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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

“Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%”

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

• Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

• Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management Improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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Customer Journey Maps: Master Customer Engagement in 2024

• January 17, 2024

The emphasis on customer experience has become more crucial than ever. You will find it interesting to know that  63% of customer experience decision-makers acknowledge the growing significance of customer experience, with 88% agreeing that customizing this experience is vital for business success. 

However, many find themselves at a crossroads, lacking the necessary resources and expertise to effectively enhance the digital customer journey. This is where the concept of a customer journey map becomes a necessity.

Imagine the first time you visit a new coffee shop. The experience, from the welcoming aroma at the door to the ease of placing your order and the ambiance as you enjoy your coffee, plays a pivotal role in whether you’ll return or recommend it to others. 

Now, apply this analogy to any business, from local coffee shops to global tech giants. Every customer interaction with a business molds their perception and influences their decision-making process. Customer journey maps are instrumental in this context, serving not just as visual aids but as strategic tools that enable businesses to comprehend and improve every aspect of the customer’s experience.

By meticulously mapping out the customer’s journey, from their initial awareness to the post-purchase phase, businesses can pinpoint critical areas for enhancement, tailor their services to align with customer expectations and forge enduring relationships. 

This approach is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Whether spearheading a startup or managing a major corporation, leveraging customer journey maps can transform your customer interactions and propel your business to new heights of success.

In this blog, we delve into how large and small businesses utilize customer journey maps to refine customer interactions, improve service delivery, and ultimately cultivate stronger, more meaningful customer relationships. 

The customer journey map is more than a tool; it’s a roadmap to deepening customer connections and achieving business excellence in a world where customer experience is paramount.

What are Customer Journey Maps?

Customer journey maps are visual representations that show a customer’s steps when interacting with a company, from first learning about the brand to forming a long-term relationship.

Customer journey maps use customer feedback and data to highlight important moments, emotions, and challenges customers face.

This map is used by businesses to understand and improve how customers experience their services or products. It’s regularly updated to keep up with changing customer needs and market trends, helping businesses stay focused on their customers.

The Different Types of Customer Journey Maps

Different customer journey maps are vital business tools tailored to specific objectives and insights. While similar in their intent to enhance customer experience, these maps differ in focus and application.

1. Current State Journey Maps

Ideal for businesses looking to refine and optimize their existing customer interactions and services.

These customer journey maps focus on the present interactions between customers and the business, helping identify and address existing issues in the customer experience.

For example, a retail store might use a current state map to analyze the checkout process, identify pain points like slow checkout lines or confusing signage, and then work on solutions to streamline the shopping experience.

2. Day in the Life Journey Maps

Suitable for companies seeking to innovate and create new products or services by understanding broader customer lifestyles and challenges.

These customer journey maps delve into customers’ or prospects’ broader lifestyles and daily challenges and go beyond direct interactions with the company’s products or services, offering insights into unmet customer needs.

For instance, a fitness wearables company might use this type of map to understand the daily physical activities of its target market, leading to the development of more personalized fitness tracking features.

3. Future State Journey Maps

Beneficial for organizations planning significant changes or new offerings, helping to align these future developments with customer needs and expectations.

These are particularly beneficial for organizations planning significant changes or introducing new offerings. They help businesses align these future developments with customer needs and expectations.

A good example is a software company envisioning how advances in machine learning could enhance user experience in the future, leading to the development of more intuitive and adaptive software solutions.

4. Blueprint Journey Maps

Crucial for businesses undergoing transformation or those needing a deep dive into the systemic changes required to enhance customer experience.

Blueprint customer journey maps start with an existing or future state journey map and add layers of operational elements like processes, policies, and technologies. They’re perfect for understanding the root causes of issues or planning the infrastructure needed for future experiences.

For example, an airline company might use a blueprint map to improve the overall passenger experience. This map would not only cover the customer’s journey from booking a flight to reaching their destination but also the roles of flight and ground staff, the efficiency of the check-in process, and the impact of technology like mobile check-ins and digital boarding passes.

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Incorporating customer journey maps into a business strategy can yield transformative results when approached with a focus on actionable outcomes. Here’s how these benefits can be realized:

1. Enhanced Customer Understanding 

By actively collecting and analyzing customer feedback, businesses can gain a profound understanding of their customers’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. This process gathers data and delves deep into the customer psyche, enabling more informed decisions about product improvements and service enhancements.

2. Elevated Customer Experience 

Identifying and prioritizing key pain points in the customer journey allows businesses to implement changes strategically. Whether streamlining a checkout process or enhancing customer support, these targeted improvements are geared toward elevating the overall customer experience. The key lies in continuously assessing the impact of these changes, ensuring they genuinely resonate with the customers.

3. Cultivating a Customer-Centric Culture

Embedding a culture of customer empathy throughout the organization is pivotal. By educating employees about the importance of customer perspective and encouraging regular engagement with customer journey maps, businesses can foster decision-making processes that truly consider customer needs. Celebrating customer service excellence further reinforces this empathetic approach.

4. Harmonized Organizational Efforts 

Sharing insights from customer journey maps across all departments fosters an organization-wide alignment with customer expectations. This approach transcends departmental boundaries, ensuring a unified strategy for enhancing customer touchpoints. Establishing common customer satisfaction goals and KPIs encourages a collaborative effort toward improving the customer experience.

5. Strategic Planning and Innovation 

Integrating the insights of customer journey maps into strategic planning allows for a more targeted approach to innovation. Keeping the journey map updated with evolving customer behaviors and market trends ensures businesses stay ahead. This ongoing adaptation and innovation process is about keeping pace, anticipating, and shaping future customer needs.

The Elements of Good Customer Journey Maps

Good customer journey maps are detailed and insightful tools that help businesses understand and improve customer experiences. Here are the key elements that make up an effective customer journey map:

• Customer Personas: Start with detailed profiles of your typical customers. These personas should include demographic information, behaviors, motivations, and goals.
• Customer Stages: Outline the different stages a customer goes through in their journey with your business, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase and post-purchase experiences.
• Touchpoints and Channels: Identify all the points where customers interact with your business, whether through your website, in a physical store, on social media, or through customer service.
• Customer Actions: Document customers’ actions at each stage of their journey. This could include visiting a website, making a purchase, or contacting customer service.
• Emotions and Motivations: Capture the emotions and motivations of customers at each stage. Understanding customers’ feelings and what drives them is crucial for creating a more empathetic customer experience.
• Pain Points and Challenges: Highlight customers’ obstacles or frustrations throughout their journey. These are areas where improvements can significantly enhance the customer experience.
• Moments of Truth: Identify key moments critical to winning or losing a customer. These are the make-or-break points where the customer’s experience can greatly influence their overall perception of your brand.
• Opportunities for Improvement: Based on the analysis, pinpoint areas where you can enhance the customer experience, whether it’s streamlining a process, improving a product, or enhancing customer service.
• Metrics and KPIs: Include relevant metrics and key performance indicators to measure the success of different customer journey stages. These can help track improvements over time.

By incorporating these elements, customer journey maps become a comprehensive guide to help businesses understand and cater to customers more effectively, improving satisfaction and loyalty.

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Creating effective customer journey maps involves deeply understanding various components that shape a customer’s interaction with a business. To make each component actionable, here’s how to approach them:

• Develop Customer Personas : Focus on creating detailed, data-driven representations of your target customers. This involves gathering and analyzing demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data to form a clear picture of who your customers are. This step is crucial for tailoring the journey to address their needs and preferences.
• Segment the Customer Stages : Break down the customer journey into clear, distinct stages like awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. Each stage should be defined by the customer’s mindset and the actions they are likely to take. This segmentation allows for targeted strategies at each point in the journey.
• Map Touchpoints and Channels : Identify and document all points of interaction and the channels through which they occur. This involves thoroughly analyzing how customers engage with your business across various platforms and mediums. Understanding these touchpoints is key to optimizing interactions at each stage.
• Analyze Customer Actions : Carefully document customers’ actions during each journey stage. This detailed analysis helps understand customer behavior and identify areas where they might need support or additional information.
• Understand Emotions and Motivations : Capture and analyze customers’ emotional experiences and motivations at each stage. This involves empathizing with customers and understanding their emotional journey, which is crucial for enhancing their overall experience.
• Identify Pain Points : Look for customer challenges and frustrations. This step is about turning problems into opportunities by identifying and addressing areas that negatively impact the customer experience.
• Highlight Moments of Truth : Recognize and emphasize the critical points in the journey that significantly impact the customer’s perception of your brand. This involves strategizing to enhance positive moments and mitigate negative ones.
• Point Opportunities to Improve : Based on the insights from the journey map, identify specific areas for enhancing the customer experience. This could involve process changes, product improvements, or customer service enhancements.
• Set Metrics and KPIs : Define and implement metrics and key performance indicators for each journey stage. This step is about establishing a continuous measurement and improvement system, ensuring that the customer experience always evolves positively.

Steps to Create Customer Journey Maps

Creating customer journey maps involves a structured and detailed process to understand and improve how customers interact with your business. Here’s how you can approach it:

Step 1: Developing Customer Personas

First, let’s get to know who we’re mapping this journey for. This step is all about creating detailed customer personas. Gather data to understand their profiles thoroughly—what’s their age, job, personal, and professional goals? 

This isn’t just about broad categories; it’s about getting to the heart of who your customers really are. Understanding them is key whether they’re your regulars, big spenders, or newcomers. And yes, keep it simple at first—no more than three personas. Here’s a fun part: involve people from different parts of your organization. They’ll bring unique insights to the table.

Step 2: Selecting a Customer Journey for Mapping

Next, let’s pick a journey to focus on. Which aspect of your customers’ experience are we going to map? It could be their first purchase, a service renewal, or maybe an issue resolution journey. Choose one that’s either the most common or the most impactful. Imagine laying out this journey step by step – what does it look like from start to finish?

Step 3: Conducting the Mapping Process

Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Who’s involved in this journey? What steps do they take? More importantly, how do your customers feel at each stage? This is where you identify that critical moment—the make-or-break point—that can shape their perception of your brand. 

Understand their needs throughout and how they might change, especially during not-so-great experiences. Don’t forget to think about how you’ll measure success here. What KPIs will tell you if you’re hitting the mark?

Step 4: Time to Innovate

This is where creativity comes in. Based on what we’ve mapped, how can we make this journey better? Let’s brainstorm. No idea is too out there at this stage. Then, sift through these ideas. Are they doable? Do they add real value? This isn’t just about making changes; it’s about making the right changes.

Step 5: Measuring and Refining

Finally, it’s all about continuous improvement. Set up a system to measure how well the journey is going. Are we meeting our KPIs? Where can we do better? This is an ongoing process—always tweaking, always refining, always aiming to provide a better experience for our customers.

Examples of Customer Journey Maps

You’re browsing through Amazon, the vast online marketplace. Every click you make, from viewing a product to adding it to your cart, is part of a meticulously crafted journey. Amazon’s customer journey map is like a grand adventure novel, incredibly detailed and extensive. 

For instance, when you see a product you like and click on it, you’ve just moved through the “impressions” stage. If you add it to your list or cart, you progress through the “Conversion Funnel.” And when you finally make that purchase, you’ve reached a crucial milestone in the journey. Amazon tracks all these steps, from the initial impression to the repeat purchase, using various metrics. It’s a journey crafted to keep you engaged and make your shopping experience smooth and enjoyable.

Imagine you’re a business owner looking to purchase a software solution like Hootsuite or MailChimp. Unlike the vast Amazon journey, your path is more straightforward and digital. The journey map for such a purchase could be laid out in a simple Excel spreadsheet. 

Each stage, from discovering the product on social media to researching via blog posts, is a clear, distinct step in your journey. The process is quick, with digital touchpoints efficiently guiding you towards making a decision. It’s a journey with minimal barriers, designed to be as swift and hassle-free as possible.

In HubSpot’s world, your journey starts as a ‘Stranger’—you’re  just getting to know what HubSpot is all about. As you engage more by subscribing to a newsletter or downloading an e-book, you transition into a ‘Subscriber’ or a ‘Lead.’ This is where HubSpot’s map gets interesting.

The journey is broken down into smaller, more focused stages. For instance, as you move from being a casual subscriber to a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), your interactions with HubSpot change. Initially, you might just be browsing content, but as an MQL, you might start receiving more personalized communications, possibly even direct interactions with sales reps.

HubSpot’s journey map recognizes that not everyone is ready to buy immediately. Some need more nurturing and more information before they make a decision. This is where the map’s beauty lies – in understanding that different people are at different stages, and each requires a unique approach. It’s about giving you the right experience at the right time, ensuring you’ve all the support and information you need if and when you decide.

Using these customer journeynmaps, you can improve their experience from start to finish. This not only makes your customers happier but also helps your business grow. It’s all about learning from your customers and improving with them.

By consistently applying the insights from customer journey maps, you turn every interaction into an opportunity for enhancement. In the long run, this approach builds a loyal customer base and creates a strong, customer-focused brand identity. Remember, every step in the customer’s journey is a chance to excel and stand out in a crowded market. 

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Optimizing the Customer Journey Using Consumer Psychology

Why customer sentiment, customer intent and customer values are at the core of customer success.

A customer journey can begin anywhere, at any time. How long it lasts is up to you. 

What makes a customer relationship last is well known: all you have to do is continually provide an optimal customer experience . Knowing how to optimize the customer experience? That’s the hard part. And it’s mission critical.

We know that 96% of consumers will abandon a brand for a single bad experience, and 92% will also take revenge by blasting you on social media. This could be for slow eCommerce processing or a malfunctioning cart, failing to resolve a technical issue, or even asking the wrong question in a survey or sending a marketing message that misses the mark .

This is why today’s CX leaders — “increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys” — still “face a clear challenge : Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with their brand are most impactful to their overall experience?”

In other words, do we prioritize our branding and promotional activities on social media? Our ads on Google SERPs ? Our website UX , or lead generation opportunities? Our email drip campaigns and sales funnel? Or our customer support channels and voice-of-the-customer program? The answer: all of them . 

Dissecting the Customer Journey

Historically, this has meant cutting up the customer journey into concrete stages along a sequence, and then separating collections of these touchpoints into silos based on a generalized purpose. For instance, many organizations divide up their journey into:

• Pre-purchase
• Post-purchase

Others take a more granular approach — (inadvertently) mimicking the path and breakdown of the sales funnel, which draws a customer from general interest (top of funnel) to more specialized research (middle of funnel) and, finally, to consideration of solutions and sales (bottom of funnel). 

A customer journey framework is more inclusive of post-purchase opportunities, while distinguishing the stages based on customer intent and sentiment , as follows:

• Motivation/Inspiration , or which pain points, needs, goals, values or influencers motivated or inspired a general interest
• Search , or the collection and analysis of data on the industry and its key terms and trends
• Evaluation , or the demoing and comparing and contrasting of varying solutions
• Decision making , or the moment of purchase/sale
• Satisfaction , or the level to which the solution addresses pain points, needs and goals
• Sharing , or the evangelizing of the solution via customer reviews, social media engagement, user-generated content and influencer marketing

Customer journey mapping entails charting out a visual representation of the path your customer will take, from motivation to satisfaction, defining: 

• A clear objective
• The targeted user personas and their pain points, needs, goals, points of friction, and buying triggers
• All stages of the journey and the goal(s) for each
• All touchpoints of the journey, and the best methods of outreach for each
• KPIs , and how to measure performance
• Key customer data , and when, where and how to obtain it
• Processes, procedures, roles and responsibilities for monitoring, analyzing, reporting and optimization

By sectioning out the stages of the customer lifecycle, brands have been able to:

• Locate the sources of the most valuable customer information
• Identify gaps and opportunities across the customer lifecycle
• Prioritize, and strategically devote marketing, sales and CX resources

However, according to Harvard Business School assistant professor Julian De Freitas, neither methodology is recommended . A member of the marketing department, De Freitas studies “how the moral psychology of consumers colors their attitudes toward firms, and how firms can market in ways that are sensitive to these moral buttons.” 

It makes sense. We already know that consumers are more concerned than ever about the mission and values of the brands they shop and support: 

• 82% of consumers prefer a brand whose values align with their own
• 75% of consumers have stopped shopping a brand “over a conflict in values”
• 39% of consumers say they’d even “boycott their favorite brand” 

Learning to Listen, and Think Like Our Customers

So, how do we ensure alignment with our customers, leads and prospects? How do we maintain and grow high-value customer relationships? By thinking of customer journeys “as continuous patterns of mental experiences traced over time.”

Indeed, why wouldn’t we leverage generations of increasingly sophisticated psychological study to better understand how our customers, leads and prospects think and behave? Further, why would we mass-message an entire population when we can target the shoppers who not only want or need the products or services we provide but are also most likely to maintain or expand their relationships with us based on shared values?

In a series of studies detailed in Harvard Business Review March 31, 2023, De Freitas and his co-authors “explored what kinds of patterns lead to successful outcomes — both when consumers have experiences themselves, and when they hear about the customer experiences of others.”

But, first, let’s travel back nearly 30 years in time to the beginning of the modern use of behavioral science and psychology in marketing — with the development of the “user experience honeycomb.”

How to Apply Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb to Customer Experience

By following Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb , you can: 

• Demonstrate your value proposition, as well as your core values
• Showcase how your products or services solve a problem or provide a solution
• Bolster your customer success rate, customer lifetime value, and all the most important customer experience KPIs

Although Morville worked in information architecture and user experience, and the Honeycomb has served countless organizations in rethinking their websites to apply user-centered design and SEO best practices, all seven hexagons can and should be applied to customer experience — from initial awareness (as, for instance, a social media app user) to prospecting (as a user on your owned properties, like your website or microsite), and from conversion to use and cross-/upselling. 

Here’s my version of the honeycomb, reconfigured for the full customer journey:

• Useful. Are our products or services useful to our target audience(s)? Do the user, prospect, lead and customer experiences we provide all offer value? How can we innovate to improve the usefulness of our offerings and how we communicate about them throughout the customer journey?
• Usable. Do we develop our products or services with our target audience(s) in mind? Do we design for ease of use? What improvements have been requested, and do we continually strive to streamline our offerings and how we communicate about them, based on user/customer feedback?
• Desirable. Are the products or services we offer what target audience(s) want? Do they solve a problem and/or otherwise meet their needs and goals? And what about the messages, interactions and experiences we provide — are they designed to promote the brand, or elicit an emotional response from our target audience(s)?
• Findable. Are our products/services and content discoverable through search, on social media, in the news, in stores, and/or via strategically placed native or banner ads? Can our customers continue to find us wherever they are (e.g., on their preferred social media platform or device), and for any reason (e.g., to make another purchase, or to fix a technical issue)? 
• Accessible. Do we simply follow the latest regulations on accessibility, or do we actively strive to deliver the best possible products/services and experiences for all people, irrespective of capability/disability, on all platforms and devices throughout the customer journey?
• Credible. Are we merely providers of a specific solution to a unique problem (if so, we have to be the undisputed expert), or are we industry insiders with extensive knowledge and experience? Do our C-suiters headline/keynote conferences; write articles, op-eds or guest posts; and/or appear as thought leaders in high-profile media? Is our website an eCommerce platform, or is it a hub for everything our customers (and future customers) need or want to know? Do we respond to complaints, listen to our customers, and showcase product improvements based on feedback?
• Valuable. Do we provide value to our customers, our employees, our partners, and our stakeholders? Do we continue to innovate to increase the breadth and depth of that value? 

The Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey

For the De Freitas et al. studies , the goal was to determine all the paths customers might journey — and which sequences create the best customer experiences. (If they’re scalable and repeatable, we’ve got a winner!)

“Some have argued that the best patterns are smooth and frictionless, while others have made the case for patterns that fluctuate, given that they are likely to be more eventful and stimulating,” De Freitas explains. “To help shed empirical light on these questions, my coauthors and I explored what kinds of patterns lead to successful outcomes — both when consumers have experiences themselves, and when they hear about the customer experiences of others.”

What did they find?

There are 27 common patterns — and across them all, consumers are least likely to make a first, repeat or new purchase when their experiences (in ranked order): 

• Are consistently negative
• Deteriorate over time
• Fluctuate significantly

Conversely, the customer experiences most likely to produce your desired outcome are:

• Consistently positive
• Improve over time

Likewise, the researchers discovered, for consumers who learn about other consumers’ experiences: After reading customer reviews or viewing a social media post from a user or influencer, consumers are least willing to take a customer journey that’s entirely negative, followed by one that’s up and down. Needless to say, the companies that receive the most referrals have a reputation for providing consistently positive or improving customer experiences.

How to Create the Optimal Customer Journey Pattern

For you, dear reader, the aforementioned might have all seemed intuitive, or even obvious. For the parts of your organization that do not directly engage with customers, however, it may have been a revelation. And when all parts of your organization integrate and think like customer experience professionals, you can start a revolution: your digital transformation.

To learn more about the De Freitas study findings , read “What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?” . 

For the best advice I’ve heard on how to promote customer-centric thinking across your organization , watch my interview with the AVP of customer experience at Health Partners Plans, Katherine Ketter:

To create the optimal customer journey pattern at your organization:

• Get rid of third-party cookies and implement UX and customer data best practices to obtain and leverage valuable zero- and first-party customer data
• Prioritize customer sentiment and other qualitative customer data to finetune and enrich the journey
• Provide consistency in brand design and voice across platforms and devices
• Throw in a little variety or add an element of surprise, without overdoing it 
• Ramp up and end with a climax, ‘tickling their buying bone’ and closing with a bang
• Implement the necessary tech to enable improved data collection and usage: a CDP and/or DXP , integrated with the most appropriate ustomer experience platform (e.g.,  Freshdesk , Help Scout , Intercom , LiveAgent , or  Zoho Desk )
• Measure your success rates using the 13 most important customer success KPIs :

Image Credits   (in order of appearance)

• Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/uGP_6CAD-14
• Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images : https://unsplash.com/photos/99U-x7KwebU
• Photo by Larry George II on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/-uGGyKVjoWo
• Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/wKTF65TcReY

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

• Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
• Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
• Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
• Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
• Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
• Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
• Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

• Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
• Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
• Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
• Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

• Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
• Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
• The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
• Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

• Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
• Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
• Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
• Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
• Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
• Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
• Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

• Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
• Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
• Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
• Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

• Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
• Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
• Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
• Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do

When most companies focus on customer experience they think about touchpoints—the individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings. This is logical. It reflects organization and accountability, and is relatively easy to build into operations. Companies try to ensure that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, sales staff, or marketing materials. But this siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.

Customer journeys include many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. Journeys can be long, stretching across multiple channels and touchpoints, and often lasting days or weeks. Bringing a new customer on board is a classic example. Another is resolving a technical issue, upgrading a product, or helping a customer to move a service to a new home. In our research, we’ve discovered that organizations that fail to appreciate the context of these situations and manage the cross-functional, end-to-end experiences that shape the customer’s view of the business can prompt a downpour of negative consequences, from customer defection and dramatically higher call volumes to lost sales and lower employee morale. In contrast, those that provide the customer with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.

This is especially true in today’s multitouchpoint, multichannel, always-on, hypercompetitive consumer markets. The explosion of potential customer interaction points—across new channels, devices, applications, and more—makes consistency of service and experience across channels nigh impossible—unless you are managing the journey, and not simply individual touchpoints. Indeed, research we conducted in 2015 involving seven EU telecom markets found that when consumers embarked on journeys that involved multiple channels their experience was materially worse than during single-channel experiences, whether those experiences were digital or not.

The trouble with touchpoints

Consider the dilemma that executives faced at one media company. Customers were leaving at an alarming rate, few new ones were available for acquiring in its market, and even the company’s best customers were getting more expensive to retain. In economic terms, a retained customer delivered significantly greater profitability than a newly acquired customer over two years. Churn, due to pricing, technology, and programming options, was an increasingly familiar problem in this hypercompetitive market. So was retention. The common methods for keeping customers were also well known but expensive—tactics like upgrade offers and discounted rate plans, or “save desks” to intercept defectors.

So the executives looked to another lever—customer experience—to see if improvements there could halt the exodus. What they found surprised them. While the company’s overall customer-satisfaction metrics were strong, focus groups revealed that a large number of customers left because of poor service and shoddy treatment over time. “How can this be?” one executive wondered. “We’ve measured customer satisfaction for years, and our call centers, field services, and website experience each score consistently over 90 percent. Our service is great!”

As company leaders probed further, however, they discovered a more complex problem. Most customers weren’t fed up with any one phone call, field visit, or other individual service interaction—in fact, most customers didn’t much care about those singular touchpoint events. What was driving them out the door was something the company wasn’t examining or managing—the customers’ cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints, multiple channels, and over time.

Take new-customer onboarding, for example, a journey that spanned about three months and involved an average of nine phone calls, a home visit from a technician, and numerous web and mail interactions. At each touchpoint, the interaction had at least a 90 percent chance of going well. But average customer satisfaction fell almost 40 percent over the course of the entire journey. The touchpoints weren’t broken—but the onboarding process as a whole was.

Many of customers’ numerous calls during the process represented attempts to clarify product information, fix problems with an order, or understand a confusing bill. Most of these service encounters were positive in a narrow sense—employees answered the questions or solved the issues as they arose—but the underlying problems were avoidable, the root causes left unaddressed, and the cumulative effect on customer experience was decidedly negative. The company’s touchpoint-oriented, metric-driven way of thinking about customer experience had a large blind spot.

Solving the problem would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but the company needed a whole new way of thinking about and managing its service operations to identify and reimagine the customer-experience journeys that mattered most.

More touchpoints, more complexity

The problem encountered by the media company is far more common than most organizations care to admit and is often difficult to spot. At the heart of the challenge is the siloed nature of service delivery and the insular cultures, behaviors, processes, and policies that flourish inside the functional groups that companies rely on to design and deliver their services. In many cases, these groups are also the keepers of the touchpoints that shape and measure how the company’s activities meet the customer’s—say, an in-store conversation with a sales rep, a visit to the company’s website, or a query to the company’s call center. Whether because of poorly aligned incentives, management inattention, or simply human nature, the functional groups that manage these touchpoints are constantly at risk of losing sight of what the customer sees (and wants)—even as the groups work hard to optimize their own contributions to the customer experience.

The media company’s sales personnel, for example, were measured and rewarded for closing new sales—not for helping customers navigate a complex menu of technology and programming options to find the lowest-price offer that met their needs. Yet frustration about complex pricing for high-end equipment, confusion about promotions, and surprise over program lineups were all frequent causes of dissatisfaction later in the process, as well as frequent sources of queries to the company’s call centers. Executives knew that each of these discrete items was a challenge—but only when they took a broader end-to-end view did it become apparent that even though each individual link in the service-delivery chain appeared healthy, the cumulative effect was quite the opposite.

The answer isn’t to replace touchpoint management and thinking. Indeed, the expertise, efficiencies, and insights that functional groups bring to bear are important, and touchpoints will continue to represent invaluable sources of insights—particularly in the fast-changing digital arena. Instead, companies need to recognize and address the fact that—at least, in most cases—they are simply not wired to naturally think about the journeys their customers take. They are wired to maximize productivity and scale economies through functional units. They are wired for transactions, not journeys.

So how should companies tackle this issue? In our experience, six actions are critical to managing customer-experience journeys (articles elsewhere in this volume explore several of these topics in depth):

• Step back and identify the nature of the journeys customers take—from the customer’s point of view.
• Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the journey.
• Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey.
• Build an understanding of what is working and what is not.
• Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.
• Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.

The amount of time it can take to identify journeys, understand performance, and redesign the experience can vary widely from company to company. For companies seeking only to fix a few glaring problems in specific journeys, top-down problem solving can be enough. But those that want to transform the overall customer experience may need a bottom-up effort to create a detailed road map for each journey, one that describes the process from start to finish and takes into account the business impact of enhancing the journey and sequencing the initiatives to do so. For many companies, combining operational, marketing and customer, and competitive-research data to understand journeys is a first-time undertaking, and it can be a long process—sometimes lasting several months. But the reward is well worth it; creating a fact base allows management to clearly see the customer’s experience and decide which aspects to prioritize.

Journeys explained

To better see how customer journeys work, let’s look at a measurable and routine service event—say, a product query—from the point of view of both the company and the customer. The company may receive millions of phone calls with questions about its product, and it is imperative to handle each of these calls well. But when customers are asked to recall their side of the experience months later, it is highly unlikely that they would describe such calls simply as a “product question.” That’s because the call has a context, and understanding it is the key to understanding customer journeys (Exhibit 1).

A customer-journey scorecard

Managers should know what a customer journey entails:

A journey is a specific, discrete experience in the customer life cycle. The act of simply purchasing a product in a store is a touchpoint within a customer’s journey. Researching and then buying a new product and getting it up and running at home would constitute the full journey as the customer sees it.

End-to-end experiences

It’s not enough to measure customer satisfaction on any single touchpoint; what matters is the customer’s experience across the entire journey. It’s common to generate high individual touchpoint-satisfaction scores and unacceptably low scores across the end-to-end journey.

Do managers describe journey events in the way a customer would (for example, “upgrading my product or service”)? Or do they lapse into company-speak (for example, “shipping new equipment”)?

Often multitouch and multichannel in nature, a “new-product onboarding” journey might begin with a website visit, then a sales call, then a second website visit, followed by a store visit, then a technical-help call during the activation or installation stage.

Journeys are often longer than you think. For example, the onboarding journey in the cable industry can extend through two or three billing cycles. (Most calls in the first few months are actually onboarding-related issues and inquiries.)

Journeys are repeatable—and can be repeated for a meaningful percentage of customers.

The customer might have been trying to ensure uninterrupted service after moving, for example, or was confused about renewal options at the end of a contract, or was trying to fix a nagging technical problem. A company that effectively manages its customer journeys would still do the best job it could with the individual transaction—but its agents would also understand the context for the call, address the root cause for the customer’s query, and create the feedback loops to help the company continuously improve the wide range of upstream and downstream interactions that surround (and sometimes cause) the call. That is a broader lens than most call centers apply (see sidebar, “A customer-journey scorecard”).

Most executives we talk to readily grasp the journey concept but wonder whether perfecting journeys pays off in hard-dollar outcomes. Our research, in the form of annual cross-industry customer-experience surveys that span pay TV, retail banking, auto insurance, and other sectors, shows that it does. Companies that excel in delivering journeys tend to win in the market. In both the insurance and TV industries, for example, better performance on journeys correlates strongly with faster revenue growth ; in fact, in measurements of customer satisfaction with the firms’ most important journeys, a one-point improvement on a ten-point scale corresponds to at least a three-percentage-point increase in the revenue-growth rate (Exhibit 2).

Moreover, the companies that perform best on journeys have a more distinct competitive advantage than those that excel at touchpoints; in one of the industries we surveyed, the gap on customer satisfaction between the top- and bottom-quartile companies on journey performance was 50 percent wider than the gap between the top- and bottom-quartile companies on touchpoint performance. Put simply, most companies perform fairly well on touchpoints, but distinctive performance on journeys can set a company apart.

Why are journeys so much more effective at driving results? For one thing, our research suggests that journeys are more predictive of desired outcomes. In most industries, the three journeys that matter most to customers account for more than 25 percent of total customer satisfaction. Indeed, across industries, performance on journeys is substantially more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than performance on touchpoints—and performance on journeys is significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes such as revenue, churn, and repeat purchase. In other words, delivering a distinctive journey experience makes it more likely that customers repeat a purchase, spend more, recommend to their friends, and stay with your company (Exhibit 3).

Journeys versus touchpoints: Some practical examples

Consider the case of the local operating entity of a global insurance player. Market leadership in one of its largest lines of business, car insurance, was under siege by both established players and new entrants. Executives knew that they would have to innovate in order to differentiate their offering. They also knew that for a long time the fragmented nature of their customer experience had been a problem: many of their customers bought their product and managed their claims via a broker. When a car needed repair after an incident, a local mechanic typically managed the process, with little involvement from the car insurer. With so many individual touchpoints outside the company’s control, the insurer struggled to provide a consistently high-quality and repeatable experience.

Research identified consistent and clear communications as one of the most important elements of customer experience. Improving the experience started with offering insurance policies that were easy to read, understand, and compare with those of competitors. But even more important to customers was securing answers to questions regarding the status of their car while under repair. What was being replaced or repaired? When would they get the car back?

The effort made it apparent that there was potential to resolve a critical frustration for customers during a very important part of their overall customer journey with the insurer. It also revealed the opportunity to build a deeper engagement and relationship. So the company set out to provide an end-to-end communications “glue” to what had been a multitouchpoint, multiparty customer journey.

Executives rapidly created a prototype using a sample of 20 current customer cases. Each day, the company would track where the case was and provide a simple update to the customer via email or text. The company set up “personal contacts” for each customer who would send the emails, serve as a single source of contact, and phone the customer directly if there was a material update to be announced, such as a delay in finishing the work. Overall, every effort was made to personalize communication during an important phase in the customer’s journey. By the end of the pilot, the company had learned a number of lessons related to the appropriate frequency of contact, the importance of using the customer’s preferred channels, and timing communications. The company also learned how to scale the service without adding substantial costs, largely by using underutilized call-center resources at off-peak hours.

The impact was profound. Net promoter scores for the customer journey climbed by 15 percentage points, and by 50 points for difficult cases, such as when repairs were first attempted but eventually the car had to be declared a total write-off. Delighted customers sent thank-you notes to the company, and brokers and mechanics reported significant improvements in their dealings with customers, who were now much better informed.

Or consider the European energy retailer that identified the “home moving” journey as a particular point of dissatisfaction among its customers, as well as a significant source of churn. The company mobilized a cross-functional team (service, sales, marketing, and IT) to understand what was happening—from the customer’s viewpoint—along the journey to prompt these high levels of customer dissatisfaction. What the team found was a basic journey that was performing poorly across the various functions and departments that supported it.

The journey’s design suffered from several features that imposed unnecessary inconvenience and anxiety on customers when moving. For example, customers had to contact the company no earlier than ten days before their move date to provide all of the necessary details—otherwise the IT systems would not record the information. An organized customer, one who called perhaps a month before the move date to set everything up, would find that his or her move details were never recorded. Customers also had only one method—voice calling—to contact the company.

Once the customer had notified the company of moving plans, he or she would receive several different forms of communication. Upon examination, the team found that some of the communications were redundant, while others contradicted other accurate pieces of communications. All this generated additional anxiety and confusion.

Poor communication, in fact, was the single largest reason that customers called into the call centers, and it was another source of dissatisfaction. Customer-service agents had no method of tracking where the customer was on his or her moving journey. More often than not, this meant that agents had to hand off the inquiry to a back-office team for further investigation and problem resolution. The back-office team, inundated with these types of inquiries, suffered delays in getting back to the customer with a resolution, naturally producing additional calls to the call center—and so on.

The good news was that, for the first time, the company understood the benefit of taking an end-to-end view of the customer journey and the importance of understanding how interdependent individual touchpoints were along the journey.

Several improvements were designed and implemented rapidly to address the key problem areas. The moving journey was redesigned into a signature customer journey for this energy-retail company: customers now have the flexibility to provide the company with their move information at a time that suits them. They also have the option to use a phone, the web, or a smartphone app to contact the company; all essential communications are now delivered consistently in a single “home movers” pack. Finally, the company now incorporates into the home-movers pack discount vouchers for do-it-yourself stores, tradespeople, and restaurants in the area—creating a welcoming cluster of local businesses (the businesses also happen to be customers of the energy retailer’s small and midsize business unit, thus creating a positive customer experience across all customer segments). The result? A 50 percent increase in customer satisfaction from the starting position, and a 15 percent reduction in the company’s customer-service cost. Employee satisfaction increased by 20 percent and churn related to this journey was cut by more than half.

In most cases, companies are simply not naturally wired to think about the journeys their customers take. Thinking about customer journeys—instead of traditional touchpoints—can require an operational and cultural shift that engages the organization across functions and from top to bottom. For the companies that master it, the reward is higher customer and employee satisfaction, revenue and cost improvements, and an enduring competitive advantage.

Nicolas Maechler is a principal in McKinsey’s Paris office, Kevin Neher is a principal in the Denver office, and Robert Park is an associate principal in the London office.

The authors wish to thank Conor Jones and Laird Rawsthorne for their contributions to this article.

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Unknown sailor's notebook found hidden in furniture tells story of USS Amesbury's WWII journey

A Massachusetts woman discovered a historic artifact that dates back to World War II and was hidden inside of a piece of furniture.

Brenda O'Keefe, a Massachusetts resident, found a green notebook that documented events from the USS Amesbury, according to the NOAA Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary .

“I was thrilled to be contacted by the notebook's discoverer, Ms. Brenda O'Keefe,” Matthew Lawrence, a maritime archaeologist at Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary told USA TODAY. “It is not often that someone reaches out to the sanctuary's staff with a discovery such as this, so we greatly value Ms. O'Keefe's efforts to share the information.”

Although the author is unknown, many of this ship's voyages and activities during World War II are documented.

Starting on June 13, 1944, the writer wrote key events of the ship's journey.

By July 2, 1944, the ship left for England. Making trips between the Unites States and England, the author showed that these journeys lasted a few days at a time.

On April 7, 1945, the author created an entry titled, “war ended with Germany.”

Although there were no identifiers to who this person might be, Lawrence said their record-keeping adds another layer to the vessel's story.

“The notebook's information allows us to tell the maritime stories embodied by the National Marine Sanctuaries,” Lawrence said. “Sometimes the stories are local, like when the Amesbury had to leave Key West to avoid a hurricane. Other times the stories are global, like when the Amesbury's participated in the D-Day landings in France.”

55 US Coast Guard cadets: Disciplined after cheating scandal for copying homework answers

USS Amesbury was a warship that made many voyages across the sea

In 1943, the USS Amesbury, a U.S. naval destroyer escort, was converted to a high speed transport vessel, according to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary .

Known to Floridians as Alexander's Wreck, the ship was named after Lt. Stanton Amesbury who was killed in enemy action over Casablanca on Nov. 9, 1942.

In the notebook, the author dated an entry on Feb. 23, 1945, “left for Philly for conversion.”

The marine sanctuary notes this event on its website, stating that the USS Amesbury was one of the 104 destroyer escorts that was converted to a high-speed transport at the Philadelphia Navy Yard .

The USS Amesbury traveled to Korea and China and was equipped with a five-inch turret gun and three twin-mount, 40 mm antiaircraft guns, the sanctuary said.

In 1946, the ship was retired from active missions and was stationed in Florida.

Ahjané Forbes is a reporter on the National Trending Team at USA TODAY. Ahjané covers breaking news, car recalls, crime, health, lottery and public policy stories. Email her at  [email protected] . Follow her on  Instagram ,  Threads  and  X @forbesfineest.

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Athens travel guide 2024: A Comprehensive Escort with Insider Tips, Must-See Attractions, and Local Secrets for an Unforgettable Journey. Kindle Edition

Embark on a journey through the heart of ancient Greece with our comprehensive guide to Athens, the cradle of Western civilization. From the majestic ruins of the Acropolis to the charming streets of Plaka, this guide is your passport to discovering the rich history, vibrant culture, and breathtaking beauty of this legendary city.

Uncover the secrets of Athens as you wander through its ancient agora, explore its bustling markets, and savor its mouthwatering cuisine.Immerse yourself in the sights and sounds of the city, from the iconic landmarks of the Parthenon and Temple of Poseidon to the hidden gems tucked away in its winding alleyways.

Whether you're a history buff, an art enthusiast, or a curious traveler seeking adventure, our guide has something for everyone. Packed with insider tips, detailed maps, and practical advice, it's the ultimate companion for exploring Athens like a local.

Don't just visit Athens – experience it like never before with our expertly crafted guide. Your unforgettable journey begins here.

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American Airlines is preparing for summer travel with new premium onboard amenities — take a look

• American Airlines is launching its first rotating collection of premium amenities Memorial Day Weekend.
• It includes a new front-row flagship suite, new bedding, and enhanced dining options. 
• The new amenity kit program will cycle skincare products and offer limited-edition specialty kits. 

American Airlines is gearing up for summer travel with new luxury in-flight offerings for its customers.

American is launching its first rotating collection of premium onboard amenities over Memorial Day Weekend. It will be available on 300 international and transcontinental flights.

The offerings include new bedding, dining options, and an amenity kit program that lets premium passengers sample different skincare brands and products.

"We thoughtfully curate each element of the onboard experience so every customer can look forward to the time they spend in flight," American's vice president of customer experience, Kim Cisek, said in a statement. "Part of the magic of travel is connecting our customers to the people and experiences that matter most to them."

While most of the new amenities are being offered to premium cabins, main cabin passengers will also have access to new bedding and other seat enhancements.

Passengers in the main cabin will have access to 4K seatback screens, Bluetooth connectivity, and new charging ports. All customers will have access to 1,500 free entertainment content options and can use high-speed WiFi.

Passengers can kick back in the flagship suites with new privacy doors and chaise lounge positions.

Customers traveling in American's flagship suite seat will have access to wireless charging, Bluetooth capability, and multiple storage spaces.

Passengers traveling in premium economy can also enjoy new amenities like wireless charging, additional storage space, and privacy headrest wings.

Customers looking for more luxury can sit front row on the new Boeing 787-9 and 777-300 aircraft's flagship suite preferred seat.

The new seat offers customers additional space and storage. It will offer additional amenities for passengers' comfort, like a Nest Bedding mattress pad, a throw blanket, and a memory foam lumbar pillow.

The seat will also have Nest Bedding pajamas and an exclusive amenity kit featuring additional skincare products.

American used customer research to enhance its bedding in all cabins.

American decided to offer dual-sided pillows to flagship first and business class after research indicated 75% of its customers preferred different materials on each side of their pillows. The new pillow will have cool touch fabric on one side and traditional fabric on the other.

Travelers in flagship business class can now enjoy slippers onboard.

The slippers used to only be offered on ultra-long-haul flights.

Customers in all cabins will enjoy enhanced bedding, with cabin-specific offerings like lumbar pillows, throw blankets, premium duvets, and fleece blankets.

American says the new bedding packaging will save 25 tons of plastic waste a year.

American collaborated with inflight textile company John Horsfall to create bedding from recycled materials. Nearly all the pillows, duvets, and blankets were made with recycled fibers, and filled bedding will be 100% recycled.

Customers traveling in premium cabins will also receive their bedding in a reusable zipper bag made with recycled fibers to reduce plastic waste from distribution.

International business class passengers can try out new flavors inspired by international cuisine and American Airlines destinations worldwide.

American is offering new menu offerings to business class passengers on international US inbound and outbound flights.

Some of the meals include macadamia-crusted sea bass with citrus cream sauce, quinoa, toasted orzo, and haricot verts.

American is also offering enhanced dining options to domestic travelers in first class.

Customers can also choose from new preorder options.

Preorder options will continue to roll out this spring for business class on flights from the US to international destinations.

Business class, premium economy, and first class passengers can pre-order all of the meals offered to their cabins. The main cabin doesn't have pre-ordering available but passengers receive a complimentary in-flight snack and beverage. They can also purchase food through the buy-on-board program.

Passengers in premium cabins will also have access to the new amenity kit program.

American's amenity kit includes basic comfort amenities like a toothbrush, dental kit, eye mask, and earplugs. The kit will also cycle different skincare products and offerings in premium cabins.

American collaborated with beauty retailer Thirteen Lune to curate skincare offerings in the amenity kit.

The kit will feature high-quality beauty brands from Thirteen Lune's tailored collection. Passengers can scan a QR code in the kit to learn about each brand and partner featured.

Customers will receive the Thirteen Lune kit for the first few weeks of the kickoff to the new program.

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