How Google Helps You Optimize the Customer Journey

The customer journey is a way to describe all your touchpoints with your customers. After mapping these interactions, it is crucial to optimize them. Google’s “See Think Do Care” model will help.

Though many interactions with businesses go excellently, the worst experiences are remembered and will be told endlessly. It is one of the most beloved topics at birthday parties. You probably recognize the following situations:

• A business promises “excellent customer service” in its marketing copy, but hides its telephone number deep inside its website. When you finally find it and call them, there are 20 minutes of synthetic elevator music…
• A couple of minutes after ordering a book, a specific web store emails you to say that your package is on its way. A day later, they email you to apologize; the product is not in stock, and the delivery will be delayed. The first email seems to be sent automatically—and I still haven’t received the book!

These are personal experiences of mine as a customer, and are just some examples of interactions that have gone wrong. As a consumer, I hate it! As a partner at a consultancy firm, these mistakes are priceless. Why? Because they are excellent examples that will convince my corporate clients that each touchpoint with the customer is important. Each interaction that goes wrong can be a reason for a consumer to seek out the competition.

To gain a better understanding of the many interactions that a business will have with its customers, the concept of the “customer journey” starts to make a lot of sense. This “variety of touchpoints by which the customer moves from awareness to engagement and purchase” (Gartner) is very relevant in the current digital era because there are more touchpoints than ever.

Traditionally, the customer journey is subdivided into five steps: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention/service, and loyalty. Successful organizations focus on developing a customer experience that ensures each touchpoint interconnects and contributes to the overall journey.

If you want to map your customer journey, try to fill out our Customer Journey Canvas. It not only identifies key interactions that the customer has with the organization, but it also brings into focus the user’s feelings and motivations as well as questions for each of the touchpoints.

Mapping the customer journey is not enough, though. The next step is to optimize it. To accomplish this, I recommend the See Think Do Care model developed by Google‘s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik. This model consists of 4 stages:

1. See: The potential customer comes into contact with your organization for the first time.
2. Think: He or she recognizes a need and actively seeks a solution.
3. Do: Knowing which product he or she needs, the person is about to become a customer.
4. Care: After the purchase, you want the customer to stay with you as long as possible.

That sounds logical, doesn’t it? “But, how do I apply this?” you may ask. Below, I will describe the practical steps that you can take:

• See: You should be visible. Through social media, your website, and online and offline advertisements, you have to reach out to potential customers.
• Think: In this stage, the content on your website plays an important role. Examples are blog posts that describe the solution of a problem and how-to videos. This way, the potential customer discovers that you are selling the product that he or she is looking for.
• Do: It is important that you remove all the friction in the buying process. Is the ordering process on your website clear? Is an ordered product shipped immediately?
• Care: Invest in customer loyalty through newsletters, social media, and other content providers.

All businesses in the world have to take a customer journey into account. Sadly, some companies fail to see this. These are organizations that don’t understand that every touchpoint with a customer is part of the whole buying experience. Some of these businesses are monopolists and can afford to create a bad customer experience. Others just go out of business.

I know you want to be another kind of business, one that places the customer front and center. At RevelX, we know how to make this wish a reality. If you need our expertise, please make an appointment with one of our experts.