Customer journey

Customer journey ( coll. To dt .: The journey of the customer ) is a marketing term and describes the individual cycles that a customer goes through before deciding to buy a product. From the point of view of marketing, the customer journey describes all points of contact ( touchpoints ) of a consumer with a brand , a product or a service. This includes not only the direct points of interaction between customers and the company (advertisement, commercial, website, etc.), but also the indirect points of contact at which the opinion of third parties about a brand, product or service is obtained (review portals, user forum, blog, etc.) .). Customers are increasingly finding out about these indirect contact points, which cannot be directly influenced by the company. A deep understanding of the entire customer journey (including direct and indirect contact points) is a basic requirement for a customer-oriented marketing and sales orientation.

overview

The customer journey is divided into 5 phases:

Awareness

Awareness of the product is raised (inspiration)

Favorability

The interest in the product is increased (favoritization)

Consideration

The customer is considering purchasing the product (wish)

Intent to purchase

The purchase intention becomes concrete (trigger)

Conversion

The product is bought (implementation)

From the point of view of the marketing aspect, there are contacts that arise through advertising as well as those that arise directly with the use of a product or service prior to a purchase decision . The customer journey can be used in marketing and communication, especially in digital channels, to minimize wastage and to make communication more efficient (in technical jargon: conversion rate optimization). The five phases of the customer journey can be seen as an extension of the classic AIDA model .

Originally, the term “customer journey” primarily focused on online retail. However, it is also increasingly being used in classic sales channels. In a retail shop, for example, there are opportunities to present the product range to the customer, to give him personal advice, to enable a fast, relatively secure and, in the case of cash, anonymous payment process, to hand over the goods to him immediately after the sale process and to give him friendly saying goodbye. Brick-and-mortar retail strives to use these unique selling points compared to mail order business in order to maintain market share and, for this purpose, is investigating how the customer journey can be improved. Part of these considerations are also questions of how one can use the possibilities of the Internet for stationary retail. " Click and Collect " play an important role in this, i.e. the collection of goods ordered via the Internet in the store, or vice versa, the dispatch of selected items in the store to your home, and other mixed forms of the sales channels "Online" and "Offline", which are under the generic term " Omni Channel ”.

Goal / benefit

The customer journey is particularly interesting in online marketing or digital channels, since the behavior of consumers can be precisely mapped here with the help of tracking technologies . The technology of customer journey analysis provides the concrete benefit of uncovering all contact points that arise through advertising. With the knowledge gained from this, it is possible to uncover interdependencies between the channels and contact points and to derive optimization potential from them. Related effects can occur in the form of both synergy and cannibalization effects.

With the findings of a customer journey analysis, it should also be clarified whether the last contact point was solely decisive for the purchase of a product or whether this was the result of an interaction or a certain sequence of several contacts and channels. This is possible because not only the last contact point is recorded with the customer journey, but all contact points in the Internet are considered. It is also important what effect the channels have on one another or whether they are dependent on one another. By researching the customer journey, new insights into the behavior and preferences of the target group with regard to use and reactions to advertising on the Internet are gained. The new level of knowledge helps advertising companies and agencies to better distribute media budgets to the individual channels and to improve the efficiency of all activities of a company in online marketing.

Proactive communication is a strategy for the entire life cycle of the customer relationship to increase customer loyalty. This includes opt-in notifications and chats, easy accessibility in social media and contact options via multiple communication channels. The strategy is applied in all phases of the customer life cycle. The goal of proactive customer communication is to anticipate and optimize every interaction in order to make it efficient and personalize it for each customer.

In addition, processes that map digital channels (e.g. advertising on the Internet) and the entire spectrum of so-called offline contact points (e.g. TV advertising, sponsoring, word of mouth, etc.) are gaining in importance Customer perspective. The challenge is to record all channels and touchpoints in one measurement system and in one and the same unit of measurement. This is where integrated approaches come into play, which do not concentrate exclusively on the online area, but rather create a comparable “currency” across all contact points with a brand.

function

The customer journey analysis requires precise data storage on the behavior of consumers in order to be able to generate a valid survey. Tracking is currently usually carried out using cookies . It is important to distinguish between “session cookies” and “persistent cookies” as well as “first-party cookies” and “third-party cookies”. The information about contact points is stored centrally in a database .

Recognition of customers in the “offline” world is attempted using customer cards and bonus programs such as Payback , but also using iBeacons , which identify the visitors' mobile devices. The behavior of the buyer outside of the Internet completes the representation of his customer journey. This approach is hampered by the endeavor of many consumers to reveal as little as possible about themselves, or at least to expect something in return.

Definition of terms

Other subject areas are also associated with the term customer journey, which, however, do not specifically reflect the same benefit, but still have a connection.

• Online customer experience primarily describes the online interface in the technical sense, which aims to optimize the navigation behavior of a website visitor and all interactions.
• Customer Care is the management of existing customers with the essential part of the customer-oriented service offer and the goal of building the longest and most satisfactory customer relationship possible.
• Touchpoint analysis describes all contact points of a buyer with a brand, a product and a service, regardless of whether the contact occurs before, during or after the purchase.
• Purchase funnel is used to optimize the conversion (conversion rate) on the website. So-called conversion paths map the movements of visitors along defined routes (click sequences).
• Multi-channel management describes the parallel use of several marketing channels for the provision of services and the establishment and maintenance of customer relationships.

Risk assessment

The difficulties in measuring a customer journey arise from the technical specification of the measuring system. This means the tracking system currently used in the market using cookies . The developments in the Internet area show that this system can no longer hold its own in the long term in order to be able to carry out valid data measurements. Additional measuring systems are required to add missing information to data.

The current challenges in marketing, communication and sales show that measuring the customer journey based purely on tracking data is not enough. It's about answering cross-channel questions: For example, how efficient is a company's print campaign compared to its appearance on social media, what role does personal recommendation play in the purchase decision process, etc.?

As described above, integrated approaches that capture all of a company's activities - whether online or offline - help here. A focus on online contact points often has an inviting effect, as these can be easily measured using tracking systems. But a pure “digital journey” only partially reproduces the entire process, as many interactions with a brand take place offline.

literature

• Research series GfM (Society for Marketing), Accelerom AG: Successful market processing in the digital world, 05/2014, online at: http://www.accelerom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Erglich-Marktverarbeitung-in -der-digital-world_Touchpoint-Management.pdf
• Axel Puhlmann: All points of contact with the brand count! In: planning & analysis , No. 3/2013, online at: http://www.conoscenti.com/pdf/FD_Puhlmann.pdf
• Prof. Dr. Franz-Rudolf Esch, Axel Puhlmann, Mirjam Schmitt: Brave new (digital) world . In: die bank - magazine for banking policy and practice , No. 10/2014
• Erwin Lammenett: practical knowledge of online marketing . 2nd Edition. Gabler Verlag, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 3-8349-1480-0 .
• Frank Reese: Web Analytics - Turning traffic into sales . Business Village GmbH, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 3-938358-71-8 .
• Olaf Resch: E-Commerce Controlling: Specifics, Potentials, Solutions . German University Publishing House / GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden 2004.
• Dinesh. C. Verma: Content Distribution Networks . John Wiley and Sons, New York 2002.

• Eyeblaster Research (2010): Search & Display: Reach Beyond the Keyword , New York
• Sabine Haase (2009): Performance finds its way into classic display marketing and pushes back TKP-based billing models (www.affili.net press center) [1]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Groissberger: Web analysis along the purchase decision process , page 17 ff.
2. ↑ http://www.advisors-academy.de/blog/39-customer-journey-als-instrument-des-business-development
3. ↑ Lauren McKay: Proactive: Take the Initiative ( Deutsch ) Destination CRM. 2010. Retrieved December 29, 2016.
4. ↑ Staff: Proactive Communication ( German ) Genesys. 2015. Accessed December 29, 2016.
5. ^ Staff: What Is Proactive Communication? ( German ) Houston Chronicle. 2015. Accessed December 29, 2016.