How to remove uncertainty from your customer journey

How is risk impacting your customer journey?

Perceived risk is one of your customer’s biggest blockers to action. It underpins the well-known ‘status quo bias’ - our tendency not to make a decision or take action in a given circumstance. For brands and retailers, this can create major friction in the customer journey.

But how do your customers evaluate risk, and why do they work so hard to avoid it?

At its core, our risk perception is a kind of safety mechanism that helps us avoid danger and loss - it keeps us alive and in the race.

It kicks in when we face uncertainty (which is helpful, as there is a whole lot of uncertainty in the world!). I’m not just referring to the US election or climate change - the world is fundamentally full of uncertainty. There is simply too much information for us to accurately assess every possible risk, especially given our limited time and cognition.

As such, we tend to err on the side of caution. The evolutionary explanation goes: if we don’t make a move, we risk nothing and nothing changes - it's the safest way to ensure we live to fight another day.

This is why we tend to favor familiar things, a tendency known as 'familiarity bias' (know anyone who goes to the same place on holiday every year?). It sounds obvious, but if something is familiar, we can be much more certain of the outcome - it's low risk! Incidentally, this is the key function of any brand.

It's also closely linked to our loss-aversion (finding losses more painful than gains of the same size) - holding onto what we already have is much lower risk than making changes that might result in big losses.

So what are the different types of risks your customers face, and how can you help mitigate against them?

The search for certainty

You know that feeling when you’re really happy with a purchase? When it meets or exceeds your expectations, all for a price you’re happy with? It could be a new subscription that saves you time, a successful investment, or simply a new pair of shoes that get you lots of compliments.

Well, that is certainty. There is no longer any risk in the scenario because you KNOW what that product or service delivers for you. Again, this isn’t rocket science, but the point here is that you should be working to instil this feeling in your customers BEFORE they actually buy from you.

The world’s leading brands develop and leverage their brand power to do this - you and I already know how we’ll feel before we buy any Apple product.

While this might be the long-term aim for any independent brand, for those of us wielding slightly less brand power than Nike or Apple, we have to work a bit harder to reduce perceived risks.

Below are some of the key risks you should be considering at every point of evaluation and decision-making across your customer journey, along with ideas on how to overcome them.

NB: These can be conscious or unconscious evaluations by your customers, but the risks they are working to evaluate and avoid remain the same.