Customer journey

Also called: customer journey or consumer journey

The customer journey is the virtual journey a customer takes up to and including the purchase of a product or service. It is a metaphor for the various intermediate steps, phases and contact moments a customer goes through before making a purchase. Typically, the customer journey also includes the subsequent relationship with the customer.

At each step in the customer journey, customer feelings arise and questions may arise. The degree to which needs are met and the amount of friction that occurs determine the experience and, ultimately, conversion. Analyzing and evaluating customer journeys can teach an organization to improve itself and its products and services. Improving the customer journey helps both to bring in more new customers and to retain existing customers.

The itinerary of a customer journey

Different scopes and classifications are possible for customer journeys.

When the customer journey is limited to and including the moment of purchase(conversion), the intermediate steps are often classified as the stages of orientation, consideration and purchase or according to the AIDA model. In a broader definition, the customer journey does not stop at the moment a transaction has taken place. By including usage and evaluation as fourth and fifth stages, the customer journey also includes the user experience, with a view to retaining customers, ensuring a good reputation and the likelihood of a recommendation or repeat purchase.

A common format for a customer journey distinguishes the following phases:

• Awareness
• Familiarity (familiarity, familiarity)
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Loyalty (loyalty, allegiance)

Chain of experiences and decisions

The term customer journey is also used in narrower senses, such as for the conversion funnel during the ordering process of a Web site or Web store. In addition to measuring conversion and page views, event tracking can be added to gain insight into visitor behavior. In turn, actions and marketing activities beyond the website can be linked to this funnel to allow customers to begin or resume their journey, such as newsletters and (automated) personal mailings.

The phase between purchasing and using a product or service is also an important part of the customer journey. Ensuring an enjoyable and effective onboarding process helps in arranging formalities and making the product your own so that it can be used to its full potential.

In an ideal scenario, the customer journey is a journey with no final destination. Instead of a funnel with a beginning and an end, a customer journey in that case is a continuous loop of decisions. Consulting firm McKinsey describes this "consumer decision journey," as a continuous loop of experiencing, considering, evaluating, committing and purchasing. The art of marketing is to trigger interest and decisions at the right times.

Plotting customer journeys

The customer journey can be a travelogue of an existing customer's journey. However, an organization can also describe fictional customer journeys, whether or not combined with personas, to design and optimize marketing activities and business processes.

Describing virtual customer journeys can be done at a general level, interacting with the desired identity of the brand or organization, or in detail at the level of specific marketing activities and business processes.

Thinking from customer journeys not only helps when designing and working out new processes and activities. Working with example scenarios also helps to better align different actions and existing activities and to identify and solve any problems.