Customers are the ultimate measure of success for every business out there, and one of the most important factors that influence their decisions is the experience they have with your brand; how they feel at each step is a big driving force.For this reason, businesses strive to perfect their customer experience (CX) game right from the first interaction with a customer. According to a report by PwC—entitled, "Experience is everything: Here's how to get it right"—about one in every three customers will walk away from a brand after just one bad experience. As alarming as this fact is, the study substantiates the importance of having a consistent customer experience in your complex ecosystem.
Yes, consistency in a complex landscape!
- A typical business in today's world has
- A website displaying their product/service portfolio
- Mobile applications to cater to on-the-go go-getters
- Presence in various social media platforms
- Different tools to assist their decision making.
This omnichannel presence exists atop an already multi-layered business ecosystem with various processes and touchpoints. On the bright side, technology has brought businesses and customers closer together while also enabling customers to approach and traverse through your business in unpredictable ways. Therefore, to arrive at a powerful CX strategy that is contextual and consistent at all touchpoints, you need to understand this navigation. How do you do that? Conventional methods have relied on survey responses, popular opinions, and self-derived assumptions about customer experience to tailor CX placements. But that doesn't match the pace of the sprawling market.
Look at what Sagar Rajgopal has to say in this excerpt from a Forbes article about common mistakes businesses make:
Using customer satisfaction scores, such as CSAT or NPS, is a great start, but scalable wins require a holistic approach. A customer experience-led strategy helps create satisfaction across the whole customer relationship, not just one small area. Including as much context as possible around your metrics helps improve the customer experience while guiding customer journeys.
To develop a consistent CX across your business, you need to open up your departmental siloes and stitch together their discontinuous experience together. In other words, you need to map customer journeys.
A customer's journey is their footprint across your business. It's a cumulative account of their experience and emotions during their interaction with your business. Like following a breadcrumb trail, tracking this journey will reveal a wealth of insights about your customers, like the following:
- Are your customers completing their purchase goals?
- Are there any roadblocks?
- What is the most popular product?
- What are the least used touchpoints?
Though understanding this journey will give you a solid idea of how your customers started out, you can't completely rely on traditional mapping techniques based on hypothetical assumptions and detached datasets; you need a tool that can track customers' journeys as they happen—in real time.
And Path Finder is here to help you do just that—discover customer journeys!
Discover customer journeys
using Path Finder
Zoho CRM's Path Finder is a tool designed to capture and record customers' journeys with your business. With its ability to capture customer interactions as signals, it automatically maps their unique paths so that you can interpret meaningful insights backed by real-time data.
Based on your objective, Path Finder can discover micro- and macro-journeys in your business, allowing you to track customer movements across different products or monitor how customers are navigating through your site. Either way, you can get a telescopic view of customers' expectations and experience—primary cues that can help you design a powerful CX strategy.
So, CX—is that all?
Understanding CX is definitely a cornerstone of Path Finder's capabilities, but there is more you can do with its findings. Path Finder generates three types of graphical reports: Sankey, Path, and Journey. Although these reports are built based on the same findings, they show journeys from different perspectives.
Discover new perspectives of your business
Path Finder gives you a bird's-eye view of your business. Based on the paths customers follow, you can determine which touchpoints in your business are profitable, where customers are stagnating the most, whether there's a product that customers find more interesting than others, which touchpoint your customers seldom use, and so on. For instance, let's look at this Sankey report.
From the report, you can derive the following insights:
- Among the available channels, lead generation is mostly happening via webforms.
- Outbound lead generation via phone is not as productive and customers from that channel are not progressing, which indicates this touchpoint needs to be fixed or removed.
- Users are responding well to email qualification methods, unless they've already come into the business as pre-qualified customers.
These are truths that you can derive by looking at how customers interact with these touchpoints. You can compare and contrast all channels at once and thereby achieve the following:
- Optimize the quality and responsiveness of your touchpoints
- Remove unproductive touchpoints
- Swap-test possible touchpoints to assess their performance
Streamline business processes
By its nature, business is transactional and therefore demands a streamlined process, which not only encourages a good process discipline but also increases productivity and revenue. Through its ability to detect important signals, Path Finder enables you to determine how the current process is performing for your business. A quick look at the following Path report will help you understand the different realities about your business process.
From the report, you can derive the following insights:
- About 13 contacts were directly created without other recommended process before.
- About five users received no follow-up after the first outgoing email campaign.
- About 20 webform leads received no contact after submitting.
These are reality checks that enable you, as a manager, to identify and address shortcomings in your business process as they happen. With these insights, you can achieve the following:
- Encourage and ensure consistent follow-up with leads.
- Eliminate unproductive steps in the process.
- Correct errors that slow down the flow of business.
Develop smart business strategies
Strategic selling is a novel selling technique that sales reps use these days. Businesses are finding ways to couple products and services together, designing logical ways to position them, attract attention, and encourage cross-sell and upsell strategies to increase sales. Path Finder is the right tool to help you develop those winning strategies, because it offers a closer look at how your customers interact with your business and which products they're most interested in. For instance, have a look at this report.
Based on the report, you can gain the following insights:
- Users that are initially accessing your site looking for landline services are reconsidering their decision and looking instead at mobile devices.
- Each user that comes in to buy a mobile device is also looking for a charger and ear pods.
- A majority of users are interested in buying headphones.
Based on this report, you can achieve the following:
- Recommend mobile devices on the landline page.
- Bundle mobile devices, chargers, and ear pods at a more appealing price point.
- Offer ear pods at a discounted price when users have mobile phones in their cart.
- Offer deals for high demand products to achieve FOMO.
Orchestrate a meaningful customer cadence
With its ability to track customer behaviors, Path Finder reveals the actual journeys customers take with your business. Instead of assuming these journeys are going well, you can be certain by relying on real-time data to orchestrate journeys using our bespoke Journey Builder. Have a look at this journey report generated by Path Finder. It is a look alike of the Journey Builder's configuration, meaning you can take this as a reference and start designing your customer cadence without much difficulty in data application.
You can glean the following insights from the report:
- Most of the visitors who explored the product lineup have follow-up inquiries. This is a good place to add answers to FAQs about your product offerings.
- A lot of customers have followed the path Entering the site > Signup > Explore products > Add to carthas more number of conversions. Focusing on this path and orchestrating contextual actions using our Journey Builder tool will help enhance the customer experience and increase revenue.
Eliminate churn as early as possible
Churn is a signal that customers send through their behavior, and most of the time you'll only know that churn has happened only after the fact. In these situations, you can refer to Path Finder's reports. Because Path Finder tracks interactions in real time, you can spot the churning behaviors as they manifest and implement corrective measures to retain customers before they leave for good.
Path Finder is thus an observant counterpart for your business—always there auditing your business processes, navigating the maze of complex business interactions, and helping you defy perceptions.
Discover new perspectives of your business
Path Finder gives you a bird's-eye view of your business. Based on the paths customers follow, you can determine which touchpoints in your business are profitable, where customers are stagnating the most, whether there's a product that customers find more interesting than others, which touchpoint your customers seldom use, and so on. For instance, let's look at this Sankey report.
From the report, you can derive the following insights:
- Among the available channels, lead generation is mostly happening via webforms.
- Outbound lead generation via phone is not as productive and customers from that channel are not progressing, which indicates this touchpoint needs to be fixed or removed.
- Users are responding well to email qualification methods, unless they've already come into the business as pre-qualified customers.
These are truths that you can derive by looking at how customers interact with these touchpoints. You can compare and contrast all channels at once and thereby achieve the following:
- Optimize the quality and responsiveness of your touchpoints
- Remove unproductive touchpoints
- Swap-test possible touchpoints to assess their performance
Streamline business processes
By its nature, business is transactional and therefore demands a streamlined process, which not only encourages a good process discipline but also increases productivity and revenue. Through its ability to detect important signals, Path Finder enables you to determine how the current process is performing for your business. A quick look at the following Path report will help you understand the different realities about your business process.
From the report, you can derive the following insights:
- About 13 contacts were directly created without other recommended process before.
- About five users received no follow-up after the first outgoing email campaign.
- About 20 webform leads received no contact after submitting.
These are reality checks that enable you, as a manager, to identify and address shortcomings in your business process as they happen. With these insights, you can achieve the following:
- Encourage and ensure consistent follow-up with leads.
- Eliminate unproductive steps in the process.
- Correct errors that slow down the flow of business.
Develop smart business strategies
Strategic selling is a novel selling technique that sales reps use these days. Businesses are finding ways to couple products and services together, designing logical ways to position them, attract attention, and encourage cross-sell and upsell strategies to increase sales. Path Finder is the right tool to help you develop those winning strategies, because it offers a closer look at how your customers interact with your business and which products they're most interested in. For instance, have a look at this report.
Based on the report, you can gain the following insights:
- Users that are initially accessing your site looking for landline services are reconsidering their decision and looking instead at mobile devices.
- Each user that comes in to buy a mobile device is also looking for a charger and ear pods.
- A majority of users are interested in buying headphones.
Based on this report, you can achieve the following:
- Recommend mobile devices on the landline page.
- Bundle mobile devices, chargers, and ear pods at a more appealing price point.
- Offer ear pods at a discounted price when users have mobile phones in their cart.
- Offer deals for high demand products to achieve FOMO.
Orchestrate a meaningful customer cadence
With its ability to track customer behaviors, Path Finder reveals the actual journeys customers take with your business. Instead of assuming these journeys are going well, you can be certain by relying on real-time data to orchestrate journeys using our bespoke Journey Builder. Have a look at this journey report generated by Path Finder. It is a look alike of the Journey Builder's configuration, meaning you can take this as a reference and start designing your customer cadence without much difficulty in data application.
You can glean the following insights from the report:
- Most of the visitors who explored the product lineup have follow-up inquiries. This is a good place to add answers to FAQs about your product offerings.
- A lot of customers have followed the path Entering the site > Signup > Explore products > Add to carthas more number of conversions. Focusing on this path and orchestrating contextual actions using our Journey Builder tool will help enhance the customer experience and increase revenue.
Eliminate churn as early as possible
Churn is a signal that customers send through their behavior, and most of the time you'll only know that churn has happened only after the fact. In these situations, you can refer to Path Finder's reports. Because Path Finder tracks interactions in real time, you can spot the churning behaviors as they manifest and implement corrective measures to retain customers before they leave for good.
Path Finder is thus an observant counterpart for your business—always there auditing your business processes, navigating the maze of complex business interactions, and helping you defy perceptions.