What is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with a company and brand. Instead of looking at each interaction separately, a customer journey documents the entire experience from the customer's perspective. A customer journey map illustrates the steps a customer goes through when engaging with a company, whether it be a product purchase, an online experience, a retail experience, a service, or any combination thereof. As expected, the more touchpoints there are, the more complicated and valuable the customer journey map becomes.

While a customer journey map will show a linear progression through the various interactions, that is rarely the reality, as customers can retrace their steps and choose different paths. The purpose of the exercise of documenting the customer journey is to accurately portray the customer experience and to identify actions (What is the customer doing at each stage?), motivations (Why is the customer proceeding to the next step? Why are they starting at that touchpoint?), questions (Where are there uncertainties?), and barriers (What structural, process, cost or other barriers stand in the way of moving to the next stage?).

What are the benefits of a customer journey map?

Once a customer's journey is clear, then multiple business benefits can be realized, including:

1. Better understanding of all customers

2. Identifification and correction of operational issues

3. Alignment of the organization with the customer experience

4. Helping the organization understand customer effort

The customer effort score (CES) is a powerful metric that measures how much effort a customer had to exert while doing business with an organization. Customers rank their experience on a seven-point scale ranging from "Very Difficult" to "Very Easy." This determines how much effort was required to use the product or service and how likely they are to continue paying for it.