Tracking the Customer's Journey to Purchase
Tracking the Customer's Journey to Purchase:from HBR.org
A customer will touch a company in many different ways before a deal is made. Before you rent your first ZipCar, you'll have talked to friends about it, checked ZipCar's website (and comparison websites), and maybe even called the company. From ZipCar's perspective, all of these touchpoints are important because if you hear bad reports or find the website and call center hard to manage, you'll very likely opt for the safe option of a Hertz or an Avis.
Unfortunately, few companies have an overall picture of their customers' journey towards a purchase, because the information is all too often stuck in a channel silo. An intercept survey that a customer might fill in upon leaving a website can tell you a lot about that customer's experience with the website, but it usually does not provide any information on where the customer will next experience the company. Surveying customers directly after their purchases to explain how they arrived at them means that you have to put a lot of faith in their remembering exactly what they did. A CRM system might let you know how customers moved between the website and the store, but it tells you nothing about how they responded to advertising or word-of-mouth reports.
Two years ago, we came across a technique that does allow companies to document quite accurately how their customers actually arrive at a purchase. It is called real-time experience tracking (RET) and we first wrote about it for HBR in a blog last year. It was developed by a market research company called MESH Planning, with which we have been partnering to improve the RET methodology and identify applications for the data it generates.
RET involves asking a consumer panel to send text messages on their cellphones every time they come across a given brand or one of its competitors over a period of a week to a month, depending on the length of the purchase process. The structured four-character message captures the brand, the touchpoint type (Saw a tweet about it? Saw it in a shop window?), how positive the customer felt about the encounter, and how persuasive it was. Respondents add further detail online, and fill in surveys at the start and end of the study to record brand attitude changes.
Companies can tell how the customer journey works — or doesn't — from that sequence of text messages. Unilever, for example, could not understand why a campaign for Axe body spray wasn't working in Italy when it was performing well in Poland. In both countries, TV advertising was positively received. But whereas in Poland the ads were followed by high street touchpoints such as the "Axe Police" — attractive women who would 'arrest' young men and spray them with Axe — such reminders close to potential purchase moments were missing in Italy. Traditional econometric models based on spend by media type would have completely failed to pick up this problem.
RET can also diagnose how attitudes lead to the next step in the chain, as one major international charity discovered. The charity, which relies on a large network of stores selling both second-hand and new goods to raise both revenue and awareness, recently applied RET in an effort to understand why direct donations (as opposed to store profits) to the charity were falling.
The RET project revealed that the in-store experience of customers (and potential donors) was rather mixed; quite a few people felt that the stores were poorly organized and deduced from this that the charity probably wasn't very good at helping its beneficiaries either. They might well purchase goods at the store, therefore, but they did not go on to make donations. Armed with this insight, solving the problem was simple: a smarter layout, displays at the cash register about the charity's fieldwork, and encouraging staff to share their passion for the charity. Non-store donations have since been rising.
Because data is gathered in real time, it can be acted on in real time, too. PepsiCo recently used RET to fine-tune its re-launch of Gatorade in Mexico, repositioning the brand around sports nutrition. They soon found that experiences in gyms and parks (seeing posters or seeing other people drinking Gatorade, for instance) were twice as effective in shifting brand attitudes as similar encounters elsewhere. They were able to quickly shift more ad and distribution resources into these touchpoints and pass on what they learned as Gatorade was re-launched in other Latin American countries.
Our first two years working with RET have confirmed its benefits in providing integrated insight, a vital first step towards holistic customer management. Its use is clearly spreading, and doubtless the market research industry will come up with new ways to exploit the rich real-time data RET produces.
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