Customer behaviour has changed forever. More than 70% of the buying journey now takes place online and business-to-business buyers are more than halfway through the buying journey before they contact a salesperson.

Many businesses are struggling to engage prospects in the right way to deliver the kind of experience customers want.

The results are all too typical. Poor customer experiences, overstretched sales teams and slower growth as your competitors breeze past you.

• Customers don't understand the solutions you provide.
• Customers can't find information on your website and many give up.
• Your website should be helping you build a better buyer but it's no longer fit for purpose.
• Sales teams are frustrated with poor quality leads.
• And frustrated customers are turning to competitors, because their experience is better.

Graph is a customer experience agency helping business leaders and marketing teams deliver an exceptional end-to-end digital journey.

Our Experience Blueprint provides you with a complete understanding of your customers' needs, their experience, the information critical to each step, the opportunities to exceed customer expectations and the technology platforms best for delivering this.

1. Why is customer experience so important?

Customer experience is now an important driver of competitive advantage, and success depends on your ability to meet customer expectations at every touch point.

A positive customer experience can have a profound effect on how customers perceive your brand, leading to better ratings and reviews, increased sales and customer retention. And it can help convert customers into loyal brand advocates - and eventually increase your customer lifetime value.

2. How to build a customer experience strategy?

Building a customer experience strategy is one of the most important steps you can take to establish and strengthen your brand. There are several key steps:

Persona development

Customer personas provide marketing teams and businesses with a detailed understanding of their ideal customer. Personas represent everyone involved in a buying decision and can be created by interviewing customers to capture their motivations, needs, wants and goals.

They help you to understand your customers on a much deeper level, so you can create seamless and more personalized experiences.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Mapping the customer journey helps you create an experience that better meets customer needs and wants. A customer journey map identifies all the touchpoints where your business interacts with customers and examines how well those touchpoints are working.

It's important to map out the entire journey from start to finish and identify what information or tools each person wants at that stage of their journey, what they're thinking, what they need to find, and what they need to do.