Customer Lifecycle :
11. The race to digital customer journeys
In our series on the new build property development customer lifecycle, we look at the impact of digital and how technology is changing the customer buying experience. We break down the customer journey and describe each step and how it may be supported using technology whether it is acquired or developed.
Table of Contents
Conclusion
Accelerated by a global pandemic 2020 has been an unprecedented year. In the background, customers have increasingly turned to digital when physical options were not available. For property developers this meant distribution of information digitally, virtual viewings and online support for purchase and handover.
Understanding and managing customer experience online has never been so important than now. This will only increase in the future as digital proves its effectiveness in making customers’ lives easier and as the next generation of buyers expect digital experiences as the norm.
Customer journey mapping
Here we summarise the customer journey. The diagram below aligns both sales and marketing stages with each step of the customer journey. It also compares how these steps have been handled within and outside a digital approach:
Whilst there is potentially a huge amount of work to fully manage customer journeys, developers can find solutions for all their needs. By summarising the customer journey above, developers can formulate plans and make key decisions on how to implement their digital strategy for managing customer journeys.
The digital stack for developers customer journey
As customers shift towards digital channels, property developers will increasingly need to support their customer journeys online. To address this change developers will need the right digital marketing skills and digital solutions to support the different customer journeys.
The following lists the complete digital stack for supporting the customer lifecycle for buying a new property:
“When considering the total cost of ownership a cloud based vendor solution will generally be the most cost effective.“
Dharmesh Mistry
Build or buy?
It should be noted that traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions such as SalesForce and MS Dynamics do not support this entire journey. Hence, developers should ensure that any supplementary solutions can integrate with 3rd party CRM solutions.
Some of these individual solutions have integrations to adjacent solutions in the customer lifecycle for example YourKeys sales progression solution integrates with Clixifix. The AskHomey Innova platform too can be used for most of the customer lifecycle.
Developers should think carefully about developing their own solutions to support their customer journeys as these will typically not be differentiated enough to provide competitive edge. As such, third party solutions will offer greater functionality and flexibility as they will have been designed for multiple clients and not just the needs of one developer. When considering the total cost of ownership a cloud based vendor solution will generally be the most cost effective, see our paper on Build vs Buy.
Finally, it is important to recognise that technology is evolving fast, hence an agile approach to technology implementation is needed as well as a constant review of the technologies used.
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Thought provoking posts for the new build sector covering Customer Experience, Innovation and Thought Leadership