What is the Customer Journey?

Not all customers are the same.

Each of your customers has different wants and needs and might interact with your business differently.

This is because each of your customers will be in a different stage of the customer journey.

And knowing your customer journey stages and details can help you to better serve your customers.

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey refers to the multiple stages through which your customer goes through when interacting with your business.

For example, a customer journey map can detail your customer interactions through the awareness (pre-purchase), purchase, and engagement (post-purchase) stages.

A customer journey map can be as general or detailed as you’d want to make it. It can be a simple map with three stages like the one mentioned before or it can be broken down into further stages.

Taking it a step further, you can draw out Customer Journey maps for specific departments of your company that deal with customers. For example, you can have a customer journey map for Customer Support and a different one for Customer Success.

Here is an example of a customer journey map for customer support:

How does it help your company?

Detailing the specifics of each of these stages can help your business to better strategize for each strategy, improving your customer satisfaction scores.

For example, it can help you better assist a customer who is running into a product issue for the first time vs a customer who is contacting you for the second time about an ongoing issue.

Both these customers have different expectations and needs, the customer journey map can help identify and improve the customer experience for both.

How to map your Customer Journey?

Mapping out your Customer Journey is easier than you’d think.

First, you just need to choose what process you’re mapping: Will you map the overall customer experience, the customer support experience or another journey?

After you choose the process you will be mapping. You will have to identify the different stages of said journey. These can be as many stages as needed from pre-interaction to post-interaction.

These stages will be the columns of your Customer Journey Map.

As for the rows, you can create this by asking some of the following questions:

What does the customer do at this stage?
What do you (as the business) have to do at this stage?
How does the customer interact with your business at this stage?
What does the customer experience at this stage? (Both positive and negative experiences)
How can this stage be improved to maximize positive experiences and reduce negative experiences?

Closing Thoughts

Customer Journey maps are a great analytical tool that can help you improve your customer satisfaction scores across your company.

And as we mentioned before, increased customer satisfaction can have a direct positive impact on your business revenue.

It is now up to you to decide which processes you’ll want to map out.