Work that Matters for Customers Who Care: Reflections from our Journey Summit

Being a part of the ecosystem that connects consumers with service providers in areas like higher education, lending, insurance, and auto comes with great responsibility. Brands, agencies, lead generators, and comparison shopping sites work together to make major-life purchase (MLP) decisions smarter and safer. In an effort to support this unique space, we held Journey Summit, a thought leadership event focusing on the challenges and opportunities in MLP marketing, last month. (You may have seen our CEO’s post about it.)

If you read my last article, I wrote about these MLP decisions like buying a house or a car. The decision-making process is hard for consumers and presents new challenges for marketers. During Summit we talked about the difficulty of tying together different interactions across a wide variety of channels and partners, over a long period of time in order to deliver good experiences and gain customer trust.

Right Message, Right Time

As our keynote speaker Seth Godin said, it’s doing work that matters for people who care. We need to connect with the MLP shopper to deliver relevant, timely messaging and offers where they want to be met. Because every day brings more choices, more channels and more outlets for consumers. The majority of MLP journeys start online where consumers encounter a litany of choices. Consider a recent Accenture study where 60% of consumers would consider buying insurance from a bank and 38% from a home services company.

Convenience for the consumer means they can be extra choosey, weigh more options and seek multiple opinions. In studying the Jornaya network of shopping behavior, we found that more than one-third of mortgage and insurance shoppers and nearly two-thirds of education seekers submit inquiries to 2 or more sites.

What happens next is an incredibly competitive chase where the consumer gets inundated with too many inbound contacts. Consumers want and expect amazing experiences but that still isn’t the norm today, it’s generally the exception.

Establishing Trust

We know the consumer rarely wants a barrage of inbound calls, texts, and emails. In fact, it only takes one bad experience for the consumer to retreat. We have to keep in mind that these MLP decisions include lots of emotion and financial risk. Getting into a bad loan or policy, for example, can have long term consequences. These factors play into the stress and anxiety for the consumer, their mood, and the marketer’s ability to create exceptional outcomes. The crux of this relationship is trust.

So how do we build that connection with the consumer in order to deliver meaningful experiences and positive outcomes? Stay tuned for more articles from the Jornaya team that will focus on establishing trust and confidence.  

Matt Lohman is CRO at Jornaya.