What Is A Customer Experience Journey? Here's Everything You Need To Know

Mapping the customer experience journey for your target audience is more important than you might think. To capture customers, earn their loyalty, and increase sales, you need to know how to consistently connect with, engage, and support buyers throughout their lifecycle.

A comprehensive view of the journey customers take with your business, from the point they become aware of a problem, to the stage when they’re ready to advocate for your company, significantly increases your company’s chances of success. 

Unfortunately, while around 30% of companies have “mapped” the customer journey, according to Gartner, many struggle to use these maps effectively.

Here, we’ll show you not only how to define and map the customer experience journey, but how you can use it to unlock new revenue and opportunities for your organization.

What is a Customer Experience Journey?

The customer experience journey is the series of steps your customer takes with your brand as they become aware of a pain point or need and make a purchasing decision. Notably, a customer experience journey isn’t exactly the same as the “buyer journey”. 

The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from the stage of initial awareness, to the point where they purchase a product or service. The customer experience journey, on the other hand, extends beyond the purchase, and follows how customers interact with your product, help to promote your brand, or remain loyal to your company. 

For instance, the customer experience journey for a SaaS company selling marketing software might start with a customer recognizing a problem with inefficient marketing processes, and researching solutions online. It may then move onto a customer interacting with a sales person, making a purchase, and referring other users to the same company as part of a loyalty program.

Why Understanding the Customer Experience Journey is Crucial 

Understanding the customer experience journey your consumers have helps to shed more light on your target audience’s needs and expectations. This is crucial at a time when 80% of companies are competing primarily based on customer experience. 

When you know the steps your customers take with your brand, you can optimize every interaction and touchpoint to increase conversions, loyalty, and advocacy. 

What’s more, understanding the customer experience journey helps you:

• Understand the goals, priorities and expectations of your audience, so you can better anticipate and address their needs. 
• Identify all of the key touchpoints you should be using to interact with customers, to advertise products, increase sales, and deliver customer service. 
• Analyze potential issues your customers have when buying products or services from you, so you can deliver a better experience. 
• Increase customer engagement, by identifying the best times and places to interact with customers throughout their lifecycle.
• Boost ROI, by improving your marketing operations, sales campaigns, and customer service strategies to increase revenue. 

The Stages of the Customer Experience Journey

The stages of the customer experience journey are similar to the steps involved in a buyer’s journey. The key difference is that an optimized customer experience journey doesn’t just focus on marketing and sales, it requires a commitment to excellent, ongoing customer service too. 

The main stages to be aware of include:

1. Awareness

During the awareness phase, your customers are just starting to become aware of your brand. They’ve already identified a challenge they need to overcome or a goal they want to accomplish, and they’re searching for answers and information on social media channels and search engines.

At this stage, your customers will be gathering as much information as possible about their issue and your brand, paying attention to influencers, web content, and recommendations. 

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your product or service as a solution to their problem. They’re starting to compare your products to alternatives, looking for insights into why they should choose you over the competition. 

This is the time when companies should draw the most attention to their unique value propositions and the benefits they can offer compared to other organizations. 

3. Conversion/Decision

The conversion, decision, or purchasing stage is when customers are ready to act. The goal for companies during this stage is to persuade customers to convert. They should be providing all the information customers need to make decisions, such as sales pages and pricing details. 

You may also consider using extra content to make your solution more attractive, such as promotional offers, or you might use abandoned cart emails and push notifications to boost engagement.

4. Retention

Once a customer makes a purchase, the retention stage of the journey focuses on keeping them loyal to your brand, and encouraging repeat transactions. Studies frequently show that acquiring a new customer can be five times more expensive than converting an existing one, so a good retention strategy is crucial to your success. 

Boost your chances of earning customer loyalty with a strong, streamlined onboarding process, a strategy for consistent outreach, engagement, and customer education, and a commitment to excellent customer service. 

5. Advocacy

Finally, in the advocacy stage, companies look for ways to leverage the satisfaction and loyalty of their existing customers to attract new buyers to their organization. Customers who love your brand could be willing to spread the word about your products and even help you capture leads in exchange for rewards as part of a loyalty program or referral campaign.

Encouraging advocacy can also include simply asking customers to talk about your brand on social media or share their experiences with your products through user-generated content and reviews.

How to Create a Customer Experience Journey Map

A customer experience journey map is a visual representation of all the steps customers take from awareness to becoming advocates for your brand. Some companies have multiple journey maps, focusing on different segments of their target audience. These maps often need to be updated and optimized over time as companies gather more data on their customers. 

Here’s how you can start creating customer experience journey maps. 

Step 1: Create buyer personas

The first step in developing a customer experience journey map is identifying your buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer or user. Your buyer personas should outline everything you need to know about the customers you want to reach, highlighting demographic data (like age or location), their personality traits, and behaviours.

There are various ways to collect data for buyer personas, from reading market research and reports, to drawing data from your CRM software and website analytics. You can also conduct surveys and focus groups to build on your insights. 

Once you’ve collected your data, segment your customers into different groups, and create a unique “customer profile” for each segment. 

Step 2: List touchpoints for each customer journey stage

Next, you’ll need to identify all of the core touchpoints your customers use to interact with your company and vice versa through every stage of the customer experience journey. Consider both direct and indirect touchpoints, such as your website (direct), and word-of-mouth marketing (indirect). 

Some key touchpoints to consider for each journey stage include:

• Awareness: Paid advertising, content marketing, social media posts, referrals and recommendations, press releases, and search engines.
• Consideration: Email and SMS advertising, website and mobile content, landing pages, sales calls, reviews and testimonials, and comparison guides. 
• Conversion: Sales and checkout pages, retargeting ads, abandoned cart campaigns, chatbots, pop-ups and forms, and sales calls. 
• Retention: Thank-you emails, online communities, onboarding campaigns, customer success campaigns, webinars and educational events. 
• Advocacy: Loyalty campaigns and referral campaigns, exclusive events, promotions for VIP customers, and social media contests. 

Step 3: Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Once you’ve identified all the core touchpoints in your customer’s journey, the next step is identifying the “experience” they have with each touchpoint. Think about:

• Customer actions: What did your customer do to reach this point in their journey (such as searching for something on Google or clicking an ad). What do you want them to do next? 
• Motivations: What’s prompting your customer to continue moving through their journey? What goals do they want to accomplish, or what challenges do they want to overcome?
• Emotions: How will customers feel at this stage in their customer experience journey? Are they excited, nervous, concerned, or frustrated by a problem they’re facing?
• Questions: What kind of questions will customers be asking at this stage? Do they need to know more about your brand, your product, how you compare to other solutions, or how they can contact you or make a purchase?
• Obstacles and pain points: What kind of roadblocks might be stopping your customer from taking the next step? For instance, if they arrive on your website checkout page, are they reluctant to buy something because of the cost, or is there something else getting in the way?

Translating Insights into a Business Strategy

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Once you have your customer journey maps, it’s time to put them to good use, by implementing them into your business strategy. 

Now that you know the steps your customers take in their journey with your brand and the touchpoints you can use to connect with them, you can begin building a unique experience. For instance, if you know a lot of your customers' journey takes place via a mobile device, you can use a platform like GENESISX to create an engaging mobile experience. 

For instance, Starbucks used the GENESISX APP>LESS platform to identify potential customers based on their proximity to stores, and their interest in coffee-related content. The app then engaged users and introduced them to new coffee flavors, used quizzes to help them identify the best product, and offered access to exclusive promotions to increase conversions.

Overall, this mobile journey led to a 15% increase in sales across target stores. 

Quick Tips for Using Your Customer Journey Maps

Effective customer journey maps give you the power to customize and enhance every stage of your customer’s interactions with your brand. When you’re translating the insights you have into your business strategy, here are some top tips to follow:

• Identify specific goals and objectives: Determine the stages of the customer journey where you can build the strongest connections with your customers and prioritize those points. For instance, if you know you boost conversions significantly with mobile experiences, focus on creating a mobile-friendly guide to help customers purchase the right product. 
• Use an omnichannel approach: Connecting with customers across multiple channels throughout their customer journey ensures you can keep them engaged and reach a wider audience. Experiment with outreach and experience across email, social media, your website, and various other channels. 
• Personalize every interaction: Leverage as much data as you can about your target audience to create more personalized, relevant, and helpful experiences for customers. With the right data, you can even guide customers toward the ideal product or service based on their specific goals and pain points, boosting conversions. 
• Gather insights: Use analytical and reporting tools, as well as direct feedback from customers in the form of reviews, testimonials, and social media comments, to optimize your strategy over time. Be ready to experiment with new strategies as your customer’s preferences and shopping behaviors change.

Mapping a Successful Customer Experience Journey

Mapping a customer experience journey and using that map to guide your business growth can be complex in today’s omnichannel world. However, the more you understand about your customers' touchpoints with your brand and the stages involved in their purchasing decisions, the more you can optimize their experiences and increase sales.

A deep knowledge of the customer journey ensures you can build experiences that adhere to your customer expectations, increasing loyalty, revenue, and brand equity. 

Discover how you can build more powerful mobile customer journeys with GENESISX today. 

Contact us to learn more about our customer engagement solutions.

Feature Image by Andrea Piacquadio