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Digital Value chain: creating a guiding voice to your Customer’s Journey
Guest Contribution
They trust you. So it’s time to respond to their need for guidance.
The Customer Journey is an interactive process, so it demands freedom and action. That means decisions, and decisions demand effort. They want you to guide them?—?are you doing that as well as you could?
Providing the next step: in a household ecommerce acting in the Nordics, we had increased transactions up to 5.5% just by showing what their customer could do next. There’s a lot of interesting things to do before the checkout!
Communication used to be a one-way lane, and for a great part of the Mad Men years, it had to ask permission to enter the consumer’s household through TV and magazines. It was not until the 70s that brands stepped up and realized that they did not have to be, necessarily, that smiling salesman that suggests in a friendly way what the customers could try. Brands were bulking and industrial technology booming with computation?—?and they leveled up their tone of voice, too.
Just check the difference in these two Coca-Cola ads, one from the 50s and one from the 70s. One of them speaks as a friend. One of them… as the voice of a god.
Nowadays, let’s say just that the two-way communication made it conversational. It is now an interactive process, and definitely being friendly and effective are driving forces. This communication process comes also with a great deal of authority. Therefore, the commanding voice of the brand is able to guide the customer all the way through the journey and suggest actions as they go. That’s a key element that some companies forget?—?too much freedom may make decisions to stall.
Customers want to trust you. They already trust you enough to be considering your product?—?so give them what to trust you with.
The bottom line is that consumers want to be able to trust the brand/company/website so that the burden of their decisions is taken, partly, from them. How does that reflect in user experience design, experimentation, and suggestions for better retention and click-through rate? Well, if they want guidance… guide them.
The challenge we face daily is that our clients do not have a map of their preferred actions from customers, organized as an optimal value chain. What shipping mode generates fewer complaints? What add-ons are the most profitable? Do you have a subscription model? What is the repurchase program like? And so on.
The devil is in the defaults
Establishing defaults in your Customer Journey is an extremely effective way of ensuring that your customers, if in doubt, can rely on an indication that may help them. Trust in payment methods and confidence in cyber security always rank high in the top click-through rate best practices. But this can be expanded way further. It’s not in the product push, it’s not in the cute 404 message text, and definitely not in your carousel. It’s in establishing what would be the best way to buy from us.
The logic of what is best, of course, is a dialog between your margins, your competitor offers and what the customer is up to decide. A balanced customer journey stems from this equation. But you can stretch the concept and imagine what is the quickest way, or what is the cheapest way to buy from us.
A useful parameter is to map the customer journey of the extreme shopper, someone who checks all boxes and supersizes everything offered to him/her. Once you cross the quickest or easier way of buying with data from purchase history in your customer base, boom. You are able to analyze who does what, and there you have a powerful combo of guidance to use your service. Remember: they trust you with their money. So help them with decision load!
The catch is that it’s not only a matter of existing, but of actively showing the way to proceed.
Finally:
The quick setup to start managing your value chain:
- Write down the list of actions. Refer to your customer journey and your customer profiles, but “fill in the gaps” with a special focus on operational and add-on choices that users have to make in order to complete the purchase (or any other microconversion you may want to include).
- For example: I’m at your bookstore buying a crime novel, I pick the hardcover, I include a small notebook with the name of the book printed on its cover for notes about it, I also check for receiving a bookmark gift; I decide to answer 2 questions in a survey to get 5% off my next purchase, and I will also subscribe to the newsletter and refer a friend in Facebook. Finally, I want my shipping delivered in urgent 1-day delivery. I will pay with an invoice, and my purchase will be processed with the Bookstore Card.
- Build a value chain. Map what each of these operations mean in terms of value/revenue to your business. When there are more options, state how they rank in comparison to other options.
- For example: 1-day delivery gives us a 20% bigger margins when compared to 7 days delivery. If users decide to add a paper bookmark to their order, we earn an extra €1,5.
- Plan emphasis and promotion. If the bookmark means a quick win, plan where to add a nice little picture of it with the product, in a moment where it feels it’s not a big deal anymore (when is the emotionally charged closure moment?). When it comes to operations with multiple choices, if the 1-day delivery is such a better deal, make it your default choice and highlight the advantages and benefits to the customer.
- Prioritise your action list. Don’t fix everything at once, because as you may know, you need to give it a bit of time for users not to freak out with changes on your site. And probably you may have better gains with some of the hypotheses, so going with those is a great start.
- Experiment! Put up your Digital Value Chain venture and experiment with different hypotheses over time. The numbers won’t be shy!
Digital Value chain: creating a guiding voice to your Customer’s Journey was originally published in The Consumer Scientist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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