Tracking Post-

Purchase Behavior

Created By:
Akim, Leila
Dela Rosa, Gregorio
Manalo Jr., Roderick C.
 You may have put a lot of effort into getting that customer to make a purchase, but
it’s just as important to put additional effort into turning that customer into a repeat
and loyal customer. Not only can that customer make additional purchases from you,
but he or she also just might recommend your business, which could lead to even
more customers.

 Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance

In the post-purchase phase, you either confirm or alter the ideas and beliefs customers
have of you from the pre-purchase and consideration phases. The mismatch between
customers’ expectations and their actual experience leads to delight or disappointment
and cognitive dissonance.
 Three of the main causes of cognitive dissonance are;

•Value: The price or total payment cost isn’t worth what was paid.

•Quality: The product or service doesn’t perform as expected, is missing

features, or breaks.

•Better alternatives: Buyer’s remorse is more intense when a customer

has rejected a lot of alternative products.
Reducing dissonance

 Customers with cognitive dissonance will take actions to

reduce it, which can mean returning a product, spreading
negative word of mouth, or not purchasing the product
again.
Customers with high cognitive dissonance can do several things:

 Take no action.
 Cancel or return the product.
 Purchase another product.
 Contact customer support or customer service representatives.
 To address customers’ dissonance, each of these reasons can be addressed using the following approaches:

 Offer a better value.

 Improve quality.
 Confirm the initial choice.
Tracking return rates

 One of the actions customers can take is to return a product. A return

guarantee is key to alleviating cognitive dissonance, but it can be expensive to
maintain if you suffer a spate of returns.
 Measuring the Post-
Purchase Touchpoints
Measuring the Post-Purchase
Touchpoints
The data you collect in the post-purchase
phase aids in understanding how well the
experience is at each stage and also how to
improve the experience for current and future
customers.
Digging into the post-purchase
touchpoints

You can deploy your surveys at

different intervals to correspond with
a touchpoint.
Some common touchpoints
include:

Shipping and delivery

Unboxing (opening the product)
Installation and setup
Customer support
Feature usage
Overall satisfaction
Shipping and delivery
When customers decide to purchase
something, they want it right away. For an in-
store purchase, this isn’t much of an issue when
the item is in stock.
Unboxing
The experience of removing a product from
its package is one of the first physical
touchpoints you have to influence the emotional
connection a customer has with the brand.
Installation and setup
For many products, after the unboxing
experience, the setup and installation process
defines the first moments of the post-purchase
phase. 
Customer support
Customer support is one of the most
common post-purchase touchpoints. This
usually consists of a call center, email support,
or online chat feature. 
FEATURE USAGE
 FEATURE USAGE

the case that customers will purchase a

product for a set of features during the
consideration phase, but use only a subset
in the post-purchase phase.
 Assessing post-purchase satisfaction ratings

You can create your own customer satisfaction questions,

but remember that consumer-advocate organizations often
also measure customer satisfaction for a variety of things
products, services, and websites
Finding Problems Using Call Center Analysis

A number of analytics measure the customer call

center experience. The point of these analytics
shouldn’t just be about finding ways to cut costs
or improve your support staff’s efficiency.
Here are six of the most common call center analytics to
track, in addition to the satisfaction:

Customer satisfaction: As with every post-purchase touchpoint, be sure your

customer lets you know how well his expectations were met.

Call resolution: Was the reason for the call successfully addressed?
Don’t rely exclusively on the customer support agent to provide this detail. Collect
data from the customer, if possible.

Hold time: People don’t like to listen to music or hear a recording about how
valuable a customer they are while they are on hold.
Here are six of the most common call center analytics to
track, in addition to the satisfaction:
Call abandonment: Long hold times lead to customers hanging up. These
abandoned calls contribute to frustration and a degradation of the brand.
Reason for call: Have customer support agents describe (using a categorization
system or comments field) the reason and resolution for the call. All too often, I’ve
worked with call-center data to address spikes in calls only to see data that has little
information regarding the reason for the call.
Call duration: A support call takes customers’ time and call agents’ time. While
it’s good to get to a resolution as quickly as possible, be careful that you aren’t
incentivizing agents to prematurely end calls.
Finding the Root Cause with Cause-and-Effect Diagrams
 Many problems in the post-purchase phase are often symptoms of other problems:
 Customer complaints
 Returns
 Calls to customer support
 Low customer satisfaction ratings
One tool that is particularly handy at getting to root causes is the aptly named cause-
and-effect diagram. It is also called the fishbone for its fishlike skeletal shape. Cause-
and-effect diagrams provide a visual display of possible causes of a problem.

EXAMPLE OF FISHBONE CAUSE AND EFFECT

 Creating a cause-and-effect diagram
Here’s how to use a cause-and-effect diagram in five steps .

1. Define the problem you want to avoid.

Ideally, you want this statement to be as specific as possible. So if you’re dealing with customer
returns, a problem statement would be
“Customer return rates are higher than 10%.”
The problem statement goes at the head of the fish.
2. Brainstorm possible causes for the problem.
For high customer return rates, this would be something like
Customers are unable to set up the product properly.
Shipping takes too long or is unclear.
Customers don’t use the product after opening it.
The price is too high relative to what customers are getting.
The product breaks or stops working.
3. Sort the causes into clusters, remove duplicates, and rearrange
the bones of the fish.
I filled in two branches of the fish.

4. Name the main bones something descriptive of the causes.

I used Pricing and Product.

5. Identify areas that need data or investigation.

Some causes are obvious (is there any indication of shipping?),
whereas others need data (where are customers making mistakes in the
setup?).