EPISODE 74 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
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If your evergreen funnel isn’t converting, your membership churn is creeping up, or you just have a nagging feeling something in your customer journey is off… this episode is going to help you start diagnosing the issue.
The tricky thing about a broken customer experience is that it rarely shows up as a complaint. People simply go quiet, unsubscribe, or cancel. And when you’ve built everything yourself, you’re often too close to it to see where it’s falling apart.
Today I’m walking you through a practical starting point for diagnosing your customer journey and finding what I call the moment that matters.
What we cover:
What a customer journey is and why it’s so hard to diagnose from the inside
The moment that matters and what it means for whether someone stays or disengages
Why dissatisfaction almost never shows up as a complaint (and what to look for instead)
How to map your customer journey by phase and spot the blind spots
The two questions to ask yourself when you’re looking for where things go wrong
Why talking to your people is still the most underrated research tool you have
Soundbites:
“Have a look at your customer journey, pinpoint all the brand touch points, and split it into different phases: Discovery phase, decision phase, onboarding phase, delivery, and retention or next step. And on each step of that customer journey, I want you to ask yourself, where do I genuinely not know what’s happening for my customer? These are the blind spots where that moment that matters could be hiding, where it could be worth digging deeper.”
“And the hard bit to admit is that even though this process might give you a top-line idea, you could just be too close to your business to make sense of things. And it could be time to get an objective perspective on that customer journey, someone to audit it for you, someone to talk to your people. And then line those two up and see where you are missing something obvious, where you’re not answering questions they have.”
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Episode Transcript:
Nadine (00:00)
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the podcast. In today’s episode, we are diving deep into all things customer journeys, and we are going to answer the following listener question. How do I know where my customer experience is actually falling apart?
So to set the foundations here, a customer journey is a complex collection of brand touch points. People can enter the journey in various platforms. It could be via an Instagram reel, it could be via a guest episode, where you guested it on someone else’s podcast, it could be via your lead magnet speaking at a summit, which makes
This whole ecosystem of your customer journey is so challenging. while you can map it out as much as possible and as intentionally as you want it to guide people to that first or next purchase, people are still deciding how they enter, how they engage with it, and where they fall in love with your brand and where they drop off. And it is so hard to pinpoint the moment that matters, as I like to call it.
As the online business owner who built the funnel, who created the membership onboarding experience, and who is the brain behind all the moving pieces. So today’s episode is all about giving you a framework that you can apply to your customer journey to start pinpointing the moment that matters where your evergreen funnel is broken and falls apart, where your onboarding experience for your membership is costing you, renewals and repeat business.
And hopefully you’re going to walk away with practical things you can do today to start diagnosing your customer journey. a customer journey exists of, as I said, a million brand touch points. And the moment that matters is where a customer either falls in love with your brand or they decide.
They want to move on and they’re not going to invest or they’re not going to stick around. It could be right after someone buys when their initial excitement of investing of all the promises on the sales page simply don’t line up with that onboarding experience. It could also be before the purchase where someone hears you on a podcast, they grab your lead magnet, but then for whatever reason, what they’re hearing is not lining up with the expectation.
They had for that brand experience and they’re just never converting into a paid customer. And usually the lack of ability to pinpoint what’s broken on their customer journey is what sends my one-on-one customers and my retention lab members my way. They are far too close to all the things they’ve built because often who I work with are.
one person businesses where they not only have the ideas, they strategize, they execute, they build everything. And so it’s sheer impossible to diagnose what’s not working. So that’s where I’m coming into the picture because potentially their membership churn rate has picked up
Or they have an evergreen funnel that is just not converting and they want to tweak it in a way that turns things around.
Unfortunately, it’s so easy to miss that moment that matters because it usually doesn’t show up as a complaint. People either just unsubscribe or they go quiet, or in the instance of a membership, you know, they just stop opening your emails, they stop engaging, and then eventually they cancel. And while we can track email open rates and email click rates, it is really hard to put your finger on
Satisfaction and an underlying dissatisfaction that compounds over time and then leads to unsubscribes or cancellations. The problem is, you know, this moment that matters is where you win over customers or you lose them for good, and where someone either becomes a long-term fan or you never hear from them again.
and particularly for memberships here, giving your members a quick win as soon as they join is so important for setting that underlying tone for their journey ahead. And obviously the evergreen funnel can be designed in a similar way. You don’t just want to be selling, you need to give them
Aha moments and and take them on a journey to prime them, to be ready to invest. But yeah, Let’s help you pinpoint where things could be going wrong on your customer journey. So this is not designed as a full audit it’s designed to be a starting point for you. So
I would love you to take a look at your customer journey for one offer, like the one where you go, my God, like if I could just fix this today, that would be amazing. So have a look at your customer journey and pinpoint all the brand touch points, whether it’s an email, a landing page, a sales page, a personal message whatever that looks like, and split it into different phases. So discovery phase, decision phase, onboarding phase, delivery.
And whatever comes after, so potentially, retention or next step. And on each step of that customer journey, I want you to ask yourself, where do I genuinely not know what’s happening for my customer? where do I assume things But I really have no idea. like where you’re lacking data, where you’re lacking visibility, where you’re lacking engagement potentially. And
These are the blind spots where that moment that matters could be hiding, where it could be worth digging deeper to see whether it is actually resonating with your people or it’s turning them away. I have a few prompts that can help you through that process. I would start with where do people go quiet without explanation? So, in an evergreen funnel, for example, at which email do people stop?
Clicking through to the sales page. What happened in that step before? what is not lining up?
And then next question where does your instinct, tell you something is missing? even though things are probably technically not broken. Like where do things feel off? Where would you pinpoint that gap? And as I said, this won’t fix your problem today, but it could help you go on a little mission to find the moment that matters.
And if in doubt, talk to your people. Like I keep repeating myself here, but having actual conversations with your audience, whether it’s your members, whether it is people in your funnel who don’t end up buying, ask them what is going on for them, ask them what they’re feeling, what they’re missing, and what’s going on in their mind. So you can then use that as first hand insight to fix it.
And the hard bit to admit is that even though you know going through this process might give you a top-line idea of where things might be broken, you again could just be too close to your business to make sense of things. And it could actually be time to get an objective perspective on that customer journey, someone to audit it for you, someone to talk to your people.
And then line those two up and see where you are missing something obvious, where you’re not answering questions they have, where you are not addressing objections that could be holding them back, or where you’re not shifting false beliefs that for whatever reason they’re holding about your offer or your solution.
And as I said before, this is absolutely not your fault. We as business owners are by nature trying to do our best. We are acting on assumptions. We are also acting based on advice that everyone out there tells you, right?
An evergreen funnel needs to be designed in this particular way. You need to follow this particular framework. when it comes to memberships, this is how you need to design it. This is what you need to have inside for people to fall in love with it. We are under so much pressure as business owners to do the right thing in inverted commas that often we’re building things that follow a framework and something we’ve been told without actually taking that step back.
To look at what it is our audience needs to hear. And that is something I love helping my clients with inside the incubator, where we dive deep into audience research. We actually have conversations with your people. Yes. And we’re identifying amazing gaps and opportunities that we can then weave into your customer journey and fix, hopefully, that moment that matters. if
You don’t have the funds to outsource, or you are someone who loves to DIY with an objective perspective, that’s also something we could do together inside the incubator of retention lab But I want you to go off now, take one offer, whether it is a membership, an evergreen funnel, you name it, have a closer look at that customer journey. So before the purchase, during that purchase decision, and after, and
Follow your gut feeling and the data to identify where potentially your customer journey could be falling apart. And then if you find something, an aha moment comes up, DM me. I would love to celebrate that progress with you. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. If you have a burning question that you would love my take on and some practical action steps to help you work through it, please.
click the link in the show notes and submit your question. And I will get to it in a future episode. And yeah, other than that, thank you so much for tuning in week on week. I can’t wait to catch up with you again next week. Have a good one.
