Industry experts often refer to the user journey as a map for good reason. Business owners must watch the logical path clients traverse as they start by learning about a product or service. Hopefully, it ends with a converted lead and potential advocacy. The customer journey shifts during digital transformation and IoT adoption efforts. How can entrepreneurs, freelancers and SMBs integrate IoT into the customer journey for an enhanced experience?
Why should SMBs optimise the user journey?
Performing research on a target audience is a process as long as the life of a company. Everything from technology to pop culture alters how consumers navigate each step. For example, signing up for discounts used to recommend newspapers or magazines, and now it is using the checkout process to collect email address signups.
Understanding and optimising user journeys is vital because the IoT will empower each touchpoint on the path. IoT yields improved satisfaction and customer loyalty. Organisations want the trip to feel organic, even when incorporating novel elements like the IoT. The user journey follows these stages:
- Awareness: The moment a customer hears about a product or service.
- Consideration: The stage when buyers perform market research and compare alternatives.
- Purchase or decision: The point when a company converts a lead.
- Retention: The efforts organisations make to keep customers coming back.
- Advocacy: The promotion and praise customers make on the company’s behalf to assist in brand awareness, which starts the journey for new customers.
The IoT allows SMBs and entrepreneurs to streamline aspects of the journey. Digitisation and adopting the IoT benefits the customer by making their experiences obstacle-free and enjoyable. However, the only works if a company accurately understands the user persona in its target audience. Execute marketing segmentation and other customer research strategies to empathise with audiences with clarity.
Then, tailoring the IoT devices to their map behaviours becomes more relevant and less gimmicky. SMBs align the IoT adoption and implementation with customer tendencies, preferences, pain points and demographics for an attentive experience.
Optimising Each Stage of the User Journey With the IoT
Understanding IoT product adoption in the context of the user journey requires focus on each part of the map. Innovative startups and SMBs have a unique responsibility to create IoT adoption expectations for the jobs of the future — 85% of which will not exist until 2030. Careful implementation now ensures more elegant use in the upcoming years.
What are the IoT tools and strategies can creative business leaders use to make this happen? Optimise each step from the beginning and use these examples as inspiration.
Awareness
Companies must initially use the IoT to gather information about existing customers. The real-time data is essential for determining how to increase awareness.
For example, smart cameras can determine how long prospective customers look at specific window display designs before entering the storefront. It leads companies to question the impact of their visuals or display design and whether that could influence shoppers outside the immediate vicinity. SMBs may also connect IoT software to social media platforms to gather information about awareness-focused ad campaigns.
Consideration
Consideration is the phase where businesses can incorporate automated, personalised communications to deepen familiarity with the brand as even more brands come into the buyer’s purview. Respectful reminders sustain brand relevance, which helps with their decision-making.
Purchase or Decision
IoT makes payment experiences faster and smarter. Customer purchasing data informs businesses to incorporate more flexible payment options or new payment methods. SMBs will have insight into how customers want to pay.
For example, if customers traditionally opt out of providing an email address, a company will take note and remove the prompt to streamline payment processing. The saved seconds make customers happier to shop there because it reduces payment resistance.
Retention
Incorporating IoT devices that make the customer experience easier is more likely to increase retention. Consider how using the IoT for inventory management is a subtle yet effective way to influence retention. The faster a business can process fulfilment correlates with quicker shipping and delivery times. Automating this process with the IoT leads to higher reviews from customers who received items promptly.
Advocacy
One of the critical components of the user journey map is identifying a consumer’s emotions, and advocacy is where those feelings come into play the most. It is also the stage where the IoT is most versatile in influencing the customer journey. Employ the IoT to keep gathering data to improve the company.
Then, publicise this progress to validate a consumer’s affinity for the business, such as posting IoT-gathered sustainability data for eco-aware shoppers. It catalyses another opportunity for them to advocate for the brand each time they receive a reminder.
Use cases and key metrics for measuring success
Let’s identify particular use cases of IoT deployment in the user journey to understand how metrics are vital in informing continued optimisation.
A beauty care retail store installs IoT devices like smart shelving to keep track of product interactivity, item sale frequency and inventory management. These metrics, like engagement, time spent in an aisle and likelihood of customers returning items to the shelf, notify companies how to change their displays and stock to align with what is doing well for the consideration and decision stages.
A freelance travel agent can use IoT-powered software to gather information about how customers interact with their website. They could see what types of travel packages sit in carts the longest to automate reminders and send discounts or coupons. A metric they will need is returning customers versus new customers and how each spends time on each website page. This is invaluable for purchasing and retention.
These are only a few examples of IoT product adoption in a business that keeps customers engaged and tended to, even without direct managerial involvement.
Optimise the User Journey With Seamless IoT Product Adoption
Adopting the IoT crafts user journeys to the needs of the 21st century. Everyone from solopreneur designers to niche retail SMBs needs data over their customer base. The visibility improves familiarity, customer satisfaction and tech literacy.
Without the IoT guiding customers, their relationships with companies would have been much longer and purely transactional. Now, it is infused with tech-forward, attentive customer experiences that keep people engaged and committed to a brand for the long term.
Eleanor Hecks is the managing editor at Designerly. She’s also a mobile app designer with a focus on UI. Connect with her about digital marketing, UX and/or tea on LinkedIn.
