How to build customer journey with Microsoft Dynamics?

Customer journey is one way of understanding the customer and their motivations behind consumer choices. It’s a kind of guide to a customer’s experience with your company. For most brands, the pattern contains similar elements: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and support.   

Creating a customer map can be work and challenging at first, but incredibly rewarding in the future. It allows you to have better control over your marketing efforts and sales funnel, adjust your efforts to increase sales, and analyze problem areas. As a result, your marketing efforts will be based on a solid strategy supported by numbers and data.  

Microsoft Dynamics already has the ability to create such a customer journey map.  It will be the perfect tool for you to create your first customer journey.  

How you can make your customer journey? 

1. Think about how a customer might come into contact with your brand. We suggest that it can be for example mail, social media, events, phone calls, meetings and others. For each of the points, add a situation in which the customer encounters these forms of communication, this will help us later in creating a precise customer journey. 

2. Ensure that your Microsoft Dynamics system captures sales and marketing data. A sub-set of information is: 
   – Campaigns Entity: Leverage both Lead Source and Source Campaign 
   – Competitor Entity: Capture who you’re losing (and winning) to at the Lead and Opportunity stages 
   – Marketing Spend and Potential ROI 
    
   By having these three options, you can build a more sophisticated and data-driven marketing budget. It will give you a clear view of which campaigns were profitable, what results the marketing efforts produced, and real revenue. Don’t overlook this step, this data will be very important to you later. 

3. Determine what goals you want to achieve by building a customer journey. Based on the data from the previous step, specify your goals and motivations. Examples include:  
   – How many leads did you need to earn a certain amount of money?  
   – What was your average monthly revenue? 
   – What activities consumed the most money? 

4. Define which of your lead sources is the best. Finally, you have the right data on hand to help you achieve this. Use it to determine which sources are the most profitable and then discuss it with your team so everything is clear and they understand why you’re choosing these options and not others. 

What’s next? 

As you and your team gather energy to begin the process of mapping the customer journey make sure each of you knows your role and its importance in the overall process. Remember the lead source you selected in the previous step? It will now be essential for your next steps. Gather all the people who have direct contact with your source.  

Then choose with your team examples of customer collaborations that were successful. Bring in a couple of such cases and go through step by step what were worth repeating actions. It will be a good idea to reach for a few unsuccessful examples of collaboration as well. It is also a good idea to learn from these unsuccessful projects in order to avoid repeating them in the future.  

As soon as you draw conclusions, move on to creating a campaign map. It will help you determine what data you need from Dynamics to execute the sample campaigns. Take a look below, we’re sure this will lighten your path to successful sales a bit!