One of my points of focus this year is to talk about the importance of the customer journey as it applies to your business success. The customer journey is the “path” which a potential customer takes from the moment they first find you until either they decide not to hire you or you are finished working with them as a customer. Knowing how important the journey a customer takes with you can be to your business, we highly recommend mapping your customer’s journey and evaluating each step along their path to look for areas you can improve and even areas you can remove.
Since there are multiple ways a potential customer can find you and multiple ways they can work with you, there are usually multiple paths you will need to map. Below are some hints and tips to get you started on the mapping process.
1) Think about all the ways a potential customer can initially contact you and use those as starting points.
2) In the customer paths that you map, don’t forget to include the ones where a potential customer doesn’t hire you, and the ones where you are not available for a potential customer, since how you handle those situations can also impact future business.
3) Include both personal touchpoints (e-mails, phone calls, in-person meetings, etc.), automated touchpoints (automated e-mails, questionnaires, invoices, etc.), and interactions with your systems (payment process, customer portal, etc.).
4) It can be helpful to apply a time cost and/or a real cost to each touchpoint so when you start the evaluation process, you can determine ROI (or perceived ROI) per touchpoint.
Mapping your customer’s journey may seem like quite a bit of work and yes, it probably will be, but the benefits of matching the quality of the customer journey to the quality of your actual wedding service are huge – more conversions from inquiry to booking, better reviews, and more referrals. And of course, if you need any help with mapping and improving your customer’s journey, please feel free to contact me for assistance.
