what is digital customer journey

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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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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.

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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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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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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

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

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

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

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

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

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

1. Awareness

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

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

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

2. Consideration

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

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

3. Purchase

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

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

4. Retention

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

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

5. Advocacy

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

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

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

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

Customer journey touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create buyer personas

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

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

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

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

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

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

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

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

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

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started with customer journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digitizing customer journeys and processes: Stories from the front lines

A compelling customer experience has evolved from a nice-to-have to a necessity in many industries. Winners use standout experiences to attract and retain business while reducing servicing costs and complaints. The rewards can be substantial, but execution is complex, requiring a complete reinvention of customer journeys and supporting processes.

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Radical though this may sound, “reinvention” is no exaggeration, because digitizing existing processes is seldom if ever the solution. Instead, successful transformations begin with a zero-based redesign of the customer experience of a given task, such as opening an account or renewing a service. That involves ignoring everything the company already has in place and asking, “What would be the best possible experience a customer could have when completing this task?”

Only when a business has defined what that experience should be can it figure out how to build the processes and technologies needed to support it. By digitizing these processes, the business can reduce costs, improve customer experience, capture value, and move to a next-generation operating model.

But what does this process of reinvention look like, and how do companies make it work? This article offers an inside view of key stages in a successful transformation. The examples are drawn mainly from financial services, but the lessons apply to any company seeking to reinvent its customer experience.

Designing a customer-centered solution

Most institutions understand the importance of a positive customer experience to the bottom line, but few excel at designing or delivering it. The transformations that bring the biggest benefit start by imagining what a world-class customer journey would look like, rather than settling for tactical evolution of the current state. This requires reimagining the entire journey, which many organizations find hard to achieve after years of incremental improvements.

One bank reduced the information required on its new-account-opening form from 45 fields to 35 and declared victory, yet it could have reduced the fields to 15 and pre-populated 10 of them from external data sources. Another bank found that the apparent requirement for a “wet signature” on a loan application quickly evaporated when the regulator was consulted.

To make this reinvention leap, leading companies employ a user-experience designer who can orchestrate the process, keep it focused on customer needs, inspire people, and ensure that the organization doesn’t allow its new vision to be limited by the way it does things today.

Another crucial aspect of reinvention is customer involvement, as the story of a Latin American bank illustrates. It was working to understand customer journeys and identify the most important processes to reimagine. Instead of doing what many organizations do at this point—try to put themselves in their customers’ shoes—the bank brought customers into the project room to get their reactions at first hand. Bankers, however empathetic, are not customers, and the only reliable way to find out what customers want is to go and ask them.

This was the first time the bank had ever spoken with its customers before redesigning a product or process. Previously it had run focus groups to gather feedback when piloting a new offering, but this had been largely a box-ticking exercise, since much of the solution had been developed and material changes would have been too costly to implement. Having direct rather than arm’s-length contact with customers was also critical. Many companies subcontract customer research to third parties and commission a report for the project team to study, but this can be a slow, remote, and inefficient process, depriving in-house teams of the regular ongoing customer exposure that can lead to great solutions.

Defining the scope of a transformation

The scope of a journey can be defined by the product (such as a mortgage or current account), the channel (such as online or branch), the customer segment (such as retail or commercial), and the phase of customer engagement (such as sales or servicing). Depending on how these elements are combined, the scope of a transformation can be narrow (a remortgage for existing customers via the online channel) or broad (all mortgage products in all channels).

Decisions about scope should be informed by a detailed assessment of the value at stake and the cost of capturing it. In our experience, companies achieve impact more quickly by focusing on a few large journeys rather than fragmenting their efforts across the enterprise. (For more on this, see “ Putting customer experience at the heart of next-generation operating models .”)

In its new approach, the bank consulted customers at every stage through weekly test-and-learn sessions. It showed customers first sketches of proposed solutions, then more detailed wire-frames, then prototypes, and finally a functioning solution. Having weekly feedback enabled the team to constantly refine the new customer experience and resolve any issues that might compromise its success at launch.

For instance, an early prototype of the bank’s new-account-opening journey sought to help customers choose an account by asking how, when, and why they would use it and recommending the most suitable product. But in tests, customers always selected “compare to other accounts” whenever a recommendation was offered; answering three or four questions hadn’t saved them the time or trouble of making comparisons for themselves. So the team took the questions out of the process, relegated recommendations to an option, and added brief summaries of account features to help customers make their own choice.

A zero-based design process can feel alien and risky at first, but handled well, it is a powerful tool for going beyond incremental change and making the kind of radical customer-centered shift needed to create the best possible experience. To turn the newly imagined solution into reality, the organization will also need to create a strong cross-functional team.

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Mobilizing a cross-functional team.

To gain multiple perspectives, best-practice companies take specialists from every function, bring them together in one place, and charge them with testing reimagined journeys and processes from every angle. Some organizations create a purpose-built “lab” or “pod” for a team working on a customer journey to insulate it from everyday business demands and free it to focus on delivery. To ensure speed to market, each team member must hold decision-making authority for his or her respective area. If the head of legal can’t attend every daily meeting, she needs to empower a member of her department to be in the lab full time and act on her behalf.

The power of this approach lies in the way it unites professionals from legal, compliance, operational risk, and other functions in working toward a common purpose. By engaging them from the start, organizations can sidestep responses that block change (“This can’t be done”) and foster more constructive dialogues (“Let’s work together to make it happen”).

One long-established bank developed its first-ever digital process for opening an account. Previously, prospective customers had to visit a branch and see a sales representative. The bank designed an account-opening process that required new customers to input just four data fields rather than the 25—already good by traditional banking standards—in the original process. Other fields were either pre-populated from public sources or deemed unnecessary.

When the bank’s cross-functional team met to review the new process, the compliance expert remarked that it couldn’t be implemented because regulation required new customers to provide at least 20 pieces of personal data. She was trying to minimize risk, as the bank had always taught her to do. The team subsequently brought in a new member who worked with colleagues from legal and operational risk to challenge the way things were done. On closer inspection of the regulations, the team found that some data fields could be filled in at any point during the customer’s relationship with the bank, not necessarily when the account was opened. This ability to question accepted wisdom is just as important as technical capabilities—and sometimes more so.

Governance is another area where long-standing structures and practices designed to minimize risk can impede the fast, well-informed decision making needed to bring digital innovations quickly to market. Agile delivery can’t be sustained if teams have to approach one governance body after another for approval. Instead, the organization should nominate a “product owner”—an executive who is accountable for delivering business value—and empower this individual to make day-to-day decisions for the team.

For strategic decisions that need to be made by a broader cross-section of leaders, leading institutions create a new governance body formed of senior representatives who can eliminate roadblocks and shield the team from parts of the organization that disagree with new developments. The governance body should meet at least every two weeks to provide guidance, ensure clarity on the way forward, and give the team the confidence and authority to move quickly.

To ensure this new structure works efficiently, team members and leaders need to adopt agile principles. That might mean leaders stop asking for detailed reports, for instance, while teams hold conversations in person rather than via long email chains. For many people, this will require a fundamental shift in mind-set and behaviors. Regular coaching from a trained agile coach can help to make the transformation as seamless as possible.

Finally, this governance body must be a real working group. One company abandoned PowerPoint presentations and heavy documentation. Instead, its steering committee moves around the meeting room to “stations” demonstrating new products and posters depicting issues that need to be resolved. Just as we change the way we drive technological innovation, so we need to change the way we consider, debate, and approve decisions.

Developing the new solution

Once a new customer experience has been designed, tested, and refined, the next step is to develop the technology infrastructure to support it. To prevent unnecessary complexity, the new build should be as architecturally flexible as possible—incorporating reusable components and services or deploying the same functionality across multiple channels—while taking care not to jeopardize the performance of existing systems.

Integrating new processes with legacy systems in a cost-efficient way is a challenge most companies face when they digitize their customer journeys. One bank adopted a systematic approach that involved first asking whether a new interface was really needed and then determining the most efficient integration approach. It found it could make trade-offs in design—such as reducing data requirements to enable existing interfaces to be used—that would cut costs and improve the speed of delivery. Where new interfaces were required, the bank used a range of techniques from screen-scraping and robotics to agile building methods.

Many banks’ IT development is overseen by architecture and infrastructure review boards that require extensive documentation and long lead times. Moreover, standards for deployment often call for multiple testing groups and management bodies to sign off on code. These processes were originally designed to protect banks against rework, security issues, and systems failures at a time when releases were infrequent. Paradoxically, however, such safeguards can now have the opposite effect, increasing the time it takes to fix problems when things go wrong. For agile delivery, banks need to move toward fully automated testing and deployment, using DevOps tools to allow for frequent smaller releases. Properly implemented, this approach should mitigate risk.

At another bank, IT projects routinely took four to six months to go from concept to development, and three to four months to go from development to production. To speed up delivery, the CTO embedded an enterprise architect in the lab on a full-time basis. Not only did this reduce the four-month concept-to-development phase to four weeks, it also improved the quality of the results, delivering a customer-onboarding workflow based on service-oriented architecture and with multiple reused and reusable components. For instance, when the team proposed developing a new service to bring customer details from source systems to the website, the enterprise architect suggested reusing a similar service that was already bringing customer data to tellers.

Time was also saved from the development-to-production phase by conducting quality-assurance and user-acceptance testing during program-development cycles, or sprints, rather than after development. In another innovation, the team used an automated deployment tool to eliminate the need to align release dates across multiple changes. This made the bank nimbler at IT development and helped it move closer to continuous deployment, where code is deployed in production as soon as it has been tested and approved by the business owner.

‘Rolling in’ the solution

In a conventional rollout, companies make detailed plans, communicate the changes, start small, replicate efforts, train teams, and let the business deal with implementation. Roll-in is a radically different approach and often a useful option for building scale.

You begin by determining the rough shape and size of your new digitized business through early cycles of test-and-learn, then gradually add more people until the team has the capacity to do all the work you require. Rather than getting your original team to train other teams and export capabilities to the rest of the organization, you effectively import volumes for your team to work on, growing its capacity while shrinking your old process and team at the same time. This ability to evolve the new business as work volumes rise enables you to create a best-practice operation from the ground up.

One major life insurer kicked off its roll-in phase by taking a small portion of its current demand—10 percent—and working out what kind of operation would be needed to handle it. To calculate optimal load balancing, it started with a small team and gradually increased the workload. Much to everyone’s surprise, the team was able to increase its output by 40 percent. Bearing this team size and work mix in mind, the insurer gradually expanded the team until it could handle the entire workload. The new team not only had higher productivity but was much quicker to build than with a conventional approach.

Driving customer adoption

However good a digitized solution may be, it means nothing if customers don’t use it. The trick is to minimize the effort needed to move to the new model and launch digital-adoption campaigns to make customers aware. Too often, these campaigns are overlooked or neglected, leading to lackluster adoption and lost value.

Successful digital-adoption campaigns start by understanding customers’ pain points and exploring the barriers that prevent digital adoption. These efforts require senior leadership involvement, a clear and comprehensive action plan, and a guaranteed budget. In our experience, successful customer adoption of new products or services rests on five pillars:

• Customer experience: ensuring that customers have a delightful experience that directly addresses their challenges and needs.
• Marketing and communications: using timely targeted messages to make customers, partners, and employees aware of the new value proposition.
• Incentives and promotions: offering appealing bonuses, perks, or discounts to encourage customers to shift by sharing the value captured.
• Legacy channels: phasing out or reducing competing and expensive legacy channels to encourage slow adopters to migrate and demonstrate commitment to the new digital solution.
• Policy: ensuring seamless internal alignment across channels and business units to avoid disruptive conflicts between leaders on strategy, targets, compensation, or mind-sets.

One European telecom company took this to heart by using every call from a customer purchasing a new product as an opportunity to educate them about its digital services via recorded messages and conversations with sales agents. Another company communicated the convenience of digital touchpoints through “send to a friend” social campaigns that took advantage of satisfied digital-care users.

While the five pillars provide a firm foundation for any customer-adoption campaign, specific tactics will vary by company and context. Sophisticated players tailor their approach by customer segment, channel, and relationship or brand. Customers’ reactions will also vary, of course. Early adopters react well to encouragement, fast followers expect rewards, and laggards may need deadlines or a gentle nudge. But regardless of category, the best way to secure a shift in behavior is to minimize the effort customers have to make to move to the new digital solution.

Leading institutions are becoming increasingly adept at using digital innovation to reshape customer journeys. Their experience in designing customer-centered solutions, building teams, getting the solutions to market, and driving scaling and adoption should point the way for other organizations to create value from this rapidly developing field.

Chandana Asif is a manager in McKinsey’s London office, where Tomas Jones is a partner; Jiro Hiraoka is a manager in the Lima office; and Prerak Vohra is an associate partner in the New York office.

The authors would like to thank Joao Dias, Christina Hawley, Yran Bartolomeu Dias, Marta Rohr, Pierce Groover, Kristine Simonsen, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall for their gracious support and expertise in creating this article.

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Digital Customer Journey Primer: Key Strategies for Engagement and Retention

Introduction

In today's fiercely competitive digital marketplace, capturing and retaining customer attention is paramount. At Costa Commerce, we understand that the battle for customer engagement extends beyond just offering superior products or services; it's about winning their time and share of wallet. This guide delves into the intricacies of managing digital customer journeys, a crucial aspect for any brand aspiring to not just attract, but also convert and retain loyal customers. We'll explore the essential steps and capabilities that guide brands from the initial point of awareness to building a lasting base of loyal customers.

Why you should manage customer journeys

In today’s digital landscape, brands compete against each other while trying to capture customers’ attention. However, their rivals aren't limited to similar products or services alone; they are also contending for customers’ time and share of wallet.

To stand out and capture the attention of future customers, brands must understand how to inspire and influence potential leads toward becoming loyal customers. The digital customer journey encompasses the essential steps and capabilities that guide brands in selling their products and services – from initial awareness to product comparisons with competitors, and from the point of purchase to building customer loyalty and advocacy.

From an internal perspective, you can not gain a competitive advantage by optimizing a single function or touchpoint to be your efficient island anymore. Instead, customer journeys need to be worked toward optimal flow, where the weakest links and bottlenecks can be noticed and reacted to swiftly.

In the digital realm, identifying your customer and communicating value consistently across multiple touchpoints at every step is critical. This ensures that consumers not only become customers but also remain loyal to your brand.

What is a Digital Customer Journey

The digital customer journey encompasses the actions taken before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service. Like any customer journey, it can be traditionally divided into five stages leading up to a customer making their first purchase:

• Awareness: The journey begins with building awareness. Your business, service, or product must be noticeable to be acknowledged and eventually purchased. This stage heavily relies on marketing and branding to make your offerings discoverable to your target audience.
• Consideration: During this stage, your product is compared with others through your website, reviews, or free trials. Customers shift their focus toward decision-making, where they weigh the qualities of your product or service against others in the market. While brand awareness remains important, the product or service's actual attributes have a more significant impact on customer behavior.
• Purchase: At this stage, potential customers have narrowed down their options and are ready to make a purchase. During this phase of the funnel, clear communication about the product or service is crucial. Minor issues such as unclear calls to action, high shipping costs, or vague payment plans can significantly impact the conversion rate.
• Interaction/Loyalty: After the purchase, it is vital to retain customers and encourage them to continue using your services or making further purchases. The quality of your product or service plays a crucial role in keeping customers loyal, and after-sales support can have a considerable impact on customer loyalty, even when the product or service functions as expected.
• Promotion/Advocacy: If your business delivers exceptional results, satisfied customers should be identified and encouraged to promote your services and products to others. This phase not only generates repeat business but also attracts new customers, driving your sales forward.

Converting customers into loyal advocates who not only return for future purchases but also endorse your products to others requires significant effort.

In conclusion, the digital customer journey is a multifaceted process, encompassing everything from initial awareness to post-purchase advocacy. Each stage – Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Interaction/Loyalty, and Promotion/Advocacy – plays a vital role in not just acquiring a customer but also in building a lasting relationship. 

At Costa Commerce, we recognize the importance of these stages in creating a seamless customer experience. Read the next article , which provides a detailed guide on managing these customer journeys effectively, ensuring your brand not only attracts but also retains a loyal customer base.

Digital Customer Journey: From Awareness to Advocacy

In today’s digital landscape, understanding the customer journey is essential for business success. The digital customer journey encompasses every interaction a customer has with a brand online, from initial engagement to becoming a loyal advocate. It’s a dynamic process that can greatly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line. By optimizing the digital customer journey, businesses can create meaningful and tailored experiences that resonate with customers, build trust, and drive advocacy.

Table of Contents

What is a digital customer journey.

The digital customer journey refers to the path that a customer takes when interacting with a brand or business through online channels. It encompasses every touchpoint, from the initial point of contact to the eventual conversion and beyond.

The 5 Stages of Digital Customer Journey

1. awareness.

In this initial stage, customers become aware of the brand or product. They may come across the brand through social media, online advertisements, or word-of-mouth. The goal is to capture customer attention and generate interest in the brand.

2. Consideration

During the consideration stage, customers actively evaluate the brand as a potential solution to their needs or problems. They conduct research, explore different options, and compare the brand with competitors. Providing valuable content and showcasing unique selling propositions can influence customers during this stage.

3. Conversion

The conversion stage is where customers make the final decision to purchase the product or service. They may add items to the cart, fill out a form, or complete a transaction. Streamlining the conversion process and providing a seamless checkout experience are critical in this stage.

4. Retention

Once a customer has made a purchase, the focus shifts to retaining their loyalty and encouraging repeat business. Providing exceptional post-purchase support, personalized communication, and proactive engagement can foster customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers become brand advocates and promote the brand to others. Satisfied customers share positive reviews, refer friends and family, and engage in word-of-mouth marketing. Encouraging advocacy through referral programs, loyalty rewards, and exceptional customer experiences can amplify the brand’s reach.

What are the Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping?

Enhanced customer understanding.

Gaining a deep understanding of customers is vital for businesses to meet their needs effectively. By visualizing the customer journey, businesses can develop insights into customers’ preferences, pain points, and behaviors. This understanding enables businesses to address customer needs more effectively and deliver personalized experiences that resonate.

Improved Customer Experience

Customer journey mapping allows businesses to identify gaps and areas for improvement in the overall customer experience. By pinpointing pain points and moments of delight, businesses can optimize interactions at each touchpoint. By providing seamless, personalized experiences, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Identification of Opportunities

Through customer journey mapping, businesses can uncover untapped potential within the customer journey. This includes identifying new touchpoints, personalized messaging, or value-added services. By leveraging these opportunities, businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors and drive innovation and growth.

Alignment of Touchpoints and Channels

Creating a cohesive and consistent customer experience across multiple touchpoints and channels is essential. Customer journey mapping ensures that businesses align their touchpoints to deliver a unified brand experience. By optimizing interactions and reducing friction, businesses can provide a seamless journey for customers, regardless of the channels they engage with.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Customer journey mapping helps businesses make data-driven decisions by identifying critical touchpoints for data collection and analysis. By leveraging data, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. These insights inform personalized interactions, optimize marketing strategies, and improve overall business performance.

Improved Collaboration and Communication

Customer journey mapping encourages cross-functional collaboration and communication within the organization. By bringing together teams from marketing, sales, customer service, and product development, businesses can collectively understand and address customer needs. This alignment fosters a customer-centric culture and improves overall business efficiency.

Increased Customer Loyalty and Advocacy

By delivering exceptional experiences throughout the customer journey, businesses can increase customer loyalty and advocacy. Satisfied customers are more likely to become brand advocates, sharing positive feedback, referring others, and contributing to the brand’s reputation and growth.

How to Create a Digital Customer Journey Map

1. define your objectives.

Clearly define the objectives of creating a digital customer journey map. Determine what specific insights or improvements you want to gain from the exercise. This will guide the entire process and ensure you focus on the right areas.

2. Identify Customer Personas

Develop customer personas that represent your target audience. These personas should capture the demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals of your typical customers. Understanding your customers at a deeper level will help you create more accurate and relevant digital customer journey maps.

3. Map Out the Stages

Identify the different stages of the customer journey, from awareness to post-purchase. Each stage represents a distinct phase in the customer’s interaction with your brand. Divide the journey into key stages that align with your specific business model and customer experience.

4. Identify Touchpoints

Within each stage, identify the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand digitally. These touchpoints may include your website, social media platforms, emails, mobile apps, online ads, customer support channels, and more. List all the touchpoints relevant to each stage of the customer journey.

5. Gather Data and Insights

Collect data and insights about customer behavior and experiences at each touchpoint. This can include website analytics, customer feedback, user surveys, social media listening, and customer service interactions. Use this data to understand customer pain points, preferences, and opportunities for improvement.

6. Visualize the Journey

Create a visual representation of the digital customer journey map using diagrams, flowcharts, or other visual tools. Clearly indicate the stages, touchpoints, and customer actions at each step. Use different colors or symbols to represent positive and negative customer experiences.

7. Analyze and Identify Gaps

Analyze the digital customer journey map to identify gaps, pain points, and areas for improvement. Look for inconsistencies, bottlenecks, or opportunities for enhancing the customer experience. This analysis will help you prioritize actions and allocate resources effectively.

8. Optimize and Iterate

Based on the insights gained from the digital customer journey map, develop strategies and initiatives to optimize the customer experience. Implement changes, test new approaches, and continuously iterate to refine and improve the journey over time.

Example of a Digital Customer Journey Map

Measuring and optimizing the digital customer journey.

To ensure the effectiveness of your digital customer journey and continuously improve the customer experience, it is crucial to measure and optimize the various stages. Here are some key considerations and strategies:

1. Set Clear Objectives

Define specific goals for each stage of the digital customer journey. Align objectives with overall business objectives, such as increasing conversions, improving customer satisfaction, or driving brand advocacy.

2. Use Relevant Metrics

Identify and track key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your objectives. Examples of metrics to consider include conversion rate, bounce rate, average order value, customer satisfaction score, and customer lifetime value.

3. Implement Analytics Tools

Utilize robust analytics tools, such as Feedsight or customer journey mapping software, to gather data and insights. Set up event tracking, conversion tracking, and goal funnels to monitor customer interactions and conversions.

4. Analyze Customer Behavior

Dive deeper into customer behavior at each stage of the journey. Use behavioral analytics to understand how customers navigate your website, interact with content, and make purchasing decisions.

5. Identify Pain Points and Bottlenecks

Identify areas of friction or challenges in the digital customer journey. Analyze customer feedback, conduct user testing, and monitor customer support interactions to pinpoint pain points and bottlenecks.

6. A/B Testing and Experimentation

Conduct A/B tests to compare different variations of touchpoints, messaging, or user experiences. Experiment with different strategies to optimize conversion rates, engagement, and customer satisfaction.

7. Personalization and Targeting

Leverage customer data and segmentation to deliver personalized experiences. Tailor content, recommendations, and offers based on customer preferences and behavior.

8. Continuous Iteration and Improvement

Regularly review and analyze data to identify areas for improvement. Implement changes, monitor their impact, and iterate based on insights gained.

9. Solicit Customer Feedback

Seek feedback directly from customers through surveys, reviews, or post-purchase communications. Use customer feedback to gain insights, address pain points, and enhance the overall customer experience.

How Feedsight Can Help Measure and Optimize Your Digital Customer Journey

Feedsight , a customer feedback analysis software that utilizes semantic and thematic analysis, provides valuable capabilities to measure and optimize your digital customer journey. By leveraging sentiment analysis and thematic analysis, Feedsight enables businesses to gain insights, identify areas for improvement, and enhance the overall customer experience.

Sentiment Analysis: Measuring Customer Sentiments

• Gain insights into the meaning and sentiment behind customer feedback.
• Identify positive, negative, and neutral sentiments expressed by customers.
• Understand customer emotions and perceptions towards your digital touchpoints and offerings.

Thematic Analysis: Uncovering Key Themes

• Extract key themes and topics from customer feedback to identify patterns and trends.
• Uncover common pain points, areas of satisfaction, and opportunities for improvement.
• Gain a comprehensive understanding of customer preferences and priorities throughout the digital journey.
• Use sentiment analysis to gauge customer sentiment at each stage of the journey.
• Identify pain points and areas of frustration to address and improve upon.
• Leverage thematic analysis to understand recurring themes and align touchpoints with customer needs.

Data-driven Decision Making

• Make data-driven decisions based on insights from sentiment and thematic analysis.
• Optimize touchpoints, messaging, and user experiences to align with customer sentiments and identified themes.
• Continuously measure and iterate on the digital customer journey based on data-driven insights.

Enhanced Customer Experience

• Personalize touchpoints and content based on sentiment analysis to meet individual customer preferences.
• Address pain points and concerns to create a seamless and satisfying journey.
• Improve customer engagement and satisfaction by delivering relevant and targeted experiences.

With Feedsight ‘s sentiment analysis and thematic analysis capabilities, businesses can effectively measure and optimize their digital customer journey. By gaining insights, identifying areas for improvement, and making data-driven decisions, organizations can enhance the customer experience, drive customer satisfaction, and achieve better business outcomes.

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Feedsight helps companies automatically analyze thousands of customer feedback to uncover recurring themes & insights.

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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.

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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.

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What Is A Digital Customer Journey? – Explained

Table of Contents

In today’s digital age, the customer journey has evolved significantly. With the rise of technology and the internet, businesses have had to adapt their marketing strategies to effectively reach and engage customers. One of the key concepts that has emerged is the digital customer journey. In this article, we will explore what exactly a digital customer journey is, why it is important, and how businesses can map out this journey to optimize their marketing efforts.

Understanding the Concept of a Digital Customer Journey

Before we delve into the details, it is important to understand what exactly is meant by a digital customer journey. Simply put, it refers to the process that a customer goes through from the moment they become aware of a product or service to the point of making a purchase decision. This journey takes place entirely online, through various touchpoints and interactions with the brand.

A digital customer journey is not just a linear path that customers follow. It is a complex web of interactions and experiences that shape their decision-making process. It involves multiple stages, including awareness, consideration, evaluation, and ultimately, conversion. Each stage presents unique challenges and opportunities for businesses to engage with their customers and guide them toward making a purchase.

During the awareness stage, customers may come across a brand through various channels, such as social media, search engines, or online advertisements. This is the first point of contact, where businesses have the opportunity to capture the attention of potential customers and create a positive impression. Businesses must have a strong online presence and compelling messaging to stand out in a crowded digital landscape.

Definition of a Digital Customer Journey

The digital customer journey can be defined as a sequence of steps that a customer follows during their online interactions with a brand. It encompasses all the touchpoints and interactions that a customer has across various digital channels, such as websites, social media platforms, emails, and online advertisements.

At the consideration stage, customers start evaluating different options and comparing products or services. They may visit a brand’s website, read reviews, or seek recommendations from friends and family. This is where businesses need to provide relevant and helpful information to assist customers in their decision-making process. Clear product descriptions, user-generated content, and customer testimonials can play a significant role in influencing customers’ perceptions and preferences.

As customers move into the evaluation stage, they may engage more deeply with a brand’s content and offerings. This could involve signing up for newsletters, attending webinars, or participating in online demos. Businesses can leverage these opportunities to showcase their expertise, build trust, and address any concerns or objections that customers may have. By providing valuable and educational content, businesses can position themselves as trusted advisors and increase the likelihood of conversion.

The Importance of a Digital Customer Journey

A well-defined and optimized digital customer journey is crucial for businesses in today’s highly competitive online marketplace. It allows businesses to understand their customers better, provide personalized experiences, and ultimately drive customer engagement and conversion. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can identify areas of improvement and make informed decisions to enhance their marketing strategies.

Furthermore, a digital customer journey provides businesses with valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. By tracking and analyzing customer interactions at different touchpoints, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of what drives customer engagement and conversion. This data can then be used to refine marketing campaigns, tailor messaging, and optimize the overall customer experience.

In conclusion, a digital customer journey is a dynamic and multifaceted process that plays a crucial role in shaping customer perception, engagement, and conversion. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach but requires businesses to adapt and evolve their strategies based on customer needs and preferences. By understanding and optimizing the digital customer journey, businesses can create meaningful connections with their customers and drive long-term success in the online marketplace.

Components of a Digital Customer Journey

The digital customer journey consists of three main components: customer touchpoints, customer engagement, and customer conversion. Let’s explore each of these components in detail.

Customer Touchpoints

Customer touchpoints refer to the points of contact between a customer and a brand throughout their online journey. These touchpoints can include a variety of interactions, such as visiting the brand’s website, reading a blog post, or engaging with the brand on social media. Each touchpoint presents an opportunity for the brand to make a positive impression and influence the customer’s decision-making process.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is all about fostering a meaningful and interactive relationship with customers. It involves creating content and experiences that resonate with the target audience, encouraging them to actively engage with the brand. This can be achieved through social media interactions, email marketing campaigns, and personalized messaging that addresses the customer’s specific needs and interests.

Customer Conversion

Customer conversion is the ultimate goal of the digital customer journey. It refers to the point at which a customer makes a purchase or takes a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or requesting a quote. The conversion stage is crucial for businesses as it directly impacts their revenue and growth. By optimizing the customer journey, businesses can increase their conversion rates and turn potential customers into loyal brand advocates.

Stages of a Digital Customer Journey

The digital customer journey can be divided into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Let’s explore each of these stages to gain a better understanding.

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is the first stage of the digital customer journey. It is the point at which a customer becomes aware of a brand or a specific product or service. At this stage, customers may come across the brand through various channels, such as search engines, social media, or online advertisements. Businesses need to create awareness by crafting compelling and informative content that grabs the attention of potential customers.

Consideration Stage

Once customers are aware of a brand, they enter the consideration stage. In this stage, customers actively seek information and compare different options before making a decision. Businesses can influence customers during this stage by providing valuable content, engaging with customers on social media, and offering personalized recommendations based on their preferences and needs.

Decision Stage

The decision stage is the final stage of the digital customer journey. It is when customers make their purchase decision and take action. At this stage, businesses need to provide a seamless and convenient experience for customers, such as user-friendly checkout processes and secure payment options. Additionally, businesses can further encourage customer loyalty by offering post-purchase support and personalized follow-ups.

How to Map a Digital Customer Journey

Mapping out the digital customer journey can be a complex task, but businesses need to optimize their marketing efforts and deliver a seamless customer experience. Let’s explore the key steps involved in mapping a digital customer journey.

Identifying Customer Personas

The first step in mapping a digital customer journey is to identify the different personas of your target audience. Customer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and motivations. By understanding your audience’s characteristics and preferences, you can tailor your marketing strategies to effectively engage with them at each stage of the journey.

Understanding Customer Behavior

Once you have identified your target personas, it is important to gain a deep understanding of their online behavior. This includes analyzing their browsing patterns, search queries, and interactions with your brand’s touchpoints. By leveraging data analytics and customer tracking tools, you can gain valuable insights into how customers engage with your brand and identify areas for improvement.

Analyzing Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a valuable source of information for mapping out the digital customer journey . By collecting and analyzing feedback through surveys, reviews, and social media listening tools, businesses can gain insights into customer satisfaction, pain points, and expectations. This feedback can help identify areas where the customer journey may be encountering roadblocks or falling short of customer expectations.

In conclusion, the digital customer journey is a vital aspect of modern marketing strategies. By understanding the concept, components, and stages of a digital customer journey, businesses can optimize their marketing efforts and deliver personalized, engaging experiences to their target audience. Mapping out the customer journey, based on customer personas, behavior analysis, and feedback analysis, allows businesses to identify opportunities for improvement and make informed decisions to drive customer engagement and conversion.

Walter Voronovic shares accurate, honest & pragmatic information on how to use the internet to build profitable digital business assets. 

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August 9, 2022 Customer Experience Digital Transformation Insights

The current state of the digital customer journey.

The world is marching steadily along the digital path. While newer companies wholeheartedly embrace the digital customer journey, not every company or industry understands it. One thing is clear: Digital transformation’s relationship with the customer journey is not a destination in and of itself, it’s a process .

What is a digital customer journey and why does it matter?

By optimizing your digital customer experience for ease of use, you can help your customers see the value in your product. In turn, this increases your odds of retaining them.

According to Qualitrics , “Research shows brands with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, in comparison to 33% of companies with weak strategies.”

As a result, mapping the digital customer journey is a higher priority than ever. Doing so allows you to identify opportunities for optimization.

Companies with effective digital customer journeys

Since personal computers became widely available, consumers began adopting digital. The advent of smartphones accelerated this trend, and the pandemic took it to a new level.

Yet, the job is never done . As technology matures, new opportunities to optimize the digital customer journey arise. To that end, new startups and industries spring up constantly, intending to disrupt the industry.

The transportation industry may seem like an unlikely hero for digital customer experiences. However, by creating a simple and intuitive experience, Uber set a high standard for ride-sharing apps and digital products in general. Anyone with a working knowledge of smartphones can figure it out quickly and easily.

Trex is helping prospective consumers reimagine their backyard escape with a Deck Designer tool that harnesses emerging technologies to deliver an exceptional experience—as well as a blueprint, cost estimate, and shopping list.

What started as a way for two broke San Franciscans to make rent has become a global competitor of major hotel brands. Airbnb started as a minimum viable product where the founders rented out their apartment to earn money for rent. This MVP gave way to a $6 billion company. However, in addition to being a strong MVP example, Airbnb can also be a cautionary tale about what happens when you stop prioritizing improvements to your customer journey. Despite the demand for a low-cost alternative to other booking options, because they stopped focusing on customer journey optimization, they are plagued by low ratings . Taking time to revisit and improve their customer journey might help them turn this around.

With that in mind, Fortune , a long-time leading publication that began its digital transformation in 2019, proves that it’s never too late to focus on the digital customer journey. By developing a digital ecosystem that delivers the high-quality information their customers wanted, Fortune was able to leverage the power of an improved digital customer journey to grow engagement and carve out their place in today’s digital world.

How to map the digital customer journey

Understanding how to modernize your business starts with mapping the digital customer journey. According to NTT Vice President Raman Sapra’s interview with Knowledge at Wharton , “before embarking on a digital transformation, organizations need to first identify their business imperatives and priorities.”

Digital customer journey mapping starts with identifying all the touchpoints for leads and customers. This includes understanding how they find you and what gains their trust. It also involves exploring what they experience after becoming a customer and making decisions to move on.

By coupling these touch points with customer surveys and user data , you can identify customer friction and pain points to better understand how you can improve your process(es), product(s), and feature(s). You will find areas of significant drop-offs, features that people love (or don’t love), and consistent feedback indicating you have some issues.

You can analyze this information to understand the best opportunities to optimize your funnel. This process might include:

• Developing strategies to draw in prospective customers at the top of the funnel.
• Maintaining engagement at the middle of the funnel.
• Uncovering new ideas to build trust and increase your bottom-of-the-funnel conversion rates.

Keep in mind that your digital customer journey isn’t always exclusively digital. Instead, it often works in tandem with human connections to build a smooth, cohesive, and top-notch experience.

A word to the wise: as in all UX research, you also need a strategy to identify and evaluate changing customer preferences, competitor analysis, and marketplace priorities. As Tim Harnett explains in VentureBeat , “Customer journey mapping isn’t a one-and-done process, but rather a continuous cycle.”

Trends in Digital Customer Journey Mapping

In addition to providing exceptional customer experiences, it’s about ensuring your company remains competitive by staying on top of marketplace trends , which include:

• Increasingly sophisticated customers who value self-service
• Omnichannel marketing to create a consistent experience everywhere customers encounter your brand
• Utilizing exceptional customer experiences to differentiate your business
• Dynamic support options that include chatbots, auto-replies, and AI to deliver quicker response times
• Personalizing every step of the digital customer journey so that each customer feels as though you’re treating them as an individual

The Digital Customer Journey Is Dynamic

Ultimately, the state of the digital customer journey is one of constant growth and change. Your customers don’t exist in a vacuum, so it follows that your business must keep pace to maintain growing CX expectations. Failing to do so might spell a Blockbuster-style disaster. Take heed and prioritize mapping your digital customer journey to ensure your business can continue to thrive.

3Pillar Global’s team of experts helps clients stay at the forefront of digital transformation. Contact us today to learn how we can help you map your digital customer journey to create an industry-leading customer experience that builds loyalty and trust.

Special thanks to these members of FORCE, 3Pillar’s expert network, for their contributions to this article.

FORCE is 3Pillar Global’s Thought Leadership Team comprised of technologists and industry experts offering their knowledge on important trends and topics in digital product development.

Digital Transformation & Customer Experience Table of Contents

• Ch. 1: How Digital Transformation Is Driving Customer Experience
• Ch. 2: What Is The Connection Between Digital Transformation And Customer Experience?
• Ch. 3: Understanding the impact of digital transformation on customer experience
• Ch. 4: The Current State of the Digital Customer Journey
• Ch. 5: Digital Transformation Strategies Through Customer Experience
• Ch. 6: What the Digitization of Customer Experience Looks Like
• Ch. 7: The Future of Digital Customer Experience
• Ch. 8: Digital Transformation Customer Journey
• Ch. 9: The Role of Digital Transformation in Customer Service
• Ch. 10: Top Digital Transformation Trends That Drive Customers
• Ch. 11: The Role of Digital AI Transformation For Your Business
• Ch. 12: Digital Transformation Challenges For Business Operations
• See all of our insights on Digital Product Development

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

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2021? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map right at the last second?

The thing is -- understanding your customer base can be extremely challenging. And 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.

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While it isn't possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a very handy tool for keeping track of important 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?

Customer journey stages.

• What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

What's included in a customer journey map, steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps
• Customer Journey Map Best Practices

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

• 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 to consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase 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.

Free Customer Journey Map Template

Fill out this form to access the free templates..

For example, at HubSpot, our customer's journey is divided into 3 stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

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 the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better 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 would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing 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 at the ready.

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

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and 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 would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so 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.

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 UX 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 also need to 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.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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.

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The Big Five: Digital Customer Journey Stages

The Big Five: Digital Customer Journey Stages, Explained

In business, everything starts with the consumer, no matter the niche or industry. There is only one boss – the customer and customer experience is the new digital marketing battlefront. Digital channels have made it possible for customers to engage with brands 24/7, but this also means it takes more time, dedication, and touchpoints to convert each prospect.

Today, moving the needle on customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention requires a seamless experience throughout each and every consumer touchpoint – understanding and being mindful of your customers and their needs at every step of their digital journey with you.

Take a deep breath because we’re about to dive deep into the 5 customer journey stages and break them down into actionable steps you can follow to walk a mile in your customers’ shoes and take them on a ride worth talking about.

What Is a Digital Customer Journey?

In the digital realm, the customers take a series of steps through a process that starts with them first discovering a business to becoming loyal, regular customers. A customer’s path from their first interaction with your brand all the way to becoming a satisfied customer and brand advocate is known as the digital customer journey.

The digital customer journey covers all touchpoints a potential customer has online with a brand before, during, and after they convert, whether that means making a purchase, signing up, downloading, etc. It includes every single interaction that takes place before, throughout, and after the buying journey, as well as all aspects of the customer journey directly influenced by your brand and those influenced or controlled by third parties.

Digital Customer Journey and Digital Marketing: Tying It All Together

As a digital marketer, you must believe in branding the digital customer experience, not just your offering. In a world where products and services are becoming increasingly commoditized, customer experience is the only true differentiator. Success is no longer just about delivering a feature – you need to stop selling and start helping.

Laser-focused on swaying the customers into making a purchase, businesses fail to put themselves in their customer’s shoes and consider the cohesiveness of their approach across various consumer touchpoints and customer journey stages. And it goes without saying that a cohesive customer journey is critical for success and that understanding your audience and their path to becoming a customer is the baseline for all your digital marketing campaigns.

Every contact you have with a customer influences whether or not they’ll come back. You must hit the mark every time or lose them to your competitors. You need to make each interaction count, as they are all equally relevant parts of the customer journey. A consistent, predictable and enjoyable customer journey and a positive customer experience create customer satisfaction and trust, which breeds brand loyalty and advocacy.

The Importance and Benefits of Understanding the Digital Customer Journey Stages

Providing a positive customer experience is the art and science of coaxing lifetime loyalty from daily customer interactions. However, it’s impossible if you don’t know what makes that experience. 

The multiple stages in which customers interact with your brand define and shape their experience. Whether their digital customer journey is a walk in the park or a bumpy ride they are screaming to get off of directly depends on how well you’ve understood and catered to each stage of their journey – from learning of your brand to earning their loyalty and advocacy.

By now, you probably know cookie-cutter strategies simply don’t cut it in today’s consumer-centric digital world. By knowing and understanding how your customers feel during all these touchpoints, you can focus on success-proofing all aspects of the customer experience with a highly personalized and tailored approach to your digital marketing efforts and the customer journey instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all mindset.

From Recognition to Endorsement: The 5 Stages of the Digital Customer Journey, Explained

As a digital marketer, your job is to make every single aspect and phase of the customer experience a delight. After all, your customer’s perception of your brand will become your brand’s reality. 

Although it may seem simple at first glance, the digital customer journey is actually a roller-coaster ride filled with ups and downs. When done right, it becomes circular, with all the touch points inherently connected in a loop that ends just so it would begin again.

So, from the very first interaction through to the post-sale initiatives, understanding each customer journey stage is crucial for business and marketing success.

  1. Discovery: The Awareness Stage

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – awareness. The awareness or discovery stage of the customer journey is the pre-sale phase, where a prospect realizes they have a need or problem they need a solution for. Whether it happens online or offline, the moment of discovering that need and noticing your brand marks the beginning of a digital customer journey.

Whether a user found out about you from talking to a friend, came across your ad on social media, or in search engine suggestions, this first stage of their customer journey is passive for the prospect. Your job is to reach out to an audience by creating compelling, informative, and optimized content and leveraging the digital marketing strategies in your arsenal to get it in front of leads and let them know you exist – whether organically or by using paid advertising on social networks, websites, search engines, etc.

If you manage to use the discovery phase to tickle the customer’s fancy, they like what they’ve seen and decide to investigate further, the digital customer journey levels up to the next phase.

  2. Consideration: The Evaluation Stage

In the second phase of the customer journey, the digital consideration stage, the potential customer has clearly identified their problem and starts browsing the web for information that provides them with the actionable steps they can take to do so. Brands are created in the consumer mind, and this is the stage where you need to invest in digital marketing strategies to engrave yourself in there – stand out from your competition, emphasize the unique value you provide, steal the spotlight and win the race.

You’re not selling just yet – you’re supposed to think about how you can transform awareness into engagement. So, while consumers are at the consideration stage, it’s essential to highlight how your products or services can solve their problems and communicate this effectively through compelling, emotional, and relatable content marketing messages on the right marketing channels.

For example, you can run a targeted social media advertising campaign promoting the benefits of using your products and services or create more custom content, such as guides and “how-to” blog posts, articles, or videos, to showcase how you can help them solve their problems.

  3. Fulfillment: The Commitment Stage

By the time they get to the commitment stage of their digital customer journey, your customers know exactly which solution meets their needs and now must decide on the best option. Whatever action takes place (a purchase, sign up, or even a page view), this is the point all consumer roads lead to – the moment the customer finally decides to act and convert .

This is where your customer’s perspective skyrockets from “I know about your brand” to “I want to do business with your brand.” So, how do you get people to commit to yours? This is the time to shine, show them what you’ve got, and demonstrate your competitive advantage in practice.

Abandoning a purchase in a single click and moving on to another brand that seamlessly delivers is easier than ever for today’s online consumers. They won’t hesitate to jump ship if fulfilling any action is a hassle. So, making the fulfillment touchpoint as easy and seamless as possible for your customers is key.

For example, you can simplify the purchase process on your website by offering handy options like data autofill, diverse payment methods, or competitive shipping alternatives.  

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  4. Retention: The Experience Stage

To ensure customer satisfaction, stop your customers from running off to a competitor the next time they need a solution, and increase your customer lifetime cycle rate, you need to focus on customer retention – the fourth (post-sale) stage of the digital customer journey. 

You can’t grow if your customers don’t stick around, and customer experience is the core of retaining customers – if they have a great buying experience, returning will be a no-brainer. Are you living up to your promises and meeting your customers’ expectations? This stage is all about after-sales check-ins, support, and making each individual customer feel valued and like they got what they’ve bargained for – maybe even more. 

It includes everything from top-notch customer service and support, offering additional support-related resources and follow-up emails, to reaching out and conveying customer satisfaction surveys through social media or other digital channels. Without a positive buying experience, the customer will never connect the key piece of the puzzle and join you in the final step of the digital journey – the loyalty stage.

  5. Advocacy: The Loyalty Stage

Digital customer journeys don’t end with conversion – that’s where the real fun starts! A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is. The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is. Loyal customers don’t just come back – they insist that their friends, colleagues, and family do business with you.

Humanizing and personalizing your brand, creating an emotional connection with your customers, and meeting or exceeding their expectations throughout the top-notch digital customer journey you provided is how you get satisfied customers more than happy to leave comments, reviews, and recommend your product or service.

Customer loyalty is the last piece of the digital customer journey puzzle – happy customers are your biggest advocates that can become your most successful sales team generating an endless loop of more prospects, more satisfied customers, and more sales.

The Road Map to Success: Digital Customer Journey Mapping

There is not a single linear journey each online customer will take – a digital customer journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. On top of that, there are more online consumer touchpoints than ever before, and businesses need a way to follow them. In a complex, consumer-centric world that expects personalization 24/7, you need to get a holistic view of the customer journey.

A digital customer journey map is a visual representation of the process and experience that a customer goes through in their digital customer journey. Digital marketers can leverage customer journey mapping to connect all the dots and transform the online customer journey into a visually accessible, easy-to-understand method for understanding the overall customer experience.

Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident – it happens by design. A well-rounded map of the entire customer journey will help you create a clear visualization of every possible way customers can interact with your brand, identify any points of friction, gain insight into the most effective channels to connect with customers, and keep them engaged throughout each stage.

Digital Success Is Not About the Destination – It’s About the Journey

One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time. Even the smallest steps and victories along the various stages of the digital customer path will take on greater meaning, go a long way and help you become a name in your industry people recognize, trust, and beat the drum for. 

Make the customer the hero of your story at each stage and take them on an adventure to remember worth spreading the good word about.

It’s a win-win!

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What is a Digital Customer Journey in eCommerce, and How to Optimize it?

What is a digital customer journey.

The digital customer journey is the path a customer takes when interacting with your brand online . This can include visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, and more.

It’s important to optimize this journey so that customers have a positive experience and are more likely to convert.

There are several steps you can take to optimize the digital customer journey for your eCommerce business . First, make sure that your website is easy to use and navigate. Customers should be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. You should also ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, as many customers now shop online using their smartphones and tablets.

In addition, you should make sure that your website is optimized for search engines. This means using keywords and phrases people are likely to use when searching for your products or services. You should also use effective SEO techniques to improve your website’s ranking in search results.

Another important part of the digital customer journey is creating a strong branding strategy. Your brand should be consistent across all channels, including your website, social media accounts, and marketing materials. When customers see the same branding everywhere they look, they’ll be more likely to trust your brand and convert into customers.

The customer journey may vary by industry and acquisition method, but it almost always contains common elements that determine effectiveness.

Basic Stages of the Customer Journey

Below are some of the remarkable basic stages of the customer journey.

At the Awareness stage, customers become aware of your product or service. This is usually done through digital channels such as social media, email marketing campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), and display ads. It’s important to create content that resonates with your target audience during this stage and encourages them to learn more about your product or service. Crafting effective content that resonates with your target audience is essential to success in this stage. Utilizing relevant visuals and educational resources and conveying a call to action can be powerful tools in driving awareness of your product or service in today’s digital market.

Consideration

The Consideration stage is a pivotal juncture in the customer journey. At the Consideration stage, customers start researching different products or services and form opinions on which one they should buy. This is where you need to provide helpful information, such as customer reviews, case studies, product comparisons, and detailed product descriptions. You should also ensure that your website is easy to use during this stage, so customers can quickly find the information they need. By providing an exceptional experience at this stage, you can set yourself apart from the competition and enable customers to make an informed decision on their purchase.

The purchase stage is a critical moment for any customer when making the decision between competing products and services. At the Purchase stage, customers make a decision on which product or service to buy. It’s important to provide customers with an easy and secure way to buy during this stage. This means having a good payment gateway and ensuring that customers feel safe and secure when making their purchases.

Creating customer loyalty should be an essential focus during the Loyalty stage. This is the stage when customers become devoted to your product or service, establishing long-term relationships with your brand. To ensure customer loyalty, it is essential to provide a superior experience for customers. An excellent way to achieve this is through post-purchase service that resolves any customer issues quickly and effectively. Additionally, offering products at reduced prices or special promotions specifically tailored to loyal customers can further increase their commitment to your brand. It is thus clear that creating an exceptional customer experience throughout the loyalty stage should be a top priority for businesses to capitalize on their customer base truly.

Building brand loyalty is a complex process. Product quality and customer service are key. But research shows that equally important is how the customer views the moment of interaction with the brand. One important factor, especially in e-commerce, is user experience and site performance. Faster page loading can improve sales metrics by as much as tens of percent. It is worth keeping this in mind when optimizing the customer’s path. Mike Jackowski COO, ASPER BROTHERS Let's Talk

The Support stage of the customer journey is a critical one – it’s where customers turn when they encounter an issue or challenge with your product or service. That’s why having a strong, knowledgeable customer service team on hand can be invaluable in creating a positive experience for your customers. Your team should be equipped and ready to provide assistance via phone, email ticketing system , or chat if needed. Furthermore, aligning digital customer journey processes and activities from acquisition through servicing can help optimize outcomes by enabling personalized interactions at every point of contact. By getting this step right, you are building loyal relationships with customers and helping them reach their goals more efficiently – it’s a must-do for any customer-focused business!

Why Optimize Digital Customer Journey?

In the digital age, creating an enjoyable experience for customers is imperative to the success of any brand. By optimizing the customer journey across digital platforms like websites, search engines, and social media, you can ensure that customers are receiving a smooth and consistent service. Doing so will result in better brand loyalty, increased engagement levels, and more repeat visits.

With a few simple steps, like facilitating interactions through chatbot conversations and researching consumer trends online, businesses can start making some tangible changes to the customer journey today. With great care in crafting an optimized digital experience for every user, you will surely benefit from increased customer satisfaction and market growth.

There are a number of ways to optimize the digital customer journey, but some of the most important elements include convenience, personalization, and engagement. By making it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for and tailoring the experience to their individual needs, you can create a brand that they’ll love interacting with. And by keeping them engaged throughout their journey, you can turn one-time customers into lifelong fans.

How to Optimize the Digital Customer Journey?

In the increasingly digital world, businesses must find ways to optimize the customer journey. By understanding how customers interact with their digital channels, businesses can create a seamless and satisfying experience that leads to conversions. There are a few key ways to optimize the digital customer journey:

• Make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for –  As a business, is important to make sure customers are able to quickly find the information they are looking for when visiting our website or app. By having a user-friendly interface with clear labels and well-organized menus, customers can easily navigate and locate the content they need. Additionally, by including search functionality, customers won’t need to spend time sifting through pages of information; rather, they can quickly search using keywords relevant to their inquiries. Making it easy for customers to access what they need helps build trust and loyalty between you and your customers.
• Make it easy for customers to take action. Ensuring that you make it easy for customers to take action is an essential part of providing a great user experience . Prominently placed call-to-actions that are clear and concise help to make sure that your customers know what the next step is. Additionally, forms should be brief and simple so that customers can complete them quickly and easily, thereby increasing conversion rates. It’s important to bear in mind how crucial these elements are in order to give your customers the best possible experience through your online presence.
• Keep it consistent. Providing customers with a consistent experience across all digital channels is essential for maintaining customer loyalty and satisfaction. This means using similar design elements, brand messaging, and tone of voice to ensure users are comfortable navigating your various channels. Presenting the same image and voice throughout your digital presence can strengthen overall trust and confidence in your company while also creating familiarity with existing and potential customers. Consistency is vital in developing consumer relationships, both positive and long-lasting.

By following these tips, businesses can create a smooth and satisfying digital customer journey that leads to conversions.

Digital Customer Journey FAQ

How do i ensure my customers have a consistent experience across all digital channels.

To optimize customers’ digital journey, businesses should focus on convenience, personalization, and engagement. Additionally, businesses should ensure that customers can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, that the call-to-action is clear and concise, and that customers have a consistent experience across all digital channels. By following these best practices, businesses can create a seamless and satisfying customer journey that leads to conversions.

What are the main benefits of creating a seamless customer journey?

The main benefits of creating a seamless customer journey are increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, improved user experience , higher conversion rates, greater brand recognition, and increased customer retention. By providing your customers with an easy and enjoyable experience, you can make sure that they come back to your website or app again and again. Additionally, a seamless customer journey leads to higher conversion rates as customers are more likely to take the desired action when presented with a clear call-to-action and intuitive navigation. Finally, by providing a consistent and enjoyable experience throughout the customer journey, your brand will become more recognizable and memorable.

The digital customer journey is the path that customers take as they interact with your digital channels. By optimizing this digital customer journey, businesses can ensure that their customers have a positive and seamless experience from start to finish. This includes making it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for, providing clear call-to-actions, and keeping a consistent experience across digital channels. Optimizing the digital customer journey can lead to more conversions and happier customers.

Mariusz Interewicz

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The 5 Steps of the Digital Customer Journey

Sep 22, 2021

Picture it: Your coworker tells you about this great new coffee shop in town. Suddenly you start to see flyers and stickers for this coffee shop everywhere on your commute to and from work. You think to yourself that maybe it’s worth giving this coffee shop a chance, so the next day you stop by. Not only is the coffee amazing, but the staff is super friendly. They even give you a free cookie with your purchase. 

You had an excellent experience. This is now your favorite coffee shop.

When we consider the digital side of things, there’s a process that starts with someone first learning of your company to actually becoming a loyal customer.

The customer’s first point of contact with your brand, all the way to their final purchase, subscription, or outreach on your website, is known as the digital customer journey.

What is the digital customer journey?

The digital customer journey is the path an online user takes to find your business. It’s a journey that’s made up of every single interaction a customer has with your company, from social media to your actual website.

There are five parts to the digital customer journey experience:

• Consideration
• Fulfillment – commitment (email signup, form fill, something where they interact)

1. Awareness 

This is the point in the customer journey where you’re on the radar and your next customer first notices your brand. This can be through many different doors, from word of mouth to social media or ads. This is when first impressions are made and where you can reach your customers. One of the most significant differences to the digital customer journey as opposed to the physical-digital customer journey is that you have stronger control over your message with the digital journey. You control where your digital ads are displayed through social media, your website, and ad placement.

2. Consideration

Your customer has heard of you and is now thinking about how you might be able to help them. This is the step in the customer journey mapping where they visit your website and actually start to engage with your company and brand either directly on the site, through reviews on the internet, or social media. Once again, you have complete control here. Do you want the customer to truly consider your offer? Having a great website will help with that. Having excellent copy and a clear call to action also doesn’t hurt. 

3. Fulfillment 

In our coffee shop example, the fulfillment stage means an actual purchase. In the digital world, this could be a purchase, but it could also be a newsletter signup, a follow, or even a page view. Because fulfillment can mean many different things, it’s essential to define exactly what fulfillment looks like for you and your company. As part of your digital strategy, make sure you define your goals. This helps to ensure that the fulfillment you’re getting is what you want. Page views are great, but if you really want newsletter signups, make sure that’s what you’re tracking for so you don’t get lost in a sea of data.

No matter what action takes place, fulfillment is the place in your customer journey map where your customer commits. They’ve done their research and have decided that your product or service can solve their problem.

4. Experience

Does your product or service live up to your promises? This is where the customer will determine if what was expected is what they received and determine if they are satisfied. It is also where the first impression of your customer service takes place and can play a huge part in overall customer satisfaction. This is also why it’s essential to know the principles of customer experience for your business. 

So, if you promised a newsletter but didn’t deliver, that’s a bad experience. Or, if they fill out the “Contact Us” form and someone is in touch with them the same day? That’s a fantastic experience. 

Experience is arguably the most important step because this is where retaining a customer and creating loyalty takes place. Without great experience, the first three steps don’t mean much because a bad experience will deter a customer from making it to the next and final step: loyalty.

If your product or service delivers exactly what your customer expects, congratulations, you just gained a new loyal customer. Customer loyalty is all about whether or not your customer actually continues to use your service or product.

Although the physical customer experience journey is linear, the digital customer experience takes place as a big ole circle where all the touch points are connected. For example, the loyalty step feeds directly back to the awareness step because if you gain a loyal customer, they are more likely to pass on the good word about your product or service to their friends and family and even share on social media.

The circular digital customer journey tends to get just a bit complex, where certain steps are either skipped altogether or combined with another step. For example, let’s say your favorite YouTuber highly recommends a mobile app that up until now you had never heard of but now, after their raving review, you suddenly feel compelled to download. 

In one fell swoop, you were made aware of this product, considered it, and have followed through with fulfillment.

How The Digital Customer Experience Relates to CX.

The digital customer journey is also directly related to Customer Experience because a great Customer Experience also starts with awareness and ends with loyalty. Customer Experience is all about listening to your customers’ wants and needs. If customers feel heard, they are more likely to not only continue purchasing your product but are also likely to share with others how great your product or service is.

Great Customer Experience can also help to figure out why customers are getting stuck at certain stages in the digital customer journey. Maybe customers are making it to the Consideration stage and visiting your website but not actually making a purchase. By conducting exercises such as surveys, you will be able to figure out exactly why customers are not acting in the way that you expect them to—and how make the right changes.

Understanding the digital customer journey and how it works for a business is essential to reaching a potential customer and keeping a loyal one. Customer behavior , interaction , and experience , whether digital or physical, make all the difference for a business. Gaining customer loyalty and engagement can build your business community.

It’s Time to Turn Visitors into Loyal Customers

Here at the Ranch, we take the Digital Customer Journey seriously. We know that a great Customer Experience and amazing digital product can turn customers into super fans and help you hit your goals. Since a customer can often make multiple touch points with your brand, we use an iterative approach of proven CX strategies to help you validate your assumptions or offer a new path to success. 

Ready to get started? Get in touch (and we promise an actual human will call you).  

Zack is an Experience Director on the Big Nerd Ranch design team and has worked on products for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100s. Zack is passionate about customer experience strategy, helping designers grow in their career, and sharpening consulting and delivery practices.

Schedule a call today! Our team of Nerds are ready to help

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What is a digital journey

Digital customer service..

What is digital journey?

A customer journey is the aggregate of experiences that a customer has when interacting with your organization. Rather than looking at each touchpoint separately -- like their experience in your store, their experience on your website, or their experiencing chatting with a customer support agent -- a customer journey  details the end-to-end experience from the customer’s perspective.

So what is digital journey? A digital journey is focused exclusively on the digital channels  available and used by your customer during their buying journey. These include your company’s website, social media channels, mobile apps, SMS messaging tools, and live chat .

Designing a digital journey

To design a digital journey that will delight your customers and keep them coming back for more, put yourself in their shoes. Define and understand each category of customer that interacts with your company. What are they trying to accomplish by purchasing from your organization? With a deep understanding of your buyers, now consider what content and offers appeal most to the customer. When, where and how should you deliver this information to them?

Additionally, you’ll want to design a digital journey that encompasses all stages of the buying cycle. Typically, these stages are awareness or browsing, filling an online shopping cart, and making a purchase. It’s also important to consider the buyer’s post-purchase needs and wants, whether that involves interacting with customer support or encouraging them to make another purchase from your company.

Benefits of creating an outstanding digital journey.

Focusing on your customer’s journey through a digital lens and ensuring it’s best-in-class can create value in several ways.

Grow revenue

By leveraging the rich at-your-fingertips data available through the technologies that fuel a buyer’s digital journey, you’re able to intelligently offer additional products to the customer. If 80% of the other customers who purchased decorative pillows also purchased a new table lamp, ensure that your digital journey displays your top-selling, in-stock offerings.

Improve customer experiences

As customers continue to embrace digital channels, companies have an opportunity to improve interactions and deliver improved customer experiences. Digital experiences are typically simpler and faster to use. Would you rather stroll aisle after aisle of a home goods superstore searching for a seasonal throw pillow? Or would you rather enter a few words into a search box and find the perfect item for your living room couch at home in your recliner?

Reduce costs

Lastly, a well-designed digital journey can help your company lower costs. By maintaining an easy-to-use help center on your website and leveraging chatbots in your contact center, you’re able to easily answer some of the most common questions a customer has without engaging live agents.

NICE CXone is the leading call center software  used by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. As a cloud-native, unified suite of applications, CXone helps companies productively interact with customers through digital channels. Watch our webinar to find out more about the role contact centers play in shaping digital journeys .

Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.

• Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
• Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
• Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.

CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.

• Single Interface:  one inbox for all digital messaging  and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
• Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
• Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.

With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.

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What is a Digital Customer Journey?

If you were wondering what a digital customer journey is , well, it begins with customers using online or mobile banking channels to carry out financial activities such as checking their account balance, making payments, transferring money between accounts or even applying for a loan.

The advantage of having an all-digital customer journey is that banks have greater visibility of what customers do on various channels. They can provide more targeted feedback and recommendations based on each individual's needs and behavior patterns. Additionally, automated processes make it easier for banks to handle large volumes of requests quickly and efficiently while still providing the personalized service levels that consumers expect these days.

What are the steps on a digital customer journey?

There are many actions users can make on a digital customer journey. Some of the most important ones include learning about the product or service, registering for an account, browsing products or services, making purchases, requesting support and resolving complaints. Each step must be designed to meet customers' specific needs so they can easily find what they're looking for and complete transactions without any hassle.

Understanding how people interact with websites and other online platforms is key to creating an effective digital customer journey. Banks can design journeys tailored specifically to their target audience by studying user behavior patterns. Additionally, it's important to ensure all channels (website homepage, checkout page, etc.) work seamlessly together so customers have a positive experience regardless of their use.

How can banks improve their digital customer journeys?

A digital customer journey is a path a person takes when interacting with a bank or other financial institution online.

A digital customer journey may include the following phases:

• Digital Onboarding . Here the customer can be onboarded automatically, or assisted remotely by an expert, providing the relevant information and documents required by the process.
• Customer Evaluation . Here the system can evaluate the customer and their request, including automatically. This step can also be done with the support of an expert.
• Customer Engagement . When the time is right, the system can automatically get in touch with the customer, proposing a tailored offer that can even be accepted through an in-app notification directly on the home banking app.
• Business Development . In this phase, the system can support banks in identifying the best candidates for an upselling or cross-selling offer.

How can banks personalize their digital customer journeys?

Any good digital customer journey aims to provide an easy, efficient experience that meets users' expectations while making it simple for them to complete transactions quickly and without hassle.

Banks can personalize their digital customer journeys by tailoring each step of the process specifically to meet their customers' needs and wants. This requires collecting data about each user's preferences and habits so that banks can create unique experiences for everyone who interacts with them online. Personalized journeys not only make customers feel valued and appreciated but also encourage repeat business and help build long-term relationships with customers.

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How voice of the customer insights can inform the future of digital experience.

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Mr. Rajesh Kari , VP and Business Leader, Infovision Social—the Research, Digital Experience, Social Media Analytics arm of InfoVision.

Steve Jobs once said that people do not know what they want until you show it to them. The basics of digital interaction strategy adoption lie in the essentials of user needs. More often than not, the trends that rule the industry may not be custom fits for all businesses or their end users. What should drive the digital customer experience (DCX) (a sum of all digital interactions) and digital experience (DX) is more about meeting customer expectations in every single interaction.

Yes, digital experience strategy should be driven by customers at its very core instead of being an IT-driven initiative. We have all witnessed the rapidly changing customer expectations lately—they can absolutely be overwhelming to keep up with.

Instead, companies should approach DX strategy with what I call digital empathy: Understand the customers and their needs and then guide them through the digital ecosystem. And how do you do that? By making voice of the customer insights the basis of your DX strategy.

Putting Customers In The Driver’s Seat

Gone are the days when customers would just settle for the DX that a brand offered. Today, they generally want more access at their disposal. They want to decide for themselves. It can be hard for companies to make a shift to enabling their customers to dictate their experience. But this shift can be managed better with knowledge of customers’ needs.

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Conducting research that helps you deconstruct customer preferences, their behaviors and their expectations is crucial. (Full disclosure: My company conducts user research.) A robust research methodology coupled with digital (website and mobile app) data analysis can help you identify customer intent that can act as a road map to your DX strategy. In short, it’s absolutely essential to know your end users or customers.

Humanizing The Digital Experience

The toughest challenge is to figure out how and when customers are trying to access a brand in the most convenient way—without differentiating between digital and nondigital experiences. The transition should be natural. They are likely to engage less with disconnected digital interactions.

User research coupled with digital user journey analysis and a social business impact analysis (BIA) can reveal accurate points of agitation for customers. In user research, it’s important to get the target audience details right in order to have an accurate, detailed understanding of their aspirations, needs and wants. You can look at existing customers’ data to gather these details.

There are also a number of digital analytics tools available to help you study digital journeys, which often reveal enough data through their heat maps and drop-off points. This can help with identifying friction points and the reasons for such drop-offs.

Your digital experience strategy can then focus on eliminating these agitation points upfront and boosting their digital experience. The very fact that your customers were able to complete their intended interaction without any hassles would create a far superior digital experience scenario.

Using More Data Layers To Make It Easier

Another misconception prevalent in DX is that longer engagement time on digital assets is a good thing. It is in certain cases, but not always. It benefits the organization to keep the customer on the website a little longer. But what the customer often wants is to finish what they intend to do on the website faster. Do you see the contradiction here? By studying user journeys, you can reveal how users move from one page to another. But the lack of context in such analyses can be misleading at times. Where they are getting disgruntled, where are they rage-clicking, what do they absolutely love about your digital asset, and what do they despise?

You can conduct research to determine all of these things by looking at how your target customers use digital assets like websites or mobile apps. Look at how they search for products or services, how they buy, and so on. You can then use these insights to create what I call a guided experience pathway, which reduces their efforts and can accelerate conversion.

Guided journey pathways are simple steps or interactions that help the end users get to their digital goals faster. You can create these pathways by posing questions, creating gamified interactions with your system or even using AI-powered chatbots. (Full disclosure: My company offers intelligent chatbots, as do others.)

When business leaders think about digital experience investments, they often inadvertently think about new tools, channels or touchpoints. But none of these are likely to help if you don’t understand the target audience that you are trying to serve. We live in an era where digital ecosystems have become quite complex. However, in my experience, the customer expectations from brands are still very simple: You need to understand them and then engage them. A brand that knows how to make the best use of voice of the customer insights can deliver superior digital experiences as well.

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Attribution basics

The Attribution Academy is filled with all the information you need about marketing attribution.

(Digital) Customer Journey

What is a (digital) customer journey.

In digital marketing, we have the unique ability to gain a lot of insights. We see what a customer clicks on, or how many pages he or she clicks before making a purchase. A customer journey is a path a customer takes before converting on your website. This path can occur online, offline or both online and offline.

A short definition

A customer journey is defined as the path or the cycle that a customer follows before deciding on the purchase of a product. The digital customer journey hence takes into account all online touchpoints that the user has with the product or brand before the purchase.

A customer journey takes place both at your website and outside your website. Therefore, the term customer journey is multi interpretable. At Odyssey, we mean the traffic sources that have sent a visitor to an advertiser’s website that finally led to a conversion or sale.

This means, every time a customer interacts with a traffic source, it is accounted for in what is called a touch point. The customer journey is therefore nothing more than a sequence of touch points before a conversion.

For example: If someone visits a webshop 5 times and buys a product on his 5th visit, we look at this customer journey as 5 touchpoints (traffic sources). Those 5 touchpoints have all contributed to the purchase.

What exactly is included when we talk about Customer Journeys?

Traditionally, a customer journey can include anything ranging from traditional (offline) media, social media, paid search, organic search and all other possible traffic sources. Simply put, if you see a product advertisement on a poster, then buy it on the mobile app, your customer journey includes those two touchpoints.

In the classic model a customer journey includes the following steps:

Awareness (first interest by the customer)

Consideration (interest becomes for concrete)

Conversion (decision to buy is made)

Retention (first experience is collected)

Advocacy (sharing experiences with others)

This references the famous AIDA model. It explains that advertising is effective through the four stages of Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

When we talk about digital customer journeys, we limit this to the digital world. This is because it is hardly possible to track physical touch points with the brand or product.

Why are Customer Journeys so important?

In recent times, the importance of customer journeys has risen tenfold. As the volume of ecommerce sales steadily increases, firms become more and more concerned with topics like user experience and digital customer experience.

But why is that so crucial in today’s industry?

In short, online customers expect to get the best experience possible. Hence, a short customer journey means a short and good experience before buying the product or service. So customer journeys can be used to identify inefficient traffic sources in those journeys, and to ultimately improve customer journeys.

Customer Journeys can also be used to identify behavioral patterns and trends, which can be used to improve the customer experience.

This is useful in many different ways. For instance, it can help you directly see and analyze customer behavior and adjust your marketing strategies to it. It also helps getting rid of traffic sources that do not contribute a lot to your customer journey.

Customer Journey Mapping

Very interesting for digital marketers is also to make use of digital customer journey mapping. This means mapping a diagram that depicts the various stages a customer goes through when interacting with the company in real time.

This can include the initial conversion, but also future services such as customer service or social media.

The benefits for the company are wide-ranging, from implying on how (and when) to interact with potential customers to figuring out which outlets are the most effective. It can also highlight issues with the customer experience, and thus increase customer satisfaction.

However, it mainly describes how customers moved through the sales funnel and gives implications on how to make these journeys shorter. In other words, it allows a company to make more sales in fewer steps.

For example, if a company sees that a lot of its journeys are ineffective in paid search, it needs to reconsider the budget (or strategy) for paid search. Similarly, a company can always seize new potentials through identifying other attractive sources.

The Bottom Line

Word of mouth, paid search, social media and posters - all of these make up a touch point within a customer journey. In a rapidly changing environment and with consumers who become more and more impatient, it is key that customer journeys become shorter and efficient.

You can use the concept of customer journeys to identify your most and least effective outlets, improve customer experience and hence increase your sales.

By using customer journeys to gain insights, one can ensure the most efficient use of their channels and get important implications on what budget to allocate to what channel. This means, money can potentially be saved and used where it is more efficient elsewhere. And all these advantages can be obtained whilst reducing the length of the journey, leading to a faster conversion.

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In case you want to find out more about digital marketing or attribution, make sure to check out our blog or our other academy posts. You can also schedule a demo and start experiencing it for yourself!

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Mapping the Digital Marketing Customer Journey for Agency Success

By Lawrence Dy | Apr 5, 2024 | Agency Insights | 8 min read

Every client that works with your agency—and each customer that buys from your clients—takes a journey before they commit to a purchase. By understanding the digital marketing customer journey , you can better influence it—capturing more leads and supporting higher conversion rates. However, the customer journey can be unique for each type of product or client, so you must do homework before leveraging this marketing tool.

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Whether you want to start a digital marketing company or expand to new client types, knowing how to map customer journeys and draw actionable conclusions about campaigns from those details is important. This guide explains the five stages of the digital marketing customer journey and provides steps for mapping your own customer journeys.

What is the digital marketing customer journey?

A customer journey is the process a potential client goes through from the point they become aware of a need to the time they become a loyal customer and advocate for a brand, service, or product. Digital channels and touchpoints, including social media, search engines, and landing pages, are all critical in shaping this journey.

To understand what a customer journey might look like for potential clients of a digital agency startup , consider the hypothetical example below:

• A business doesn't have a strong social media presence and realizes this may be a weak link for its online branding and marketing.
• The business owner begins to search online to learn more about social media marketing.
• A digital marketing agency's blog post on the topic appears in the search results, and the agency owner clicks through to read more.
• Later, the business owner realizes that successful social media marketing requires a lot of work—they either need to hire someone to help with this or find an agency to help.
• Remembering the helpful nature of the marketing agency's blog post, the agency owner returns to that site to read more about the social media services.
• The business owner becomes a client of the agency.
• After seeing successful results with social media marketing campaigns, the business owner invests in other agency services and refers other businesses to the agency.

The five stages of the customer journey

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1. Awareness

During this stage, customers become aware of a need or challenge and the fact that products and solutions exist to meet that need.

Brand awareness is essential to engaging with prospects in this phase. Digital strategies such as social media marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization help increase customer awareness of your products. They also create opportunities for others to share your content to increase potential exposure.

2. Findability

In the second stage, prospects actively search for information and solutions. They may turn to search engines, ask for recommendations on social media, or return to sites they remember as authoritative from previous searches.

To connect with potential clients in this stage of the journey, your services must be easy to find. Consider how you can optimize digital channels and websites to make content and solutions easy to understand. You may want to invest in search engine marketing, such as PPC efforts, to enhance your visibility in the search engines.

3. Reputation

As consumers find potential businesses or products to meet their needs, they evaluate the credibility and potential fit of these options. Common actions in this stage of the customer journey include reading reviews and testimonials, asking trusted friends about experiences with a product, and reviewing brand about us and services pages.

Social proof is critically important in this stage. Ensure you have processes to encourage existing clients to leave reviews and refer others.

4. Conversion

At this point in the digital marketing customer journey, the prospect takes a desired action, such as buying a product, signing up for a service, joining a newsletter subscriber list, or attending a webinar.

Strong conversion funnels are important at this stage. Ensure your marketing strategies support a positive user experience and that you leverage persuasive techniques to encourage potential clients to take those actions.

5. Advocacy

That first purchase isn’t the end of the customer journey. In the final stage, existing customers and clients become loyal brand ambassadors. They’re among the first to try new services you offer and they talk positively about your business and refer others.

Using the digital marketing customer journey for agency clients

You can also use the customer value journey for digital marketing to support lead generation strategies and other services you provide to clients. Reviewing client services and marketing efforts through the lens of the customer journey framework can help you identify strengths you can leverage and weaknesses you can address.

To use the customer journey framework with clients, you need to:

• Understand client goals
• Identify the right target audiences
• Align marketing strategies with customer journey stages

Tips and tricks to map out your client's customer journey

Customer journey online marketing should be among your agency skills . Start practicing this critical marketing skill with your clients by following the steps below.

1. Define objectives

Start by understanding the goals of your marketing strategy or the client business, as this impacts what part of the customer journey you may need to address first.

For example, if your client wants to launch a brand new product into a market, you might begin by concentrating on the awareness and findability stages. But if a client has a strong brand presence and wants to work on driving more conversions, you might concentrate on the conversion stage.

2. Gather information about your customers

You might know how to find clients and drive conversions, but before you can put those skills into action, you must understand the specific target audience for each effort. Gather information about target customers to create customer personas. You’ll need information such as:

• Demographics. Age, income level, geolocation, and other demographics can impact customer journeys. For example, people of various ages tend to use different social media platforms.
• Online behaviors. Consider how the target audience engages online. Are they most interested in video or text content, for example.
• Existing customer metrics. Review data and feedback related to existing customers to determine how you can leverage that information to improve future customer journeys.

3. List all potential customer touchpoints

The typical digital marketing customer journey involves numerous touchpoints. The infamous marketing “Rule of 7” says prospects must see a message at least seven times before they engage with it. While this traditional wisdom, which dates back to the 1930s, may not be spot-on accurate today, the concept is still true.

An accurate customer journey map considers those many touchpoints. Brainstorm with your client and team to list all possible ways a consumer might interact with a brand, product, or marketing message.

4. Think about the ideal customer journey

Take some time to draft the perfect customer journey with your client. This is a customer journey with no friction in the process that leads to a conversion every time.

5. Now consider real journeys customers take

With the ideal customer journey as a starting point—and armed with all the information you’ve gathered about actual customer behavior—talk about what more realistic customer journeys might look like.

Ask your client and marketing team to consider questions such as:

• Where is friction in the process that might slow a customer journey?
• What types of challenges or considerations might derail the journey or cause someone to investigate the competition instead?
• How many paths might a customer take to conversion and what do those various journeys look like?

This is also a good time to consider actual customer feedback about the journey. Customers can tell you where they experienced a challenge and at what point in the process they knew they were making a purchase.

6. Create visual representations of potential customer journeys

Explain client relationships with customers and marketing efforts with visual representations that are easy to follow. You can use Excel or other programs to create flow charts that tell a visual story about the customer journey.

Image source: Excel

Implement the customer journey framework for better results

Understanding the buyer’s journey in digital marketing is critical to success. This information can help you make decisions about the best niches for marketing agencies and inform your customer acquisition, retention, and brand advocacy efforts.

If you haven’t implemented the customer journey framework in your digital marketing strategies, consider doing so today. All you need to get started is time to gather data, feedback from customers and your marketing team, and a program to create flow charts or other mapping visuals.

About the Author

Lawrence Dy

Lawrence Dy is the SEO Strategy Manager at Vendasta. His career spans from starting as a Jr. Copywriter in the automotive industry to becoming a Senior Editorial Content Manager in various digital marketing niches. Outside of work, Lawrence moonlights as a music producer/beatmaker and spends time with friends and family.

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Three customer success trends in a post-pandemic world

COVID-19 changed everything. Loyalty is on the auction block. Customers are uncertain: delaying purchases and shopping around. Brands that win in this new era will…

Janet de Guzman

April 4, 2024 • 4 minutes read

COVID-19 changed everything. Loyalty is on the auction block. Customers are uncertain: delaying purchases and shopping around. Brands that win in this new era will use customer success to drive transformative change with an eye to the future. 

What is customer success?

Customer success grew out of the boom in SaaS companies. As B2B SaaS companies gained popularity in the early 2000s, vendors faced a challenge: neglecting customer training and retention led to frustrated users grappling with complex software, resulting in higher churn rates and reduced profitability. This underscores the importance of reducing churn to maximize customer life value in subscription-based models.

Customer success is a discipline focused on ensuring customers reach their desired outcomes when using an organization’s product or services. A relationship-focused customer success strategy includes involvement in the purchase decision, implementation and use of products or services and customer support – proactively engaging with customers to understand their needs, address any challenges and foster long-term satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer success trends shaping the future

Customer success aims to be a key driver of growth by aligning your company with the customer – taking a thoughtful, proactive, and strategic approach to growing the portfolio over time. Here are three trends impacting the landscape.

1. Customer expectations are skyrocketing

Customers are expecting brands to automate and personalize the service they receive. In fact, 93% of customer service teams say expectations are higher than ever before. Coming out of the pandemic, customers have new priorities. Accenture found that 50% of survey respondents say the pandemic and everything that has happened since has made them question their life choices – and 48% say they plan less than a year into the future, or even not at all.

As budgets come under pressure, customer success teams will need to dig deep to optimize their resources and find innovative ways to deliver value without incurring excessive costs. Brands need to move beyond age, gender, career level and socio-economic segments into crafting seamless and unique experiences for customers.

2. More customers are focusing on the latter half of the journey

There’s a growing appreciation in business of the importance of the post-sale customer journey. Although customer success started in SaaS, it has since branched out into other industries such as banking, insurance, and telecommunications – and it’s even being adopted in some surprising places like healthcare. Depending on the industry, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 35 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. 1

Teams are zeroing in on how customer data can be analyzed to identify emerging trends, potential issues and opportunities for improvements. Contact center analytics can help uncover insights that help brands provide better customer journeys. Improved orchestration can help inform next journey steps along with predictive insights: who’s more likely to expand and who might be at risk of leaving. These insights can help customer success teams fine-tune their strategies over time and provide a deeply personalized experience.

3. Customer success is increasingly becoming a key driver of growth

Customer success is crucial against a backdrop of inflation, budget constraints, and challenging economic conditions. Many organizations are leaning into customer success to transition it from a cost center to a profit center. Research by Forrester found that 72% of companies said improving customer success was their number one priority. Two-thirds (66.3%) of customer success professionals say they are not currently using AI in their role. Those that do seem to be using it to write and condense emails and perform preliminary research. Others use it to ensure brevity and clarity in customer communications. Looking ahead, AI has exciting potential. Maintaining transparency and honesty in the way it’s used will become increasingly critical to winning and retaining customer trust.

Customer acquisition is only the first step in an extended journey for both the customer and the business. Delivering consistent and value-rich post-sale experiences is key to driving growth in this environment. Learn more about how OpenText Experience Cloud can help you cultivate meaningful customer relationships by delivering value-rich post-sale experiences.

•  Forbes , 2022.
• Accenture Life Trends , 2024.
• The State of Customer Success Report, 2023.

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As Senior Director of Product Marketing for OpenText Experience Cloud, Janet de Guzman works at the intersection of product management, engineering, sales, and marketing. She leads a global team responsible for the development and implementation of marketing, messaging, positioning and go-to-market strategies for our digital experience solutions. Janet has more than 20 years of diverse experience in information management, business development, management consulting and industry marketing.

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