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Tracking the Customer's Journey to Purchase
by Emma Macdonald, Hugh Wilson, and Umut Konus
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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.
Read the entire HBR article
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