Episode 303: A quick tool for systems success
In this episode, Fiona shares a tactic for evaluating and improving business systems by mapping out the customer journey and identifying areas where there may be bottlenecks or a lack of resources. Fiona provides a step-by-step guide for drawing out the customer journey map and offers suggestions for addressing system issues. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Rebranding and the tedious admin work that goes with it
Customer journey map and the buyer cycle
Mapping out the customer journey on paper
Identifying bottlenecks and drop-offs in the customer journey
Finding solutions to fix the system
Examples of systems that need fixing
Importance of figuring out what is wrong with the system.
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 303 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today it is a quick tip episode, and that's where I share a tip, tool, or tactic that you can implement immediately in your small business. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this beautiful land on which I live and record this podcast. It is windy at the moment in this beautiful land, I hope you can still hear me. That is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention, in case you missed it, is that we have recently rebranded. You'll find all the stuff for the podcast over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast. You can find our shop, mydailybusiness.com/shop, and all the free stuff over at mydailybusiness.com/freestuff. We'll link to that all in the show notes and you'll be able to find all the show notes from past episodes as well over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
If you have worked with me, if you've come to a workshop, if you have had anything to do with me, or even listened to this podcast for some time, you'll know that I'm a very visual learner. I like to draw things, I like to have frameworks, I like to scribble when I'm talking to people and visually represent a diagram or a matrix or a table or something that I think allows you to understand complex issues in brand and marketing and systems in an easy, succinct way, but also in a way that is visual. I'm a reader and I love words. I love language. That's what I studied. I did English honours at uni and I love that and I've worked as a journalist for a long time. But I think sometimes when I'm trying to figure out a problem in somebody's business, if I'm coaching or in my own business or just a problem just in life, I will often start drawing it out.
Today's quick tip episode goes down that same path. In particular, it's a tactic that I use when I'm looking at the best systems for a client or for my own business. Because we have recently rebranded from My Daily Business Coach to My Daily Business, one of the things that have come up is the mountain of tedious admin work, of having to change logins and all the things that go with changing your email address and changing your name and changing your URL. It's been a journey. If you're interested in that journey, check out Thursday's episode coming up because that is all about why we rebranded the actual steps I took, who I worked with to do it, and all of those things. But one of the things is that I've had to go through all of the tools, all of the platforms, and software that we are using in this business and decide firstly if I'm going to bother updating it because are we going to keep using this or are we going to let it slide?
Is it helping us? When I'm looking at systems, how are they helping with the customer journey? A customer journey map or a customer journey or buyer cycle or whatever you want to call it, a sales funnel is about taking people from not being aware of your business to become an advocate for your business. I like to look at it as a buyer cycle. You have five key stages, awareness, research, evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase, which if you've done it correctly, it gives people a great experience and ends up becoming advocacy. You want to take those people from unaware to advocates. One of the ways to look at doing that is to just draw a line on the page. On your left, they don't know anything about us, how are they going to find out about us?
You might have things like collaboration ads, social media, and a whole bunch of things that you might be doing there. You might be doing events, direct mail, like a whole bunch of things to just get that awareness happening. Then you've got all these other stages before they become advocates and you retain them and the whole thing starts again, which is why I like to look at it as a cycle, not a sales funnel where you are spitting people out. Coming back to today's topic, which is about figuring out your systems, I like to look at that customer journey map and figure out what is the drop-off happening or where do we not have systems to support this. If you want to play along and you're able to draw at this point in time, you're not driving or operating heavy machinery, you can get a piece of paper, turn it so that it's landscape, and what you're going to do is draw an arrow across from left to right.
If you can't do this right now, but you want to come back to it, you can find the show notes over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/303. You've got the piece of paper, you've drawn your arrow in the middle of that piece of paper on the top half of the page, and you are going to map out the customer journey. You can do this for the customer journey. You could do this for your content marketing system. You could do it for HR people, management, and recruitment retention of staff. Anything could be on that top half. But let's say, for example, it's the customer journey map. You've got the awareness, all the things you're doing, then the next stage, and on. That's all above the arrow. And underneath the arrow, you are going to figure out where the drop-off is happening and where you don't have a resource, a system, or software to support that.
What you'll find is that you know where the bottlenecks are, you know where things are dropping off, and you know where things are becoming stressful or overwhelming. And that is where you want to start is to figure out what is not working there because either there is no system in place or there was a system but no one adheres to it, or there was a system and you half doing it, or there was a system and it worked well, but things have changed and you haven't updated the system. Therefore things are falling by the wayside. What you can then see is, can we create a system? Can we update a system that was already in existence but we haven't been using it? Can we shake things up a little? Can we hire somebody to help with that?
Or can we look at a software program that is going to help us such as a platform Or maybe if you change your email provider, maybe you can find an email provider that makes doing X or Y much easier than the current place that you have? A lot of the time, particularly I find with websites, people will say, “I can't update the website myself.” Or it's in this particular platform or this particular company. And they have restrictions on what you can do. It's figuring out if that's going to be like an issue every single time for every customer, maybe we should look at a different email provider or maybe we should look at a different website provider so it's really figuring out where is stuff really stuffing up or becoming stressful either for the customer or client or for you as the business owner or people working in your business.
That is where you should start with figuring out what is wrong with the system. Let's say, for example, you have an e-commerce store and you have decent sales, but you don't have much repeat business. You look at that space between purchase and post-purchase and you're like, we've looked at our analytics, or maybe you haven't even looked at the analytics. You just know that you're not seeing the same people's names pop up. You're like, we are getting sales, but everyone's just doing one sale and then not coming back. And it may be that you're not even looking at the analytics to see what your repeat buyers are or your frequency of purchases. But the other thing could be that you don't have a system for retention.
You don't have a system in place to get in touch with people, again, to offer incentives. You don't have a loyalty program. It's figuring out what is missing to help that customer journey work as seamlessly both for the client or customer and for the business yourself as possible. One of the easiest ways, like I said, is just to draw this out because what can happen is you get overwhelmed and I've done it, believe me, I have done this. You go down a spiral of watching YouTube videos on the best way to organize this or the best retention programs, or you start looking at all of these blogs on Notion versus Monday or ConvertKit versus MailChimp, and all of these things. And suddenly you're in this research bubble that's not helping you determine what the steps are that you need to take.
Yes, it's giving you ideas about, if I choose that platform or this, or even you might have gone down a path of looking at all these infographics and systems diagrams and yet not needing to apply that particular system to your business. The first step is always to map out your customer journey and map the ideal. Then underneath that, figure out where the issues are happening, where maybe you don't have the resource in place to get back to people in time. That lag between people evaluating that you're the right fit for them and purchasing is deeper than you want it to be or longer than you want it to be because you don't have automated emails going out to people or you don't have a way of tracking who's come to your website. They've filled in a form maybe, and maybe the form doesn't work or maybe you can't fix the form because you paid somebody 10 years ago to do your website and you can't get in to fix that stuff up.
It's like, this is always a problem that we always have to do a workaround. We don't catch everybody that contacted us. Those are things you want to avoid. And the way that you can potentially avoid them is by just having a look first and foremost, what's the ideal journey and then what is not working with that? And then that is where you're like, we need a project management software. You can go into your research of which one should I choose and which one is going to be better for your business, as opposed to jumping that step when you don't know if that project management software is what you need to support your customer journey map. I hope that helps. It is quite a complex thing to get your head around, but I hope that just that idea of putting it on one page, drawing a line, putting out bullet points or other things even mind maps, whatever you want to do on the top half and then figuring out the bottom half.
Because I can tell you that so many times when I've done this for clients and now that we are redoing this for ourselves with the rebrand, it is easy to spot, this is the problem, this is where we need to start. I hope that has helped you. If it has, I'd love to hear from you. You can send us a DM @mydailybusiness_, or you can email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com. If you have found it useful, I would love it again if you could share it or you could send it to a friend or even leave us a review. It just helps other small business owners learn and maybe make changes that they need to make in their business as a result. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you next time.
