The Customer Decision Journey: A blueprint for strategy

As businesses strive to remain competitive in today's ever-evolving landscape, the customer decision journey (CDJ) can be a guiding light, illuminating many paths to success. In this article, we look at the pivotal role of the CDJ in shaping business strategy and offer insights into leveraging its potential for strategic advantage.

CDJ and business impact

At the heart of every successful business strategy lies a deep understanding of the CDJ. This journey covers the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with you, from initial awareness about your company, services and products, through to purchasing and then onwards to after-sales customer loyalty and advocacy.

According to Forbes, companies that prioritize mapping and optimizing the CDJ are better positioned to drive customer engagement, enhance brand loyalty, and ultimately achieve sustainable growth. Using the CDJ as a way of thinking helps businesses unlock new opportunities, identify barriers and find new areas for innovation and differentiation.

CDJ in B2B

There are many famous examples of companies who have optimized each stage of the CDJ, increasing the customer’s tendency to make a purchase. Amazon for example has made the actual process of buying easier with its one-click approach, while at the same time overcoming any concerns about investing in a specific item, with its transparent reviews. Nike is another good example using an integrated omnichannel approach making it easier to choose a product and then order it.

The application of the CDJ is not just for the consumer goods market, however. It can be used across multiple B2C, B2G, and B2B industries, including medtech. In fact, in the complex world of healthcare, the CDJ is a must-tool to help unravel and comprehend the intricacies of the decision making process, its associated stakeholders, and their drivers.

Expected outcomes of a CDJ exercise

By mapping out the CDJ for your medtech and B2B/B2G customers, you will be able to identify critical touchpoints and points of influence on the purchasing journey. Once this framework is identified, you are then better able to evaluate your performance, in the eyes of your customer, at each stage and get a solid understanding of what is supporting or hindering your target customer’s decision to buy from you.

It’s important to note that the CDJ framework is all encompassing and doesn’t just focus on customer experience with a product. It’s also not just for evaluating marketing programs. Using the CDJ, can uncover barriers associated to price, product, reputation, distribution and more.

In the B2B world it can also help you identify the right stakeholders to target. In my experience of facilitating business teams to better understand their customers ‘journey, I have often found that at the end of a workshop, there is a realisation that not enough attention has been paid to key groups of decision makers.

Finally, the CDJ process will also help prioritize where to spend your time and resources.

Where to start?

An initial CDJ mapping exercise can be done using in- house insights, such as those from your sales and technical teams, from commercial data, from anecdotal customer feedback and by mining your intrinsic company knowledge. Using an external facilitator who does not have a pre-conceived bias on your customers journey can also bring a fresh, external perspective.

The starting point is to identify your customer persona, for example a CEO, a biomedical engineer, a radiologist, and then map their journey with you from the very beginning where they start to have a need, to the very end once they have experienced your technology and are looking to buy again. This links back to the stages of the CDJ – awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty.

It’s important in this process to consider all touchpoints, even those that are not face to face and not part of a traditional linear path. It’s also crucial to really focus in on the points associated with making a purchasing decision.

The second part of the exercise is to use the map and analyse your customer’s experience with you at every single point of engagement.

And what do you do with the results?

Going through a CDJ exercise will generate actionable insights, ideas and questions. It can become clear, once the CDJ is mapped, what barriers need to be overcome to increase success, it also helps identifies what customer behaviours to target and transform, as well as provides a better understanding which of the stages of the CDJ impacts your business the most.

By leveraging these insights, you can start brainstorming innovative solutions to unlock the areas of opportunity or overcome the points of concern, which were highlighted through the CDJ mapping process.

In general, the CDJ framework also ensures that you invest energy into all the different stages of your customers purchasing cycle, and don’t just become active once a sale is imminent.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the customer decision journey is not merely a theoretical construct but a practical framework for shaping business strategy.

At Unplain Jane, we offer consultancy around optimizing the customer decision journey, run workshops to help you map it for your business as well as conduct brainstorming sessions based on CDJ insights, generating ideas to increase preference, and therefore improve sales. Reach out to learn more!