Every business wants to know how to create a great customer experience. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. However, there is a way to figure out what will work best for your business – and that’s by finding breakpoints in your customers’ experience.
What are Breakpoints?
Breakpoints refer to any points in the customer journey where there is a potential for friction or confusion. These are the moments that can make or break a sale, so it’s important to identify them early on. For instance, a breakpoint might be when a customer is trying to checkout on your website but gets confused by the process. Also, breakpoints can occur offline, such as when a customer is speaking to a salesperson and doesn’t feel like they’re being listened to. There are several ways to identify breakpoints in your customers’ experience, including the following.
Examine Your Customer Journey
Usually, breakpoints will be most apparent when you take a close look at your customer journey. This means mapping out each step of the journey, from initial awareness all the way to post-purchase follow-up. As you do this, look for any points where customers might get confused or encounter problems. For instance, if you notice that a lot of customers abandon their shopping carts at the checkout stage, this could be a sign of a breakpoint. You can also ask your customers directly about their experiences and look for any areas where they had difficulty. You can even utilize mystery shopping to get an outsider’s perspective on your customer journey. You’re probably wondering, what is mystery shopping?
Mystery shopping is a research method where businesses send secret shoppers to experience their products or services firsthand. This can be a useful way to identify breakpoints in the customer experience, as it allows you to see things from the customer’s perspective. Of course, mystery shopping is not the only way to find breakpoints. However, it can be a valuable addition to your research.
Use Customer Feedback to Find Breakpoints
Another way to identify breakpoints is to use customer feedback. This can come from surveys, reviews, social media, and other sources. Look for any patterns in the feedback that suggests there might be a problem at a certain stage of the journey. For instance, if you see a lot of customers complaining about the same issue, it’s likely that there’s a breakpoint there.
However, remember that how you conduct customer feedback can also be a breakpoint in itself. One common mistake is to ask customers for feedback at the wrong time, such as immediately after they’ve made a purchase. This can be intrusive and cause them to react negatively. It’s better to wait until they’re no longer in the customer journey before you ask for feedback.
Use Data to Find Breakpoints
Data can also be a valuable tool for finding breakpoints. Look at your website analytics and see where customers are dropping off. This will give you a good indication of where the potential problems are. You can also use A/B testing to experiment with different changes on your website and see how they affect customer behavior.
The first step is to identify what you want to test. This could be anything from the design of your website to the copy on your product pages. Once you’ve decided what to test, create two versions of it – version A and version B. Then, track how each version performs in terms of conversion rate and other key metrics. This will help you to identify which version is performing better and so find the breakpoints in your customers’ experience.
Conclusion
Reducing breakpoints are an important part of creating a great customer experience, but they’re only one part of the puzzle. Once you’ve identified the breakpoints in your customers’ journey, you also need to figure out how to fix them. In some cases, this might be a simple matter of making a few tweaks to your website. However, in other cases, it could require a more significant change, such as redesigning your entire customer journey. Either way, the goal is to make sure that your customers have a smooth and enjoyable experience from start to finish.