Building a successful customer journey is vital for forming and maintaining strong customer relationships and business growth. And automation can enhance that process…if you know how to apply it properly.
To learn more about automating the customer journey, I recently sat down with Wild Fig’s Chief Creative Officer, Kari Switala. Here, she shares why it’s important to map out your customer journey and how automation can help you build a process that keeps your customers happy and engaged for the long term.
Good question. When we go through this process with clients, it's pretty elemental. Prior to our meeting, I ideally have them write out the steps of their customer journey on a piece of paper. Then we'll go through it together with their team and ask questions. For example: A new customer comes in, so you send them a welcome email…what does that look like? And what's the next point of contact?
Then what ultimately happens (especially if there are multiple people involved in the meeting) is that someone will say, “Wait, no, we actually do this and this….” or “Wait a second, we do that? I didn't know that we did that. When did we start doing that?” So documenting the customer journey—even if you're not doing it as consistently as you’d like—then having that discussion with team members who are involved in the new customer experience, is key.
Next, we want to make sure the process retains a personal connection once it’s automated. So, when we look at what can or should be automated, we look at things that are repetitive—like a welcome email. On the other hand, something like a thank-you card—where you ideally want to add a personal touch from the staff—that you don't want to automate.
It’s looking at what makes sense, what's repeatable, and also whether you have a lot of variables that change on a regular basis.
For example, if an email needs to be adjusted based on the type of service, or if the next step in the process is different depending on the type of customer or scenario, that's not an ideal task to automate. It has to be something that's repeatable and that makes sense with the mode of delivery. So I think that's probably the biggest thing to consider when looking at what to automate, as well as where you want to add those personal touches.
Definitely over-automation—where they try to automate everything.
You can automate things in a way that still feels like there's a human connection, with personalization, for example. You also want to make sure the content aligns with your brand and is written to engage your audience and make them feel…at home, for lack of a better word.
But I think sometimes people get so excited about the automation and having all this work done for them that they forget about that piece of it. They end up over-automating, and you can tell. You can tell when, for example, when a chatbot’s sending you messages, right?
So that personalized experience is a really important factor in keeping your messaging engaging. Maintaining that personal human touch is vital, because people do business with people, not with businesses. That’s really important—especially in an AI-driven world. Maintaining a personal touch in your marketing helps make your audience feel special and establish a real connection with your brand.
At Wild Fig, we work to build long-term relationships with our clients, so taking that time to make sure the customer journey experience is really well done is very important to us. After all, that's their first taste of who we are.
When we're documenting the customer journey, we're looking for opportunities to ensure that every customer is having the same experience and to free up the staff’s time so they can focus on other things. But we also want to look for opportunities to make the experience better.
Back when I worked as a marketing director for an accounting firm, we documented all the steps of our customer journey, then looked through it and said, “Okay, how does this align with our client retention, and where are there opportunities to enhance the experience? Also, where are clients dropping off?”
Here’s what we found: While clients were initially excited about finding a great new accounting firm to work with, the excitement ebbed when they had to write that first check. That spot in the journey was a major pain point. They started off on a high point, then, like a roller coaster, started to dip. They were at a low point for a while, because once they paid their fee, they then had to gather all the documents the accountant needed…which no one wants to do, right? It’s so time-consuming.
The next time they hit a high point was typically when they got their first set of financials and had their first meeting with the accountant. That was the highest point in the relationship, and it would never go back to that point unless something happened. For example, if they had an issue with the IRS they needed help with, having someone that could solve that problem for them brought them back to that high point. But after that, we’d never see them reach that point again, because everything became automatic. The wow factor wasn't there anymore.
So we had to take that into account. We knew they were going to be in a world of hurt when gathering all those documents, so what could we do to make them feel better about it? We ended up creating some messages around that, and sent automated emails to let them know, “Hey, we know this probably sucks, and it’s the last thing you want to do, but rest assured, once we've got these pieces, it's gonna feel much better.”
It’s important to think about the emotional experience the customer has and how you can leverage automation to help smooth things out and avoid huge dips in the relationship.
Yes, and also places where they have a good experience. Those are the perfect times to ask for reviews or referrals! Where are those high points in the relationship? How can we encourage the client to do something with their excitement that's going to help us work with more people like them?
But then, of course, we’re also looking at the places where they might drop off, or where there may be lulls in the relationship. We experienced this when we redid our own process, actually. At first, we were like, whoa, okay, we need to provide way more education, way more information. So we put a really good plan in place…but we overdid it. We were actually giving clients too much information, and they were starting to feel overwhelmed.
So really, you're looking for multiple signals to help you adjust your process as you go. That’s the beauty of automation. When you first document and automate the journey, you're going to have to go back and tweak it on a pretty regular basis. You give it a couple of months to run, or run a certain number of clients through it, and get their feedback. You also take the temperature of the staff to learn how they’re feeling about the process and what they’re hearing from clients. Is it helping? Is it hurting? Are there things you could improve?
You can’t just build it once and it’s done. You have to take the time to measure how effective it is and determine if there are things you can do to improve the experience.
I think it goes back to that initial question of when you should automate a process and when you shouldn't.
If there are multiple factors, or if the experience is going to be different for each person, it's not an opportunity for automation. There's no way it can work, and if you try to build something for every scenario, inevitably, you're going to waste a ton of time. For example, maybe some aspect of the customer journey is better handled with a phone call versus trying to automate it. Or automating a task ends up negatively impacting your customer experience.
So we look for what's repeatable and scalable. Those are the kinds of things you want to automate. Then look for where there are opportunities to enhance the process or create more of a personal experience, where an element of automation might still be helpful.
For example, say that when a new customer comes on board, they get a certain number of emails sent to them, and then a member of the team gets an alert to send them a personalized thank-you card and gift. Even though it's a physical task, someone's getting an automated alert so you ensure the customer experience stays consistent across the board. This helps you make sure the ball isn’t dropped—that you've got those processes documented, and people are getting reminders for the things they need to do.
I think looking at how the more consistent communication that automation provides can improve the customer experience, and how that allows you to not only retain customers longer, but also improve sales.
For example, say a customer buys one online course from you. From there, you continue to nurture that relationship with automation, encouraging them to take the next step of buying another course or package. In that way, automation can definitely increase customer retention and sales.
But ultimately, you really need to focus on ensuring that automation helps you provide a great customer experience. Because then, customers will stay with you and refer you to others.
When we talk about email marketing, the obvious ones are opens and clicks. You want to make sure your customers are receiving the email, actually opening it, and clicking on any of the links you provide—whether it's a CTA or a piece of educational material.
Another thing might be, if you have forms they need to fill out, ensuring that you’re monitoring those responses. You can set up some automation to gently remind them to fill out the form if they don’t do so right away.
Whatever that main call-to-action you want them to take—that’s the most important element to track.
A while ago, we worked with a client, LearningRx, who does trainings to help kids overcome learning challenges. They had a process where someone would come into the office for an initial assessment, then schedule a consultation to walk through the results. (Having gone through this myself as a parent, it can be pretty alarming to get those results!) As they go over the results, they talk about LearningRx and why it’s a proven strategy for helping kids overcome these challenges. At that point, they provide a plan tailored to the child.
Ideally, they’d get a commitment that day. But what would often happen is, for a variety of reasons (sticker shock, or maybe one of the parents wasn’t able to attend the consultation, for example) a decision wasn’t made right away. They needed a way to stay in touch and nurture that relationship.
So what we did that ended up being really effective was that, once a person got past a couple of touchpoints, we’d put them into an automated campaign that would send them quarterly emails to check in. We personalized the emails with the name of the child, so it wasn’t just “your son or daughter.”
And even though the emails were completely automated, we wrote them in a way that expressed empathy and compassion for what the parent was going through. In many cases, the parent wanted to sign their child up, but either the timing wasn’t right or they didn’t have the funds for it at the time. So writing copy from a compassionate, empathetic standpoint was important, as was personalizing it with their child’s name.
When we sent those quarterly emails, they'd convert probably 10-20%. It was a nice, gentle reminder for those who weren’t ready to sign up initially, but now things have changed and they’re ready.
That is a great example of how you can leverage personalization without it feeling creepy. Anytime you can keep the client’s perspective and emotions in mind when you create your email copy, that helps combat any potentially creepy vibes from the personalization piece.
Yes. We recently went through this process with our client, Two Bettys. They had brought a new tool into the mix and were changing up their staffing structure, so there were several “aha” moments that caused them to make changes to improve their customer experience, including implementing a quicker quote process.
In their case, so many of their customers stay with them because of who they are as people, what they value, and how they care for their employees. So I think they had an “aha” moment about some of the things that had been adjusted due to staffing issues or to address other problems. They had to walk through all of those changes to determine if they were working or if they should be doing something else, and getting everybody on the same page.
A lot of companies go through the same thing, where you create a plan, then things happen, and business changes, so the plan gets adjusted and adjusted again, and it's now in its 12th variation. So they have to bring together everyone involved in the process to review it on a regular basis, making sure it’s still effective and they’re all on the same page. I think that is probably the most common “aha” moment I've seen when we're meeting with clients.
Another “aha” moment with the Two Bettys’ process came after they changed how they do quotes. Previously, clients would contact them and speak with someone to get a quote for cleaning. With their new process, they have an online quoting tool that provides faster quotes…which is great for the customer! And it was converting customers at a higher rate, which was great for business!
But that tool removed some of the communication the customer would typically have with the Two Bettys team, so some of that personal touch went away. This created challenges around making sure customer expectations are set for their first cleaning appointment. Their takeaway from examining this process was that they needed to set clear expectations for both the customer and the Two Bettys team, and work to increase communication with the customer within the first three months they were with them.
They found that this three-month period is crucial—if a customer stayed with them for three months, they’d stay long-term…but if they left within the first three months, the chances of them coming back was slim. Communication during that time is key to making sure they could retain all those customers they were converting with their new quoting tool. It was such a valuable outcome from examining their process, and making changes accordingly will help them keep their clients and staff happy long-term.
Thank you, Kari, for sharing your insights with us about automating the customer journey!
Want to explore customer journey automation, or learn more about what a successful customer journey looks like? Schedule a discovery call to chat about your needs and how Wild Fig can help.