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Digital customer journeys: Understanding the path to purchase

What drives someone to purchase a certain product online, from clothes to software? Do they simply search the product they want and then click on the first link or online store matching what they are looking for, or is there slightly more to it? Digital customer journeys are able to answer these questions. In fact, they are able to intricately delve in to the exact process from first click to final decision, by showing you the pages accessed by the consumer that have led them to purchase a product. Therefore, digital customer journeys should never be discounted as they are an extremely important analytic tool that should be utilized by all online businesses if they want to fully comprehend how to effectively market their product and maximize profit. The journey starts with brand interaction, and once this has been established a large number of diagnostic tools can then be used to monitor the entire customer engagement experience.

It starts with brand interaction

Some customers do set out with a specific brand in mind and quickly navigate to the product they want, but not all customers do. Some are more price conscious and simply want the best deal, and others are more concerned with the best quality. Understanding what drives a customer, and thus how they will interact with the brand’s pages will help a business to understand what has benefitted or hindered the purchasing process and how to address these issues in the future.

Using digital customer journeys to examine the process is the best way to understand the purchasing decision and adapt the user interface to meet customer needs and accessibility. Since a business can see the entire purchase or non-purchase process they are able to analyse which pages the customer stayed on, what information was contained therein, and what may have helped to sway them in to purchasing their product. They are also able to see if the web interface itself has any issues with it that may be hindering the process such as dead links, or poor manoeuvrability between devices and apps.

The benefits of analytics solutions

Once digital customer journeys are being utilized by a business then it is time to examine any problems that may be reoccurring and subject them to customer experience analytic solutions. Analyzing the journey quickly pinpoints where problems have occurred from slow loading pages, to improper redirects from social media sites such as Facebook or Instagram. Once these issues have been determined than they can be quickly examined and resolved.

If there’s one thing customers hate it is being inconvenienced. If a page is taking 5 seconds to load for a simple shopping website, the customer is quickly going to lose interest and click on whatever other site is easily accessible next. Knowing exactly where these issues in the customer journey are occurring are important, and something that is easily fixable once known. But, if it is not analysed then a company may find itself at a loss as to why a certain product is not selling as predicted.

Managing the digital experience

Digital customer experience management and the solutions provided by it serve as an effective means of ensuring that the customer experience across platforms runs smoothly and provides the necessary analytics to understand how a customer is interacting with a brand. Understanding and monitoring accessibility, and customer history allows a company to actively work to meet the consumer needs and adapt their platform and product in order to market it in the most effective way possible. Following a customer’s journey from when the customer literally first thinks of or ‘clicks’ on a product all the way to the online checkout allows a brand to be in control of its own success as long as it has a product which is attractive to a certain clientele.