A Bespoke Solution to Mass Production — Our Customer Journey
My name is Shaun Fredericks, and I am the operations director for The Bespoke Amenities Co, a guest amenities manufacturer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The business was started in 2013 to become a customer-centric manufacturer of hospitality cosmetics for the hospitality industry.
Sitting down this week, I had the privilege of mapping our current customer journey. It has been a wild ride for the business over the last eight years of operation, especially with the added edition of a pandemic that has decimated the hospitality industry in the previous 12 months. There are several ways in which customers interact with our business daily. We have customers that phone in orders, emails orders, Watsapp or text message orders, and importantly, we have an online store that people can purchase directly. We are currently busy developing a business-to-business online store, therefore chose to profile our current online store.
Often when you are involved with creating a piece of content, you look at it from the developer’s point, and you tend to include features that you think the customer will want to use or see. You often forget to look at the system or process from the customers perspective, which can be detrimental to your strategy. Working through our customer journey highlighted several deficiencies within our online presence and platform.
Our business has some great products. We have spent a large portion of the pandemic redesigning products to modern and sophisticated standards. Most importantly, we incorporate specific environmental sustainability features to combat single-use plastic that plagues our industry — currently, sustainability what drives our business purpose and processes. We acknowledge that our industry is problematic, and we want to be the change. Sustainability is everything to us.
The first issue I identified is that our website is not the easiest to find. The sustainability initiatives are also nowhere to be found within the search engines. We have recently change platforms from Magento to WordPress; therefore, it is clear that more emphasis needs to be placed on our SEO. Investing in Google Ad’s is also necessary, especially to get our sustainability message across.
The following issues identified within the website platform lies with the comparison of products. We have several options available to customers to suit various tourism gradings and price points. However, being unable to compare products against each other and not effectively identify products for my specific property, e.g. a 5-star property, makes choosing the right product rather tricky. Introducing a product comparison tool making use of a simple survey would optimise the site for users.
Looking ahead to building the business-to-business platform, it is evident that we need to follow a straightforward customer-centric approach. Understanding the customer’s needs and creating a platform that is easy to find and use is key to ensuring a happy and loyal customer. A customer journey is a must, and I am looking forward to optimising our websites in the future by looking at various analytics available to us. At the end of the day, you cannot manage what you cannot measure.
