What is a Customer Journey
The (online) customer journey is an often overlooked critical concept that allows online businesses to truly serve their customers for the long haul and by doing this massively increases customer lifetime value and customer loyalty.
Customer journeys is the missing link that propels online businesses from 6 or 7 figures to 8 figures and beyond.
The concept of online customer journeys is a bit more advanced and if you do not yet have an established business with the market fit we don't recommend you to start with this just yet and first focus on working your way to product-market fit.
Smart Journeys, which is Kyvio's online customer journeys application, is meant for businesses with teams of at least 10 people with at least 1 full-time person responsible for the customer journey & funnel strategy and building out the funnels inside your customer journey.
So what are Online Customer Journeys?
There are 2 important differentiation to make to explain what a CJ exactly is because you need to understand WHO your customer is.
1. Your company offers B2B products or services and thus your customer is somebody who represents a business and the interests of this business.
Every business goes through a lifecycle. Now there are different models but the one we like the most at Kyvio is represented below:
Each lifecycle phase comes with its own set of problems and this is where you come in.
The customer journey is a (visual) representation of the solutions you can offer to your customer in each lifecycle phase. This can be 1 solution (= 1 product) per lifecycle phase or multiple. As you probably already know each phase has -many- problems to be solved for an entrepreneur.
The more phases you can cover with your products/services the longer the customer will stay with you, the more money they will spend with you, the more loyal they will become, and the more your business will grow.
Each solution you can offer should be represented by a FUNNEL (link to what is a funnel). In this funnel, each time, you lead the customer through the stages of awareness; make them problem aware, then solutionS aware, then product & USP aware (= your solution), and then when they are most aware you close them.
The further the customer goes into your customer journey the easier it will become to close them.
2. Your company offers B2C products or services and thus your customer is a consumer who represents himself and his/her own interests.
Selling to consumers is a bit different to B2B, consumers obviously also go through phases in their life but this is often too broad to use to base your customer journey on. So instead of using a lifecycle model, we recommend using technology/trend adoption models.
Note that this does not mean you should never use a consumer lifecycle model - it depends on YOUR business. E.g. for life insurance, or any other health-related services or products a consumer lifecycle model might just be the best fit!
The most basic model to think about consumer adoption is the Rogers Curve:
Each segment in this model have their own 'problems' they look at to adopt your product or service and it is your job to address them each to grown your market share and dominate your market.
In each segment, you create a specific angle for those types of people and each angle represents a funnel. In each funnel, you use the stages of awareness to make the consumer problem aware, solutionS aware, product & USP aware, and finally most aware where you sell them.
For B2C products or services, we recommend you to use the 7 stages of awareness to further increase the LTV and the impact these customers have on your (online) business.
In this example, the full customer journey for B2C represents your product's journey to dominate your market and grow your market share for your product/service.
IMPORTANT NOTE;
In this article, we used various models as examples such as 5-stages of awareness, the full business lifecycle model, and the Rogers Adoption Curve. Each of those models can be substituted by other similar models (e.g. the '7 stages of awareness' and the 'corporate lifecycle model'). It is up to you to choose the model you think is best for your unique situation and business