Automating the steps in a standard purchasing process to improve customer experience

Submitted by Alexandra Truchot, Content Creation Specialist for Objectif Lune.
September 29, 2016

Purchasing one of your products or services is only one of the steps in a more complex customer journey. By the time your customers get to the payment stage, they will have gone through many other crucial stages during which they also interacted with your company. Furthermore, following a purchase, the journey continues because if you want to build customer loyalty or have customers make another purchase, you have to keep in touch with them.  So the journey begins with the discovery of your brand and continues with the order, payment and delivery, not to mention the after-sales service, if required.

All of these steps are just as important in order to build customer loyalty and turn your customers into ambassadors of your products and services.

Managing them, however, can be complex and often involve many small and tedious manual tasks. By automating the most essential processes, you could save a lot of time and gain your customers’ trust by offering them a better experience when dealing with your company.

Here are a few steps in a standard customer journey which you can easily automate.

Communications with potential customers
Sales cycles are often long. Prospecting is a complex task. It takes months to strengthen ties with your network and in order to do so, you need to provide high-quality content to potential customers.

Accounts opening
The creation of new accounts is a defining moment in the customer-company relationship. But if this step is made even more complex by the excessive use of paper or tedious manual data entry by your employees, it can be frustrating for potential customers.

Order-taking
Managing purchase orders often requires scanning piles upon piles of documents every day. Employees have to manually enter numerous data to launch the subsequent phases of the process. This causes many delays and orders can sometimes take several days before being confirmed!

Deliveries
When delivering the products to your customers, you have a golden opportunity to interact with them and ensure that their experience is a good one.

Invoicing
Did you know that transactional messages are 8 times more likely to be opened than other types of communications? This is therefore a great opportunity for you to communicate with your customers.

Document management
According to the Institute of Financial Operations, 43% of organizations say that being unable to find the right data in their different customer files remains their greatest issue where after-sales services are concerned. When Customer Service wants to respond to a request, it often wastes valuable time trying to put the information together, or simply even finding the information!

Get closer to reaching your productivity, operational efficiency and customer experience objectives one step at a time!


AlexandraTruchot ThumbnailAlexandra Truchot – Content creation specialist with Objectif Lune. Writer and compulsive reader. Eager for unknown destinations and exciting encounters. Anything is possible, you just have to believe it. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Objectif Lune has 20 years of experience developing Customer Communications Management solutions. Our solutions bridge the gap between systems and automate more personalized, relevant, multichannel customer communications. Learn more at: www.objectiflune.com.