In a not so recent article (Nov/2015) on the Harvard Business Review, Competing on Customer Journeys by David C. Edelman and Marc Singer discusses the new shaping of the customer journey. Their description of the journey is shaped in a strikingly similar structure that remind many of us as a type of (not so) casual loop or a system archetype. What they equate this new journey is a shortening of the buying cycle and an extension of why I might call the empowerment cycle of the customer.
This equates to many of my thoughts from the blog posts, The 5 Rs of Growth and Funnel of Opportunity where I discuss the majority of our growth and revenue is coming after the sale, not before. A short excerpt from their article:
Companies building the most effective journeys master four interconnected capabilities: automation, proactive personalization, contextual interaction, and journey innovation. Each of these makes journeys “stickier”—more likely to draw in and permanently capture customers. And although the capabilities all rely on sophisticated IT (see the sidebar “New Journey Technologies”), they depend equally on creative design thinking and novel managerial approaches, as we’ll explore later.
I encourage you to read the article and to read about how the New Journey is beginning to materialize. The journey is becoming more and more about the loyalty loop and as the authors said, “locking them within it” and as I would say, viewing from a Funnel of Opportunity.