Brands that nail customer and emotional experience are brands that know their customers in and out. They can predict their customers’ next action and understand different consumer behavioral patterns well. How do they do it?

Well, understanding your customer requires understanding their journey with your business. It takes a bit of hard work and effort to fully map out your customer journey, but it’s all worth it.

What is a customer journey?

Customer journey, also known as buyer journey, refers to the series of phases the customer goes through from the moment of connecting with the business until the end. It includes all the interactions between the customer and the business. Every customer journey is unique, and a single business can have more than one customer journey, depending on the types of customer personas. But, they all commonly consist of 5 phases. 

1. Awareness 

Awareness is when the customer first encounters the brand. They could’ve stumbled upon your brand by accident or found it when looking for solutions for their problem. While the customer is not looking to purchase anything from your brand at this stage, it is important to make a good first impression.

Evoking the right emotion here can convert the lead to a potential customer! So, project your brand in the right manner by providing all the right details they are looking for. Customers love brands that seem informative and resourceful at first sight. 

2. Consideration

The second stage is when a customer begins to reflect and consider if your brand is a worthy choice. Here, it’s important to play to your strengths to persuade the customer to buy.

In addition to compelling marketing techniques, validation from past users of the product or service can also be very helpful. This is why it always helps to have a section dedicated to reviews and testimonials. They play a role in making the lead feel satisfied. 

3. Purchase 

You have won the customer, and they have decided to purchase! But, this is the most important phase that determines if your customers will come back again. Offering a seamless shopping experience, a quick checkout process, and multiple payment methods are some key factors at play here.

Make sure your customers are excited or joyful about their purchase. Using an Emotional Value Index (EVI®) survey, you can ask how they feel about their experience so far. It will also help you improve the service and resolve any pain points they encounter.

4. Retention 

This phase should focus on keeping your customers satisfied even after they have purchased the product. Persuade them to purchase again! Moreover, it is costlier to attract new customers than retain new ones. So, always invest your best efforts to retain your clients. 

You can keep in touch with them through follow-up surveys on emotional experience and customer satisfaction. Also, maintaining an omnichannel presence can help customers engage with the brand via different platforms.

5. Loyalty 

The journey doesn’t end with your old customers repeatedly purchasing from you. They can also become your advocates and recommend your brand to people they know. Word-of-mouth marketing is very effective and free!

Offering your customers attractive membership programs, discounts, and early access to new products can improve loyalty to a great extent. You can use EVI® and NPS to track and measure your customers’ likeliness to promote your brand to others.

How EVI® can help?

The Emotional Value Index (EVI®) is a versatile metric that can be applied throughout the customer journey and gives you an opportunity to analyze the entire customer journey using one main KPI. It helps you track, measure, and improve your customers’ emotions and help them enjoy a better emotional experience. Using EVI® surveys in different phases of the customer journey, you can identify what drives your sales and what makes your customers churn throughout their buying journey! EVI® is a vital metric to optimize any business’s customer journey.

If you are looking for a place to start, here’s a free template that will make mapping super easy! In addition to ourselves, this template is used by our customers and hundreds of other businesses around the world.