Supply Chain Snafus? Try Customer Mapping To Win Back Loyalty

Customer loyalty has taken a big hit over the past several months thanks to supply chain issues. Customers are more willing to get what they need somewhere else if their usual suspects have empty shelves.

So how do you get those customers back into the fold (besides keeping an eagle eye on the Suez Canal)? It’s never been more important to provide an exceptional, consistent customer experience across all of your channels. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty tall order. So let’s start at the micro level and make our way over to the macro.

Be the customer

If you’ve already mapped out your customer’s typical journey, great! But if you haven’t, now’s your chance. The journey you’re about to embark on is going to require 2 things:

• A place where you can store a bunch of screenshots
• A journal

Now, what you’re going to do is either follow your existing customer journey map or invent your own as you go, and you’re going to go through it as a customer.

1. Start by searching for your brand on Google. What ads come up? Take a screenshot of them. How do you feel when you see them? Write that down in your journal.
2. Now to your brand’s website. Take a screenshot of it. How does it make you feel? What do you like and not like about it? Does it match up with the message you saw in the search results? Log all of this in your journal.
3. Now go ahead and leave the website – you’re not ready to buy yet! You should start getting ads on social media and display following you around for the next few days. Take screenshots of those too. How many of them are there? What do they say? Does what they say match up with everything else you’ve seen so far? How are you feeling about the brand now? Write it all down.
4. Now it’s time to take this (fake, but informative) relationship to the next level! Go back to the website and sign up for emails. Take screenshots of that process. Is it easy? What’s the message? Is the value of it clearly communicated? Keep logging in your journal!
5. Time to spend some money! Whether it’s via email or a social media ad, click through and purchase something from your brand. Take more screenshots and document everything. How is the process? Is it frustrating or seamless? Is the messaging clear? Do you feel drowned or informed by notifications? Log it all!
6. Use the product. How does it make you feel? Does it make you trust the brand more or less? Would you recommend it to others? Keep taking pictures and journaling!

Time to go macro

Now that you’ve done this process and you know where the issues are with your messaging, it’s time to go fix it.

Stop.

Don’t fix it.

While the above process is useful, there is one little flaw with it: a lot of it is based solely on your opinion. The problem with that is there are an awful lot of other opinions out there that you’re trying to cater to! So how are you going to fix your broken message?

You’re not going to do it with your gut instincts. This is where you need cold hard data, and lots of it. And the best place to get that is with AI.

Your brain is a marvel. It can take in stimuli, recognize patterns and make decisions. AI is like a whole bunch of brains that can take in way more information, spot patterns more easily by performing billions of calculations per second, and can give you data about what’s working and what’s not.

Let’s look at a real-world example from Walgreens of how AI can help you make better business decisions (and maybe even surprise you).

“For a long time, everyone thought shorter subject lines were more effective. But we were surprised to find that a lot of times, longer subject lines perform really well. There was an instance where I had an executive email me and say, ‘Hey, what, what’s up with these super long subject lines?’ And I was able to say, they’re long because they’re the most effective. And that’s all proven by data. And so it’s always a good feeling when you know you’re making the right decisions because you’ve got the data behind it.”

– Ryan Duritsa, Digital Creative Director, Walgreens

If you’re going to provide a consistent, high-converting, customer-pleasing experience across all your channels to millions of people, the ONLY way you will ever be able to do it at scale is with the help of AI’s megabrain. Don’t worry about customer loyalty – we’ll help you get it back.

via GIPHY