When considering the fundamentals of marketing, one thing stays the same: customer journeys happen whether you architect them or not. This isn’t groundbreaking for most marketers, however the most successful recognise how critical it is. They’re deliberate about understanding their customers’ journeys – from the very first touchpoint with their brand, all the way to repeat business. 

Yet many Australian businesses continue to rely on singular touchpoints from individual teams to inform them about customers’ experiences, like calls with a sales representative or interactions with support via chat bot or email. 

While these touchpoints do impact the customer experience, the customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints that together result in the overall customer experience. They can have a number of great interactions, but a bad overall experience – and vice versa. In fact, businesses in Australia are risking seven percent of revenue due to poor customer experience (CX). For this reason, the customer experience doesn’t fall on one team, it is the job of marketing, sales, customer service and other internal teams within the company to work together to provide the best overall experience. 

Making customer journey mapping part of the vernacular

The most common points of friction within the customer journey are the handoffs between teams. Does your sales team know what expectations your marketing team is setting though content? Does your customer service team know what your sales team is telling their prospects? Does your customer service team keep your sales team in the loop for future opportunities?

One way to mitigate a disconnect between your internal teams is to create a customer journey map. To give you a comprehensive and holistic birds eye view of your customer’s journey, this map should cover the path from the awareness of an existing pain point, to finally becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service. For example, the typical HubSpot customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal. Then, within each stage, there are several “moments” such as comparing tools, sales negotiations, technical setup, and so on.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer’s experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Shifting your focus during macroeconomic uncertainty

In a macroeconomic boom, there is often less concern for generating quality leads as there’s typically a larger surplus to choose from in the first place. This leaves a lot more wiggle room for process inefficiencies and band aid solutions – or to be frank, mediocre marketing. 

And, in times of prosperity, personalised journeys are lower down the priority list for businesses. However as soon as the purse strings tighten, the importance of personalisation shines through. This is because stronger connections create better quality leads, which equals a greater chance to close business, and ultimately means hitting goals faster.

Now, with Australia experiencing a taste of macroeconomic uncertainty, businesses must be more critical than ever about where they invest.  Marketers should use this economic dip as an opportunity to take a step back and observe what’s working and what’s actually detracting from the overall experience. Introducing automation is a great solution for scaling personalisation in the customer experience, but we naturally introduce complexity to meet each customer’s preferences. By using tools that help untangle the complexity of all the new channels marketers are introducing, businesses will succeed in delivering an elevated experience, while the business manages internal handoffs more seamlessly.

Gaining a new perspective on marketing

Connecting with customers and investing in more robust ways to leverage reporting and automation should always be top of mind. Traditional marketing automation and reporting tools give marketers a siloed view into their customers’ journeys. Think about it like standing nose to nose with a massive painting – you see only a small piece of a larger vision. Now, imagine taking ten steps back from that painting, and the entirely new perspective that would be uncovered.

Marketers need a way to take those ten steps back, which is why we built Customer Journey Analytics. The tool was built on the back of the insight that marketers need the ability to identify gaps – like detecting drop offs or tailoring campaigns for maximum ROI – and optimise marketing efforts without changing existing day-to-day processes. In other words, marketers need to be able to see the whole picture to enhance the journey that customers are having, and ultimately improve the experience customers have with brands.

By nature, Australians are a culture of early adopters, and they make no exception when it comes to marketing. As a cohort they’re magnetised to the latest tools and SaaS products to help generate impactful outputs – but sometimes simplicity is key. By taking a step back from the chaos of siloed customer touchpoints, marketers will see the full picture of the entire customer journey more clearly than ever before. Not only will a simplified view make their jobs easier, but also provide an opportunity for businesses to orchestrate the most seamless, personalised customer journey yet. 

Kat Warboys is the marketing director, APAC at HubSpot.