Did your business stem from a hobby, or did you accidentally stumble into your business? If so, this episode is for you! In this episode we talk about how to map and create an incredible customer journey. Your job is to think about how customers become aware of your product or service, what helps them in considering if you are the right person for the job, how easy the purchase process is, how you handle post-sale, and lastly how your customers can become advocates for your business!
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
Did your business stem from a hobby, or did you accidentally stumble into your business? If so, this episode is for you! In this episode we talk about how to map and create an incredible customer journey. Your job is to think about how customers become aware of your product or service, what helps them in considering if you are the right person for the job, how easy the purchase process is, how you handle post-sale, and lastly how your customers can become advocates for your business!
For detailed show notes, Justin Varuzzo's after thoughts on each episode, and lists you can use to take immediate action in your business, check out the website at http://www.marketingandservice.com.
Did you start your business by sitting down and creating a comprehensive business plan and doing market research about the product or service, or are you like most small businesses in, maybe you just kind of fell into it. You had a little idea and maybe it took off and before you knew it, something that was a hobby or something that was fun or something you did for someone else suddenly becomes your own business. If this is the case, then this episode is four.
Speaker 2:Hey, Justin, Bruzzo here from marketing and service.com. This is the marketing and service.com podcast. The podcast that's designed to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships. In this episode, we're going to explore planning out your customer journey and just how important this can be. Especially if you've fallen into your business. Like so many of us do. If you enjoy what you
Speaker 1:Hear today, I beg you to please go and subscribe or follow this podcast. It means so much to me, and it helps spread the word about everything that we've got going on here in today's episode. I want to talk about the customer journey, but I'm actually going to start by just giving a real world example about the customer journey I've experienced. For today's example, I want to talk about a innovative company called Warby Parker. If you're not familiar with Barbie Parker, they're an online retailer that sells prescription glasses and sunglasses. Warby Parker started in 2010 and over the next five or six years became a huge hit they've received round after round of funding. And they've got a really incredible business model and their entire business model was based on providing a pair of prescription glasses for$99. Well, it was actually$95, but we won't quibble over a few bucks, like many people out there. I had never heard of this company before. I was actually finishing my master's degree and taking a class in marketing. And one of the reports that another student submitted was a case study of Warby Parker. And I was immediately fascinated by what this company was doing as someone who wears glasses. I have never gotten out of a pair of glasses without spending at least three or$400, no matter what insurance I've ever had, no matter what brand I've ever bought. I would usually go to the mall and go to one of the big retailers and no matter what the sale was, no matter the deal, it would always end up being at least$300 for a complete set of frames and prescription lenses. And I have pretty basic lenses, single vision I'm nearsighted, and my eyes aren't really that bad. So I don't have any special needs or difficult prescriptions to fill. So I became aware of Warby after taking this class and I read this case study. And the first thing I did was I went to their website and on their website, they said, you should really download the app. I have an iPhone. And I went to the app store. I download the Barbie Parker app and it was really well designed. It was really super easy to use. And most impressive was the virtual try-on system. It was not so much different than any other virtual try-on system. You might've used in the past where obviously it just animates whatever the product is over your head in this case, it's glasses. So you pick a frame, you swipe down and it shows you your face with those glasses on it. But there were a few things that make this really cool with Warby Parker. And if you have one of the later I-phones with face ID, it actually uses the face ID sensor, which uses 3d scanning technology to scan your face in a much more effective and efficient way than simply using a single two dimensional picture of your face. Like many other companies use some companies, you even have to take the picture of yourself and then upload it. And then you can see what the different frames look like on your face. Warby Parker does this in real time. You simply open the app, you swipe down and boom, you're wearing the glasses and they look really good. Even the reflections in the lenses, just they look real. It looks like you're really wearing these glasses. It's way beyond what you'd expect from a Snapchat or something similar like that. It is really, really well done and incredibly impressive. Shout out to Warby Parker for making an awesome app. So as someone who'd never heard of this company, I had a few objections before making a purchase. My first was I questioned the quality of a set of frames and glasses for only$95. Were these things going to be junk where they're going to be falling apart in a week where the prescription's just not going to be cut? Well, was I going to have trouble seeing, I really did have some, some concerns about this. Uh, my biggest concern was this amazing app that scans your face and shows you the glasses. So cool. Well, we all know we've done a virtual try-on and something. And of course, when you actually get the product, it doesn't remotely look like it did when you try it on virtually. So Warby Parker actually overcame that objection because one of the things they do is they will ship you five frames for free. You literally just pick five frames and they will ship them to you along with a return label. This way you can actually try the frames in person, make sure they fit and make sure they're perfect before you order the actual glasses. When you pick the frame, you like you send them all back and then they make your glasses and send you out. The finished product is actually a really cool way to shop for glasses. The packaging was top-notch and they made it super easy to send the frames back to them with a prepaid return label. But what really blew my mind is every single frame that I picked of those five looked exactly as they did in the virtual try-on, by using that additional technology and the iPhone, they are really able to scale things between your pupils and your nose and the bridge and the corners of your head, and really accurately show what these will look like. And the pictures that I took in the app were almost indistinguishable from the pictures that I took in real life. When I actually had these glasses and frames in my hand. So being super impressed with everything thus far, of course, I went ahead and pick the frame that I liked and I bought it and purchasing. These were also exceptionally easy again in the apple ecosystem, I use apple pay a lot and it was a one click checkout. I said, these are the frames I want. And I hit the apple pay button and boom, I'm done. I spent$95. The shipping was free. Pretty sure there was sales tax, but we can't get around that at checkout. The expectations were very, very clear. It would take a few days to make the frames and the lenses, and it would take a couple days to ship. And to my surprise, about four days later, I had the finished glasses in my hand and they were absolutely perfect. I love them. The quality was just as good as all the big brand name glasses I've ever bought. And I was just so impressed at how easy the process was that the glasses looked great. They had a ton of options to choose from, and it was really just a pleasant experience now because I had no problems. I didn't have to really engage with their service at all, but I did have to send the old frames back. The communication was excellent. As soon as they got the frames back, I got emails saying, Hey, we received your frames. Thank you so much. We hope you loved them. And as a result of this positive experience like instantly, I became a huge advocate for them. Everyone who shops for glasses. I tell them before you buy anything, just check out Warby Parker. Now they don't get into things. If you have a stigmatism, if you have complicated prescriptions, they're probably not the place for you. And you probably already know you're spending more than$300 for a pair of glasses. But if you're like me and you have a pretty basic prescription and everything is simple, you just go ahead your order, you get your glasses. And they're awesome. I should add that. After I made the purchase, they do send you a link to provide a prescription. You do have to provide a prescription and you do have to go to your eye doctor to get an eye exam. And that prescription has to be valid. But of course, this is all legal issues that can't provide glasses without a valid prescription. So that was certainly expected. And once you do it once now that prescriptions on file. So if I want to order sunglasses a week later, it is a one-click checkout process. And I don't have to worry about anything. So now that I have shared this story about Warby Parker, I want to go back and I want to look at each element of this shopping experience. One by one, this is called a customer journey. And as I said in the beginning of this podcast, many people, I know myself included. I enjoy taking pictures and, um, uh, photography is a hobby of mine. And I took some pictures at a friend's wedding and I posted them on Facebook. And a month later, someone called and said, Hey, I love those wedding pictures. Do you want to shoot my wedding? Now at the time I was not a professional photographer. Uh, I told this prospective client that I'm not a professional, but I will do it if they're okay with that. And they were great and the wedding went awesome. The pictures came out awesome. Everything was great. Post those on Facebook and sure enough, a month later, I get another call. Hey, do you want to book a wedding? Do you want to book a wedding? Do you book a wedding? Now I fell into this. So I really enjoyed wedding photography, but I don't want to make a living out of it. So I didn't really give a lot of thought to those typical business things that you should. I wasn't really looking at overhead and averaging out the cost of my equipment and all these things. I already owned everything. So if I made a few thousand dollars shooting a wedding and spending a day, it was fantastic. I loved it. It was perfect. And the way I looked at it, I was getting paid for my hobby. But here's the thing. I know that a lot of people fall into this exact same situation and it keeps growing and growing and growing, but it gave me the insight to understand how easy it is to start making money and getting involved in a business, but not really giving a lot of thought about how it happened or what the processes are, or even what the price of the product should be or what my profit margin should be or how much it's going to cost me to buy replacement equipment down the line. Or if I have to hire a second photographer to help with a wedding, there's all these things that come into play like with any business. But when you're just doing as a hobby, you don't give it a lot of thought. But considering how many people I personally know who started something as a hobby, I have a friend who was an accountant. They worked in a corporate accounting world, but they started doing taxes for their friends on the side as a hobby before they knew it, they were a full-time accountant on their own, and they own their own accounting business. Another person I know was working for someone doing landscaping. Eventually they bought their own tractor and a little trailer to pull the tractor around and they started getting gigs on the side to mow lawns before they knew it. They were in a full-time lawnmowing business. And I'm sure you have an example of your own of how you got into your business. Now it's probably no surprise. If I said, if you thought about this beforehand, and you knew this was going to happen, or you wanted to start this, you might've spent more time considering, well, how will I market this? How will I manage this? What should I charge? How will I pay taxes? What's my liability insurance. How much is it going to cost to hire an employee? How do I scale? Once I get past the first 20 or 30 clients, and I can't mow the lawn anymore, I have to hire other people to mow the lawn. But if I'm mowing the lawn all day, how am I going to get new business on and on and on, you have all these questions and you're trying to piece it together while you're trying to run a business, but I'm going to assume that you're already up and running, but you did not go through this careful planning process upfront because so few small businesses really do it. And even though it makes a lot of sense, it's just not the reality of how a lot of businesses are started. So let's go back to that Warby Parker and let's go through this customer journey. And the goal here today is I want you to listen to this podcast with a pencil and paper in front of you. And I want you to take some notes as we go along that pertain to your business and your customer journey. Now you can just Google image, customer journey map, and you'll find a lot of examples and listen, there's no standard here. There's, they're usually all roughly the same. Some will show something. Some won't show other things, but I'm going to walk through the most basic version of this. The first thing, if you picture the customer journey, you're going to draw five rectangles next to each other. So put that paper in landscape mode. And at the top, I want you to draw five rectangles. The first rectangle, all the way to the left top corner, you're going to write awareness. Now awareness is the first step in a customer journey. Awareness of course is where did they hear about you? How was your business found? How do people learn about your product or service? How did they become aware? Now there's a lot of ways this can happen. It could be Google. It could be a Google search. And you know, my, my car broke down. I need a mechanic, mechanics near me and boom, you're the first one that shows up. So you get the call. It could be word of mouth. That friend says something you're in a class. And someone says, Hey, check out this company, Warby Parker. They're pretty cool. What they're doing with glasses, right? That was a perfect word of mouth awareness. I'd never heard of this company before, until someone else mentioned it to me. If you have a retail store, it could simply be dried by traffic, right? If you're on a busy road, someone drives by you have a nice window display. They say, oh, that looks cool. Let me go check out this place. Maybe do some advertising. So someone sees you in a newspaper or they see you on TV or social media, right? Public relations. Maybe you had an article done about your business. Maybe you created a piece of content, like a blog article or a newspaper article or a YouTube video or something where someone was searching for the answer to something. And they come across you or they come across your business. And now they say, oh, okay, let's check these people out. Let's see what's going on. So that's the awareness phase of the customer journey. Once you move out of awareness, a person moves into the consideration phase. So in that next rectangle on your paper, I want you to write consideration. The consideration phase is the phase where customers have to decide if you are the answer to their problem. So in this phase, you want to create validation for the product or service that you offer. You want to start building trust. This could be landing pages that go into a lot more detail about what you offer. Maybe it's comparison, shopping tools or articles that will compare you to your competitors on your own website. So they can see where you shine. And others might fall short. You could have testimonial content, right? What are people saying about your business? Oh, Hey, look, my neighbor down the road, put a testimonial up here that says this business is great. They're the, they're the ones who want to use. If you, if you mow your lawn, they do a great job, right? So this consideration phase is important because if someone goes online and they see bad reviews, or they see nothing at all about your business, they might be apprehensive. Like I was with Barbie Parker. Am I going to get a quality pair of glasses here? And in the Warby Parker example, the biggest concern I had is are these going to be quality? And I'm like, am I going to see? Well, when I purchase these and the website and the app overcame those objections immediately by one saying, we're going to send you all the frames for free. So you have nothing to worry about. There. You can hold these. You can put them on. You can make sure you like, I mean, Hey, by the way, if you don't like any of it, just send it all back. There's no obligation. We're not gonna charge you one. Penny, you go on, you can go back to the mall and go to your, you know, pay your three or$500 for a pair of glasses and be happy with those, no obligation and no pressure that in the consideration phase for me, made it easier to get to the next phase, which is the purchase itself. So now in that third rectangle, I want you to write the word purchase purchases. Exactly what it sounds like, how easy and fluid is it for someone to buy the product or service that you're selling? Can they do it online? Is it easy? Can they schedule it online? Is there a mobile app they can use? Uh, do you accept all the payment methods? And I'm gonna, I'm going to do another podcast on this because I, I have a pet peeve. There's still businesses today that don't take American express, uh, or don't take credit cards at all. And I'm sorry, I, I don't care how much it costs to take a credit card. It usually averages about 3%. For most businesses. There is no way in hell that you're going to save more money by not spending that 3% than being able to accept any payment method possible. You need to make sure you accept any form of money that someone is going to give you. Tesla is now accepting Bitcoin as a payment method on their websites to purchase a Tesla, take anything that someone is willing to give you and pay the small fee because it is worth it again, build it into your cost of doing business, but you have to accept every payment option possible. You want to take PayPal visa, MasterCard discover American express apple pay is so big, especially for people like me. I'm obsessed with apple pay. It is a one-click checkout process that makes my life so easy. Make sure you accept every payment method. I, and I'm sure you have been disappointed at some point where you got to the end of the line for purchasing something and you realize they don't take a credit card that you intended to use to make the purchase. What a frustrating experience the purchase phase also is where you can set clear expectations as to what the customer can expect. So in my case with Barbie Parker, well, how long is it going to take to make these glasses? Uh, how long is it going to take to ship? How are you going to ship them? Is this something I'm going to expect in two or three days? Or is it going to be two, three weeks? And of course always try to exceed those expectations as Warby Parker did. They said, I believe at the time it was either seven to 10 or 10 to 14 days, but I literally had these finished glasses in four days, also purchasing in their app, the same app where I was able to do the virtual try-on again was super simple. I checked the frame that I wanted and I hit pay with apple pay and I was done. So now in the next box, you're going to write service. Service is everything that happens after the sale, right? So what if there's a problem? What if these glasses aren't correct? How do I send them back? Can I go online and print a return label? Is there someone I can call? If I have a question, what if I need help adjusting them? Can I take them to a local eyeglass place for an adjustment or a repair? If there's a problem, uh, maybe you have a service and it's something that needs to be set up or a product or software. Is there an onboarding process where once you pay for this product or service, you now have an onboarding team. That's going to walk you through, getting started, how to use it, how to make the most of it, right? Is there a returns process? All of these things kind of fall under service, which has all the things that happen after someone makes a purchase. And then in the last box is going to be advocacy. Uh, or you could call it loyalty, whatever you want to call it. But this is the best and most powerful box of all, because this is where your customers become the word of mouth machine. This is where anyone who talks about glasses. I say, Hey, before you do anything, check out Warby Parker. They are awesome. Word of mouth, testimonials, customers, driving traffic on social media and your existing customers coming back over and over again for repeat business, I lost a pair of glasses. So a year later I bought another pair from Warby Parker. I was loyal. I need to buy sunglasses. My sunglasses just broke. I'm going to go to Warby Parker and I'm going to buy my sunglasses because I can trust them. Now I've had multiple trips down this customer journey that have all been really, really positive. So now that you have these boxes across the page, what you need to do your homework is to think about how each one of those boxes pertains to your business or to your product or service right here. I use the example of Warby Parker because it was a real life example of a business that I had zero awareness of. And I went from knowing nothing to being an advocate for this business in a very short period of time. So underneath your awareness box, take a little time and think about how do people find out about your product or service? How did they find out about your business? Where does your business come from? You probably already know the answer of whatever the biggest driver of your business is. If it's word of mouth and every time you get a client, because you've never done any advertising whatsoever, they say, Hey, I got your number from X, Y, or Z. Then, you know, word of mouth is super important for your business, but still think about what are other places where I could even get more new business in. I live in New York and I just learned about this invasive species of a bug called an Ash beetle that is literally killing all the Ash trees in north America. And it's, from what I understand in a few years, there will no longer be any Ash trees in America, in north America, maybe the world. And of course I have a few Ash trees on my property that were dead and I wasn't aware of this, but when someone came out to give me an estimate on cutting these trees down, they noted, Hey, look, you can see all the millions of little holes where the bugs burrow, and they go in there and they nest and they destroyed the tree. Now, one example of awareness would be creating a piece of content. Now, again, this could be a YouTube video. This could be an Instagram. This could be any piece of content that your business can create. And in this case, using the Ash tree, as an example, if you're a, a company that does tree work, it would be great to have a little article about Ash trees and this invasive species. That's killing them, noting the town in area that you serve. Now, if I go online and say, Hey, uh, you know, why are all my Ash trees dying? You now have that opportunity to possibly get in front of a new client who will see your article that says, Hey, the reason your Ash trees are dying is they're all drying and it's going to happen no matter what you should call us. You have a serious problem on your hands, because at some point, all these Ash trees are going to start falling and wrecking your house. Call us today. We can come and take care of that for you. You are making them aware of a problem. They may not even know they had, I didn't know I had this problem. Apparently everyone in the Northeast has this problem right now. And it's spreading westward, but a great piece of content is a great opportunity to create awareness. So again, think about the things you already do. And then think about some things that you could do to create more awareness about your business. Now, move on to consideration. This is your opportunity to prove that you are the answer to this person's problem or this business's problem, whether it's a business to business or business, to consumer, whatever model your business is, this consideration phase is the opportunity for you to prove that you're the one to go with. And again, without going too deep into this, YouTube is an incredible venue for you to prove yourself. Everyone always would think that if they could just get on Oprah, that would make their entire career. You can get in front of more people than get in front of Oprah. By being on YouTube, there are billions of users on YouTube and you have the opportunity to capture all of that. It's incredible. Don't blow it. This is a great place to add value to this consideration phase, but we're talking about your business. So what are the things people do when they consider you think about those things and list them out, and then again, list out some things you think you should do that might make people consider you more often than not. This is also a great area to start comparing yourself to the competition, but that's another conversation. So now jump over to that purchase section is your checkout process easy? Is it easy to give you money? Do you X do you accept every type of money possible? Do I have to make a million clicks or can I just click pay with apple pay? And I'm done. Do I have to call you to schedule an appointment or wait for someone to call me back? Or can I just schedule the appointment through the website? What can I do that makes this purchase incredibly convenient and easy now, again, list out the things that you currently have. What's great. Okay, great. You accept all the credit cards. That's a good start, but your website kind of sucks or you don't take apple pay right now. This is something that's important. Uh, you should have contactless payments, especially now post COVID. We, we need, uh, we're in a different world. People don't want to hand over a credit card. Do you take a contactless payment in your store? Do you take apple pay on your website? This is important. So make sure if this is not already happening, this is where you'd add this to the list of things to look out for, because you want to create an incredible customer journey. The next box under service, just listen to any other episode of this podcast, because the whole point of this podcast is that by having an incredible service experience, you drive people into that loyalty and advocacy stage much, much quicker. And as I've always said, I believe the sweet spot competitively speaking for not just small businesses, but virtually all businesses is at that intersection of marketing and service. You are going to sell something and you might be great at promoting it and pricing it and creating an, a fantastic value proposition. But your service sucks and ruins everything. The sweet spot is by getting both of those things, right? If you can drive people into this journey and you can bring them out of the journey and keep them happy all along, this is where you will see huge, huge success. So I'm not going to get into all these things under service, but you know what it is, it's everything that happens after the sale goes under this service column. What can you do after the sale to make things easier? Again, I'm going to go back to YouTube. Can you create a video that helps someone with the new product or service they just bought? Is there care instructions that maybe you could make a little video out of? Is there an onboarding process that you could add video content to, to make it easier to understand whatever it may be, take some time and think about what you have and what you could add. Lastly, in the loyalty stage, again, I'm not going to go too deep into this because a lot of this podcast in general, talks about creating strong and long lasting customer relationships that will automatically make loyal customers. But think about, is there incentive for someone to spread the word? I got a call out to companies that have, uh, that do a really good job with word of mouth and driving traffic from other customers. Uh, if anyone has played with Robin hood or weeble, uh, with, with stocks, these two things make buying a stock, uh, so easy and so much like a video game. It for me is personally slightly embarrassing. Uh, I feel like I'm in a carnival sometimes, and it doesn't even feel real, but everything is free. If you ever check these out, I'm not, I'm not really saying anything bad about I I've tried both of them. They're both decent, but they really push this idea of, Hey, refer a friend and get three free stocks and big fireworks, go off on the screen, say, you, you could get a share of apple or you could get a share of Microsoft or Google, or even Amazon, if you just refer one or two friends to the platform and sure enough, it works. Everyone goes and goes, oh, I want to get that apple stock. You might get apple, but chances are, you're going to get a penny stock that you don't care about, but nonetheless, they are driving advocacy in that final stage and they're doing it really well. So it's something to look at. Even if you have no interest in selling stocks or buying stocks, take a look at their apps to see how they game-ify and make it fun to share with your friends. And then again, under that box list out, the things that you do that, you know, you do well that creates loyalty or advocacy with your customers. And think about what you could do. Is there some type of referral program, is there a kickback program? You want someone to tell a friend, uh, but they're not going to lie to their friend for a small, you know,$10 bonus or a$20 coupon. Uh, now if you say you're gonna give them thousands of dollars then yeah. Maybe, maybe they'd say, Hey, yeah, deal with this company. They're great. Even, even though you're not, but for the most part, uh, if you, if you have a respectable offer where you say, Hey, I'm trying to grow this, uh, it would mean the world to me. If you could share this with one or two people, uh, and by the way, if they come and they actually do business with us, you know, I'll take 50 bucks off the next service. And again, I, this is all arbitrary. It depends on what your business is, how much you want to put up here. But, and that's just one phase of referral program. Like that is just one thing that would go under loyalty, but think about it listed out and take action. So now that you've got this all written out and you're looking at this customer journey, really think about it from beginning to end now, like so many things we discuss, I don't expect you to go out and build some incredible customer journey over the next week. So your homework is take one thing from each square. So one from awareness of one from consideration, one from the purchase, one from service and one from loyalty implement one a month over the next five months, whatever the easiest thing you can do in each box do that right now. So right now do something for awareness, whatever that easiest thing is, do it, do it. Now, start thinking about it now implemented over the next 30 days. When you move on to consideration a month from now, do the same thing. Pick the easiest thing that you could be doing and just make it happen. We're not trying to build this customer journey overnight. It takes work and you've got a lot of other stuff you got to deal with, but don't forget about it because in the long run, building out this incredible customer journey will build incredible customer relationships and it will drive repeat business. And it will drive word of mouth business, which is the best because it is free or close to it. If you're paying out of referral, but you get the point. I hope you enjoy it this episode again, please, if you enjoy,
Speaker 2:If you've gotten anything out of this, please click that follow or subscribe button because that is what keeps us going. And I am so appreciative when you do. And since we're talking about referrals, if you're listening this far, tell one friend business associate, maybe you come have a sales guy come to your office next week, let them know about the podcast. Spread the word. I'd greatly. Appreciate it. Have a question I would love to hear from you. You should hit us up on the Facebook page. It's the marketing and service.com podcast. Facebook page. It's free. You just join it and I'm there. And I would love to talk to you. You want to shoot me an email? Shoot me an email. justin@marketingandservice.com. It's easy. J U S T I n@marketingandservice.com. And I'd love to hear from you. I want to know what you got going on. And what is your biggest business challenge? Maybe there's a guest you want to hear on here? Just shoot me a note. Hit me up on Facebook, but I look forward to meeting you. I'm Justin Bruzzo marketing and service.com have a great day. Okay.