Customer Journey: The complete guide

We can’t read people’s minds, but we’ve come pretty close to understanding them by using technology to study their behaviors, actions and patterns to deduce how they may be thinking/feeling. Businesses stand to gain a lot from understanding their customers’ emotional and psychological states as they interact and purchase from them. Customer insights lead businesses to offer personalized customer experiences, improving brand loyalty and affinity. So businesses invest time and money to study the elusive customer journey- how customers discover and engage with and buy from a brand.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the path a customer follows through the stages of their relationship with a company. From their first time hearing about the business to the nurturing of their relationship and becoming a paying customer, a customer journey includes every touchpoint that constitutes the overall customer experience.

For example, a common customer journey for a B2C SaaS business might look like this:

• A customer sees an ad for your product on a website.

• A few days later, they see a Tweet from your marketing team promoting a blog post with a link to sign up for your newsletter.

• Intrigued by the product, the customer looks at online reviews to learn more.

• They click through a marketing email to set up a free trial.

• After using the software for a few days, they are hooked! They talk to sales to get on the annual payment plan.

• Later, the customer notices a bug and reaches out to the customer support team to troubleshoot and fix it.

• When the customer is happy with the product, support, and overall brand experience, they start recommending your product to colleagues and friends.

Notice how many different departments and teams are involved in taking the customer from learning about your product to using and recommending it to others. All departments and units within a business must come together to build the customer’s experience. Tracking the customer journey is one of the critical steps to offering a great customer experience.

Customer journey vs. buyer journey

The customer starts with a problem and not a brand in mind. This simple fact creates the difference between the customer journey and the buyer journey. The buyer journey starts way before the customer is aware of your solution and lasts well beyond their interactions with you. 

Let’s see how this plays out. A person wants to purchase a device- a laptop or tablet. They know they need one because they are about to start a computer science training. They consider various factors- which one is handy, easier to carry and useful for coding/typing purposes. Then, they make a decision to buy a laptop. Now, they consider their options. They weigh each brand’s pros and cons and consider pricing, reviews and other parameters. This is all a part of their buyer journey. 

However, the precise moment when they interact with your laptop brand is when they enter your customer journey. They may download a comparison guide from your website, follow your social media page, sign up for your offers and emails or simply call you to learn about a laptop’s specifications.

Since you have little to no control over the buyer journey, the best you can do to improve your customer’s experience is to focus on your brand and the experience you offer across various customer channels.

What are the stages of a customer journey?

Knowing and segmenting the customer journey helps you tackle specific opportunities and roadblocks along the various stages.

Here is an overview of the five stages of the customer journey.

Awareness

Your customers in the awareness stage grapple with a pain point. They may not know what product/solution might solve the problem yet. For instance, a person realizes they cannot focus when working from home. Their productivity is declining, which is a pain point. 

Brands often create educational content to appeal to customers in the awareness phase. E-books, how-to articles, videos, etc., are great examples of general-purpose content to attract customers who know their pain points but not your product.

Consideration

In the consideration phase, a customer has tried to alleviate the problem by themselves (maybe they’ve tried meditation to improve their focus) but failed to do so. They now realize they need a product or service to address their issue. They have looked at various solutions that help at-home employees boost their productivity. 

For instance, a Pomodoro timer app, a to-do list management app and a co-working app solve for the same pain point. The customer now considers all the available solutions. To put your business on their radar, create product-related content for customers in the consideration stage. 

Customers want to know how your co-working app would help them improve their productivity. Product comparison articles, white papers and case studies appeal to customers in the consideration stage as these content types show how your product has worked for others facing a similar problem.

Decision

In this stage, the customer has evaluated their options, looked up reviews, checked pricing plans and policies, and is ready to purchase your product to meet their needs. Your co-working solution will add accountability and productivity to their days.

Now, you deliver a seamless purchasing experience for them to easily buy and use your product. Content for decision-stage customers includes free demos, product trials, free consultations, limited-time discounts and offers.

Retention

In the customer retention stage, the customer decides to stay with your product or to move on to another solution. Brands must prioritize the user experience for this stage to reduce churn and maintain healthy repeat revenue. The percentage of customers who continue using your solution is your net retention rate, a common north-star metric for companies.

Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones. So, businesses strive to keep their customers using strategies such as excellent customer service, seamless subscription renews, lowest prices for existing customers, etc.

Advocacy

Now, your customer is your advocate. Happy that your co-working solution helped their productivity, they might recommend it to their freelancer friend who often works alone and lacks a working environment and accountability.

Depending on the complexity of your industry or the nature of your customers, there may be additional stages before the customer becomes an advocate. For example, SaaS businesses may have onboarding or value realization as separate stages in their customer journey.

The marketing/sales funnel is now perceived as a customer journey loop by CX (customer experience) experts, as customer retention and advocacy assume importance in helping businesses attain predictable growth. Strategies to build customer loyalty include introducing a referral program, offering perks to repeat customers, investing in the customer experience, etc.

Source: The infinity loop with different customer journey stages - The CX Review

Benefits of understanding the customer journey

“Customer Experience is a sum of all the interactions that a customer has with an organization over the life of the relationship with that organization. And probably even more importantly, the feelings, the emotions, and the perceptions of those interactions.”- Annette Franz, CEO of CX Journey Inc. and CX keynote speaker.

The benefits of customer journey mapping reach both your employees and customers.

• You understand customer needs better: Customer journey mapping lets you know what customers expect and want from each interaction. While some of these customer expectations may be explicit (clicking on a link to download an e-book), other unspoken needs surface from studying customer behavioral data (requiring an easy way to compare products without leaving the page). Customer journey reveals what customers are looking for so businesses can fulfill their needs at every step in the purchase cycle.

•  You understand your customers’ challenges: It’s hard to position your product as a solution if you don’t fully comprehend your buyers’ pain points. For instance, a co-working application business can assume people use their service to work with others. However, the core challenge of productivity and accountability might surface when you talk to a few customers. Customers also experience barriers, doubts, and fears that hold them back from considering, adopting, and continuing to use your product or service.

•  Employees realize their role in your CX vision: Creating a holistic, smooth and sticky customer experience is a cross-functional effort, often involving marketing, product development, sales, and support functions. Customer journey mapping shows the role each team plays in the larger goal of achieving higher customer retention and loyalty. When stakeholders from each team get involved in the journey mapping process, they can assume responsibility for improving the customer experience and driving better business outcomes.

Source: Mapping customer journeys is a cross-functional effort - The CX Review.

• You build a customer-centric culture: Customer-centricity is often left to customer-facing departments. This is a mistake when competing businesses are getting increasingly customer-obsessed. A customer journey can lend crucial insights into your customers, beneficial for sales, marketing, and product development departments to place customers at the heart of important decisions.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your company from the moment they discover you through their subsequent purchases and interactions. It includes every touchpoint the customer uses to interact with your brand and their goals and emotions as they progress.

For businesses with multiple customer personas, each persona has a set of possible customer journeys they can take with you. For instance, for our co-working application example, various customer personas can be remote tech workers, single mothers working from home, freelancers and digital nomads. Each segment of customers experiences your product uniquely.

For example, a freelancer might use a co-working application randomly round-the-clock, while a remote tech worker clocks in at a specific time every day. How different buyer personas find and engage with your brand, what motivates and hinders them from buying from you, and their buyer journey can largely vary.

What are the essential components of a customer journey map?

A customer journey can be as elaborate or as focused as you build it. Its scope can widen or shrink based on what you want to achieve with it. A customer journey map must include the following components to fulfill its purpose.

Personas

A persona is a category of customers with similar needs, goals, and motivations. Before designing the customer journey map, determine the customer persona you’re doing this for. A customer persona can significantly alter the customer journey map. For instance, a Gen Z customer may be more likely to follow you on TikTok, and a Boomer customer may prefer to subscribe to your emails. Customer personas segmented on various parameters shift how customers interact and purchase from brands.

Timeline

Decide what part of the customer's lifetime you want to focus on. Ideally, your journey map would span the customer’s first encounter with your brand to when they leave you. But it’s wise to zoom in on, say, the onboarding or acquisition stage to laser-point to a specific issue/feature in their experience. This is often the only way a business can realistically create customer journeys, as a big-picture version can get messy quickly.

Emotion

No matter what you sell, there’s an emotion behind why customers buy it. They’re either experiencing or trying to prevent themselves from feeling a difficult emotion. Buyers may feel excitement, fear, pain, frustration, worry, relief and happiness throughout the customer journey. A key aspect of customer experience comes from empathizing with your customers, for which you need to know how they feel at each interaction with your brand.

Touchpoints

The customer journey map is an intricate network of the touchpoints you offer your customers and how they navigate them. Each customer touchpoint allows the user to take a specific action. For example, a customer can call your sales support, subscribe to your newsletter, follow your Facebook page, download a text guide, watch a webinar, etc.

Channels

Customer journey maps can spread across several channels. So, for each action the customer takes, we identify where it takes place. Including channels in customer journeys allows businesses to assess how they integrate and whether any friction exists between them. Common channels include the website, native app, social media, telephone and the physical store.

Metrics and KPIs

At each customer touchpoint, you can quantitatively measure the customer experience with metrics and strive to improve them to elevate the customer experience. For instance, the net promoter score(NPS) is a clear indicator of customer advocacy that you can aim to improve. Other important metrics may include site traffic, bounce rate, social media following and engagement, and newsletter signups.

How to build a customer journey map?

Annette Franz walks through the steps of creating journey maps in this 37-minute video. You can also refer to the transcript of the session.

Step 1: Listen and gather customer data

A customer journey map can be your true north if you have data-backed customer insights. Surveys with well-framed questions, focus groups, and customer interviews are some ways to solicit customer feedback data. However, solicited data can be misleading as customers may not be 100% sure or honest in their answers. Collecting behavioral data becomes necessary to listen to the voice of the customer. Methods include social media listening, website behavior analysis, and mining customer service interactions.

Step 2: Create customer personas

Personas are customer profiles that segment your user base so you can reach out to each group with personalized messaging. For instance, for B2B marketing software, the CMO and CFO can be two separate personas. The CMO is worried about changing the marketing process and training the marketing team on the new software, while the CFO is concerned with justifying the cost of purchasing new software. You can use geographic and demographic data like age group, industry, and common interests to create your customer personas. 

Step 3: Gather touchpoints

List all digital and physical touchpoints your customers use to interact with your brand. A UX journey map reveals the touchpoints customers frequent to engage and buy from you. Common touchpoints include website landing pages, product pages, social media accounts, email marketing, third-party reviews and customer service/support.

Step 4: List key activities

Identify the key activities customers engage in at each touchpoint and why. What information do they need? What are they trying to accomplish? What emotions might a customer feel at each touchpoint? Is it a positive or negative experience?

For instance, key activities customers engage in at an e-commerce site include browsing products on the website or mobile app, adding products to a cart, checking out, leaving an online review on the mobile app, sharing the link to a product with friends/family, creating a wishlist, and so on. 

Step 5: Map the right metrics and KPIs

Determine what makes each interaction successful. For example, contacting customer support would be successful if the customer received an accurate answer in a reasonable time frame. Identifying the right CX metrics at each touchpoint allows businesses to improve tangible numbers that quantify customer experience.

Tracking KPIs allows you to single out platforms that work best for you and prioritize them while focusing on improving the others.

Step 6: Put it all together

Now, we put the journey map together per the stages in your customer lifecycle (acquisition, onboarding, trial, etc.). Place each interaction on the customer journey map. This can be as simple as using post-it notes on a whiteboard for your first version of the customer journey map or as advanced as using a CX journey mapping software.

Step 7: Review and improve the journey map

You’ll probably never complete the buyer’s journey mapping exercise as your customer’s perspective and expectations evolve and the industry shifts continuously. You may create new touchpoints or discover new information about customer behavior and preferences. For instance, you may want to add more calls to action on a landing page to convert customers or introduce video transcripts on your webinar page.

Examples of customer journey maps

Let’s consider three distinct examples of customer journeys. These examples are simplified by using a single customer persona and a small issue they face. Note that your result will be more intricate than the customer journey map examples presented here.

Example 1: A local coffee shop’s consumer’s journey

Customer persona: Duke- a 24-year-old remote worker who works on his laptop, sipping coffee.

Touchpoints: Instagram, mobile application, website, physical store

Key activities: Duke follows the cafe’s Instagram handle and gets notified about this cafe’s opening in their city. Duke decides to visit the cafe after getting their location from their website linked in their Instagram bio. Duke learns about their loyalty program and downloads their mobile app to gain points and use them later to buy beverages.

Metrics/KPIs: The metrics that matter to the cafe are repeat customers, their frequency of visits, and how much they spend each time.

Customer feedback: Duke finds that the cafe isn’t well-lit, which is an issue for Duke, who uses the space as their work environment. Duke tells this to the cafe manager.

Ideas for CX improvement: The cafe owner learns that they should improve the lighting to help customers comfortably work out of their space, which means repeat business.

Example 2: A bank’s customer’s journey

Customer persona: Liz- a millennial customer who runs a business and is eligible for a credit card or loan with the bank.

Touchpoints: email marketing, phone, website, mobile banking application

Key activities: Liz logs into the mobile banking application frequently to make payments. Liz stays updated on the bank’s offers through their emails and text messages. Liz also calls customer support when in need of assistance.

Metrics/KPIs: The key metrics for the bank include email open rates, number of transactions, and whether or not Liz avails a credit card or loan from the bank.

Customer feedback: Behavioral patterns from Liz’s data show she explored loan options with the bank by calling customer support. However, Liz didn’t act on it. This could point to a CX issue, indecisiveness, or lack of time on the customer’s end.

Ideas for CX improvement: The bank can make the decision easier for Liz by creating an informational document that clearly explains how their loan process works, the various loans they offer and under what conditions a person can avail a loan.

Example 3: An HR technology software’s customer journey

Customer persona: Larry, a middle-aged HR manager who feels frustrated by the manual employee onboarding process at his small business and wants to upgrade to an HR tech software.

Touchpoints: website, social media, email marketing, sales support

Key activities: Larry uses a search engine to research the various software solutions available for HR teams and discovers this HR tech company’s website. There, Larry downloads their e-book and subscribes to their mailing list. Larry follows them on social media. Still considering other options, Larry calls sales support to learn more about the solution’s pricing, features and usability for a small business.

Metrics/KPIs: KPIs that matter to the HRtech company include website traffic, e-book downloads, email list subscriptions, and monthly sales.

Customer feedback: Larry tells sales support that he is still considering their top competitor and is unclear how their solutions differ.

Ideas for CX improvement: The HR technology company can create a comparative guide to help Larry easily make a decision after comparing each solution’s pricing, features and usability.

Here’s another detailed blog post with customer journey examples from seven different industries.

Customer journey best practices

1. Break down departmental silos

It’s easy for departments within a company to become tunnel-visioned about their day-to-day tasks and lose sight of the bigger picture- the CX. This can lead to fractures in the customer experience. Invite stakeholders from different departments (marketing, sales, product development and customer support) to contribute ideas and insights to your buyer journey map and learn about their share of responsibilities in improving the customer experience. 

2. Keep it real and actionable

A customer journey map shouldn’t be aspirational - it should be realistic. Lay out what your customers currently experience, even if it’s painful, so you can start working on it. Incorporating ample user research ensures you stay true to the facts without inflating or underestimating the reality. Make sure your customer journey map ends with actionable steps that can be delegated across the company. Remember, customer journey mapping is a means to an end and not the goal in itself.

3. Use your customer journey as a strategic resource

Once you’ve designed your customer journey map, it might be tempting to throw it in a drawer, erase the whiteboard and never think of it again. But the work has just begun. Keep your customer journey map at the forefront of customer experience decisions to deliver a more unified experience across the entire customer lifecycle.

4. Smooth the customer’s path by being proactive

Proactive customer service is when you resolve and prevent issues before the customer notices them. There are four areas to look at when offering proactive service:

- When do customers discover your brand? Understanding when your customers find you allows you to anticipate their future needs. Is it a certain time of the year or a certain point in their life when they discover your brand?

- When do customers purchase? How long does it take customers to arrive at a purchase decision, and what are they doing in that time? For example, suppose customers typically look at the frequently asked questions page on your website before making their decision. In that case, you can offer proactive live chat to drive conversions and answer any remaining questions they have.

- What products do they view? Understanding what products and services catch your visitors’ eye reveals what they need/want most. If a customer views the same page repeatedly, you can send them an email with additional information to help them choose.

- When do customers leave? Understanding why a journey ends is just as important as knowing why it begins. Customer retention is a big goal of customer journey mapping. What happens before customers cancel their relationship with you? And how can you eliminate that friction? Ask customers what made them stop purchasing from you and document their responses on your map.

Map your omnichannel strategy with your customer journey

Customers have come to expect omnichannel experiences. They want to start their journey at one touchpoint, continue it at another and finally purchase at a different channel. How easily businesses can enable this omnichannel experience depends on the channels they currently offer and how well they are integrated with each other.

Customer journey mapping can reveal disconnects between touchpoints, giving you a to-do list to achieve omnichannel. Omnichannel can unlock value for your customers and enhance their experience. For instance, a local coffee shop can send real-time, personalized notifications to its customers when they are in proximity. Or, a retail store can allow customers to add products to their cart on mobile/web and pick them up in-store.

Omnichannel journeys also alleviate the customer’s annoyance when they sense a disconnect between a brand’s touchpoints. For instance, a customer may feel annoyed when a brand keeps showing them advertisements for a television long after they bought one at the same brand’s store. 

Here are a few activities involved in creating omnichannel customer journeys:

• Integrating touchpoints

• Making data centralized and accessible to everyone 

• Modernizing legacy technology infrastructure 

• Introducing automation, personalization and self-service options

Tools to help you with your journey mapping

Below, we review the top three tools to visualize your customer journeys.

Canvanizer

Canvanizer is a free tool to review different internal departments for customer-centricity. It allows you to brainstorm, solicit and manage ideas for CX improvement. You can choose from available templates or start mapping your customer journey from scratch.

UXpressia

UXpressia allows you to bring different stakeholders together to work on customer journey mapping in real time or asynchronously. It offers over a hundred map templates to choose from and allows you to give the user the level of detailing they need by hiding certain parts of the map.

Smaply

Smaply is a customer journey mapping tool that helps companies evaluate touchpoints and prioritize mission-critical customer pain points by using visualization and simple drag-and-drop functionality to create CJMs. It also allows you to create hierarchies between maps and link them for structure.

Customer journeys and your customer service software

Here are a few ways to utilize a modern customer service software to elevate the customer experience.

Prioritize touchpoints

When you’ve documented all touchpoints, identify the ones that significantly impact the customer experience. Use your helpdesk’s automation features to set smarter SLAs for these critical moments in the customer’s journey. 

Automate proactive service

Always know where a customer is in their journey so you can foresee their needs. For example, if a customer is close to renewal, customer support agents can pull in the sales team to close the deal hiccup-free. An agent can access this level of information when their help desk and CRM are deeply integrated, giving them a detailed view of the customer’s timeline with the brand.

Give better, more contextual customer service

When customer service/support reps have more context, they can deliver better service. Reps know the path a customer has taken with the brand and use it to inform their course of action. 

For example, by turning on the customer journey feature on Freshdesk, customer service reps can see the last five solution articles that the customer has read in the self-service portal before submitting a ticket. This gives enough context to agents to not suggest a solution the customer may have already tried, saving time for both parties.

Feedback and reporting

Your customer journey is always changing, and so should your customer journey map. You’ll need to update and revise the map based on customer feedback periodically. Your help desk reporting can help uncover new issues not currently represented on your journey map.

Customer feedback forms (like customer satisfaction surveys) and support ticket insights (e.g., ticket volume trends and ticket tag analysis) can inform changes to your customer journey map. Customer feedback opens a direct window into the thoughts and feelings of your customers - so don’t miss out on incorporating this valuable data into your customer experience management.

Use Freshworks Customer Service Suite to manage your customer’s journey

With a customer journey map, you can make the most out of Freshworks Customer Service Suite’s powerful features in fine-tuning customer service interactions and delivering delight along the customer journey.