customer journey, you can create a more cohesive, more personalized, and ultimately more satisfying experience for your customers. The rewards are significant — increased loyalty, positive word-of-mouth referrals, and, ultimately, a healthier bottom line for your business.
It’s time to stop thinking about individual interactions and start focusing on the bigger picture: the journey your customers take with your brand.
At Sappy, we’re developing the tools that will help you do just that — using AI to automate more interactions and supporting skilled human agents in focusing their time where it makes the most difference to customers. If you’re looking for a simpler way to scale customer engagement, join our waitlist.
