If today’s consumers move seamlessly between physical and digital touchpoints, how can a brand rely only on a logo or tagline to reach them? Brands need to come forth with an attention-grabbing experience. How? By crafting a customer journey that reflects their identity at all moments.
From the first Google search to the post-purchase email, from the receptionist’s tone of voice to a store’s scent, every interaction shapes perception. And perception shapes value.
Analysing and optimising the customer journey is a strategic operational exercise and a brand imperative. Nailing it means creating a cohesive and consistent brand experience that is not only impactful initially but also memorable in the long term.
Let’s explore why tailoring and optimising the customer journey is central to a successful brand strategy, and how it impacts business goals.
What Is A Customer Journey?
The customer journey is the complete series of interactions a person has with a brand across time, channels and platforms. From the tiniest engraved detail in a luxury hotel welcome card to the surprise bonus voucher attached to the purchase of a product in an online shop. Similar to a marketing funnel, the customer journey also unfolds in several moments:
- awareness stage, when the person discovers the brand and gets a first impression of it;
- the consideration stage, when the person researches, compares and evaluates the brand’s proposition;
- the conversion moment, when the deal is closed through a booking, purchase, or enrolment;
- the product or service experience stage, which confirms or denies a central part of the brand’s promise;
- a retention and advocacy stage where the brand commits to follow-up with the customer, nurturing their loyalty and encouraging referrals.
A customer journey is not linear, and there are many moments where things can go unexpectedly wrong. Gaps, loopholes and external contextual factors may undermine the relationship dynamics between the brand and the customer. It’s important to bear in mind that there’s an emotional component to it as customers’ trust and expectations walk side by side throughout the journey.
Mapping your customer journey is a crucial task to understand how the public is navigating your universe and control all touchpoints, ensuring that you are reaching your buyers and potential buyers at all moments with the right tone of voice, message and approach to maximise conversion.
Customer Journey Optimisation Is Strategically Critical
When we discuss the brand, we are inevitably discussing a business asset. Brand equity is the total intangible worth of a brand’s reputation, customer loyalty, and perception in the marketplace. We can, therefore, say that brand equity is not built either in isolated collaterals such as leaflets, brochures or social media posts, nor via campaigns or activations alone.
It is built in time, through several big, small, and repeated interactions with the audience across every dimension, channel and platform. The sum of these touchpoints builds brand experience, which in turn shapes brand perception, and brand perception feeds (or starves!) brand equity.
Ensuring an aligned brand experience is key for brand growth and business success, being also a reliable indicator for brand maturity. Mature brands know that if they want to be perceived as premium, they have to invest in a customer journey that feels effortless, clear and tailored to its customers’ personal needs and wants, ensuring that they build and maintain a loyal customer base that identifies with the brand and buys upon that reliability.
On the other hand, if a brand makes a point in saying that they care first and foremost about their customers, but interactions with the customer service feel cold and distant instead of warm and empathetic, they fail in gaining the audience’s trust and money.
Brand Consistency Drives Consumer Trust
As mentioned, trust and expectation walk hand in hand during the customer journey, and both are built and nurtured through consistency. But consistency does not mean uniformity. It means coherence.
If a brand promised me “oranges” but all I got was “apples”, I experienced dissonance because the expectation I was sold was not met, meaning that the brand broke my trust and I will not buy from it again. It’s the same as navigating a website that feels high-end but getting to the store and finding a generic physical space: the brand is incoherent and feels fake. When the brand promises and fails to deliver, its credibility crumbles and its business suffers.
Inconsistency issues are the type of pitfalls that frequently occur when a brand’s organic growth is too rapid or when a brand is acquired and hastily integrated into a totally different structure and culture. Stakeholders should be aware when navigating those challenging moments and anticipate the necessary adjustments to avoid losing their audience along the way.
When The Brand Experience Becomes The Differentiator
In saturated markets, products and services are easily replicable, and the margin for innovation or groundbreaking positioning is narrow. But when it comes to brand experience, cheating doesn’t cut it. An aligned and optimised customer journey is a multidimensional construction that requires total understanding of the brand identity, complete commitment to delivering what’s promised and the resources to make it all happen and meet business goals.
An optimised on-brand customer journey becomes a successful differentiator both from a brand and from a business standpoints when it can accomplish three particular goals:
- when it anticipates its customers’ needs, meaning that the brand knows its audience and has a deep understanding of its profile, therefore building trust and reliability;
- when it provides an involving, intuitive and seamless interaction flow, with low to no-friction moments, retaining customers with an easy and enjoyable conversion process;
- when it offers memorable moments by creating emotional resonance with the audience, either through the integration of meaningful storytelling, display of cultural relevance or zeitgeist awareness, or even through pebbling, thus building connection and community around common values or vision.
How Can KOBU Agency Help Tailoring Your Brand’s Customer Journey
At KOBU Agency, we observe a brand’s customer journey as the materialisation of its identity. And, to be honest, we think brands should put their money where their mouth is. This means that we strongly recommend our clients a thorough evaluation of their customer journey from a brand experience perspective, in order to identify gaps and misalignments that require attention, correction and, potentially, investment. In a sense, a brand’s customer journey can make or break the business, despite the core product or service quality.
Our approach to analysing a brand’s customer journey involves mapping it thoroughly and asking the several questions, such as:
- Is the brand not delivering the service in a 3-working-day period as its website promises? Please know that inconsistency between promise and reality creates mistrust and a feeling of unprofessionalism.
- Is the customer not receiving a confirmation email after purchasing a product online? Beware. A lack of reply to a conversion moment creates a void in the relationship that can be interpreted as indifference and ingratitude.
- Is that confirmation email only explanatory or is it also nurturing the customer? Do better. Preserving the relationship includes acknowledging and thanking the customer for choosing your brand.
- Filling and sending a contact form takes five clicks? Can we make it in three clicks?
- Where across the customer journey can we upgrade the experience? Make it more seamless, more engaging, more unique?
The goal of these questions and analysis is to spot misalignments between the brand’s identity, promise or intention and its design, operations, and overall behaviour. And then making the necessary changes, adjustments, improvements to have all brand touchpoints and interaction moments actively contributing to a truthful and unified brand experience.
At KOBU Agency, we believe that a strategically designed customer journey ensures an aligned relationship between brand promise and customer expectation, between brand identity and brand experience. This alignment is perceived and experienced through several tangible and intangible aspects such as visual consistency in brand design, tone of voice, or environment in physical spaces; through behavioural consistency in customer care staff and service levels; or through the overall emotional consistency as in how the customer feels throughout the entirety of the customer journey.