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Pathy
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A Customer Journey should be blah blah blah… What the hell even is a Customer Journey?
Oh, hey world! Ol’ mate Ed here back on the blog (Peroni in hand, but that’s neither here nor there).
Today’s all bout’ ye old customer journey (that bad boi). What the heck it is, and what an efficient one will do for your biz, using the example of a design agency.
At a high level, your customer journey is the process that your customers take from initial awareness (the need for a Designer / a biz’ that provides design services) through to off-boarding and then beyond.
There’s really five key stages of the customer journey for a biz offering design services
- Awareness: Your customer becomes aware of the need for Design services
- Consideration: Your customer evaluates how and who they will engage to carry out design services.
- Decision: Your customer selects a Designer and onboarding commences
- Service Delivery: Their masterpiece is completed
- Off-boarding and legacy (retainer) service: Your customer evaluates their overall experience and considers future design needs
So now that we are clear on what a high level a customer journey actually looks like, it’s time to delve in and demonstrate how a well-optimised customer journey can actually drastically benefit your biz’. Let’s break it on down into 8 key thiiiiiings to a well optimised customer journey…
1. Increase your profit margin
If you’ve been following Empact for a while now, you’d probably notice that we devote far more energy to talking about profit over revenue. I’m not going to go all ranty here, but for most founders it’s the profit you make in the end that matters, not necessarily the amount of turnover. A million dollars in revenue isn’t that great if you have say $990,000 in expenses (even if you have a ‘creative’ accountant). The caveat of course is if you plan on aggressively scaling… Now that rant’s over, having a well optimised system means you’re acquiring customers more efficiently, AND you’re serving them without draining you and your team’s resources, so you can focus on the ‘things that you actually need (and want) to be doing’. This is a combination with appropriate boundaries, but that’s a conversation for another day.
Let’s look at a real-life example in action:
You’re using a combination of a project management software and an automation tool to send an automated email to your client, all triggered by simply changing a task status within your project management system. OK, you have to lift a nail, but 5 seconds as opposed to whatever length of time and mental resource it’s taking you or your team to send a manually typed email. Your team will have lower billable hours (for those organised that way) and the biz has improved client comms. All by letting automation do the heavy lifting.
2. Efficient and smooth projects
Whether it’s more time with your fam, more projects (cash money), starting the next big thing or travel (like me), it’s all possible with a well optimised customer journey. Let’s say, for example, you have an email list of around 2,000 highly qualified contacts, but due to time constraints, you just haven’t gotten around to emailing them on the reg’. Let’s say you decided to build an email funnel off the back of some value with a downloadable, that sells into your product. Using the rule of thumb where you generate $1 per email, per month, this could translate into an extra $2,000 dollars per month, (this formula was developed by marketer American Marketer Russell Brunson).. Yes, I hear you, it isn’t easy to build an email list, but the gold is in the formula. Say you were able to double your list size over 12 months – that has the potential to add an extra $4,000 per month! And so on and so on.
3. Elevate your customer’s emotions and overall satisfaction
There are two facets to a great customer experience for our example of the creative agency, however this could be parlayed for alot of service based businesses.
- The quality of the work and feedback process
- And the drastically neglected… Speed of project completion
Let’s look at a real-life example in action:
Dennis has reached out about a rebranding for his law firm. He accepted your proposal and signed on the dotted line. But by the time the deadline for his client homework rolls around, Dennis has ghosted you. Eventually another 2 weeks has passed by, Dennis reaches out asking; “Where are we at in the project?”. You politely inform him that he still hasn’t submitted his homework, which you require from him to get started.
Another 4 days goes by, and you finally receive Dennis’s homework (via email), you madly prep your team to recover the time lost sticking to the project deadline. They quickly complete the first round of concepts, and you fire off the email to Dennis.
Another 3 weeks pass with no reply. Dennis reaches out and asks where the project is at – and with more than a hint of déjà vu, you take a deep breath and tell him that you’re waiting on his feedback for the 1st round concepts that are sitting in his inbox. Dennis apologises and promptly replies. The rest of the project unfolds pretty smoothly, you smash out the rebrand and gather your gumption to ask Dennis for a testimonial.
Dennis’ testimonial unfolds in typical lawyer speak, and is great – apart from one, small, part. “The project was completed a month after the proposal had claimed”. You’re livid! You’ve bent over backwards for Dennis, any issues that occurred were because it was his hold-ups that delayed the project!
But equally true though was that you didn’t have time to send a reminder to him – and therefore didn’t. This could have been triggered by a relatively simple automation, and you could have been in his inbox on his case.
If your Amazon package was delayed by a month, you’d be questioning the brand experience (not to mention their support team, particularly if without communication on their end prior), the same can be said for your creative industries business. Let automation do the heavy lifting and help you help your clients.
4. Improves the work-life balance for you, the business decision maker.
It goes without saying (but I’m going to say it anyway), a cause very close to Empact’s heart of hearts is the work-life balance of (you) the business decision maker. As a business decision maker, you have the opportunity for creating lifestyle by design in ways that someone down the food chain simply doesn’t have. But too often that’s a double-edged sword and come Friday at 4pm, you’re probably envying your friends in the 9-5.
So instead of using that extra time that you’ve gained back to making your business or role sustainable for the longer term, time for things that matter most to you, you opt (by default) to load up on more client work.
Here’s a real-life example:
Picture this…
You check your inbox, and to your delight/minor satisfaction/anxiety (as you’re slammed), there’s a new enquiry.
Hitting reply, and as the job is pretty standard, it takes you 20 minutes to get all the deets into your beautifully designed proposal template into InDesign and send it off. The prospective client loves the pitch and agrees via email. You send through an updated contract agreement and make it all editable in PDF (another 15 minutes). The prospect signs and becomes a new client, you sign and date and email the contract back – all complete (another 5 minutes).
Now, hopefully you didn’t resonate with this, but if you did, good news, you have quite nice (excellent in fact) time gains on your horizon.
Now picture this…
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Email hits your inbox (via a pre-filled enquiry form) of which you have all the deets to craft your proposal, it’s a pretty standard job.
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You open your proposal software, add in the prospect’s contact details to your beautifully designed template and send through the proposal with the agreement at the back if they want to go ahead, they sign and date all in one hit. (5 minutes).
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Your inbox has a notification email, it’s your proposal software, stating there’s an update – you’ve won the project! Yay! The prospect has signed the agreement, and now you have a new client – go you!
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You open the proposal with the agreement, sign it, and an automation sends it to your cloud storage for a backup and safe keeping. Your client receives a copy automatically emailed to them for their records (5 minutes)
Total time saved: 30 minutes
AKA – That’s 30 minutes PER PROPOSAL! Take your hourly rate and have it, that’s what you just saved in money terms too!
Ultimately, depending on the volume of proposals you’re sending, the solution differs. Contact the team at Empact to find out more.
6. Time regained for you, the business decision maker.
(whether for freedom, scaling or some other objective).
We’ve explored improving work-life balance and subsequent freedoms, (highly recommend).
But imagine this:
You see an opportunity hiding in plain sight, the problem: You’re still tied down with everything that you have going on, and you know it would be irresponsible to divide your time further and pursue this opportunity, even though you can see exactly what it will do for you.
Sure, a well optimised customer journey alone, probably isn’t going to provide you with the necessary inputs to start a side gig, but it certainly is part of the solution, to be able to step into the next thing with confidence and assist the transition of your time.
7. Forecast and manage your projects with ease
Remember Dennis, the lawyer you rebranded above? 👆
When he agrees to the start date and then doesn’t complete his homework by your deadline that you reminded him of twice, he (unconsciously) pushes out the delivery date, then you are forced to shift other client projects around (if you can) given you’ve called upon your team.
This is even worse if it’s just you, sure, you might move projects around, but given the feast and famine of when clients generally want to come back to you, when it rains it pours. You might find a scenario where all your current projects (after hearing nothing all week), come back with feedback and change requests at 4pm on a Friday arvo, and even though no one expects a turnaround for Monday morning, you know that you’ll be pushed to meet the deadlines even though it’s not your fault. There goes your weekend, bye bye! Yuck!
A well optimised customer journey in this scenario isn’t 100% of the pie without legally enforceable client boundaries, and that means getting your contracts in tip-top shape, (even though you hope to never use it). But certainly by having automated reminders established when a client hasn’t fulfilled what they need too, you have a much better chance of gaining consistency in project delivery, and subsequently being able to forecast out your planning timelines with consistency.
8. Clients stick to your organisation’s boundaries
Another scenario using ol’ mate Dennis again. Let’s say this time you sent follow-up emails yourself, via your personal email, or even left a call or text from your personal number 😳 (not uncommon). The answer is utilising a well optimised customer journey to let automation do the heavy lifting around reminder emails.
Ok, I can understand wanting to do this, believing it will enhance the customer experience. However, 1) It takes time away from what the client is paying you to do, and 2) It opens the door to the client pushing you and compromising on your own personal boundaries.
Let’s imagine Dennis answers your call or replies to your text and gives you every reason under the sun as to why he hasn’t completed the required homework for you to create your masterpiece (this is all at 9pm on a Tuesday) – once you receive that message/hear that information on the call, it makes you look like an**hole if you compromise. Never mind that, you’re now robbed of the enjoyment at that friend’s wedding in a fortnight’s time because you can’t stop thinking about the glut of projects coming back at once, or now have to find work for your contractor’s committed hours next week.
Very hard for Dennis to assert himself on an automated reminder email and solid process, which by the way, if necessary, you can call him out for not flagging this with the previous two reminders.
Obviously stuff happens, and you’re not unreasonable, you know when this behaviour is fair and when it isn’t.
Finally, this isn’t done without strong enforceable boundaries with the client, so this means firstly working out 1) what is reasonable to accept for the client to have homework/revisions back to you and 2) are they legally enforceable? Consider financial and time penalties to incentivise completion if your good faith has been taken advantage of.
So, there you have it, 8 benefits of having a highly optimised customer journey.
This is actually just the tip of the iceberg, if you have any questions, or if we piqued your interest. Please reach out to the team at Empact Digital who will be more than happy to help.
References:
Blankenship, Mike, 16th October, 2022, (Clickfunnels Blog), ‘Email Marketing For Beginners: 5 tips to succeed’, Retrieved 14th February, 2023, from < https://www.clickfunnels.com/blog/email-marketing-for-beginners/ >
