A Napier Webinar: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Using B2B Customer Journeys

A key component of any successful B2B technology marketing campaign is the analysis of customer’s behaviour and the process they go through when choosing products and services. Customer journeys allow you to map these behaviours and provide a tailored marketing and communications plan to quickly move the customer from awareness to opportunity.

Watch our on-demand, ‘A Practical Guide to Understanding and Using B2B Customer Journeys’, where we discuss what customer journeys are, and cover:

• A simple four-stage model to getting started with customer journeys
• Example customer journey maps
• How analysing customer touchpoints delivers tangible results
• Why different personas follow different journeys
• Designing campaigns to accelerate customers along their journeys

Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.

Napier Webinar: ‘A Practical Guide to Understanding and Using B2B Customer Journeys’ Transcript

Speakers: Mike Maynard

Hi, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar, where we’re going to talk about customer journeys. So customer journeys are really, really interesting and an important part, I think of any approach to marketing. But maybe the interesting thing to do is to take a look at, you know what some people say about customer journeys. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to pick Drake. Now, obviously, you know, maybe maybe r&b stars are perhaps not your useful, or most used quote for information about marketing. But he’s got a lot to say about journeys. Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination, this is very true.

The customer journey, experience treats teaches you an awful lot about the company that you’re working with. But I think more importantly, sometimes the journey is actually really amazing. And as Drake says, you know, sometimes you’ll look back from that journey or wish you could go there again, because of all the experiences. And I think this is this is really important is that, when we think about, you know, the companies that we’re promoting as marketers, it’s really important to remember that you are not just promoting the product or the service. But actually, it’s important to make sure that whole journey towards becoming a customer is a journey that people can enjoy. And they find useful and helpful.

Because ultimately, that’s what’s gonna make you know what your product is today. So it’s going to be really important to actually, you know, build good and effective customer journeys, because a lot of the way customers perceive, you know, b2b companies today is around, you know, how they experience going from, you know, just sort of starting to talk to the company all the way through to becoming a customer. Anyway, we’re gonna move on and have a look quickly at, you know, the different things we’ll talk about today in the webinar, and then dive into customer journeys themselves. So today, we’re going to do a little bit of history, you know, where does this concept of customer journeys come from, it’s actually a relatively new concept just over 30 years old. We’re going to talk about the sales funnel, which actually, I guess was the original customer journey, and why it was always wrong. We’re going to talk about a concept called the buying journey DNA very closely linked to customer journeys, as the kinds of things you need to think about as you build your customer journeys. And within that, particularly, we are going to look at buying styles. So what people are how people approach buying particular b2b setting.

One of the things I think, you know, a lot of people associate with customer journeys is customer journey maps. And customer journey maps are really interesting. It’s kind of a graphical visual representation of the sequence of steps that someone goes through in terms of starting out as a prospect going all the way through to becoming a customer, and hopefully staying with you as a customer throughout the product or service lifestyle. So we’ll have a look at mapping and give some examples. And lastly, we’re talking about next steps.

So the kinds of things you can do after listening to this webinar, to hopefully help improve your marketing campaigns. So let’s start off with a brief history of customer journeys. As I said, customer journeys are a relatively new thing. They were actually first introduced in a book called service wisdom that was published about 34 years ago, by Chip Bell, and Ron Ron’s empathy. So these two guys, were really looking at customer service, rather than necessarily marketing. But they came up with concept of the journey. And they said, the goal of customer journey mapping is to create and retain a deep understanding of the customers experiences, while he or she is traversing the path taken between having a need and getting that need met. So they were very focused on this mapping on this, this idea of, you know, really drawing this graphical representation.

And really, it’s all about, you know, getting inside of the customer’s head, understanding what they’re seeing and feeling and understanding their experiences. So I love that. I think that’s great, you know, really trying to understand the experiences. And so let’s just talk about what actually a customer journey is. And so, a customer journey from our point of view, this is a Napier definition. I mean, there’s lots of different definitions, but we see it as experiences a customer has, whilst moving from awareness of a product through purchase, to the time the customer no longer interacts with the brand or products. So very simple, similar to the definition of, you know, going from from having a knee to having the need met. But I think it’s really important. I mean, from our point of view, customer journeys. It’s not just about what you do as a brand. You It’s all the experiences that the customer has, it’s definitely something that is more than just what you can influence or control.

And particularly, you know, things like word of mouth information is a key part of a lot of customer journeys, and shouldn’t be underestimated. The next thing to say, is a customer journey is not just about, you know, making someone move from being a prospect to a customer, it’s not just pre purchase, it actually matters, what happens after the purchase. So, you know, customer journeys is not just related to sales and marketing, it’s also related to the whole customer experience. And then lastly, you know, customer journeys, customer journey maps are often used interchangeably, the map is a visual representation. And the journey itself is what the customer experiences. So customer journeys, you know, I think, a fairly obvious thing, you want to track how the customer feels, or how that what they experience, from, you know, this point where they first start moving from awareness, all the way through to when they no longer interact with you. Now, historically, that was very much something that people used to talk about the sales funnel. So this is sales funnel, this is actually the sales funnel, used by Salesforce, and they talk about, you know, going from awareness of the company to interest to evaluation, they need to negotiate the price, then you just close the sale by making a payment, and then you repurchase and that’s kind of their, their concept. It’s great. There’s lots of, you know, really clear stages in there.

But I don’t think we ever really believe that people flow through that funnel in a nice smooth manner. So, you know, once someone starts evaluating, it doesn’t mean they’re going to move straight on to negotiating price. And actually, I think, you know, a lot of people with complex and expensive software products like Salesforce, they may well evaluate, and then go back and be interested, and then come and evaluate again, the following year, you know, very often we see, you know, even hear clients talking about, well, we’re looking at, you know, this CRM package or this other SAS package, but we’re not gonna do it this year, we’re gonna look maybe next year, we’re too busy, or we haven’t got the budget or whatever the issues are. So if we’re to be honest, we never really believed a sales funnel. It’s a great model. You know, and the idea of moving people from one stage to the next, I think, is super important, you know, someone’s in that interest category, getting them to really evaluate, it’s important if they’re evaluating, getting into start talking about negotiating a price. I mean, that is super important. It’s not really reality. And this is certainly something Forrester thought.

So Forrester famously produced this kind of crazy funnel, where they tried to emphasise the fact that buying decisions are complex. And so what you see is you see the funnel, not not being a one way, route, and also not being a single route. So people can go back in the funnel, and they can also take choose to take different routes. And I think this is much more realistic. I mean, that the this diagram, I think, was very widely cited when it came out. And it really made a very clear point. But the reality is, is that people don’t take funnels, they take journeys, and those journeys can take different routes as you go through. So what makes up a journey? What what is the DNA behind the journey?

Well, this concept of the buying journey, DNA was introduced by a guy called Lewis, who wrote a book about why how customers buy very much about b2b purchases. And it talks about several things that make up the buying journey DNA. So behind the buying journey, there’s elements. So the first element we look at the top is triggers. So triggers are what start the journey, what caused people to begin that and that might be having a need. Or it might be some marketing information that exposes opportunities, or indeed, highlights that there’s a need that the customer wasn’t aware of. So we have a trigger that’s important that starts the journey that’s different from the journey itself. And it’s something you’ve really got to focus on. The next item that Louis put in was steps, steps are the customer journeys, we normally talk about it. So they’re the stages of the journey. And it’s really important to understand those steps. But equally, I think, you know, it’s important to realise the journey and the whole DNA of the journey is not just about a sequence of steps. And particularly in b2b, that’s the case. And we’re talking about the steps later. And particularly when we look at some journey maps. He said you got to consider key players.

And the key players are the personas basically, that would create the people who buy the product or influence the purchase or, you know, part of the decision making unit. Or if you’re an American, you probably call it the buying committee and So these these key players are really important. And actually, these key players will often follow different journeys. So, for one product, you don’t necessarily have one definitive journey, it could be different depending upon the persona. We’re talking about buying style. And effectively Lewis position, the buying style is having two axes, people either believe that they’ve got choice, or they go for value. And they want a solution or a product. And we’ll talk about that, because I think this is really important. Quite often, there’s some trendy marketing approaches, which is just well, we have to sell solutions. Actually, you know, if we look at this, not everybody wants a solution.

There’s value drivers or the value proposition that companies offer. And it’s really important to understand, you know, what drives the reasons pushing people to buy. And then correspondingly, the last item is buying concern. So the things that will stop people buy. And this is really interesting, because I think if you look at value drivers, you can have a product that produces obvious value for a customer. So let’s say you’ve got a product that reduces waste in the manufacturing process, it cost 10,000 pounds, it will save the customer, customer 20,000 pounds, there’s, you know, an immediate return on investment, you know, first year you’re actually going to get a 200% return, it’s clearly a good thing. Surely everyone’s going to buy it. And the answer is no, not everybody will buy it. And there’ll be reasons why maybe they don’t buy it, you know, and one particularly good reason might be that there are alternative products that might be cheaper, that have a better ROI. Or, alternatively, there might be a different approach to saving that waste, that doesn’t require investing in a product, it might be changing the manufacturing flow. And so addressing buying concerns is very important. So this is all together, all the things you need to consider when you’re thinking about a customer journey is not just the steps, what we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on a couple of these. And the first thing we’re really going to focus on his buying style, because I think this is particularly interesting for business to business, because a lot of people assume that, you know, conventional wisdom is always the way to go. So what happens is that people have different approaches.

And Lewis said it can be mapped on two axes. And one axes is whether somebody is looking to choose between multiple suppliers, or they’ve got something that drives them to buy from only one supplier. So typically, they’re buying on value on price. And this is this is very interesting. And I think, you know, a lot of people when they’re talking about marketing, they look at price driven customers, we all see that in our markets. And they think, oh, no, we really got to work hard, you know, convincing the customer that our price is the cheapest. And actually, that’s really hard to do. Because the mindset of a value buyer is there is only one supplier that can provide what I need, I need the cheapest price, only one supplier can provide the cheapest price, they are typically quite closed in the way they approach supplier selection. And actually, it’s usually far better to look at buyers who consider they have a choice and market to them because they’re much more willing to consider multiple vendors. Unless, of course, you’re prepared to be the lowest price supplier. On the other axes, it’s really interesting. And Lewis said something about today, you know, I think most marketers are like, Oh, you shouldn’t sell products, you should sell solutions. And actually, you know, Louis said no, there’s two sorts of buyers. You know, one source knows they’ve got a problem, they got a need. But they don’t know what’s going to satisfy that need. They don’t know what they want. And the other type of buyer is they’ve got a need, and they know exactly what they want. You know, and this, this might be a case of, you know, somebody who needs a particularly in an M five nut and bolt, they know what they want, they know what they’re gonna buy, it’s not necessarily a solution sell. But equally, you could offer you know, products to customers that are looking to attach wings to aircraft where you know, they have a need, they may not have a defined solution, so the solution cell could come in there. So I think it’s important to remember that and remember that there are customers who believe that they want value, typically something bought on price, or something that they know is going to deliver a certain level of quality at a certain price and people who want products.

And, you know, Lewis actually went on and he talked about, you know, these different approaches and how they might approach buying. So he talks about Starbucks as being you know, somebody knows they need a product they want value If so, if you know you want a cup of coffee, you’re going to potentially go to Starbucks, you know what you’re going to get, you know, the price is what the price is going to be. And it’s going to be better than, you know, some sort of more sort of bespoke coffee shop where perhaps the coffee might be better, but you’re actually going to pay a lot more money. So he talks about that product value kind of axes there. And if someone believes they’ve got choice, but they want a product, then typically they’re going to have a sort of select approach. So they’re going to look at the suppliers and offer the product, they’re going to put the list of products that are available in they’re going to kind of rank them. And this is where, you know, you’ll see a lot of, for example, technical sales being done on data sheets, where it’s important to get all the information that the customer needs, because they know what product they want. And they know they know the matrix is going to meet all the specs is going to meet. And they just want to sort and select you need to be in that shortlist. If you don’t provide the data, they won’t be able to so on select easily, you won’t actually be one of the suppliers that they consider. If they believe they’ve got choice, and they’ve they’ve, they need a solution.

So they’re looking for it, they’re going to search and choose this is really interesting. And to me, you know, a lot of this is around, who are the suppliers that people trust and view as being the ones to go to so a lot of this is driven by brand, because they’re not going to know exactly what they buy until they start interacting with the different brands. So I think searching shoes is very much a brand different driven thing. Obviously, there will potentially be some shortlisting there. But it’s much harder to shortlist solutions than it is to shortlist products. And lastly, and this is a very trendy term in the service industry, which is trusted advisor where a client will come to a supplier, you know, maybe maybe it’s a law firm or an accountant. And whenever they have a problem with that particular area, they will just ask for the solution and asked what they should do. And this is something where if you can have a client that is feels they can only buy for you because then you’re the only supplier they can really trust you’ve got this relationship, you’ve worked with them a long time, you know, the customer believes you’re the only one supplier can provide what they need, then you can become a trusted adviser. And that’s really interesting. But clearly it requires the customer to not only be looking for a solution rather than a product, but also to believe that they have no choice in terms of where they go. So it has interesting implications on service businesses and b2b.

So these buying styles are very important, as I’ve talked through them, you’ll realise that not only is how you approach the customer, and the way you sell to them very different, but also their journeys very different. You know, if you believe there’s only one supplier, you’re gonna go straight to that supplier classically in the trusted advisor. If you’ve got a law firm that you always work with that says the firm you trust you feel they know your business, there’s not really going to be any supplier selection, you’re just going to go to them and talk to them about your next problem. So that’s a very different customer journey, to maybe somebody who believes they’ve got a lot of choice, and then still looking for a solution, they are going to search and choose amongst brands, and they’re gonna have a process of evaluating different brands to see who they believe is going to be the best one to provide the solution. So we’ve understood that different buying styles have different journeys, same with different personas. So the reality is there can be many, many customer journey maps for selling one particular product. Typically, most people limit the number of customer journey maps they produce, mainly to manage complexity.

And also because the customer journey map should really be very, very detailed, the more detailed you can get it the more effective it is. And clearly it becomes exponentially more difficult with the more personas and buying styles you consider. So let’s have a look at a customer journey map. Well, I mean basically a customer journey map can be whatever you want, it can be as simple and complex as you like. But what it needs is it needs the steps or the touch points that you have with the customer. So you need to know what is happening to influence that customer and good customer journey maps will also consider things that are not directly related to your brand. So that might be word of mouth information. Or it might be you know viewing content on a trade publication.

Obviously, you’ve got those steps those touch points those touch points will then generate actions from the prospect. So you need to know what should happen as a result of each touch point. Mosca customer journey maps also include emotions, so most people want to understand how the customer is feeling. And that can be based upon the challenge they’re facing the need Have that’s got to be met. Or it can also be emotions that are driven by the touch points. And a lot of customer journey work is done around existing customer journeys, and trying to evaluate where customers are less happy. And then look at ways to, you know, change that. So at that particular touch point, they become slightly more happy. So, emotions are very important. pain points, obviously, a very important is where the customer has a need or a pain point, you really need to understand that and how well that customer understands the need is very important.

And lastly, solutions, you know, as part of the customer journey, you’re providing that solution, you might want to also include that in the map as well. So, lots of different things you can put in the map. But there’s actually no right format. There’s some conventional styles, but you can do really whatever you like, whatever makes sense, in terms of mapping the customer journey, so you can see an example here. But what we’ll do now is we’ll actually go through, and we’ll have a look at a couple of customer journeys that have been created, you know, so you can see some examples. So here’s a simple customer journey. It’s interesting, you know, the journey has been put into funnel like stages, there’s four stages, we can see with the four colours. And what we can see is actually, this, this indicates emotional state, by the line, this line goes up, the customer feels happier. And we can see at each stage, we’ve got the various steps within each stage. And so we’re tracking you know, how well they’re doing. And this customer journey, also insert some eventually quotes that what the customer might be thinking.

So, you know, what we can see is, you know, obviously, this person is trying to go to see a film, they’re going to a cinema. And you know, step two, their question is, can I find somebody that’s closer I don’t really want to travel, we then see some issues with travel. So we can see lots of different things as the customer flows through. And this is quite a simple map, and actually, will quite often use maps like this, to work with clients. So here’s an example of a customer map that’s based on something we did with a client a little while ago, you can see that we’ve categorised the interactions into basically four stages or phases. And each phase where you’ve got information about what the customer might be thinking. So for example, I don’t know, the mega core offer for station infrastructure and and what they’re going to supply us. We’ll talk about, you know, the content that will supply. And we’ll talk about the touch points. So the channels we’re using to reach the customer at the start.

So where customers might have low awareness, we want to drive awareness, you can see well, it using lots of different channels. So you know, we might be posting video on YouTube, we might be doing Google ads, we might be doing ads in publications, all sorts of things to drive touchpoints, because we’re going to have to reach quite wide, we don’t necessarily have an engagement with that customer. And then you’ll see with this customer journey map, we move through and we get much more focused and effectively this is, you know, one of those classic customer journeys that you’ll often see with b2b where we’re trying to, you know, create content, use that content at the awareness stage to generate a prospect, and then nurture that prospect with a sequence of emails and maybe some Google ads as well. Other customer journeys can look very different. And I mentioned things can be very different. This is a customer journey for a software as a service products. Zendesk, which is a support desk product, and they show the customer journey as a cycle. Obviously, with SAS, there’s typically a renewal period, quite often annual renewal. And so it’s very important to make sure that you understand that customer journey, and you understand what can cause that customer to either reorder and remain a customer to actually just pick and choose another product or maybe not reorder and then come back a bit later. So perhaps a lapsed customer coming back.

So very different style, and very focused on the different touch points here. You’ll notice that this one doesn’t include things like customer, emotional state, or anything else. It’s very simple, very straightforward, but equally a very clear model and it makes it clear what you have to do to ensure that the customer engages with you and ultimately reorders and remains a customer one of the things I would say is that real customer journeys have an awful lot of touchpoints and so we can see here this is a simple PowerPoint template created by slide salad that they’re you know offering as a off the shelf customer journey. I’d always caution against trying to use customer journeys that are off the shelf, almost certainly your journey will be very different to other businesses. And the emphasis on different steps will be very different. But if you want, you can pull off the shelf customer journeys like this. Interesting though this is even itself with all these steps is quite limited. You know, for example, there is no concept of word of mouth.

So there’s no idea of the customer, you know, asking either friends or colleagues or anyone else what’s happening. And even in b2b Word of mouth is hugely important, and completely omitted from this. So beware if you get those off the shelf journeys, because often they can miss important stages as well. So we’ve talked about journeys a lot, and we’ve mentioned how complex they are, and how many steps are. And I think one of the challenges that you know, b2b companies have is, we still tend to think about, oh, we’re going to run, you know, an email nurture campaign to move people through the customer journey. And that actually, is often the wrong approach. If you’re looking to move someone through an entire customer journey, I mean, for a start, you need a product that is bought in a fairly short timeframe.

And a lot of products actually take a fairly long timeframe to buy. I mean, we have, you know, clients that have products that are large capital investment, that can take years in terms of the customer journey, trying to create campaigns that run over years is just not the right thing to do, you’ll never get the timing right, you’ll never be able to understand exactly where the customer is. So you need to simplify. And one of the ways you can simplify is actually simplifying down into it to less steps, there’s touch points of the customer journey. But actually, a better way is to use something called micro journeys. So here we can see, and this is a consumer example. But it’s equally applicable. We’ve got a customer journey where someone is basically flying on an aeroplane. And we’re looking at one element of that customer journey, which is the check in. So if we go and expand here, we can actually see that the customer is checking in. And there’s multiple routes through this journey. So we can actually understand that in more detail. And what we can do as marketers is look and see, well, how can we make this journey more effective?

You know, and you can see, actually, maybe this has already been done, you know, there was a route to check in with a mobile app. But also, there’s additional routes here where the airline sends either an email, or an SMS, or maybe a call. So help the customer check in, remind them to do it. So you know, quite often, you’ll see, you know, different customer journeys being looked at like this, and then people looking at adding extra routes. So if a customer doesn’t take one route, there’s a parallel route that’s going to take them through the maybe includes a little nudge from the company that they’re interacting with. So, you know, micro journeys are great, because it then makes this large and potentially quite long term customer journey more manageable.

They’re still quite complex. And it is okay to simplify. And the reality is, is no matter how hard we work, we’ll probably never perfectly replicate the customer’s experience in any customer journey. So, I mean, my advice is to balance you know, getting accuracy and detail alongside making sure that you’ve got a customer journey model, which is, you know, close enough to reality, but also simple enough for you to be able to, you know, optimise and manage it. And this can be an iterative process. If you’ve not looked at the customer journey for your customers before, you might start with something fairly simple. And then iterate. Once you’ve identified the problems in that that journey at a fairly high level, you may then dig a bit deeper produce a journey that is a little more divided up into more steps, and then look and optimise again. So iteration as well, in terms of improving the customer journey is a great idea.

So what do we do next? Well, I think you know, the first thing I’d say is think about customer journeys. and not think about customer journeys, just in terms of a funnel, I need to move on from one stage to another, but gain the customers perspective. They are complex, you’ve got to remember that. And so you might have to simplify certainly in the early days. But really just try and get into that customer’s head that mindset and really understand what’s stopping them moving from one step to another. And if there’s anything you can do as a marketing professional, to help them move forward. Obviously the way to do this is to ask customers, the best source of information on customer mindsets is the customers themselves. I would say you know me Make sure you think about personas and buying styles. Which buying style do you generally work with, and do different personas involved in the decision take different journeys.

And this is super important. I think it’s one of the areas where your customer journeys, you know, a really a dramatic level up from, from simply thinking about the sales funnel, is it’s much easier to think about these different personas and different buying styles. And when you’ve got your journey, definitely split it into micro journeys, don’t try and boil the ocean all at once. Just try and take a little segment of the journey and try and optimise it. And then you know, when you’ve got that micro journey, analyse the stages and look at, you know, not just where opportunities are lost. I mean, obviously, we want to look at where prospects drop out and maybe go to another supplier, see if there’s anything we can do. But also look at where progress slows.

And this is something that we’re really focused on as an agency is making sure that we can help clients increase the velocity of prospects through the journey. And the reason we’re worried about that is that if you can get the prospect to the end of the journey before anyone else, the prospect will be bought, or will have bought with you before they’re ready to buy with anybody else. So you’re going to win that sale. So don’t just look for losing customers or potential customers, but also look for where that’s progress through the journey slows down. And look if there’s anything you can do to increase interaction, and make it you know, easier for the customer to buy and stay with you. So that’s really what I wanted to talk about in terms of customer journeys, it’s I think it’s covered a lot of what we need to know.

And hopefully, it’s going to give you a bit of a basis in terms of how you can go and build your own customer journey. And look to optimise it, obviously now what we can do is maybe look to take some questions. So I’m just gonna check the chat and see if we’ve got any questions from people. Okay. Okay, so we’ve got a great question here. How can someone easily spot a weak point in the customer journey? And what are the typical methods to solve this, which is really interesting, I mean, in business to business, quite often, this weak point is something you can pick out with data. You know, and a classic example of a weak point might be, you’ve got a particular, you know, nurture, campaign or email that you send out at a certain stage in the journey. And that triggers a higher than average level of opt outs, or a lower than average level of interaction. And it’s really where you’ve got these items where you’re actually not hitting your average level, you’ve got to ask, well, is that because of where people are in the journey? Or is that because what I’m sending is not the right thing. And quite often, you know, what’s being sent is not the right thing.

So I would definitely say, you know, look through the journey, look at the data. And that usually gives you a good, good insight into where your weak points are. Okay. Okay, we’re being asked about micro journey. So the next question is, can we give an example of a micro journey? It’s another great question. I love this. And, you know, a really good example might be if you’re selling components that have data sheets, so a lot of our clients will have components that might be a semiconductor company, they have a datasheet, that gives you information about that product. And typically, what’s going to happen is someone’s going to be interested in a product, they go to your page, they’ll download the datasheet, they’ll do some evaluation. And from that datasheet, they’ll then decide whether or not to purchase perhaps, an evaluation board if they need an evaluation board to develop, or maybe a sample if they just want samples to test the product. And quite clearly, you know, there’s a micro journey there. And that whole process of buying a product, if you think about a product that needs you know that there’s maybe a a complex part like a microcontroller. You know, there’s a whole big journey for around that. But just the step from datasheet to development kit is a very small micro journey.

And so thinking about you know, how many data sheets you get downloaded versus how many development kits you sell, and looking to optimise that ratio, so increase the number of development kits per datasheet is a great example of improving the performance of a micro journey. Okay, and we’ll do one more question. And the question is, if the customer journey goes beyond purchase, how important is customer satisfaction in the journey? And I think this is this is really interesting. You know, ultimately, customer satisfaction as a metric pretty much determine is that analogous to how well the journey has gone for the customer. So if the customer is happy, generally they’ve had a good journey. That’s not always the case. You know, you can have a customer journey that has lots of, you know, potholes and mistakes. aches and errors. And if you fit fix them, you can still end up with very high customer satisfaction. The reality is is fixing them may not have cost your customer satisfaction, but it’s cost you money in terms of time and effort to fix the problems.

So, customer satisfaction is very important. And ultimately, if you look at customer satisfaction, the higher the level of satisfaction, the more likely people are to give word of mouth recommendations. And word of mouth can be very simple. You know, if you look at, you know, a b2b situation where you’re selling to a big organisation, and quite often there are multiple projects you could sell into whether you’re selling software or components or whatever. And what you want is people already using your product to be, you know, at least positive about the product, and if not, if not, maybe ambassadors and going out saying everyone should use this product. So high level of customer satisfaction, we’ll get that high level word of mouth, which will increase your chances of winning future projects. So great question, you know, customer journey.

The satisfaction is really important. high customer satisfaction, though, doesn’t always mean that you’ve had a great customer journey. It doesn’t mean the end of the journey has been good. But it could it could still mean that there’s problems in the journey. So don’t think the two are the same. Well, thank you very much, everyone, for listening. I hope you found this webinar useful. If you’ve got any questions, please do send me an email. My email is Mike at Napier b2b dot com. I’d love to talk about it. We love working with clients, helping them build customer journeys and then optimise those stages within the journeys. And I hope you’re able to build journeys and use it to make your sales processes more effective and ultimately increase the performance your company. So thank you very much