As sales and marketing organizations continue to work towards greater alignment to enhance the B2B buying experience, they are not just working to enhance the ways they engage potential clients, but they are also looking for strategies to better retain current clients. Successful teams can navigate the balance between tracking potential clients and retaining current clients, but companies are still looking for ways to be more customer-centric and serve a more seamless customer journey.
To understand how to better serve a more seamless customer journey, companies need to realize the vast potential that customer retention itself can have on net profits, for just a 5% improvement in customer retention can result in a 25% to 95% increase in profits. In a session during the Strategy & Planning Series, ON24 Director of Customer Marketing Tiffany Beddow discussed all things customer engagement and ways to enhance the customer journey.
Tip 1: Understand The Customer’s Situation
Sales teams need to be able to step into the customer’s shoes and empathize with them and the experience they’re having with the brand. Understanding how a customer is feeling about a brand can allow teams to adapt their approaches to better serve the customer journey. Checking the temperature of key internal stakeholders regarding the brand experience can also go a long way in building a customer-centric foundation.
Tip 2: Align Teams
When it comes to understanding the customer journey, bring along anyone who touches the customer. This should include the customer success, product, sales and marketing teams. It’s one thing to identify what the customer journey is and where the problems are, but to implement change, executives and other department heads need to buy into the plan of action.
At ON24, Beddow described the lack of collaboration amongst teams and how teams worked to break up silos and enforce collaboration. Teams came together to map out the first year and assign goals and roles for each department based on an assigned time period. Aligning departments within a particular set of goals helps companies identify shortcomings and move more towards a customer-centric approach and a more identifiable customer journey.
Tip 3: Build A Visual Customer Journey Guide, Then Put It Into Action
A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you, according to Beddow. In building and enacting a customer journey map, it’s pivotal to incorporate three facets:
- Channels where your customers interact with you (e.g., product, blog, knowledge center, community, in-person events, existing digital content, 1:1 meetings);
- Tools to enhance customer experience; and
- Important triggers and milestones for your customers and your brand.
Most importantly, much like departments need to be aligned within a specific set of goals, companies need to have tools readily available to properly align these three facets for a seamless customer journey.
Tip 4: Prioritize Cohesive Customer Experience
Prioritizing a cohesive customer experience makes it easy for customers to follow along throughout the customer journey and better connect with a brand. ON24 strives to provide a cohesive customer experience, with their implementations of webinar experiences, on-demand hubs, subscription libraries and login page promotions all within easy access to a customer.
Even before a customer journey begins, companies need to ensure that site navigation tools and informational resources are easily accessible to customers and, by doing so, customers are empowered to take more of a self-service approach. Instead of reaching out to customers when they are not necessarily looking to buy, companies with a cohesive customer experience can get a better feel for the customer pool and better plan out the customer journey.
