As we have helped many growing firms automate RevOps over the past 10 years, we have found one universal truth related to customer experience (CX). Loyalty and advocacy for your organization do not exclusively begin post-purchase. They begin the moment a prospect interacts with your company. This insight has reshaped how we think—and how you should— about optimizing, automating, and scaling customer experience.
A prospect or customer pledges support multiple times, and at growing levels of fealty to your organization along the customer’s journey – Awareness, Consideration, Purchasing, Retention, and Advocacy. Each stage is a milestone and presents an opportunity to increase customer (prospect) commitment to your brand. However, many organizations do not keep this truth in mind when designing customer experiences. As a result, they miss the chance to nurture buyer commitment and maximize revenue potential at every stage.
In this post, you’ll learn how thoughtful, well-designed, frictionless customer experiences increase brand strength and revenue generation by enhancing buyer commitment at all points along the customer journey.
Why Frictionless Customer Experience is Important to Buyer Commitment
While the buyer’s journey is presented sequentially, with Advocacy following Purchasing and Retention, Advocacy’s only prerequisite stage is Awareness. One does not necessarily have to become a customer to be an advocate for your brand. A prospect can jump to Advocacy from any preceding stage. Furthermore, potential customers can be in the Advocacy and preceding stages simultaneously. Even if a potential buyer is not currently in the market for a product or service, an ad or marketing content that left a positive impression could still lead them to recommend it to a friend who is actively looking.
The customer experience is not guaranteed to be linear or cyclical and can stop at any moment. Each friction point jeopardizes commitment and creates a risk to both completing the journey and building any advocacy. Each point of friction slows buying momentum, reduces purchase potential, and lowers the valuable commitment of both prospects and customers.
Let’s look at some examples from each stage.
Buyer Commitment and Friction Points in the Customer Journey
1. Awareness: The First Commitment
The customer journey begins at the Awareness stage, where prospects first encounter your brand, products, or services. Here, they are immediately faced with a commitment choice. Your “maybe-to-be” customer is deciding whether or not to commit to stepping over that threshold— metaphorical, virtual, or physical—to learn more (i.e., to consider a purchase). Common commitment friction at this stage includes unclear messaging, poor branding, and a lack of online presence. To reduce friction, you must keep your brand messaging clear, make your value proposition immediately apparent, and ensure your digital assets are optimized for visibility and engagement.
2. Consideration: Deepening the Commitment
After taking that first step, prospects enter the Consideration phase. Perhaps, they are committing to filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, picking up a product, reading a label, asking a question on a community forum, or browsing for answers about your product or category. You may not even know when someone enters the Consideration phase. Often, the first time you see them as an organization is after they have purchased. Common commitment friction at this stage includes lengthy forms, lack of social proof, and irrelevant or unconvincing content. To make commitment frictionless here, you’ll need to streamline your forms, provide clear and compelling reasons to take the next step, and offer testimonials or case studies that build trust and confidence.
3. Purchasing: Capturing the Commitment
At the Purchasing phase of their journey, the customer has made the “soft” commitment to buy. Here, organizations with a frictionless purchasing process cement that commitment quickly. Those with a complex purchase cycle, friction in the buying process, or any number of factors that raise doubt in a prospect’s mind reduce the likelihood of further commitment and may experience higher rates of prospects deciding, “I’ve changed my mind.” Common commitment friction at this stage includes complicated checkout/booking processes, unexpected costs, or lack of payment options. Customer commitment becomes smoother if you simplify the checkout process, be transparent about costs, and offer multiple payment options to accommodate different customer preferences.
4. Retention: Sustaining the Commitment
For prospects who commit fully to purchasing and becoming customers, the Retention stage requires a sustained commitment level. While every company’s long-term goal is that customers never rescind their commitment, there are short-term milestones you must hit.
If you have a refund window, the first goal is to ensure that new customers don’t revoke their commitment before that window closes. If you offer a subscription-based product/service, every charge is a reaffirmation of their commitment. If you have an auto-renewal mechanism, the customer is pledging their future commitment (perhaps indefinitely) during the initial purchasing process. Without an auto-renewal process, each billing cycle requests that the customer consciously recommit. This introduces friction and potentially increases customer churn that must be offset by additional marketing spend to achieve the equivalent MRR/ARR as a competitor with an auto-renewal process.
Other common commitment friction at this stage includes poor customer support, unclear billing, or unmet product expectations. To simplify commitment here, you must provide excellent customer support, ensure transparency in billing, and continuously meet or exceed customer expectations through product updates or enhancements.
5. Advocacy: The Pinnacle of Commitment
In the Advocacy stage, prospects and customers are committing to associate their reputation with yours in various ways. Advocacy should be a recurring and intentional commitment whether it’s word of mouth, an introduction, a review, a social post, or emailing an affiliate link to their contact list. This may be the biggest and most overt commitment a customer makes, whether they think so or not. This is why organizations prioritize the Advocacy stage when designing customer experience processes. It ties back to our insight on levels of commitment and why we think firms need to shift their thinking.
Common commitment friction at this stage includes cumbersome advocacy process, and poor or lack of incentives. You’ll bolster commitment when you make it easy for customers to share their positive experiences, provide incentives for referrals, and engage with your advocates regularly to keep them motivated.
Your CX process must build momentum to propel more people from Awareness to Advocacy. Not engineering the friction out of the buying process means more marketing investment, more Herculean human intervention, more client churn, lost revenue, wasted manpower, and so on.
How Your Organizational Structure Creates Friction, Damages Buyer Commitment, and Erodes Customer Experience
The traditional departmental structure touching the customer journey is more complex and intertwined than you think. Marketing, Sales, Finance, Operations, Product, HR, Legal, Executives, PR, Partners, et al deliver some element of customer service. However, customers don’t make these functional distinctions the way internal functions often do. To customers, interacting with anyone in your organization is seen collectively as one thing called “customer experience.”
Let’s look at how you can unknowingly create friction and damage commitment because you have not thought about scaling customer experience holistically across your organization’s structure.
- Marketing directly impacts the Awareness and Consideration stages. But, they also have an indirect effect on Purchasing, Retention, and Advocacy. For example, if Marketing targets an ill-defined buyer persona, sets misaligned expectations, and pushes the wrong leads through Awareness and Consideration, it negatively impacts the prospect’s experience at the Purchasing stage.
- Perhaps, a prospect responds to an ad they shouldn’t have seen in the first place. They commit and add your product to their cart, go to checkout, enter their billing address, and receive a message saying, “We’re unable to ship to your state today.” That leaves an annoying CX taste in their mouth. Functions start pointing fingers at each other.
- Marketing wipes their hands and says “Hey, I did my job. I’m filling the top of the funnel.” Operations might be saying, “Well, our systems are working properly. We don’t want these people to be able to purchase at this time.” Customer service has to intervene and reset expectations. Great!
Here’s what it has cost your business, to put it mildly:
1. You have spent actual marketing dollars to drive the wrong traffic to your site.
2. They have spent (wasted) time chatting with support during the pre-sales process.
3. 15,000 of these types of contacts have entered into your CRM and increased your tech bill.
What level of “commitment” do you think these disconnects produce?
Conclusion
Every stage of a customer’s journey is intertwined and interdependent in so many ways that they impact commitment before, during, and after purchase. That is why CX processes are about so much more than just getting a purchase today but building frictionless commitment and streamlining organizational structure to achieve short-term and long-term dividends.
With more clarity and less friction in any given stage, prospects and customers will be more committed to purchasing and referring more business to you. That means more scale, more revenue, lower costs, and stronger positive differentiation for your organization.
If you’re looking for a strategic partner who can help erase friction, enhance commitment at every stage of the customer journey, and improve overall customer experience, book a free call with one of our strategists right away. Let’s work together to drive scalable growth for your business.
