How to overcome customer anxiety by giving them a safe journey and candies in the box.

If you want to know how to get noticed, this show is for you. I have interviews, tools, tips, everything that an entrepreneur could need in order to help their organization get noticed for free. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, on the Unnoticed Show. We all talk about the customer journey, but how many of us have mapped out our customer journey so that those people that we would like to do business with us would find us and get to like us and to trust us and eventually to give us their money. Now, this may not seem like PR, but actually it's all around trust. And public relations creates trust with people that may or may not have ever have met you. And when you're making a purchase online, trust, whether it's a consumer or a B2B element, is a central part of any transaction. So I want to just share with you what I learned by fixing my daughter's MacBook Pro. May seem a little bit of a strange subject, but I learned a lot from this company because they have, for me, mapped out my customer journey really well. So much so that I was willing to send a £1,000 piece of technology to a company that I've never heard of before in the hope that I would Get it A fixed and B get it back. And in this age of scams, we know that's not always going to be the case. When I first went online to look for someone to fix my problem, which is this broken Mac, I have to say that I was a little bit nervous because when you go online, you never know whether you're going to get what you are looking for. We went to the Apple shop and they quoted me £900 to fix my daughter's computer, and that would. Then be frankly more than the replacement cost. So we had to take a view and find an alternative. Now I looked online and it was both an ad but also top of the search rankings, macbook-repairs.co.uk, and came up with very simple and easy to read, open for mail-in repairs as normal, no fix, no fee. Free £1,000 insured drop-off, label, and return courier, 12-month warranty, and a phone number. A really straightforward call to action straight away and very focused. And what I noticed then is that they have over 900 positive reviews across Google. So here's a company that is really focusing on reassuring me on the first part of my customer journey, which is my research. Now, I'm already interested and I'm thinking, is this company for real? Because if I'm going to send a product, a MacBook Air away to someone that I don't know and can't see, and it's not obvious where they are, am I ever going to get my device back again? Sure enough, on the front it says here, have you ever spilled liquid on your MacBook? The answer is I haven't, but my daughter absolutely had. So straight away they had answered what was going on in my mind for me. So it's great in terms of using a hook. They'd already discussed with me online what I was going to be doing. They have an online chat, so I had a quick chat with them and I sent them a picture of the computer, and then they replied back to me straight away with an estimate that was in writing. Now, through the period of this process, a chap called Rhys wrote back to me, and before I had sent it, I wanted to just have a bit more of a check, so I checked out their postal address. Now, the whole process in which I had written to them was starting on the 17th of May all the way through to the 31st when I got my device back again. I only had 10 emails over that period Of just over ten days, and those emails were a combination of automated and written. When I had asked them about evidence that my computer was going to be okay, Reese sent me a video of the computer now turning on, showing me the screen with my daughter's login and ID, and playing the speakers and showing the trackpad. So the reason I'm sharing this is because. At each stage in my customer journey, this company, eFIXX Limited, had got a response to reassure me, to inform me, to invoice me for the fixing of this computer. Now, the reason I'm sharing this is because how many of us run a business where a main part of the objection to working with us is an anxiety? Is a concern. That person has not seen me, hasn't seen anyone else. I can't see a physical office or a physical shop. And on that customer journey, that avatar, that person that we have profiled to be our customer, gets lost. They drop on and off. Now, what I liked about the eFIXX people was I sent them an inquiry and I got a written quote. Very detailed explaining to me what was going to be happening. Then once I'd committed, they sent me a label to print off, and I was able to box up my computer and send it away. And then they were able to let me know they'd received it, and they let me know that they were fixing it. Then they sent me a quote to say this is the piece that actually we need to fix, and then they sent me a note to say it was fixed, and then a video to show me how it was fixed, and then another invoice that I had to pay. And once that was paid, that was a nervous moment because I'd paid it, they had a fixed computer— was I actually going to get my computer back again? And I think that's where the involvement of a human, Rhys, writing to me to give me reassurance got me across the line. Of course, at that stage I was already committed because I had sent them the computer and I'd sent them the money. So if they'd wanted to they could have walked away. And this is where the 900+ testimonials had been the reassurance for me. On my own website, East West PR, where I've served over 500 clients, I don't have any testimonials. Working with eFIXX reminded me that I am missing a key part of my own customer journey, and I immediately reached out to some clients to start to ask them to send me some testimonials. I used to have testimonials on my website, in fact, and then when we replaced the website, in the interest of having a clean website, we left out what is one of the essential parts of customer trust, especially now that we don't see one another, which is social proof. So as we're looking at our own website, social proof can be these testimonials. They can also be media coverage, for example, that we can put onto the website. Embed links, embed the actual articles we have for our clients on our website. We have case studies which are great, and that's great for our clients, but actually it's demonstrating that we've done the work, but it's not necessarily saying how grateful or how appreciative our own clients are of us. I started a Trustpilot, uh, review site, but for the business-to-business, we get so few, I think I'm going to be better off just having reviews that I ask clients to send me, and I'll just embed them into my WordPress site through the gallery. I think it'd be easier because I don't have a huge volume. But the customer journey is really what I wanted to share today. This idea that whether it's a company or it's an individual, the number of stages we go through from looking for the solution to finding a potential solution to being reassured that the company we're looking at understands our problem to taking that leap of faith to engage that company and getting reassured that was well taken, then entering into the engagement itself. And to have all these emails coming in over a 10-day period at each critical stage of the work showed to me this was a company that had process and also understood the need for my reassurance. How many of us have businesses where we don't communicate with customers until the product is delivered? And the customer may or may not be waiting for details about how the project is going. Is there any way that we can improve that through using tools? Is there any way that we can improve that by using tools, for example, like ClickSend, which we've now embedded into our Zoho CRM? And we use that now to send people a message to say that we've sent them, for example, important briefing book. So as we've moved away from one another, and we don't see each other as much. The customer journey and understanding that is a key part of what we need to do for our businesses. And how can we do that? One is just to very simply write it down. The other one is there's a company called Creately, for example, which has a nice way of making your customer journey map, and that is free to use, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. You can also use one called totango.com, miro.com. Also, some of the bigger ones like Semrush have got customer journey mapping tools. So we need to think about how we can map our customer and then have the messaging throughout the buying cycle be represented on all the touch points Whether it's on our website, whether it's on the emails that we send, the SMSs that we send. I've been just looking at my YouTube account, for example, and realizing that there isn't any detail about the company within the YouTube account. So really doing an audit and finding that all the touchpoints that we have for the company would reinforce what we're saying about our company when the customer is on their journey of discovery and engagement and fulfillment. Now I got the laptop back, it works wonderfully well, and I left our friends at eFIXX a, a review. When I got the MacBook back, inside the packaging was a nice note, and also thinking that these devices would go home to students, they put a couple of candies in just for good measure. A really nice way to round out the whole customer experience and to realize that the customer journey has many different stages, and there are many different places at which we can lose a customer. And as it's so hard to find them in the first place, keeping them on the path and reassuring them throughout the path is a key part of anybody's PR activities. So thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show, a bit shorter than normal because I decided that every now and again, without having a guest, I'm just going to share some tools and some insights that I've got. from running a PR business for over 25 years. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. I hope it helps you. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. I hope that you've enjoyed it, and if you have, please do rate it on any of the players. If you'd like more information, go over to eastwestpr.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or connect with me on LinkedIn. That's just Jim James, East West Public Relations. I'd be delighted to connect with you, and let me know how I can help you to get noticed.