The Customer Experience
The problem with models is that they are general descriptions of a more or less ideal situation, which never occurs in reality. While they attempt to describe the purchase process, they’re not very dynamic, flexible or specific.
It’s like describing a home by citing its square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms. It gives you a basic idea but it lacks a lot of information.
Another issue with these models is that they describe orderly and complete ways in which customers don’t really behave. That’s partly because they are viewing the purchase process mainly from the business’s point of view vs. the customer’s.
But as journey management and customer experience expert Kerry Bodine points out, when you look at things from the customer’s perspective, some important differences emerge.
“No prospective customer seeks “awareness” of any company (and let’s be honest, they’re not thinking of how best to solidify their “retention” either). Instead, they want to accomplish a goal or task—and working with your organization is simply the way to do that.”
This focus on the customer’s goal or task is based on jobs-to-be-done-theory, a marketing and innovation approach that seeks to design campaigns and products around “jobs” by creating experiences that help customers make progress, avoid obstacles and reconcile the social, emotional, and functional dimensions of the jobs.
Content is integral to customer experiences and in many cases ideal for communicating how to accomplish the jobs, their processes, and their social and emotional components.
Discover information resources for more insights to how content helps move customers through their journeys (and experiences) with your business.