Path Finder: Discover customer journeys
Journey Discovery: Overview
Digital transformation is changing the game of commerce—both for customers and businesses. For one, the landscape is changing. Businesses now own multiple channels to interact with their prospects and customers. Your prospects conduct business with you via more than one channel. Secondly, your customer behavior is ever-changing. Your sales team is no longer the only point of contact especially in the case of B2B transactions. Decision-making processes are simplified with contextual handouts, not to mention the self-service touchpoints. Businesses undergo such dynamic shifts in their processes with the prime goal to provide a great customer experience. But, in efforts to be customer-ready, businesses are facing a new problem here—the problem of plenty!
- As the number of touchpoints grows, the customer interactions become random and unpredictable.
- The sales pipeline is no longer linear nor chronological.<3> Your prospect may join or leave the funnel at any point in time, without trace.<4>
- The increase in traffic and traction challenges businesses in identifying and defining customer behaviors and personas— important determinants to formulate CX strategies.
When you take a closer look at these problems, they all converge at one focal point—lack of knowledge about their customers' journey.
The solution is indeed to Discover your customers' journeys!
Customer journey is a trail of customers' foot print on your business.
It is a testimony in itself that
- Broadcasts real-time customer navigation in your business.
- Explains customers' reaction, response, and behavior at each stage of your sales pipeline.
- Diagnose their roadblocks and pain points in their journey.
- Substantiates their decisions at each turning point.
Why discover customer journeys?
To improve the customer experience, it's crucial to have streamlined business processes. Many businesses struggle to understand how customers interact with them, and Pathfinder provides the clarity they need. Knowing where and how customers move is essential to gather the following information
- The touchpoints they are interested in.
- The average number of journeys possible in your business.
- The underlying opportunities and bottlenecks
- Popular paths taken in your business
- Understand their behavioral patterns
With these insights about their journeys, you can
- Eradicate unproductive and problematic touchpoints
- Launch new meaningful touchpoints
- Identify distinct customer persona and behavior
- Strategize cross-selling and upselling techniques
- Identify and improve the frequently used path
- Repair existing paths and orchestrate seamless customer journeys
- Identify unique paths and understand the positive/negative impact they might have on your business.
- Stage powerful marketing outreach programs
In short—untangle the traffic and formulate a great customer experience.
Path Finder
Path Finder is a robust tool that will help you discover and map customer journeys from across your business landscape. It is an observant tool that constantly looks for customer signals, capture and trace their movements, and maps them as unique paths.
After capturing live interactions, Path Finder records them as unique journeys and display three types of graphical maps: Path, Sankey, and Journey.
Path report: It will display the number of journeys taken in your business in an orderly fashion. It helps you to compare one journey with other and get ideas about different customer behaviors.
Sankey report: With its property to showcase "flow", Sankey help understand how your customers are navigating through touchpoints, graphically. You can look at the paths' volume and saturation to understand the traffic at a particular touchpoint.
Journey report: It is a flowchart representation of your customers' journeys. Hovering over a particular touchpoint, you can derive insights as to how different paths lead to it and how paths are directed from there. Imagine It will help understand important touchpoints and the accessibility of those in your business.
These reports are thus self-scribed maps of customers through which you can decipher their activities.
How does Path Finder capture live customer interactions?
Thus far, you've seen what Path Finder is, the outputs it produces, and how you can best use it for different scenarios. You would have understood its core function: capture, associate, and map signals. To best perform these actions, Path Finder relies upon three components.
Stages
Stages are literally the stages present in your business. Every journey, despite being non-linear, goes through different stages.
For example, Website sign-up > newsletter subscription > compared products > wish-listed an item > moved to cart > checked-out>order complete > invoice raised. This is a breadcrumb of navigation, say your prospect have made to accomplish their goal.
Configuring these significant stops as stages will help you understand where in the journey/process, are your prospect/customer currently in. Based on which, you can come up with relevant plan of action.
Touchpoints
Touchpoints are junctures or access points through which your prospects and customers interact with you. Their interaction can be a visit, a click, a download, a conversation, opening an email, making a phone call, and so on. Their every nudge will act as an external signal that triggers that particular touchpoint and as their interactions persist, the touchpoints are linked in the order of interaction.
Identifiers
Identifiers are unique values that could denote a visitor, a user, a prospect, or a customer. Identifiers add an identity to the customers such that whenever they interact, Path Finder can determine their activity, recognize them, and associate them to the respective paths. This is how Path Finder can make the observed paths unique to each customers. They are the most important configuration and must be configured such that the identifiers are unique to each user so that Path Finder does not track multiple users.
Here's an illustration of Path Finder at work.
From the above image, you can understand that there are 5 stages, which customer might get to at different point in their journey. Visitors of the site interact with desired touchpoints within and across stages and unique paths are mapped based on their identifying attributes configured as identifiers.
Business scenarios
Discover prospect behavior on a newly launched business
Zylker is an online business consultancy firm. Like a blank canvas, the newly launched business lacks knowledge about their prospects. Their objectives are to understand:
- Popular source of incoming leads
- What their leads are mostly looking for in their business?
- How are they converging?
- How long after are they converging?
- Are there drop-outs and where in their journey are they dropping out?
To meet these needs, they can setup Path Finder in the following ways:
Define Stages: Stages are milestones. To start with, they have to jot down all the hard stops they think their customers might take.
Configure Touchpoints: Touchpoints are access points through which an interaction is established. Zylker have to identify and configure interaction hubs their visitors are corresponding with your business at each stops they make (states).
Define identifiers: Teach Path Finder as to who are their visitors. Unique attributes like their last name, mobile number, and so on, help form unique paths. Zylker have to scour through their applications, collate all identifiers available across the applications they are connecting together, and tag the relevant ones.
Insurance convergence
ZylkerSure is a digital insurer that offers a wide range of insurance coverage for bike, car, health, travel, and electronics. Along with its quick-to-process and quick-to-claim policies, ZylkerSure is popular for its reasonable prices too. Being in the digital space, the company would like to learn how their customers are onboarded, which cross-selling strategy worked favorably, and how to fix bottlenecks and better stage pricing and bundling. Path Finder is a great tool when it comes to understanding patterns and customer trails.
Access your files securely from anywhere
Zoho CRM Training Programs
Learn how to use the best tools for sales force automation and better customer engagement from Zoho's implementation specialists.
Zoho DataPrep Personalized Demo
If you'd like a personalized walk-through of our data preparation tool, please request a demo and we'll be happy to show you how to get the best out of Zoho DataPrep.
- Zoho Workerly Home
- Forums
- Connect With Us:
- Zoho Recruit Home
- Forums
- Connect With Us:
New to Zoho Writer?
Create. Review. Publish.
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
You are currently viewing the help pages of Qntrl’s earlier version. Click here to view our latest version—Qntrl 3.0's help articles.
New to Zoho Survey?
Zoho Sheet Resources
Zoho Forms Resources
New to Zoho Sign?
Zoho Sign Resources
Sign, Paperless!
New to Zoho TeamInbox?
Zoho TeamInbox Resources
New to Zoho ZeptoMail?
Design. Discuss. Deliver.
New to Zoho Workerly?
New to Zoho Recruit?
New to Zoho CRM?
New to Zoho Projects?
New to Zoho Sprints?
New to Zoho Assist?
New to Bigin?
Related Articles
Setting up Path Finder
You can decipher from its name—Path Finder help find customers' paths taken in your business. Your business infrastructure is a multi-layered maze through which your customers enter and exit in a non-linear fashion. On one side you have different ...Orchestrating customer journeys using Journey Builder
Give your customers a friction-free experience all along their sales journey From receiving a lead in your business to converting them as a contact and closing a deal with them, your prospect is interacting with one business entity—your brand. And, ...Introduction to Zoho CommandCenter
Release news: Dear Customers, This document applies for customer with CommandCenter 2.0 enabled in their organization. Coming with new UI and UX controls, 2.0 deals with enhanced functions for a seamless customer journey management. Click here to ...Customer journey management: A deep dive into the craft of experience engineering
Release news: Dear Customers, This document applies for customer with CommandCenter 2.0 enabled in their organization. Coming with new UI and UX controls, 2.0 deals with enhanced functions for a seamless customer journey management. Click here to ...
New to Zoho LandingPage?
Zoho LandingPage Resources