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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

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Digital customer journeys: from awareness to advocacy.

13 min read Just understanding a customer’s needs and wants is no longer enough. You need to know not only what they think and feel about every online interaction with your product, but also what they might do in the future. This is where digital customer journey mapping comes into play.

Customers expect not only a high-quality digital experience ; they also expect to be treated as individuals. Their online experience must be personalized, relevant, and tailored to their wants, needs and interests. And where customers have high expectations , it follows that they have low tolerance for a below-par experience.

Now, more than ever, customers will abandon a purchase or a brand with a single click if they’re not happy, and move onto another brand that seamlessly delivers what they want. A recent study from the XM Institute asked large organizations to evaluate the quality of the experiences they deliver across different channels. Less than 30% rated any of their digital experiences as “good” or “very good”.

Modern customers are digital kangaroos, able to hop from brand to brand and product to product, on any device. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your brand’s path to purchase is as easy as possible, to stop them from hopping off to a competitor.

How do you do this? With digital customer journey mapping.

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

What is a digital customer journey?

This is the path to purchase and retention – from first noticing the product to buying and using it. The journey combines all the touchpoints (i.e. points of interaction with your business) a customer has, and collects consumer data, transaction information, cross-device browsing history, and customer service interactions. There are five stages in the digital customer journey:

• Awareness: this is the point at which a customer notices your product . Awareness can come from a multitude of channels: social media and word of mouth from friends, influencers and brand advocates, search engine suggestions, adverts, marketing emails, blogs, SMS, apps, loyalty programs, and affiliate marketing.
• Consideration: A customer likes what they’ve seen, so they start to think about and research the product. They’ll visit your website, engage with a chatbot, sign up for free trials, demos, webinars, look at discounts, and check online reviews and testimonials.
• Purchase: To buy online, customers will create an account (or log into their existing one), fill their shopping cart, may be upsold or cross-sold, apply discounts, choose an electronic payment option, check out, and leave a review about the purchase.
• Experience: This is how well the order is fulfilled, and includes: shipping and delivery, tracking, online help center, support content (FAQs, instructions and assembly guides), chatbots and assisted chat, guarantees, follow-up emails and social media interactions.
• Loyalty: Loyalty programs , personalized rewards, newsletters, and social media interaction are all well and good. But creating an emotional connection with the customer, and ensuring they receive the value they expect from the brand is the new approach to loyalty: is the product good quality? Did the customer receive good support ?

What exactly is a digital customer journey map?

When you map out the digital journey graphically, including all the devices, and touchpoints your customer interacts with, you’ll understand how they make decisions, connect and interact with your brand. You can also identify and rectify any pain points that make the customer experience less than seamless.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

• You’ll walk in your customers’ (virtual) shoes : Employees sometimes find it difficult to empathize or understand the customer’s perspective. They may try to second guess what customers are feeling, rather than experiencing the journey themselves. By collecting feedback at touchpoints along the journey, the customer can express how they are feeling (frustrated? Happy? Disappointed? Cared for?) and employees can jump in to solve issues and make the customer experience smoother and more enjoyable.
• The whole company will work together: All too often, organizations work in silos: not only communication silos (when different teams don’t speak to each other) but also system and data silos that hold customer information that’s specific only to that part of the journey.  It’s the lack of a 360 view of the customer and seamless sharing of insight that creates this fragmented experience. With a customer journey map and centralized customer information, everyone, across all departments, knows where they fit in and what their role is in delivering a seamless experience.
•   You’ll inform your content marketing and content creation: Customers buy more if your content is relevant and targeted to them. Your customer journey map will help you build a full 360° picture of your customers: demographics , behavior , and psychographics , so you can target new and returning buyers.
• You’ll be able to predict customer behavior: Not only will journey mapping give you valuable insight into customers’ wants, needs, feelings, actions and aspirations, you’ll also be able to use the data to predict and influence how customers will behave.
• You’ll be able to identify gaps: when you map out each stage of the journey, and then map out your existing processes, you can not only uncover gaps, but also identify what your highest value journey touchpoints are. Without mapping, you could be focusing on optimizing touchpoints that are not really that influential, while missing a more important point.

Creating your digital customer journey map

The first thing to understand is that you have no control over a customer’s journey. A customer will go where they like, on whichever device or platform they choose, negotiating the touchpoints to achieve their goal of a satisfactory purchase. Your role is to build an omnichannel framework that anticipates where they are going to go and supports their goal.

• Base it on your sales funnel:  You will probably have the basis for your digital customer journey already – your online sales funnel (awareness, interest, decision, action). Use this as a guideline to define how many touchpoints your customers have, and how each interaction funnels into the next.
• Put your customer hat on: Walk through all the stages of your sales funnel as a customer would, noting the touchpoints. What social media would they interact with? Does your website have the right information? How easy is your booking process? How helpful are the after sales people? Is the loyalty scheme attractive? Would you be happy to recommend your own product ?
• Customize your touchpoints: You know which social media platform attracts most customers, how to respond to reviews so your business demonstrates it cares about customers, how your purchase process works, how good your aftersales team is, and how you reward loyal customers. These are the touchpoints that are specific to your company. When you bolt them onto your customer journey map and collect feedback about each of them, you’ll be able to see if they are performing as well as you think they are.
• Create personas: As companies scale, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of individual customers. This is where personas come in: these are fictitious customer types based on real customers, using demographic and psychographic profiles that include age, gender, socioeconomic background, lifestyle, interests, opinions, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. Each persona travels along their customer journey in a slightly different way, enabling a company to recognize the differences and cater to every type of customer.
• Use customer journey mapping software: Customer journey solutions are now so sophisticated that they can give real-time visualizations of your customers moving towards purchase and beyond, capturing their online interactions with your brand. AI-enabled software will flag any touchpoint where customers are struggling and highlight any places where they drop out. Not only can you jump in and fix the problems, you can also measure the impact that improving the customer experience at those points has on the company’s bottom line.

Data you can collect with digital customer journey mapping

These are just some of the types of data you can collect along your digital customer journey. When you feed all these into a single platform for analysis, you’ll be able to see how they relate to each other, and where they have knock-on effects.

• Web-browsing data: Every time someone clicks onto your website, you can track their activity on the site and see how they are interacting with your brand. You can also see what devices they are using to access your site.
• Mobile app data: If a customer is using your mobile app, they already have a degree of loyalty. Mobile apps yield more customer information from profiles, sign-ins, and location.
• Sales data: You can track a customer’s purchase history and shopping habits over time. Do they buy immediately, leave items in their shopping cart, or abandon their cart periodically? Don’t forget sales that didn’t happen – finding out why not is valuable for understanding what needs to improve.
• Advertising data: Who has clicked through to your site from an advertisement? This data will give you information about customers who are just starting out on their journey with you. You can marry advertising data with sales data to test the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
• Loyalty data: Your best customers are usually those in your loyalty program. By analyzing who they are and how they use your brand, you’ll be able to target people just like them.
• Survey data: Want to know what customers think of your brand? Ask them. Sending surveys at touchpoints along the customer journey can give you quality information about what’s working and what’s not.
• Social media listening: Increasingly, customers interact with brands through social media. Understanding the nature of this interaction can help develop your social, as well as general marketing strategies .
• Aftersales data: Information from your customer services department can reveal a wide range of issues: product quality, delivery reliability, areas that need product support. How customers are treated after they’ve made a purchase is pivotal to whether they become loyal, or not.

What about B2B digital customer journey mapping?

Whether you’re selling B2C or B2B, the main principles of journey mapping are the same. After all, although you are trading with companies, you are still selling to people within those companies – there are just more of them, and your feedback processes will need to be a little different.

When you map B2B journeys , you need to bear the following in mind:

• More types of people are involved in a B2B journey than a B2C one: Therefore, you’ll need to create more customer personas. For example, if you’re supplying an online finance platform, you will have to deal with the CIO, executives, managers, tech personnel and the call center assistants. All these people are your customers, segmented by persona.
• B2B customers are more valuable: Building business relationships can take years of investment, and if you lose a business customer, you might lose a lot of revenue as a result. You’ll need to prioritize and segment your customer personas by business value: the CIO has more purchasing power than a single call center assistant, for example.
• B2B customer feedback is different: Because much B2B is built on personal interaction and recommendation, business people often know each other. It’s more acceptable to pick up the phone and talk through a problem than send out a generic survey. Your feedback techniques will have to be much more personalized to each of your B2B customers, so that they feel heard, and still special.

An example of a customer journey map template

The brands that thrive in this new reality are those that understand what customers want in digital and take action to deliver the experiences they expect. Here’s a customer journey template for you to start mapping out your digital journey.

To learn more about customer journey management take a look at our free online course below:

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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Understanding your customer is the key to survival in online adventures where you wrestle with clicks and scrolls. Enter the superhero cape of digital customer journey mapping, which swoops in to decipher the cryptic language of online behavior.

Digital customer journey and digital customer journey mapping definitions

The digital customer journey is a customer's entire process while interacting with a business or brand online. It includes stages like awareness, consideration, purchase, post-purchase engagement, and advocacy, encompassing various digital touchpoints.

Digital customer journey mapping , on the other hand, is a strategic process of visually representing and analyzing the digital customer journey. It involves creating a detailed map that outlines each step a customer takes, the touchpoints they encounter, and the emotions they experience during their online interactions.

In essence, the digital customer journey is the overall customer experience online. In contrast, digital customer journey mapping is a tool or process used to analyze and visualize that experience to better understand, optimize, and enhance the customer journey.

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Significance of digital customer journey mapping

• Enhanced customer experience: Customer journey mapping allows businesses to understand and optimize every step of the customer journey, improving overall satisfaction.
• Improved retention and satisfaction: Identifying pain points and addressing customer needs result in increased loyalty and reduced churn rates.
• Business growth: With insights into opportunities for innovation, product development, and marketing strategies, customer journey mapping helps with sustained business growth.
• Cross-functional collaboration: A customer journey map encourages collaboration between departments, ensuring a cohesive and consistent customer experience across channels.
• Data-driven insights: It utilizes customer data to make informed decisions, tailor marketing efforts, and enhance personalized interactions.
• Adaptability to a dynamic digital landscape: You can stay agile by continuously updating maps to reflect changes in customer behavior and technology trends.
• Competitive advantage: Businesses that understand and respond to customer needs gain a competitive edge by offering superior digital experiences.

Creating digital customer journey mapping

Digital customer journey mapping involves a strategic approach to understanding and improving the customer experience in the digital realm. The process includes several steps you should follow:

1. Define the scope: Clearly outline the scope of the customer journey mapping initiative. Specify the product or service, target audience, and the particular stages of the customer's interaction to be analyzed.

2. Identify customer touchpoints: Pinpoint the various touchpoints where customers interact with the brand digitally. This includes website visits, social media engagement, email communication, mobile app usage, and more.

3. Create customer personas: Develop detailed personas representing different segments of the target audience. Include demographics, preferences, behaviors, and pain points to humanize and understand the diverse needs of customers.

4. Map customer goals and objectives: Define the goals customers aim to achieve at each touchpoint. Whether it's making a purchase, seeking information, or resolving an issue, understanding these objectives is crucial for tailoring the journey map.

5. Understand pain points and friction: Identify obstacles and challenges customers may encounter during their journey. Recognizing pain points allows businesses to address issues, reduce friction, and enhance customer experience.

6. Evaluate cross-channel interactions: Analyze how customers transition between different digital channels. Understand the seamless flow of information and interactions across platforms, ensuring consistency and cohesiveness.

7. Gather data and insights: Utilize customer data, analytics, and feedback to inform the mapping process. Data-driven insights provide a factual basis for understanding customer behavior and preferences.

8. Collaborate across departments: Foster collaboration between marketing, sales, customer service, and IT departments. A cross-functional approach ensures a holistic view of the customer journey and facilitates the implementation of improvements.

9. Visualize the journey: Create a visual representation of the customer journey map. Use diagrams, charts, or other visualization tools to illustrate the various stages, touchpoints, and interactions.

10. Iterate and update: Recognize that the digital landscape is dynamic. Regularly review and update the customer journey map to reflect changes in customer behavior, technology, or business strategies.

By focusing on these fundamental aspects, you can lay the groundwork for a robust digital customer journey mapping strategy that enhances customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall success in the online world.

Customer journey map example

Creating a customer journey map involves several components that can be customized based on your specific business and industry. Here's a basic template to get you started. 

Feel free to adapt and expand upon it according to your needs:

Customer journey map template

1. Map title:

• For example, Digital Customer Journey Map for [Product/Service]

2. Customer persona:

• Create a persona representing your target customer. Include demographics, preferences, and behaviors.

3. Stages of the journey:

• List the key stages your customer goes through, such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Post-Purchase, and Advocacy.

4. Touchpoints:

• Identify and map out the specific touchpoints at each stage (Website Visit, Social Media Interaction, Email Communication, etc.).

5. Customer goals:

• Define your customer's goals at each journey stage (Obtain Information, Make a Purchase, Seek Support, etc.).

6. Pain points:

• Identify potential pain points or challenges the customer may encounter at each stage (Confusing Website Navigation, Slow Customer Support, etc.).

7. Emotional journey:

• Note the emotional highs and lows your customer may experience during the journey (Excitement at Discovery, Frustration with Checkout Process , etc.).

8. Channels and interactions:

• Specify the digital channels through which interactions occur (Website, Mobile App, Social Media, etc.) and describe the nature of these interactions.

9. Key metrics:

• Define metrics to measure success at each stage (Conversion Rate, Customer Satisfaction Score, etc.).

10. Opportunities for improvement:

• Identify areas where the customer journey can be enhanced or optimized. This could include improving website navigation, refining communication strategies, or streamlining the purchase process.

11. Feedback integration:

• Specify how customer feedback, obtained through surveys, reviews, or other channels, will be integrated into the journey map for continuous improvement.

12. Visual elements:

• Include visual elements such as charts, graphs, or icons to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand.

Remember, this is a basic template, and you can customize it further based on your business' unique characteristics and goals. Regularly update the map to reflect changes in customer behavior, technology trends, or business strategies.

Tools and technologies for creating a customer journey map

Here are the tools and software you need to create a customer journey map:

Visualization tools

• Journey mapping software

Dedicated journey mapping tools like Smaply, UXPressia, or Canvanizer provide interactive platforms for creating, visualizing, and sharing digital customer journey maps. These tools offer features such as drag-and-drop functionality, collaboration capabilities, and the ability to create dynamic, real-time maps.

• Diagramming software

General-purpose diagramming tools like Microsoft Visio, Lucidchart, or draw.io can be adapted for journey mapping, providing flexibility in design and customization. These tools suit businesses looking for versatile solutions to create detailed and customized customer journey maps.  

• Storyboarding tools

Storyboarding tools like Miro or Storyboard help visualize customer journeys in a sequential storyboard format, making it easier to illustrate the customer's experience step by step. This is particularly useful for storytelling and understanding the narrative flow of the customer journey.

CRM systems

Salesforce is a comprehensive CRM platform that allows businesses to manage customer interactions, track leads, and integrate customer data seamlessly. Integration with customer journey mapping enables a holistic view, combining sales and marketing data to enhance the overall understanding of the customer journey.

• HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a user-friendly solution that helps businesses organize and track customer interactions, making aligning marketing and sales efforts easier. Integrating HubSpot CRM with customer journey mapping provides a centralized hub for managing customer relationships and analyzing touchpoints.

Zoho CRM is a versatile platform offering automation, analytics, and customization features for managing customer relationships. Integration with customer journey mapping tools allows businesses to align sales processes with the digital customer journey for more effective customer engagement.

Turn visitors into customers

Analytics and data integration.

• Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides in-depth insights into website and app user behavior, helping businesses understand how customers interact with digital touchpoints. Integration with customer journey mapping enables a data-driven approach, combining analytics data with mapped customer interactions for a comprehensive view.

Mixpanel is an analytics platform focusing on user engagement, providing detailed insights into user actions and behaviors. Integration with customer journey mapping enhances the understanding of user behavior across digital channels, facilitating targeted improvements in the customer journey.

• Data integration platforms (like Zapier)

Platforms like Zapier facilitate seamless integration between different software applications, allowing businesses to automate workflows and share data. Integrating data sources with customer journey mapping ensures that the maps stay updated in real time, reflecting the latest customer interactions and trends.

By leveraging these tools and technologies, you can create, manage, and derive actionable insights from digital customer journey maps, ultimately leading to improved customer experiences and business success.

Best practices for digital customer journey mapping

Regular updates.

• Scheduled reviews

Establish a regular review schedule for customer journey maps to ensure they stay aligned with evolving customer behaviors and business strategies. Regular updates help maintain the relevance and accuracy of the maps in the dynamic digital landscape.

• Real-time data integration

Implement mechanisms for real-time data integration, allowing maps to reflect the latest customer interactions and feedback. Real-time updates provide a more accurate representation of the customer journey and enable timely strategy adjustments.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Interdepartmental workshops

Conduct regular workshops involving marketing, sales, customer service , and IT teams to contribute collaboratively to the customer journey mapping process.

Cross-functional collaboration ensures diverse perspectives are considered, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.

• Shared goals and metrics

Establish shared goals and KPIs across departments to align efforts toward a unified customer experience. Shared metrics foster a collaborative environment and encourage teams to work together towards common objectives .

Data analytics for improvement

• Utilizing predictive analytics

Leverage predictive analytics to anticipate customer behaviors and trends, allowing for proactive adjustments to the customer journey. Predictive analytics empowers companies to stay ahead of customer needs and preferences, enhancing the overall customer experience.

• Performance measurement

Implement KPIs to measure the success of the mapped customer journey and identify improvement areas. Data analytics provide actionable insights, enabling businesses to iterate on strategies and enhance the effectiveness of the customer journey.

Customer feedback integration

• Multichannel feedback collection

Collect customer feedback through various channels , including surveys, social media, and direct interactions, to better understand customer sentiments. Diverse feedback sources provide a comprehensive view, helping businesses identify improvement areas and validate the mapped customer journey.

• Feedback loop implementation

Establish a feedback loop where insights from customer feedback directly inform updates and adjustments to the customer journey map. Integrating customer feedback into the mapping process ensures the journey accurately reflects real customer experiences and expectations.

By incorporating these best practices, businesses can create compelling digital customer journey maps and foster a culture of continuous improvement, adaptability, and customer-centricity in their operations.

Customer journey map case studies

Let's look closer into two examples of successful digital customer journey implementation – Amazon and Airbnb.

Amazon's customer journey mapping has been a cornerstone of its success. From personalized recommendations to seamless one-click purchasing, Amazon uses data-driven journey maps to enhance the customer experience. 

Amazon leverages advanced analytics to understand user behavior, tailors recommendations based on past interactions, and ensures a consistent experience across its website, mobile app, and other digital touchpoints.

Airbnb focuses on creating a seamless digital journey for both hosts and guests. Their customer journey map incorporates user-friendly interfaces, transparent communication , and a robust review system. Airbnb uses customer feedback to continually refine its platform, implementing features like instant booking and personalized search results to cater to user preferences and enhance overall satisfaction.

Lessons learned from Amazon and Airbnb

1. User-centric design

Both Amazon and Airbnb prioritize user-centric design in their customer journey mapping. Understanding and catering to user preferences, pain points, and goals contribute to a positive overall experience.

2. Data-driven decision-making

Successful implementations rely heavily on data analytics. Both companies leverage data to anticipate user needs, personalize interactions, and optimize the customer journey for improved engagement.

3. Continuous iteration and adaptation

Amazon and Airbnb continually iterate on their customer journey maps. A commitment to regular updates and adaptations is crucial for maintaining relevance and effectiveness.

4. Customer feedback integration

Both Amazon and Airbnb actively integrate customer feedback into their journey-mapping processes. This iterative approach allows them to address issues promptly, validate assumptions, and stay aligned with evolving customer expectations.

5. Agile implementation strategies

The success of these case studies lies in the agility of their implementation strategies. Quickly adapting to emerging trends, technologies, and user behaviors is critical for sustained success in the digital space.

6. Embracing technology trends

Both companies embrace emerging technologies. Amazon's use of machine learning for recommendations and Airbnb's adoption of virtual reality for property previews showcase a commitment to staying at the forefront of technology trends.

You can draw inspiration from these examples to enhance your mapping strategies and drive success in the digital realm.

Creating your digital customer journey map

With journey mapping, you can create highly personalized, adaptive, and technologically immersive customer experiences across various digital touchpoints. And you should start as soon as possible. 

Early adopters of digital customer journey mapping will gain a head start in refining their customer experiences and the ability to seamlessly iterate and adapt.

Get a glimpse into the future of business communication with digital natives.

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Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot’s free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer’s journey, a day in your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you’re creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don’t have one, I recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics ready.

Don’t have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot’s Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started.

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you’ve learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. If you group too many personas into one journey, your map won’t accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there’s no overlap.

This is essential in creating a customer journey map because it provides insight into your customers’ actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you must also look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels.
• Email marketing.
• Third-party review sites or mentions.

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding — you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

Digital customer journey stages exposed: From awareness to purchase and beyond

 key takeaways.

Understand the digital customer journey, its five phases and different examples 

Learn effective methods to optimize throughout the digital customer journey

Discover how digital experience intelligence tools work and take insights further

What is the digital customer journey?

The digital customer journey captures the five steps a consumer takes on their path to conversion, such as purchase. This includes all customer touchpoints where there is engagement–from interest in the product, to making contact with the brand and the further path down the journey to purchase.

It’s important to know that once the sale is made, the journey continues to the “end”—this is where customer loyalty strategies encourage customers to repeat buying from their company in the future and creating referrals to their business. 

All of these customer touchpoints are essential to a brand because most customers need to be exposed to and engage with a brand or product many times before they decide to click “buy.” These touchpoints can include both physical and digital marketing efforts—from physical and online ads, to reviews to word-of-mouth recommendations and more. 

It’s also critical to understand that within each user’s journey, there are multiple touchpoints, and they may go back and forth between them, zig-zagging towards a purchase. For instance,  87% start their research online , but they may visit a store to see the product, request product information from your website, and then compare the shop on their mobile device. 

The importance of digital customer journeys in today’s world

In the traditional world of marketing, organizations started off with a product, did some TV or radio ads, and then customers went to brick and mortar shops to choose among brands and buy a product.

Today’s digital customer experience is vastly different. There are many more touch points to connect with consumers. They are exposed to digital media channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and an array of online platforms (websites, forums, blogs, etc.).

There are also many more ways to buy the product, including through a website, mobile app, in the physical store–or even a combination of these with the rise of click and collect. Now we’re even ordering with our voice via our voice-assisted devices.

The average household today has more than 22 connected devices . Our customer journey—from awareness to purchase—has become one of many pathways and multiple devices.

And each of these devices has multiple points of interaction. From calls and texts to messaging apps, social media, Spotify and browsing on Amazon, the average person spends 5 hours and 24 minutes on their phone each day . And at least 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase using their mobile device over the past 6 months.

Think about the last product you bought. How many times did you interact with the brand online as you did your research? How many times did you visit the brand’s website before you bought? Did you interact with their web chat or online help?

Clearly there are more online touchpoints and digital customer journey stages than ever before, and businesses need a way to follow, map and understand this customer journey from beginning to end.

The different stages of the digital customer journey

One of the biggest challenges for companies is understanding motivations and influences that drive a prospect to become a customer. That information is critical to improving the digital customer journey from awareness through advocacy. 

Each pathway to purchase will be different, but at some point they’ll go through these stages. 

Awareness : This is the discovery phase. A consumer determines that they have a need for a product and starts investigating solutions. This is when people turn to the web to do research, looking at a variety of content–from articles to blogs to other educational content. This is the time you want to be noticed.

Consideration : During this stage, a consumer will start comparing different solutions and evaluate the pros and cons. This phase may involve visiting your website, attending a webinar, requesting a free trial and other actions to move closer to a decision. Ideally, the consumer is looking at your product as a viable solution to their needs.

Decision/purchase: This stage is that pivotal moment when the potential buyer has decided that your product is the best choice and wants to buy it. They will create an account, start shopping and buy your product. During this all-important decision phase, the overall experience will influence future behavior–the speed of purchase, delivery and communication.

Retention/loyalty: Once the shopper has moved to buyer, this is the time to nurture them to be a loyal customer. Post-purchase, the product should work as expected or exceed expectations and include strong support as needed. It’s also the time to optimize opportunities for future purchases, leveraging digital analytics to personalize pages, offer rewards and other loyalty techniques.

Advocacy: This phase of the customer journey pushes your brand forward through the power of a happy customer. This customer has established an emotional connection with your company, will purchase in the future and recommends your product to others through word-of-mouth referrals, reviews, customer generated content and other endorsements.

To retain customers and turn them into advocates, you need to understand how they really experience your brand or product. Customer journey analytics can help you see where customers are struggling, dropping off and errors across your website or app so you can optimize the customer journey and keep customers happy and build loyalty. 

Examples of digital customer journeys

Every company has five stages to the digital customer journey, but the path to purchase and beyond will depend on the product and touchpoints in the process. Here are examples from different industries that illustrate the variety of strategies and approaches.

Retail and e-commerce digital customer journey examples

Online holiday gift purchase

Online cosmetics purchase

Food and beverage digital customer journey example

Online food order from a restaurant

Travel and hospitality digital customer journey example

Leisure traveller journey

Telecom digital customer journey example

Journey to choosing a new mobile phone

Health insurance digital customer journey

Banking and financial services

Internet banking customer journey

Why is it important to analyze and optimize the digital customer journey?

In today's digital age, businesses have to adapt to the changing customer behavior to remain competitive. As noted, customers have access to more information than ever before, which has made them more empowered and demanding. Therefore, businesses have to ensure that they are providing an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey. This is where the analysis and optimization of the digital customer journey come in.

Importance of analyzing the digital customer journey

Analyzing the digital customer journey helps businesses understand how customers are interacting with their brand online. It provides insights into how customers are finding and engaging with their website, what content is resonating with them, and what pain points they're experiencing. This information helps businesses identify areas where they can improve the customer experience and increase conversions.

Optimizing the digital customer journey

Optimizing the digital customer journey involves making improvements to the touchpoints to provide a seamless and personalized customer experience. This includes optimizing the website's user experience, creating targeted content, and automating email communications. By doing this, businesses can reduce friction in the customer journey and increase the chances of conversion.

Benefits of analyzing and optimizing the digital customer journey

Analyzing and optimizing the digital customer journey provides several benefits to businesses, including:

Increased conversions: By reducing friction in the customer journey and providing a personalized experience, businesses can increase the chances of conversion.

Improved customer experience: By addressing pain points and providing relevant information, businesses can improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.

Better insights: By analyzing the customer journey, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can inform marketing and product development strategies.

Competitive advantage: By providing an exceptional customer experience, businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors and increase customer loyalty.

How to analyze and optimize the digital customer journey

Now that we have a better understanding of the digital customer journey, we can explore how to analyze and optimize it. In this section, we will outline several key steps businesses can take to improve their digital customer experience.

Step 1: Understand Your Customers

To optimize the digital customer journey, businesses need to have a deep understanding of their customers. A great way to get started is building out customer personas. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help build an understanding of your customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors - what you need to craft content and messages that resonate with them. To create customer personas, you need to gather demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral data.

Step 2: Map Out the Customer Journey

Once businesses have a better understanding of their customers, they can create a customer journey map to visualize the various stages of the digital customer journey. Be sure to read our complete guide to customer journey mapping where we discuss how to create an effective customer journey map and provide examples.

Step 3: Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

With a customer journey map in place, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Leveraging digital analytics tools to identify points of friction at important touchpoints in the digital journey is imperative when trying to identify opportunities for optimization. Further on we’ll discuss how you can leverage digital experience intelligence to surface actionable insights connected to real pain points, low customer satisfaction scores and revenue loss.

Step 4: Improve Website Usability

A crucial aspect of optimizing the digital customer journey is improving website usability. One of the biggest deal-breakers for a potential buyer is the purchase process. Cart abandonment is almost 70% across industries. How can you make it seamless and fast? Offer multiple ways of paying, like digital wallets, one-click purchases and guest check out for new customers. Clearly state shipping and other costs prior to purchase. Activate omnichannel purchasing methods through social shopping and headless check out.

Step 5: Personalize the Experience

Personalization is becoming increasingly important in the digital customer journey. Ninety percent of customers are more likely to buy from a business that personalizes the customer experience . This can include product recommendations based on past browsing behavior, personalized email campaigns, customized landing pages and other ways to show that you recognize them as an individual buyer and value their time.

Step 6: Use Omnichannel Marketing: Providing a consistent brand experience

Omnichannel marketing involves reaching customers through multiple channels, such as email, social media, and mobile apps. Continually assessing and optimizing your omnichannel strategy ensures you’re providing a consistent brand experience across the touchpoints your customers will pass through as they traverse the different stages of the digital journey.

Step 7: Measure and Optimize

Finally, businesses need to continually measure and optimize the digital customer journey to ensure it is working effectively. Having access to tools which enable businesses to easily access the most meaningful insights is essential in a digital era – where the best digital experiences create loyal customer bases.

Below we will discuss the tools you need to get ahead.

The tools you need to get ahead

Typical data analytics can offer useful quantitative data, but digital experience intelligence takes insights far beyond these capabilities for macro and micro conversion points that matter most.

With a comprehensive suite of sophisticated tools, you can optimize the parts of the customer digital journey that will provide the most value to your customers, and in turn, your bottom-line.

The benefits of leveraging digital experience intelligence tools to analyze and optimize key touchpoints in the digital customer journey

There are many benefits to using tools to help you cut ahead and optimize areas that’ll add the most value to your customers and bottom line. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Identifying opportunities to fuel experimentation programs

By replaying exactly what the customer sees, product, marketing and IT departments can test website changes, website content, campaigns and even microsites before they go live. This allows for better workflows and journey optimization.

Site usability monitoring & IT troubleshooting

With 40% of consumers abandoning a website if a page takes more than three seconds to load and 53% abandoning a mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load, site usability must be fine-tuned. The digital consumer has little patience, so monitoring usability can significantly impact the business. Customer acquisition, conversion rates, retention and even SEO rankings can be improved by analysis of experience and performance data.

Reproduce and diagnose errors

If something goes wrong (even if it’s not visible to the customer), performance data and access to session replays can immediately pinpoint what to fix. This helps with rapid diagnosis and problem solving and eliminates the need to tediously and repeatedly reproduce the error.

Improved customer experience

For the user experience designer, the purpose of journey mapping is to identify gaps and touchpoints in the customer experience that are disjointed or frustrating. These might be:

Difference in experience between devices, when a user moves from one device to another

Gaps and disconnects between content or site categories, where the user might get frustrated

Gaps between channels (for example, where the experience of going from social media to the website could be better)

According to a report from Forrester Research, “Understanding the specific devices, touchpoints and interactions is the only way to know if your digital investments will directly improve a customer experience.”

Most of all, a digital journey map puts the customer at the center of the organization’s thinking. It demonstrates how both mobile and web layouts impact customer behaviors.

What to look for in analytics tools for digital customer journey optimization: the functions you need to get ahead

There are certain features built into most digital analytics tools that will help you quickly understand key moments and impact in the customer journey. They include:

Augmented journey map: Get a visual, “big picture” view of where there are problems along the digital customer journey to identify and prioritize issues to fix.

Session replay: Find out the why of an issue on the path to purchase with capture and review of the entire interaction.

Struggle score: Analyze actions, behavioral patterns, and technical errors that help determine friction points in the customer journey causing problems for users.

Mobile crash analytics : One of the biggest causes of app abandonment is crashes. Find out how, where, and why that happened so you can fix the problem.

Now it’s time to understand where customers are struggling and why, as well as why digital marketing and sales funnel conversions are underperforming. The functions that can help you understand this that you should be looking for when considering tools for improving the digital customer experience are:

You can decide on your own criteria for any marketing funnel in digital marketing, ideally by selecting a specific customer journey map for marketing (or maybe you have a tool that supports free-text search). For example, you might want to create a funnel of the entire purchase experience for all the traffic coming from Facebook. Then you can narrow it down to all the sessions where visitors spent more than 20 seconds on the “Special Offers” page but didn’t click to buy. With this data segmented into a digital marketing and sales funnel, you can start to understand the content marketing customer journey: why people struggle, where and why they are abandoning a transaction, and why they’re not converting.

Customer journey filters

To optimize customer experience on a particular page, try filtering your session replays by:

Mobile device

Operating system

Geographic location

Mouse movements

Customer demographics

Customer segment

Customer struggles

Traffic sources

Amount of time spent on page

These variables, and more, can help you to fine tune and understand who is struggling most, across which devices and locations, what issues were encountered and how to fix them for better outcomes.

A click map shows you on average how many times a specific element was clicked, was changed (e.g. data populated in a field) and how much time was spent on it, within a given timeframe. Use analysis of this experience data to understand if the behavior of an individual customer or visitor is representative of the overall digital consumer behavior on a page or web element and if the issue you’re witnessing in a specific session is a wider problem experienced by many customers.

Abandonment rate indicator

More advanced customer mapping tools can give you an idea of where your customers are abandoning their journey to conversion and how often this occurs, allowing you to create a customer decision journey example. This helps you prioritize steps in the customer value journey to maximize your impact to revenue in the shortest amount of time.

Flexible data exporting

Everyone in the organization who is involved in customer journey strategy needs access to the data–IT, marketing, product, distribution and customer service. Choose a customer journey map solution that lets you export the raw customer journey data, real-time scenario-based data, or even batches of data so everyone has access to the digital truth.

Customer feedback through VoC

An integrated voice of customer tool connects what customers are saying with what they really experienced so you can analyze, prioritize and act on feedback quickly. But the issue is not all customers will leave feedback. In a customer experience capacity, this means you can switch gears and uncover VoC through user behavior and actions of the silent majority (voice of the silent). Leveraging this feedback and data allows teams to truly understand and optimize the customer journey.

Checkout our guide on customer journey maps and how to get started mapping them out .

Asim Zaheer

Chief Marketing Officer, Glassbox

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• What is a digital customer journey?

Last updated

22 May 2023

Reviewed by

Jean Kaluza

Learn the definition of the digital customer journey and why it’s crucial for your product in this comprehensive guide. 

The digital buyer or customer journey encompasses all of a customer’s interactions with your company, from discovery to purchase.

It consists of all the interactions across all online brand channels and touchpoints, including: 

The company's website

Mobile applications

Social media channels

SMS messaging

These interactions influence their purchasing experience. 

• Why analyze your digital customer journey?

Since a digital customer journey guides the customer to purchase, analyzing it will enable you to offer a seamless shopping experience. 

You should also analyze your digital customer journey to: 

Understand customer needs and expectations

Proactively detect friction points that are challenging a seamless customer experience

Gain insights into adjusting your marketing efforts for better results

• The different stages of the digital customer journey 

The stages of a buyer's journey vary by business and customer. However, when a customer embarks on purchasing a product or service, they go through these five distinct phases:

Awareness: The discovery phase

Here, customers are at the start of the buyer lifecycle. This is where customers discover their problems and seek solutions to these pain points . They have a goal in mind and need to find a solution. 

During this phase, customers become aware of your brand's existence and the products you sell. Brand awareness can span multiple channels, such as: 

Word of mouth

Social media

Brand advocates

Email marketing

Search engine suggestions

Affiliate marketing

As a business, good branding and a solid social media presence are essential to capture the audience's attention. 

With a digital customer journey, you have stronger control over your marketing campaigns than the traditional customer journey.

Consideration: The evaluation phase 

This is the stage where customers have done enough research and are now evaluating the different brands and their offers. The customer is aware of your brand and may start evaluating whether you can solve their problem. 

When a customer is dissatisfied with a brand’s offerings, they move on to one that delivers a seamless experience. 

During the evaluation phase, customers: 

Visit various company websites

Review platforms

Watch product videos to choose the best solution

Read in-depth case studies and reviews

Customers who are satisfied with your company will sign up for a free trial. A brand has a lot of control at this stage, so ensure that you demonstrate how you can solve their problem. 

Decision: The selection phase

This is the final stage of the digital customer journey. The customer selects a brand they want to proceed with and make their purchase. 

Some content to promote at this stage is free demos, consultations, and product promotions to demonstrate an advantage over your competitors.

Retention: Turning users into regulars

A common problem is ensuring stickiness to your product: Companies can achieve high logins and subscriptions but fail anyway. Preventing this requires learning what keeps their users from returning. 

Meta used “Facebook friends” to retain users, which was instrumental in achieving its lofty goals. The company learned that a new Facebook user with five friends was much more likely to log in regularly. 

Advocacy: The promoting phase

What could become the most vital stage to achieve is the advocacy phase. Here, a company can cultivate a more effortless marketing cycle. 

During the advocacy stage, users become champions of your product without prompt or incentive, referring their friends and peers. This obviously saves valuable marketing dollars, organically shuffling in primed users to your discovery phase. 

Amazon uses a version of the buyer’s phases known as The Product-Led Growth Flywheel , which it refers to as the virtuous cycle. 

The Flywheel encapsulates existing metrics and structures from marketing and product to achieve organic growth exponentially by cultivating champions that do your marketing work for you.

• What is a digital customer journey map?

A digital customer journey map visually depicts a customer's interaction with a brand. 

This visual representation gives a narrative of a customer's steps, from initial engagement with a brand to the last stage of purchasing a service or product. 

It comprises: 

Consumer data

Transaction information

Customer service interactions

Cross-device browsing history

A digital customer journey map provides insight into what motivates customers to purchase and their pain points when interacting with various touchpoints. 

• What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping involves developing a customer journey. The goal is to map out the customer's actions at each touchpoint. 

Customer journey mapping has endless benefits, including:

A deeper understanding of your customers

Customer journey mapping gives you a holistic view of all customers interacting with your brand. 

It allows you to understand their varying characteristics and purchasing behaviors. This enables a company to tailor its products. 

With customer personas , your brand can better address their needs and wants. 

Curating a unique customer experience

Journey mapping provides a perspective of the customer's experience, and you learn how to structure your processes to encourage more customer purchases. 

Since customer demands are growing, digital journeys are becoming vital in how companies engage with customers. It allows companies to improve their customers' interactions over digital channels. 

Growth of business revenue

Knowing your customers' pain points positions you to offer solutions to their problems, so you can boost sales and increase revenue in the long run. 

Improving touchpoints will boost the customer onboarding process, building new revenue. 

Reducing operational costs

When you know more about your customers, forming a strategy is clearer and cheaper. Understanding their demographics means you’re less likely to spend money everywhere. For example, knowing your customers aren’t on Facebook can save your ad campaign budget. 

Sometimes customers have basic questions that bots can handle. Leveraging live chatbots can reduce the cost of hiring real agents to interact with your customers.

With personalized market campaigns, the marketing team knows what to communicate and when. This allows the company to optimize the return on market investments. 

• Creating your digital customer journey map

Here is a brief guide to mapping your digital customer journey:

Step 1: Conduct customer research

You create a digital customer journey map using data from primary research . Collecting and analyzing target audience data is vital to making customer-centric decisions. 

To ensure you have reliable information, conduct focus groups , in-person interviews , and brainstorming workshops .

Step 2: Design a buyer persona

With the collected research data, create buyer personas . A buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer where you consider their characteristics and behaviors, such as demographics. 

As you design a digital customer journey map, account for different customer needs and expectations for your personas. These personas allow you to understand your customers better, including their motivations, challenges, needs, and what they need you to solve.

Step 3: Leverage the power of personalization  

Option overload is an issue as brands compete for consumers' attention. 

Personalizing the customer experience allows you to stand out and tailor products to their needs. With personalization, you can display appropriate messages to target personas instead of wasting resources. 

Step 4: Define the stages of a digital customer journey

The next step is to determine the actions that will lead your customers to conclude a purchase. 

Consider the customer's perspective, thoughts, emotions, pain points, and goals for each stage. This will help you understand what each customer is struggling with and trying to accomplish. 

Step 5: Outline all your touchpoints with the target audience

Touchpoints are where prospective customers interact with your brand. 

They can include:

Social media profiles

YouTube videos

First, list all the touchpoints and evaluate how each fits your customer's journey. Remember that touchpoints differ from one buyer persona to another depending on their customer journey map . 

Outlining the touchpoints allows you to assess which is most crucial in their purchasing process. 

Next, optimize each touchpoint for customer onboarding and conversion. 

If you’re unsure, use web analytics to identify traffic sources. 

Step 6: Align your touchpoints to offer a seamless customer experience

Once you’ve defined the customer touchpoints and the main stages in a customer journey, put it all together. 

Create a well-organized digital customer journey map to guide buyers from start to end. 

Step 7: Update customer journey maps frequently

A customer journey map is an ongoing investment as changes often occur. 

Once you’ve mapped out a digital customer journey, identify gaps and ways to improve customer satisfaction . 

To achieve this, frequently collect customer feedback and use it as a foundation for improvements.

You can also experience the customer journey yourself: Walk through all the stages while noting any obstacles you encounter. 

Here are some questions to get you started as you review your customer journey:

Was the purchasing process easy?

How easy was it to get in touch with customer care?

Was the agent helpful?

Is the whole exercise time-consuming?

Is the information at the different stages relevant?

How should you deliver a seamless customer experience?

• Digital customer journey examples

Here are two examples of digital customer journeys:

Example one: Repairing a broken car

During the awareness stage, the car owner knows the car is unfit for driving, so they must fix it. 

They search for a mechanic and may look for customer testimonials from previous customers of nearby garages. 

During the consideration stage, the client has various solutions and seeks the best option to solve their issue. 

Next, the customer will compare garages offering specific repair services before identifying one with the best reviews or a successful track record. 

Once the customer settles on a garage that offers repair services, they will interact with the mechanic and begin repair negotiations. 

Example 2: Booking of an airplane ticket

In this example, the customer's journey begins when they realize they need to travel. 

At the awareness stage, the customer will conduct online research on airlines and routes to their destinations. They may come across the airline via social media channels, advertisements, or even referrals from friends. 

Once they list all the airline brands, the customer will consider the available flights and decide which best fits their needs. 

On the other side, airlines try to upsell additional services to appeal to customers. Therefore, customers may consider airlines that upsell services such as priority onboarding or upgraded seats. 

Depending on their spending limits or airlines with better offerings, customers will compare the flight options that best suit their budget. They abandon tickets outside their means. 

The decision stage ends when the customers purchase a ticket and receive an onboarding pass, travel information, and guides via email.

Who is involved in a digital customer journey?

A digital customer journey is a process a user (potential customer) goes through when interacting with a brand.

What are the four types of digital users?

The four types of digital users are explorers, socializers, achievers, and listeners. 

Which department is responsible for the customer journey? 

Sales and marketing departments play a vital role in optimizing a customer journey map. 

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Oct 5, 2020

How To Create A Customer Journey Map

• Digital Strategy

It goes without saying that a cohesive customer journey is absolutely critical for success. These marketers understand how a customer or user journey map can streamline processes and provide customers with a consistent experience with a brand. Ideally, a customer journey map transforms the online customer journey into a visually accessible method for digital marketers to use to their advantage.

To streamline your customer experience and be consistently available to consumers throughout their online experience, read on to uncover how you can create a best-in-class customer journey map for your own brand.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a “visual representation of every experience your customers have with you.” Throughout their experience with your brand, a customer will most likely engage or be reminded of your brand on multiple platforms, in varying ways. A customer journey map helps your brand deliver a streamlined narrative of a customer’s experience throughout the online sales funnel.

Although it may seem that the journey from first interaction through to a sale is quite simple, it is anything but. A customer is bombarded with countless advertisements, newsletters, and competitive content on a daily basis. This makes their journey with your brand complicated, and a well-rounded customer journey map is your solution to making that experience easier.

Customers can interact with your brand in countless ways in the modern digital landscape.  Some examples include :

• Reading a branded blog post
• Accessing your website from search engine platform
• Following your brand on varying social media channels

By creating a clear visualization of every possible way a customer can interact and contact your brand, a customer journey map can help you keep customers engaged while you increase conversions and revenue.

Why Create a Customer Journey Map?

With so much of the journey taking place digitally, it’s vital that digital marketers understand exactly where customers are interacting with your brand while providing accessible, high-quality content on a regular basis.

With an effective customer journey map, digital marketers will gain a better understanding of how their customers interact with their business while accessing helpful insight into what channels are most effective for converting leads into prospects, and prospects into loyal customers.

Gone are the days when products were traditionally marketed by boasting specific features. Modern buyers are interested in the brand as a whole, how they personally engage with them, and most importantly, how the offering can solve a problem they are facing. A streamlined customer journey map will help clarify how digital marketers can most effectively provide prospects with this information and keep them engaged and dedicated to completing a purchase.

Get Started with the Customer Journey Map

Now that you understand what a customer journey map is and how it can take your digital marketing efforts to the next level, let’s jump into how to map out the online journey. Your customer’s journey is complex, so the job of the map is to make it as focused and simple as possible.

Step 1: Use your sales funnel to define the buying process

Ideally, your brand will already have an online sales funnel developed that demonstrates how leads move through your content and marketing strategies to eventually complete a purchase. This information will provide you with a guideline as to how many potential touchpoints a customer has with your brand and content, and how each interaction feeds into the next.

Step 2: Think like a customer

Regardless of the massive increase in customer data, it’s tough to truly think like a customer. Each prospect is a unique human with different needs, emotions, personalities, responsibilities, and so on. So how can you, as a digital marketer, understand how your customers are making choices to eventually reach the end of your sales funnel and purchase your product or service?

Although you won’t be able to fully predict a prospect’s next steps, you can align their goals with varying stages of your sales funnel, while moving through the process yourself. Track these steps as you go through a variety of touchpoints and combinations of choices. If you come across a section of your buying journey that doesn’t feel like a natural next step, take note, and optimize this step to make the customer journey more logical and straightforward.

If you really want to optimize your customer journey, review transcripts of support calls and emails to track where a purchase process went wrong and work to fix these issues before moving onto the next step.

Step 3: Develop the touchpoints of customer interaction

Simply stated, a touchpoint is any digital place at which a customer can access information about your brand or engage with your website. In turn, each touchpoint is also critical for interaction and conversion on the business end of things.

Many of these touchpoints will have been tracked in the second step of this process. However, now is the time to plot these touchpoints logically. For example, a customer “liking” a social media post counts as one touchpoint, while clicking through to a link from that social media post is another. Group these touchpoints into logical areas, such as “social media touchpoints” and “web page touchpoints.”

Step 4: Implement your customer journey map and conduct research

First things first, though: create a visually-appealing customer journey map that is accessible for all necessary team members. A graphic designer can help compile your findings and touchpoints in a visual sequence that is understandable, logical, and beautiful.

Now that you’ve identified each possible touchpoint, grouped them into logical areas sequences, and developed an accessible customer journey map, it’s time to implement your new findings and see how they work digitally.

Platforms like Google Analytics will be of immense help if you’re looking to see where buyers are dropping out of the customer journey on a regular basis. If you notice patterns such as a lack of click-throughs from newsletters or customer abandonment just before the purchase is completed, analyze these touchpoints and make necessary improvements.

Targeted prospects want their journey to be as simple as possible, so including too many touchpoints in their buying process may not keep them engaged the entire way through. While reviewing your customer journey map, make sure that the journey is easy enough to keep them taking the ideal logical steps while providing the personalized and educational content they need to stay engaged.

Step 5: Regularly optimize your customer journey map

Like most aspects of a digital marketing strategy, your online customer journey will change frequently as technology develops and new digital platforms are introduced into the buying cycle. By taking the time to regularly review how your customers are moving through your buying cycle, you can identify gaps and develop processes to streamline the customer experience.

According to a 2016 report, the  Aberdeen Group’s Customer Journey Mapping: Lead the Way to Advocacy , organizations experienced a 16.8% decrease in the size of the sales cycle when a user journey map is developed, implemented, and maintained successfully. Although the process of creating a customer journey map can be a timely endeavor for digital marketers, it provides unparalleled value for both your brand and your customers.

Offering prospects a streamlined and enjoyable online experience will help to keep them engaged while you drive sales forward. When you understand your customers’ needs and preferences, you can increase your own productivity by focusing your digital marketing developments on the touchpoints that need most help. Enable yourself to create consistent customer experiences that align your digital marketing strategies with the high-quality digital content that your customers have come to expect from your best-in-class organization.

• Why User Experience is Key to Digital Marketing Success
• 5 Customer Lifecycle Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs
• 3 Ways Little Data Trumps Big Data For a Superior User Experience
• Walkthrough: Google Analytics with Cathal Melinn

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Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping: The Ultimate Guide

Kate Parish

In today’s digital era, businesses need to ensure seamless customer experiences across all channels. Omnichannel customer journey mapping is a crucial tool for reaching this objective. Businesses may uncover pain areas, ensure better interactions, produce a consistent customer experience, decrease the abandoned shopping carts rate, and improve other KPIs by recognizing every touchpoint in the customer journey.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll discuss the significance of omnichannel customer journey mapping and offer a step-by-step process for making one. We’ll provide you with the knowledge and skills business owners and marketing specialists require to improve the customer experience and raise satisfaction.

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Omnichannel customer journey maps explained.

An omnichannel customer journey map visually depicts a customer’s interactions with a brand across all touchpoints, channels, and devices. It presents a comprehensive picture of the customer journey, taking into account both online and offline encounters and emphasizing the possibilities, challenges, and crucial moments that might have an influence on customer satisfaction .

Understanding your potential lead or customer will help you drop the rate of  abandoned shopping carts and increase the number of valuable leads.

To create an efficient omnichannel customer journey map, businesses need to collect information on consumer interactions across all channels, including social media, websites, mobile applications, email, and in-store encounters. This data has to be thoroughly examined to identify recurring trends and patterns that can assist in extensive map creation.

The map should be done with the customer’s needs, preferences, and habits in mind. All the stages of the customer journey, from awareness to loyalty, should be considered, and important touchpoints that might affect the customer experience should be identified.

Once the map has been made, it may be utilized to pinpoint problem areas and establish plans for enhancing the client experience. Businesses may use the map, for instance, to identify the precise touchpoints where a client is having trouble making an online purchase and come up with ways to streamline the procedure.

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Why should you adhere to a customer journey omnichannel model.

By offering a smooth and customized consumer experience across all channels, the omnichannel model may help companies stay competitive in today’s digital environment. Here are some further arguments in favor of using the omnichannel strategy.

• Improved customer experience: Businesses may offer a smooth customer experience across all channels, including social media, email, chat, phone, and in-store, by employing an omnichannel approach. This might raise loyalty and boost customer satisfaction.
• Better engagement: an omnichannel strategy allows organizations to interact with consumers at every touchpoint, resulting in increased possibilities for contact and the development of stronger relationships.
• Higher conversion rates: Companies may boost conversion rates and lower customer turnover by giving customers a unified, tailored experience across all channels.
• Better data insights: By using an omnichannel strategy, organizations may gather data from many sources and better understand the behavior, preferences, and pain points of their customers. This can enhance overall business performance and provide information for future marketing tactics.
• Enhanced operational effectiveness: By integrating data, procedures, and technology across all channels, an omnichannel strategy may assist companies in streamlining their operations and lowering costs.

Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping Step-By-Step

Finding your major target customer categories and channels is generally the first step in the omnichannel customer journey mapping process. Determine the stages of the journey, which may include awareness, deliberation, purchase, post-purchase, and advocacy. Consider the exact areas you want to concentrate on and the precise results you wish to attain. This will keep you on task and help you maintain your attention. Other steps of the omnichannel journey mapping process are the following:

Identifying the Touchpoints and Micro-Conversions

Determine little actions that help website visitors achieve a bigger objective (like making a purchase). Micro-conversions are potent predictors of user engagement, purchase intent, and sales funnel performance, even if they often do not contribute to a website’s total conversion rate.

List all the touchpoints where customers may interact with your brand for each channel. Examples of touchpoints include a website visit, email opening, placing an order, getting a confirmation message, and other actions. Sort each touchpoint according to the phase of the customer journey it takes place in. For instance, a confirmation letter serves as a post-purchase touchpoint, whereas an email newsletter is an awareness touchpoint.

Then evaluate each touchpoint based on how well it satisfies the requirements and expectations of the consumer. Determine the shortcomings of the touchpoints and possibilities to enhance the customer experience.

Gathering Customer Data

Gather information on consumer behavior and input from all online and offline touchpoints, including social media, email, phone, in-store, and chatbots. After gathering information from each touchpoint, arrange it in a way it is simple to interpret and visualize. Spreadsheets and customer journey mapping software are tools you may use to do this. Analyze the obtained data to find patterns, gaps, and pain points throughout the customer journey.

Creating Personas

Based on the data analysis, create customer personas that depict the various client base groups. Analyze the patterns in the information you have gathered. Group your consumers according to any shared traits they may have.

Once you have determined the traits that each group shares, make up fake customer profiles to represent each one. Give each persona a name, age, occupation, list of hobbies, and other pertinent details. Make the identities as specific as you can.

Use your established personas to guide your product development and marketing efforts. Ask yourself questions like “How would this persona react to this product?” “What channels would this persona use to find information?” or “What drives this persona to make a purchase?”

Focus on the user  – before starting your campaign, ensure that the content reflects your potential clients’ needs.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities

Examine the customer journey map to find problems, obstacles, and areas that may be improved. Keep an eye out for points in the customer journey where your consumers are having trouble, running into roadblocks, or getting frustrated. The product characteristics, customer service, or delivery timeframes may be the source of these problems.

Look for opportunities to improve the customer experience. These possibilities can involve delivering tailored advice, enhancing communication, or providing further services.

Prioritize the discovered opportunities and pain points in accordance with how they will affect your company’s objectives and the client experience.

Implementing Changes and Monitoring Progress

You’ll need to create a plan to improve all the weak points, solve the problems customers face, and use all the opportunities. You can use a template action plan to get started if necessary. To ensure that your customer journey mapping and action plan stays applicable and efficient in achieving your company objectives, continually examine and update it.

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Understanding the mapping process is crucial, but looking for additional solutions is still imperative to make the process easier and more efficient. Here are some valuable tips worth paying attention to.

Employ the Relevant Tools

Use digital technologies to streamline the omnichannel customer journey mapping process. Here are a few examples:

• Customer Journey Mapping Software: These products make planning out customer journeys simpler and more logical by offering drag-and-drop interfaces, pre-built templates, and other capabilities. Software for charting the customer journey includes Touchpoint Dashboard, Smaply, and CX Journey.
• Analytics Tools: Data regarding consumer behavior and interactions across many channels may be gathered using analytics tools. When utilized to identify pain points and potential improvement areas, these tools can offer insights into how customers interact with a company at various stages of their journey. Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics are a few well-known analytics programs.
• CRM Systems: To keep track of client interactions across various channels and touchpoints, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are utilized. Such tools help personalize customer interactions by gathering data on consumer preferences, previous purchases, and other important data points. Among the popular CRM systems are Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho.
• Social media listening: Such technologies may be used to track what clients say about a company on social media platforms. Businesses may use this to pinpoint areas where their customer experience could be enhanced and respond instantly to consumer complaints and feedback. Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Hootsuite are a few known social media listening apps.
• User testing: Utilizing testing technologies, businesses may learn from actual customers about their interactions with their goods and services. Surveys, focus groups, and other kinds of user testing might fall under this category. User testing may offer insightful information on how customers interact with a company through various channels and touchpoints. Optimal Workshop, UserTesting, and UsabilityHub are well-liked user-testing software programs.

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Always Ask for a Customer Feedback

Your decision-making process should be guided and informed by customer feedback if you want to innovate and make improvements to your product or service. It brings wonderful possibilities that can aid in enhancing the omnichannel consumer experience.

Providing customers with a simple option of leaving feedback is essential for exceptional customer service. Thanks to the omnichannel strategy, brands can interact with customers through any channel and get feedback at each point of contact. There are several ways to get client feedback, including through websites, social media, emails, in-app surveys, and reviews. The information obtained will help you keep your strategy flawless.

Offer Self Service

Providing customers with self-service choices is another lucrative strategy, capable of enhancing the whole brand experience. One of the most crucial aspects of the customer experience is reaction speed. Customers need prompt responses to their inquiries. Through self-service portals, they may instantly access information, which also helps businesses save time and resources. Businesses can provide how-to videos, manuals, and tutorials to assist consumers in resolving their issues on their own.

Finally, omnichannel customer journey mapping is crucial for companies to comprehend customers’ experiences across all touchpoints and enhance their journey. Businesses may uncover issues and opportunities for optimization and customize their marketing strategies by developing a comprehensive perspective of the customer’s interactions.

In contrast to organizations with weak omnichannel strategies, which only keep 33% of their customers , companies with effective omnichannel customer engagement strategies have an average of 89% client retention. These figures show what a big difference omnichannel customer journey mapping can make to a company’s bottom line.

Businesses may enhance customer experience, better understand consumer wants and preferences, and ultimately increase revenue by utilizing omnichannel customer journey mapping.

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What is personalized marketing?

According to recent   Epsilon research , 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience.

This shows that customers not only expect personalization, they value it.

But taking a more tailored approach isn’t just about giving consumers more of what they want, it’s about reacting to complex shifts in consumer behaviors.

Today’s consumers expect personalization, and brands who use data-driven marketing campaigns to deliver this are seeing the results.

What do we know about today’s consumers?

What does this tell us?

These facts tell us more than we think. As digital consumers become more fragmented, and ever-more challenging to reach, they’re also taking more control over the marketing they’re exposed to.

Online consumers are now opting for a multi-device approach to purchasing, which in turn offers another angle to their data and their  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">purchase history , which sites such as  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Amazon , along with various brands use to help determine future purchases, connecting online and  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">mobile app  usage to traditional marketing and in some cases,  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">physical stores .

Using  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">data collection  to understand an individual’s buying behaviors and preferences is a powerful tool in any brand’s armoury, enabling them to target people on the right channels, via the right device, at the right time.

As consumer expectations change alongside behaviors, businesses have a huge opportunity to use the wealth of information at their fingertips.

Using this to tailor their marketing to their audience, this means improving the  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">individual  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;"> loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;">customer  experience , increasing engagement, and ultimately, driving ROI.

Chapter 1: Why personalization matters

Demographic data that groups people according to age, gender, household income, location and ethnicity no longer provides enough intelligence to connect with consumers.

Today, brands have access to deep data that quantifies an individual consumer’s attitudes and behaviors, interests and perceptions, allowing them to go far beyond demographics.

The somewhat lazy pigeonholing of ‘millennials’ is a case in point. As marketing professor, Mark Ritson told Marketing Week UK, “The minute marketers start thinking all millennials are the same, they reject the behavioural and attitudinal nuances of a hugely heterogeneous population and collapse them into one big, generic mess.”

While there are key differences that set each generation apart, there are also shared attitudes and interests that bind them.

Smart brands will use deep insights to identify their audiences’ shared interests and attitudes, while pinpointing the differences that make them unique.

With AI and  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">machine learning  forming a key part of how users are targeted these days, this has helped to enable a deeper level of targeting.

Enter micro-targeting.

Micro-audiences came on the scene as a means of segmenting small groups of like-minded individuals to target and influence their thoughts or actions.

It relies on understanding the target audience so well that marketers will also have a very good idea as to how these people will respond.

From first-party insights into what a consumer has searched for on your site to third-party insights that reveal behaviors and perceptions...

Brands can now drill down in as much detail as possible to reach very specific audiences in a microscopic way.

This gives them the tools to deliver content that truly resonates.

This kind of in-depth targeting is nothing new, but ready access to complex  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer data  is changing how it’s done.

Chapter 2: Knowing your audience

Understanding segmentation.

Customer segmentation is about dividing your customer base into groups of individuals that share certain preferences and characteristics. 

This was once the starting point for every brand striving to better understand their target audience, whereby consumers were split into designated groups based on demographic data to drive more targeted campaigns.

But times have changed.

With the help of global  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">data collection  and platforms that track consumer behaviors and motivations on a massive scale, it’s now possible to create custom audiences within seconds, and build accurate audience profiles.

These go far beyond demographics, encompassing lifestyles, attitudes, self-perceptions and interests.

The steps that matter

1. Stop segmenting, start profiling

Audience profiling is now the most effective way to define, segment and target consumers in the more per sonalized  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">digital marketing  space.

With insights that quantify not only the what, but the why behind consumer behaviors, it’s easier than ever to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in the right way.

This kind of profiling - analyzing interests, attitudes, behaviors and perceptions - is what makes personalization possible.

This ensures campaigns are highly targeted and brands are well positioned to make the most of their ROI, informing  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing strategy  from end to end.

2. Creating real-life personas

Buyer personas are fictitious representations of your consumers, created using in-depth insights into your target audience.

These are used by marketers in every sector and can take various forms, helping to put a face and a personality behind the consumers they want to target, painting a more accurate picture of their lives, needs and wants.

Real-life personas add the emotional and behavioral component, helping brands to determine an end goal for each target consumer.

This empowers marketers with the knowledge they need to get inside the minds of their target audience and build the radical empathy that’s needed to make real connections.

loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Third-party data  is invaluable for building o ut these personas and backing your assumptions with hard facts.

3. Map the consumer journey

The  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer journey  is a combined set of behaviors that customers display when they meet your brand, which grows ever more complex with increasing fragmentation across devices, channels and behaviors.

Customers and  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">potential customers  interact with brands in numerous different ways, via many different touchpoints, depending on their needs.

Our latest research , for example, reveals that over half of digital consumers are now following brands on  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">social media , and social networks are now the top product research channel among consumers aged 16-24.

This shows how  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">social media  is now playing a key role in the different stages of the consumer journey, but there are far more touchpoints to be identified by analyzing the buying process of each consumer group.

Many brands will identify and map several different journeys to get a complete understanding of the touchpoints that matter. To identify these journeys, deep insights are used to pinpoint the moments, dev ices and channels that offer the most potential to put personalization into practice.

Understanding this link between data and communications is the key to building connections that last.

As Mahesh Kolar, Director of Mobility Applications at NTT DATA says: “We believe that  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer journey  mapping is vital for giving organizations the ‘Aha’ moment when it comes to understanding their digital possibilities.”

Chapter 3: Working with data

Audience profiling.

The first step in achieving personalization lies in understanding your target audience. This means going far beyond demographics to take an in-depth look at their interests, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

Audience profiling is about gathering the insights needed to do this.

This is where robust consumer data that quantifies consumer behaviors and perceptions come into play, guiding your brand every step of the way to ensure you stay as close to your consumers as possible.

With tools like GlobalWebIndex that eliminate the need for guesswork, a  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing strategy  can meet consumer demand for audience-centric content that’s targeted, personalized and responsive.

This can be applied to your entire  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing strategy  from end to end in the following ways:

Personalized marketing proves a brand’s dedication to their consumers. It shows they’ve gone the extra mile to get to know who this person is. In today’s massmedia world, this is an essential step in making real connections." Tom Smith, CEO and Founder, GlobalWebIndex

Turning data into insight

Creating personalized messages that resonate starts with understanding the perceptions and behaviors you want to shift.

Using audience profiling to quantify the perceptions that are blocking or powering repeat purchasing gives you the tools to know what to say.

Brands have access to a wealth of data, but giving this data the leverage it needs to drive meaningful creativity lies in the creation of insight. After all, a fact, a finding or a data point without context is worthless.

The path to identifying an actionable insight that will drive sales lies in matching your consumers to your objectives, and asking the right questions.

Here’s how it’s done.

  How to do it

1. Quantify current perceptions of your brand. How can I split my audience into targeted groups that align with my goals? 2. Validate the perception changes that will drive revenue. Identify the perceptions that will drive or block repeat purchasing.

3. Create a message that will change perceptions. Define and test a message that will successfully change perceptions among your target audience.

4. Package this message into engaging formats Turn your messaging into engaging campaigns that will have impact.  

Questions your data should answer

To put marketing that works into practice, you need data that will answer the right questions.

• Am I targeting the right audience?
• What defines this audience?
• What matters to them?
• What motivates them?
• What interests them?
• Who and what do they follow?
• Where and when can we reach them?
• What are their perceptions of our brand?
• Which perceptions drive or block purchasing?
• How are they interacting with us?
• What does their purchase journey look like?
• What are the touchpoints that matter?
• What trends can we identify with these consumers?

Chapter 4: Getting personal

Tactics that work.

Once you have access to the data you need to create a pen portrait of your audience, you can start putting personalization to the test. While many tactics and tools are used to make this work, some stand out above the rest.

1. Content marketing

loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Content marketing  is defined by the  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Content Marketing  Institute (CMI) as ‘a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive action.’

The institute’s research shows that  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">content marketing  has become an almost universal tactic, with 90% of companies using it in 2016, and even more utilizing it in 2017.

Successful  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">content marketing  not only carefully considers the target personas in question, it relies on both  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">real-time  analytics and  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">third-party data  to understand what, when, where and how will resonate best.

Not only this, today’s consumers expect  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">personalized content . Surrounded by the likes of  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Amazon ’s  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">product recommendations  for related purchases, Netflix’s ‘what to watch next’, and Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ service, these brands are setting the standard when it comes to content.

Consumers value content that is useful, relevant and entertaining to them, so the more tailored it is, the better it will perform. 

Consumers value content that is useful, relevant and entertaining to them, so the more tailored it is, the better it will perform.

Many brands are seeing a stronger ROI thanks to their  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">personalization efforts  overall.

2. Email marketing

loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">Email marketing  isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s playing a more important role than ever in delivering against marketing and wider business targets thanks to a more  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">personalized  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;"> loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px;">email  marketing  approach.

But the kind of  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">email marketing  that works for today’s consumers is evolving fast.

Research by The Direct Marketing Association , shows segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue.

Improved segmentation and targeting enables you to have a more personalized approach and, in turn, drive revenue via conversion and improved  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">open rates , while increasing  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">customer loyalty  over time.

3. Retargeting

For many, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit to your website. Retargeting is a tactic designed to help brands reach that 98% who don’t convert right away, and attr act  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">prospective customers .

Content retargeting means serving customers with content specific to their needs, interests and journey stage. Tactics can include campaign mirroring, retaining past searches and reengaging through blogs.

Aligning your content in a personalized way allows you to streamline the customer’s experience of your brand throughout their online journey, whether the goal is to sign up, visit, download something or make an  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">ecommerce  transa ction.

But while retargeting can prove effective when done right, using unreliable data - solely tied to cookies as opposed to real people - can have a detrimental impact on your brand.

Chapter 5: The authentic factor

Keeping it real.

The continuous rise of consumer power and increased demand for transparency means brands are under increasing pressure to be authentic.

Social media has led the way in forcing companies to be more up front, to be real, and to listen to their customers.

This shift has forced brands to think again, and at the heart of being authentic is being able to demonstrate that you know what your customers think and feel, and that you can anticipate their needs.

By matching their brand experiences to your data, you can show that you care about what they want. This not only boosts loyalty, but offers a human - or authentic - face to the brand experience.

As Ashley Deibert, Vice President of Marketing at iQ Media says: “Those that have embraced authenticity and transparency (Dove, Airbnb) find consumers will do the marketing for them.

Those that have fought it (Uber, Pepsi) continue to struggle to regain footing with an audience who will watch their every move, waiting to pounce when the first signs of negativity arise.”

As reported in Creative Review , people no longer want to be sold to, they want to feel part of a brand’s story. Data that taps into people’s perceptions and behaviors makes this possible.

For example, some brands try publicity stunts and influencer marketing on  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">social media  in an effort to achieve huge reach, but those that use data and apply insights can cleverly create laser-focused content and messages, tailored to a targeted group of people.

This audience will respond much more favorably to content they see as genuine, valuable and on-brand. This in turn creates  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">lifetime value  with the consumer, as they become more loyal customers that enjoy and interact with the brand's content. 

As reported in Creative Review, people no longer want to be sold to, they want to feel part of a brand’s story. Data that taps into people’s perceptions and behaviors, this current form of  loading..." data-placement="top" data-boundary="window" data-original-title="mapping consumer digital journey" title="mapping consumer digital journey" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px; background-color: #ffffff;">marketing personalization  is what makes this possible.

Not sure where to begin? Start by analyzing your target consumers’ interests and online behaviors in GlobalWebIndex. From here, you can identify the tactics, topics and influencers that will have the most impact.

The reason authenticity is so important today is because people will simply no longer buy from inauthentic brands. The art of spin is becoming more and more redundant." Sue Unerman, Chief Transformation Officer, MediaCom UK

  Personalized marketing checklist

Five key considerations when creating personalized marketing campaigns.

• Know who you’re targeting by interrogating complex data.
• Use consumer data to build out real-life personas of key members of your target audience, and personalize your communications for each group.
• Use dynamic content to personalize the customer experience based on customer interests or browsing behaviors.
• Find out what your audience wants on social media by using data to discover when they’re likely to be online and what kind of content they engage with.
• Bring all your data together to create a single customer view, enabling you to deliver a consistently personalized experience, regardless of touchpoint.

Personalized marketing is only as good as the data it uses, yet many brands are relying on unreliable or inaccurate data to achieve this, wasting budget and tarnishing the practice.

To get it right, there’s a pressing need for a more comprehensive understanding of your consumers - from how they interact with your brand to the bigger picture concerning their interests, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors.

With this knowledge, you can deliver tailored marketing that resonates with the individuals you’re targeting, ultimately impacting your bottom line.

Your next steps...

Most marketers are already using audience profiling tools to get more personalized. We hope this guide has given you some actionable tips on what to do next.

Start by getting closer to our granular data and platform, and get to know your audience better.

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Customer Journey Mapping Is at the Heart of Digital Transformation

November 4, 2015 • 12 min read.

Companies that carefully map out customer buying “journeys” are better prepared to transform their businesses, say experts from Wharton and NTT DATA.

Digital technologies such as analytics, mobility, social networks, cloud computing and the Internet of Things are making old ways of working redundant and forcing companies to transform. According to Raman Sapra, senior vice president and global head of NTT DATA’s digital business services, the best way to leverage digital is to take a comprehensive rather than a piecemeal approach. And a key tool to achieve this is customer journey mapping, where powerful new data collection and analytics tools are helping to provide deeper insights to fuel performance. In this paper, experts from Wharton and NTT DATA examine how this mapping is at the heart of digital transformation.

Companies such as Uber, Spotify and Airbnb are disrupting their industries. Take Uber. The popular taxi-hailing app does not own any vehicles and yet provides transportation to some 8 million users. Music-streaming service Spotify lets music lovers listen to a wide range of artists, yet it does not own a radio station. And Airbnb, a provider of accommodations with more than a million listings across the globe, does not own any lodgings.

These startups are leveraging new technologies to disrupt their industries while making life easier for users. But digital transformation goes deeper than simply improving the customer experience. It is also increasingly used to transform business processes and interactions within a company to keep it relevant in the digital age.

“Typically, digital is associated only with providing a superior customer experience. But digital can also help create new business models, drive operational excellence and enhance employee engagement,” says Raman Sapra, senior vice president and global head of NTT DATA’s digital business services.

“Typically, digital is associated only with providing a superior customer experience. But digital can also help create new business models, drive operational excellence and enhance employee engagement.” –Raman Sapra

New digital tools are extending information collection and then helping to turn an otherwise overwhelming flood of information into actionable knowledge. For instance, telecom providers can use data analytics to help predict data loss or network deterioration, as well as prevent service disruptions. More generally, companies can use social media to connect better with their employees. Or, they can tap data analytics to make decisions faster and bring operational efficiencies.

But before embarking on a digital transformation, organizations need to first identify their business imperatives and priorities, Sapra says. They need to understand what their customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders desire. They also must identify the digital possibilities in their industry. Using these benchmarks as a foundation, organizations can tailor a digital strategy and roadmap, and then proceed to build their digital initiatives.

There is one critical tool for successful digital transformation — smart customer journey mapping. “It is at the heart of digital transformation,” says Sapra. Adds Mahesh Kolar, director of mobility applications at NTT DATA: “There are many different ways, like focus groups and surveys, to understand the customer journey. But we believe that customer journey mapping is vital for giving organizations the ‘Aha’ moment when it comes to understanding their digital possibilities.” And new digital tools are now making it possible to create a much deeper understanding of the journey.

Identifying Digital Touchpoints

What exactly is customer journey mapping? “It is the definitive first step in the process of converting a current ‘as-is’ state to a future state that promises an enhanced customer experience,” says Siddharth Gaikwad, practice head of digital experience at NTT DATA. The term “customers,” he adds, does not only refer to end-users; it could be any stakeholder — such as employees or partners.

“A journey map is an illustrated representation of a customer’s expectations, experiences and reflections as it unfolds over time across multiple stages and touchpoints while using a product or consuming a service.”

“A journey map is an illustrated representation of a customer’s expectations, experiences and reflections as it unfolds over time across multiple stages and touchpoints while using a product or consuming a service.” –Siddharth Gaikwad

Take the booking of an airline ticket. Here, the journey mapping starts from the time the customer realizes the need to travel. It captures the customer’s various expectations at that stage. It then maps their actual experience of buying the ticket and even the emotions felt after the purchase. Expectations are thus benchmarked against actual experience.

By capturing the current “as is” state of a customer’s journey — in this case, the booking of an airline ticket — the map amplifies various pain points along the purchase path. For experience designers, questions that arise around the journey include the following: Do we know the customer’s context? Is the information about the various options adequate or even relevant? Are there too many details to be filled out multiple times? Is the whole exercise too time-consuming? Capturing the “as is” state can also predict likely future behavior.

Thereafter, in collaboration with domain experts across different parts of the organization and its extended eco-system, and using design methods like storytelling and card sorting, the map findings are converted into insights. Storytelling, the art of overlaying context, perspective and imagery around a user’s journey, combined with card sorting, the technique of identifying mental models or patterns, become important tools in rendering the “to-be” future-state. In creating the map, the organization can use the rapidly evolving elements of digital — analytics, mobile, social, the cloud and Internet of Things — to enhance the customer experience.

“By overlaying the digital possibilities upon customer journey maps, organizations are able to better visualize which aspects of their business they should focus on, which of the new technologies they should embrace and what new business models they can create,” says Gaikwad. “It helps them to realign their investments, technologies and business models so they can engage more effectively with customers, employees and partners.”

Patti Williams, a Wharton professor of marketing, points out that journeys help companies understand consumer decision-making. It reveals the types of information, sources, emotions and other factors that can influence them and their choices, she says.

Williams agrees that customer journey mapping is an important tool for transforming a business. “Journey mappings are deep, embedded consumer insights.” Developing a multilayered understanding of consumers and how they make choices in a contextual setting “offers companies the opportunity to change practices in a way that reflects the reality of consumer decision making.” Consumer journey mapping, she adds, “is at the center of all consumer-focused organizations and can transform many businesses.”

“Consumer journey mapping is at the center of all consumer-focused organizations and can transform many businesses.” –Patti Williams

And as Gaikwad points out, “very few non-consumer-focused organizations remain out there, and they will change very soon. Consumerization of the enterprise is driving that change.”

Overly simple customer journey models, however, will likely fall short, says Jerry (Yoram) Wind, a Wharton professor of marketing. It is crucial that mapping be dynamic. “Mapping is very difficult given the heterogeneity of all markets and [also because] the same consumer may have a totally different journey at different times because of different contexts.” In the airline case, for instance, consumers could be traveling for various reasons, such as a vacation, business trip or family emergency. “Thus, most maps, unless they are dynamic and include context, can be quite misleading.”

Customer journey mapping requires design, domain and facilitation skills. Typically, a customer journey map is created by using data from primary research, such as personal interviews, focus group sessions, brainstorming and shadowing, as well as secondary research such as gathering and collaborating over information from databases within the organization, websites, social media and so on. Many digital tools are growing rapidly in sophistication and usefulness, and enhancing the value of gleaned insights.

The first step is to define the exact area — for instance, product, service and task — where the organization wants improvement, and identify the “consumer.” For example, a hotel may want to improve its front desk service. Here, the “consumer” would be the customer-relations employees manning the front desk. But, if the hotel wants to enhance the self-check-in experience, the “consumer” would be the guests.

With the consumer defined, the user experience team then creates a “persona” based on the customer’s demographic and psychographic profile. This would include age, socioeconomic background, value systems, opinions, attitudes, lifestyle, likes and dislikes, and so on. Thereafter, this persona’s journey — comprising expectations, experience and reflections — is mapped across a specific task. These insights are then converted into touchpoints –where the organization literally makes a connection to the customer, whether via desktop or mobile, or through a web site or social media.

“The curious case of the touchpoint is that it does not work without context of the consumer,” says Gaikwad. This is where the new digital tools add a new dimension of value. “What better time than this digital age to mine that context — it’s available on the cloud, in the devices and all over social media,” he says.

In the case of guest check-in, some touchpoints suggested through journey mapping could be self-check-in hotel lobby kiosks. Based on the guests’ persona and their context, the kiosk could dispense personalized, magnetic access cards with QR codes (the quick response bar code), which, when scanned, could offer personalized suggestions.

“Mapping is very difficult given the heterogeneity of all markets and [also because] the same consumer may have a totally different journey at different times because of different contexts.” –Jerry (Yoram) Wind

Value Proposition For instance, if the guest is a child, the access card could recommend relevant kid-friendly activities. For business travelers, it could offer details about convention centers and other business-related information. Kolar notes: “The key is to see how much personalization you can provide and how much of it you can contextualize around a given customer in a way that delights them, but at the same time is not intrusive.”

Thus, a series of connected maps covering each phase in the customer lifecycle can give an organization complete control over their capability to deliver a product or a service, Gaikwad says. In the hotel example, there could be different maps for check-in, housekeeping, concierge service, food and beverage service, and checkout. Typically, an accurate map takes up to a couple of weeks to create based on the persona, and “if done properly, it can have a shelf life of a couple of years, even in the current market where paradigm shifts are happening so regularly,” he adds.

The Way Forward

Williams believes customer journey maps should be updated frequently and often can involve an ongoing investment. Creating a journey map is an intensive process influenced by time and materials, so “budgets influence how frequently they can realistically be done. But as changes occur, they should be updated.” Williams adds that “different customer segments will have different journeys, so journeys should be understood at a segment level” as well.

One of the biggest challenges, as with so many initiatives, is getting senior management’s commitment. Successful customer journey mapping takes time and close collaboration. The effectiveness of a map depends in part on how well managers engage in the map creation process and how far into the future they can project as they analyze customer insights.

While converting journey map findings into actionable insights about digital touchpoints requires senior members across functions to brainstorm together, this is often easier planned than executed. Busy executives typically are preoccupied with operations, and many organizations work in silos — so the all-important coordination can be challenging. Storytelling and card sorting come handy to motivate, incentivize and create stickiness among diverse groups to help keep on track.

While the value of traditional journey maps is widely accepted, there remains the issue of setting metrics for the return on investment (ROI) for the latest, digital approaches. At present, “I don’t know if there is a sure way of defining a clear return on investment for customer journey mapping,” says Kolar. “We think it is a powerful tool to understand the context of the users and to take them from their current state to a heightened state of customer delight.” The new digital tools are helping. “With advanced analytics, the value, effectiveness and cost of an investment can be understood early on and course corrections can be made to minimize impact.”

Kolar believes digital customer journey mapping is here to stay. Because of the tremendous reach of social media, a single vocal customer or employee can have a big business impact. This makes it all the more important for organizations to be on top of their game.

“My sense is customer journey mapping will become a mandatory tool for digital transformation. Enterprises will begin to do customer journey mapping as the first part of their planning activities.”

Adds Sapra: “Most customer journeys of today are rendered as static maps. As digital tools advance even further, “I think they will become a lot more dynamic. They will become a current document that will get updated in real time in this connected world. That’s when the map will become even more valuable.”

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The Digital Customer Journey Mapping Process: 5 Key Steps

What is Digital Customer Journey Mapping?

Why is a digital customer journey map necessary, benefits of creating a digital customer journey map, enhanced empathy and pain point understanding, uniform view across teams, addressing delivery and experience gaps, predictive insights into customer behavior, continuous improvement of the customer journey, 5 steps to mapping out a digital customer journey, define your ideal customer , identify your customer’s pain points, determine the end goal of your customers, start mapping out their journey by defining each touchpoint, implement, analyze, and improve, build your digital customer journey map with cadenceseo consulting, how to create a customer journey map in 5 steps, 1. define who your ideal customer is.

• Location (great for local SEO purposes)
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2. Identify Your Customer’s Pain Points

3. know what your customer’s end-goal is, 4. start mapping out their journey by defining each touchpoint.

• Initial touchpoint – reads a blog on your website
• Sign up for your email newsletter
• Receives your welcome email campaign – clicks through to learn more about the brand, may see a product on your page and click on it, but doesn’t purchase
• Receives an abandoned cart email regarding the product that also includes customer testimonials
• The customer clicks through and makes the purchase.

5. Implement, Research, Analyze, and Improve

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Digital Customer Journeys: The Ultimate Guide to Optimising Them Properly

Marie Jehanne

April 28, 2021 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Oct 3, 2023

Table of Contents

What is the digital customer journey?

The influence of digital on the customer journey, the different stages of the digital customer journey, why analyze your digital customer journey, how to optimize your digital customer journey, and finally, here are 4 examples of digital customer journeys.

Listen the article in audio format:

By multiplying the available points of contact between brands and customers, digital technology has considerably complicated the customer journey.

The recent pandemic has further reinforced this trend by converting “brick and mortar” buyers into e-buyers in the space of a few short weeks.

In this guide, you’ll discover why analyzing the digital customer journey is fundamental to business success, plus how to optimize it with illustrated examples of inspiring customer journeys.

Uncover trends for crucial digital KPIs

Access the 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks Report and Interactive Explorer.

The digital customer journey is the path followed by an internet user – from the awareness stage right through to the purchase stage.

Essentially, it covers every single interaction that takes place online between the customer and the brand throughout the buying journey.

In some cases, the digital customer journey can extend beyond the act of purchase or subscription; to customer loyalty. For example, the brand may offer personalized post-sale offers or adapted content to improve the buyer’s knowledge and experience of their newly purchased product.

Initially, it was mostly the banking and insurance sectors that studied the customer journey in detail, due to the long and personal relationships they built with their customers over time.

But today, the digital customer journey is a hot topic amongst any brand that understands the breadth and importance of digital.

Over the last few years, the digital boom has impacted this journey by adding new stages – such as websites and blogs – alongside traditional physical stores, TV and radio advertisements, and catalogs. Closely followed by social media, voice assistants, chatbots, and even display advertising, the emergence of these new marketing channels has added layers of complexity to the digital customer journey.

And because no industry is the same, the customer journey often takes different forms. For example, within a hospital environment, we call it a “patient journey” instead. However, a patient’s journey – from making an appointment on the internet to consulting the results online – has very little in common with the journey of a customer looking to purchase a new kitchen.

You could argue (with some degree of truth) that the digital world has given us as many stages of the buyer’s journey as there are grains of sand on the beach. And to be honest, you wouldn’t be far off.

But, you’ll be glad to know there are three essential buying stages that cover every customer journey – no matter the industry. Let’s take a look…

1 – Awareness: the discovery phase

The discovery stage is when your customer realizes they don’t have something, and they need something. For example, this could be replacing a broken refrigerator or buying a second bike that’s more suitable for cycling to work.

And what does the user do? They turn to the internet to do some research. This means, as a brand, you need to make sure you’re answering their questions. You’re not selling to them just yet, but you’re answering their questions and they’re starting to think you know what you’re talking about. The content you’ll create for the awareness stage is tutorials, blog posts, and e-books.

2 – Consideration: the evaluation phase

Once the customer has consulted various sources to help answer their problem, they’ll start to think about which solution is best for them.

To do this, they’ll compare their options by reading buying guides, browsing customer reviews, and watching product videos to choose the best option for their budget. This means as a brand, you’ll need to make sure you have this content on hand to help your potential customers decide you’re their best option.

3 – Decision: the selection phase

The decision phase is the final step. Customers know exactly which product meets their needs and must now choose from the various options on offer. As a brand, it’s time to ensure you have the right content to demonstrate your comparative advantage over your competitors.

If you can, why not let the customer make up their own mind with a free test period? This could dramatically help to remove any final obstacles, so be generous if you can!

Digital customer journey mapping has several advantages, such as:

• Detecting the points of friction encountered by the customer which lead them to modify, postpone or cancel their project
• Better understanding customer needs and habits to offer them the most suitable content at the best time
• Giving you insights to adjust your marketing efforts towards the most profitable or high potential opportunities

Focus on an omnichannel approach

In today’s world, the customer journey needs to meet the demands of multiple channels.

To do this, we need to adopt an “omnichannel” approach which gives equal importance to all stages of the journey.

The objective? To build a “seamless” user experience; one that’s consistent across all channels – whether telephone, social media, or your website.

The time for compartmentalization is over.

Get everyone involved

Reshaping and optimizing your digital customer journey isn’t a small task. In fact, it can lead to huge changes within your business.

That’s why involving all employees in the process is essential for maintaining consistency and output as you optimize your customer journey.

Feedback from each department is invaluable and will help contribute to the development of a “concrete” path based on reliable data.

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Personalize the experience

In today’s heavily saturated market, personalization can help you make a difference and stand out amongst the crowd.

Nevertheless, personalizing your journey effectively requires excellent knowledge of your business goals and a clear understanding of your target personas. With these things covered, you’ll be able to determine the content to display on your site or application according to age, location, areas of interest, previous searches, or purchases…

Contentsquare’s customer journey analysis tools can help you do this.

We wouldn’t want to finish this article without sharing some examples of digital customer journeys that are as different as they are inspiring.

Example 1: Digital Experience

This customer journey shows clearly how a chocolate brand might create new followers; from discovering products by chance in the street to transforming the customer into a true ambassador.

Example 2: UXFirm

This second example from UXFirm has a different objective and emphasizes the experience of the customer at each stage – from awareness to purchase.

Example 3: wcig

The third example describes in detail each stage and obstacle faced by those with disabilities in a working environment. A very complicated (but enlightening) example of a customer journey!

Example 4: Zendesk

Finally, let’s conclude with an example of a digital customer journey by Zendesk that clearly shows the dynamics of customer acquisition, retention, and loss.

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Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare based in France. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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Home CX Customer Experience

Digital Customer Journey: Definition, Stages & Examples

Defining the digital customer journey (DCJ) our customers follow is critical to offering a good user experience. This process that finally leads to the purchase must be optimized if we want good results.

That is why more and more companies recommend products or services that might interest you. Even streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix suggest movies or series that you might like, personalizing user experience. The most exciting thing about this is that these strategies are not coincidental. There are many efforts behind it, such as building a great customer experience strategy through the use of tools like the customer journey .

LEARN ABOUT: Perfect Customer-First Strategy

One of the greatest challenges for companies is learning what their customers want. How do you live up to their expectations? What are the exact moments and places that most influence their buying decisions?

LEARN ABOUT: Time to Value

If you want to learn more about what is digital customer journey, its five stages and read some examples, this is the right article for you.

Content Index

• Digital Customer Journey Definition
• Optimizing your Digital Customer Journey

The five stages of the Digital Customer Journey

• Example of Digital Customer Journey

What is Digital Customer Journey?

The Digital Customer Journey (DCJ) is the process carried out by a user. It goes from the moment the user identifies they have a need, to the moment they acquire a product or service to satisfy or solve it.

This process or journey comprises five different phases: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and customer advocacy . The user will decide on either buying or discarding your product/service, depending on how every interaction with your brand within those 5 phases makes them feel. And remember, the best way to attain a good visualization of user interactions, touchpoints and all stages is through a user journey map .

In each phase there are different touchpoints . This term refers to the contact points where the user and the company meet. The DCJ is built to identify these points of contact. Of course, this journey is not the same for all users. Depending on the type of consumer, their trip will be different; thus, their relationship with these customer points of contact will vary.

The DCJ is not only a descriptive tool of a process but also a practical one. It is the first step in an optimization process that leads to better sales opportunities and more satisfied customers.

Learn how to create your  customer journey canvas  and download our template.

Why optimizing your Digital Customer Journey is a good idea?

The focus on customer experience has surpassed the price and the product as a brand differentiator. The strategy’s success is based on the communication of different areas within an organization. But, mainly, on understanding the importance of their role in digital customer experience .

Today, the main trends that stand out in the management of relationships between companies and clients are: a more informed, hyper-connected, self-sufficient, demanding and much more emotional consumer. Similarly, the transformation of the opening of multiple channels and their correct integration to the contact, self-service and customer experience channels regarding a product or service.

Here lies the importance of the Digital Customer Journey. While the purpose of any marketing strategy is to execute a purchase, the process the customer goes through is now as relevant as the purchase itself. In other words, if the customer does not have a pleasant, frictionless experience during their purchase journey, they will most likely not reach their destination.

If you like reading about what is the digital customer journey, you might find interesting learning about customer journey vs customer experience: the difference .

Let’s look at the different phases in the case of the online customer journey.

Awareness (pre-sale)

The customer awareness or discovery phase is where the user realizes they have a need. Keep in mind that “the need” is a broad concept in the customer journey.

A need may be, for example, that you want to try the new flavor of a brand of candies. You didn’t know that flavor existed, and suddenly, you discover it. Or, for example, you feel like getting a massage based on a post you saw on your Instagram feed.

Discovery can be offline, for example, in a conversation with friends, in a shop window, or in a TV commercial, before going online. In general, the entire customer journey can start offline and go digital.

LEARN ABOUT:  Customer Journey Mapping Tools

If you like reading about customer journey, you might find valuble to learn how to build your own Customer Journey Map .

In this case, where we’re talking about a 100% digital process, the most common way to get to the awareness phase is through advertising, whether on social networks, websites, or search engines or even through sponsored articles in the media.

It is also possible to discover it through recommendations on social networks, where influencer marketing strategies come into play.

Be that as it may, this first stage is passive for the user, requiring no effort from the user’s standpoint. They discover they have a need based on observing Ads or by listening to a friend talk about a specific brand, for instance. If they decide to investigate further, we move on to the next phase.

2. Consideration (pre-sale)

Digital consideration is the second phase of the digital customer journey. At this point, the user begins to think about what they have discovered and consider if and where to buy it.

Here it begins the search process. The brand can reach the user through SEO and SEM content strategy by sending out email campaigns, reviews on third-party websites or sponsored articles, etc…

Consideration is perhaps the stage where most companies invest more money since it is where everything is at stake. The business needs to attract the user with various digital marketing strategies in order to compete and win the first spot in the mind of the consumer. 

At this point is when the potential client has to understand what you offer that the competition does not give. And as we have already mentioned, it is not only an informative process but also an emotional one.

At the consideration stage, it is crucial to differentiate from the competition and offer the added value of your brand. It is not only about solving the need once but about truly understanding the user persona that is targeted so that later down the line, they become loyal customers. 

3. Purchase (post-sale)

Finally, it’s time to buy. We cannot express enough how the shopping experience in a digital customer journey is crucial. For instance, if the website usability is poor, you leave. In case there are too many steps or you can’t pay with your preferred payment method, you also leave.

Cart abandonment is a crucial problem in many e-commerce. Within the company’s digitization strategy, optimizing the sales process is essential to not lose all previous work.

Your potential client is lost because they instead go to an alternative where the process is more accessible. For this, it is necessary to make the purchase as easy and frictionless as possible for the customer. If they feel that it is becoming a hassle to purchase something at your online commerce, they turn around to your competition. 

You can make the purchase process easier by offering alternatives such as data autofill, having different transaction payment methods or providing competitive shipping options, for instance. These actions are essential, so the purchase is not lost at the last moment.

4. Retention (post-sale)

Once the purchase is over, we move on to retention. If your experience in customer service has been positive, it will be much easier to convince your customers to stay. 

How do you do that? It could be a telephone after-sales service, reaching out to the customer through a digital channel and touching base with them to offer extra support with their purchase. Responding promptly to the customer will aid to get a better impression of your business and, most importantly, increase the customer’s lifetime cycle rate. 

There are different strategies your marketing and customer success team can implement to build longstanding customer relationships. That could be sending out additional resources to add more value to the purchase, creating a customer online community, and keeping the CX experts following up with online surveys to learn more about their current experience with the brand, to name a few.

In the Retention phase, the key is to make the client feel that they’re important to the business. 

5. Advocacy (this is where every business wants customers on)

Lastly, we need these satisfied customers to recommend us to other potential customers. In this sense, the voice of the customer (VOC) must be listened to. As we explained in our article on what VOC means, this methodology puts the customer and their impressions at the center.

If you find it interesting reading about the voice of the customer, you might want to review these VOC survey questions and templates . 

We can know what our NPS is and what we need to change to achieve these recommendations through customer satisfaction surveys. Considering that retaining a customer is much more profitable than getting a new one, profitability will most likely skyrocket if our retained customers recommend us.

Example of Digital Customer Journey: Purchasing a guitar online

Now that every stage of the digital customer journey is explained let’s go over all of the phases in a simple example. 

Let’s say you want to purchase a guitar. In the awareness phase, you discover you’d like to learn to play a musical instrument. Maybe the mobile phone “heard you” speak with your friends about your interest to learn to play the guitar, and now your social media and every website you visit are bursting with Ads of companies wanting to sell you the “best guitar in the market.” The awareness or discovery stage doesn’t require any effort from the user other than reading the Ads that show up on your digital channels. 

The next stage, consideration , is when you start to notice you might ponder on the idea of the purchasing process of a guitar. Now the search process has begun, and you’re actively looking for the best guitar that fits you. In this stage, you could be doing things like watching YouTube reviews, reading a blog post about “the top 10 best guitar alternatives for beginners,” and even comparing prices from different e-commerces such as Amazon, Best Buy, or an official musical instruments online store. Once it’s decided where you want to purchase your product, you go to their website to order it. But then you get a couple of unpleasant surprises. The website user experience is terrible because the pages take a lot of time to load. Even when you manage to overcome such inconvenience with a lot of patience, the site marks an error whenever you’re trying to do the transaction with your card. Given your e-shopping experience got stuck, now you go to your second online shop website of preference. This time you can navigate through the website quite faster, and the payment transaction with your card gets through with ease. 

The second option you had to go for instead of the first one continues bringing in a great customer experience. What happens in the retention stage? Well, they said the approximate delivery date was going to be in a week, but you got your guitar within 3 days! Plus, it comes in a nice box with a personalized note from the business thanking you for the purchase and offering flexible return policies. Besides, you’ve also received downloadable resources and provided customer access to an online community portal where you can connect with other users and get support from the company’s Customer Success team. All of these actions may seem like a bonus, but they aim to make the client feel special, so the next time you need to purchase any other instrument or an extra set of new strings, you buy with them.     

Finally, if you’re happy with the guitar and the service they continually provide post-sale, you might start recommending them to other people, be it in person or by writing a review on their website.

This may take some time to get here, so the sum of what the business does in all the previous stages (especially retention) is critical.

 This is the part where you, as their customer, are so happy with the product and their service that you start genuinely advocating for them.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

In conclusion…

• The Digital Customer journey is the process carried out by a user when interacting with your brand to satisfy a need with your product or service. 
• There are 5 stages the user goes through Discovery, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
• Touchpoints are a critical part of a DCJ because they are your company’s points of customer contact, end to end.
• The success of your company relies on the optimization of your DCJ. Remember, the customer’s process is as relevant as the purchase itself.
• Great customer experiences can be obtained through the use of a powerful customer experience management platform.

If you’d like to boost customer loyalty at your company, QuestionPro CX can help you achieve it with our extensive toolbox set of features, including the creation and deployment of CX surveys, NPS flexible dashboards, sentiment analysis , customer churn prediction, closed-loop feedback system to address customer issues better, and more! 

Do you have a CX program and don’t know where to start or how to incorporate a CEM? Share what’s your current business challenge, and we will offer you different proposals tailored to your needs.

Try QuestionPro CX today if you want to boost customer loyalty by efficiently processing large amounts of data in real-time and turning them into fact-driven action support. 

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