- Request a demo
- United States
If you’ve ever taken a journey, you know the stress and frustration that can result if you experience delays or have to alter your plans. Whether it’s traffic, a transit strike, or the flight crew turning up late to the gate, encountering unexpected obstacles that slow down or derail your journey can quickly put you in a bad mood, and even make you feel resentful for having to endure the inconvenience.
The same is true for customers trying to do business with you. If they experience delays or friction, if they receive contradictory or confusing messages, or if the buying process simply isn’t smooth enough, they are likely to end their customer journey long before they reach the “destination” you want to guide them to: the sale. Worse, they probably won’t make that journey again — at least, not with your brand or business.
This guide can help you, and your sales and marketing teams, better understand what the customer journey entails so you can improve your efforts to guide your customers not just to the first sale, but to many more after that. It also highlights practical strategies and technology tools you can use to optimize each stage of that journey to help your customers have positive and productive experiences when engaging with your business.
You are a consumer, and you have no doubt been on countless customer journeys in your lifetime. Even so, to make sure your business is doing what’s needed to support your customers along their journeys, let’s review what a customer journey is and what its six main stages are.
The customer journey is every step a consumer takes along the road to becoming your customer. There are many steps in that journey but we distill them down to six key stages which we’ll discuss in more detail throughout this guide. The six stages are, in this order:
Each step in the customer journey has touchpoints or interactions that provide a business with the opportunity to elevate the customer experience. However, each interaction is also a potential pain point, a moment when the customer journey can go awry.
Before we delve into the various stages of the customer journey, let’s look at a hypothetical example of a customer journey in the auto industry.
The customer journey for an auto buyer is a bit different from the healthcare journey, but it essentially leads to the same destination.
A recent college graduate has saved up enough money to buy her first brand-new car. She can only buy a small car because of the lack of parking near her apartment building. She’s aware from social media posts that several car manufacturers, including Fiat, BMW/MINI, and Mitsubishi make vehicles that would work for her.
She quickly moves into the discovery stage, which is prompted by a targeted ad from a local Fiat dealership that keeps cropping up online while she’s doing her research. The ad touts a generous first-time buyer discount for qualifying purchasers. So, she calls the dealership to get more information on the discount and to ask what models are available.
This grad is now at the consideration stage, and she’s in luck. The model she wants is in the dealership’s current inventory and comes with a $2,500 first-time buyer discount. However, she has to act quickly to take advantage of the offer. She visits the dealership, test-drives a few cars, and continues her customer journey by purchasing a Fiat 500.
Over the next year or so, this consumer takes her car back to the dealer for its factory warranty services. She’s so happy with her purchase and her treatment at the dealership that she continues to get oil changes, smog checks, and service long after the free factory services have expired. She’s not only become a loyal customer but an active advocate for this dealership. She’s talked the business up so often to her friends and colleagues that two of them have also decided to purchase a vehicle there.
The auto dealership provided a frictionless customer journey, with no delays, issues, or bumps in the road. By doing so, it promoted customer satisfaction, earned customer loyalty, and even inspired advocacy. There were plenty of points where things could have ended differently, but that didn’t happen, and it was a win-win for the business and its customer.
There are 5 key components to a customer journey. Before we dive deeper into them, it’s important to note that the customer journey is not the same as the customer experience, even though they are intertwined. These terms are often confused.
The customer experience, often referred to simply as CX, is how a business interacts with a customer at every stage of their customer journey. Maintaining a positive customer experience helps you keep the customer journey moving forward, and plays a critical role in customer retention and advocacy. As such, CX is integral to a successful customer journey. In fact, a Salesforce study found that 88% of consumers believe the customer experience a business provides is just as important as its product or services.
Now, let’s talk about the key components of the customer journey.
Touchpoints exist throughout the customer journey. They are the places or moments where the customer engages with your brand.
Engagement can be direct, such as when a consumer finds your business in their online search results, visits your website, sees an ad, or receives an email marketing piece from you.
Touchpoints can also be indirect, such as when the consumer reads a review of your business or product, or your business is mentioned in a blog they read or podcast they listen to.
Each touchpoint, whether direct or indirect, creates awareness and perception of your brand in the customer’s mind and leads them deeper into the customer journey.
Interactions are more than touchpoints; they are moments when a consumer actively engages with your brand or business. Interactions also occur throughout the customer journey.
A consumer may see an offer online and pick up the phone to get more information or drop into your store. Those are both valuable interactions. The consumer may engage a chatbot on your website for help in setting up a medical appointment. That’s another interaction. They may call customer service with a question or problem. That’s also a very valuable interaction.
Interactions provide an opportunity for a business to reinforce the customer experience with exceptional service and also generate valuable data from the customer at the same time. For example, if a customer is happy with the service they’ve received, they’ll be more willing to complete a short survey or provide a review.
Channels are the means by which you communicate with your customers along the customer journey. Think of these channels as the lanes on a huge highway. Consumers on their customer journey might use social media apps, like Instagram, WhatsApp, and X, video apps such as YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, or they might use live chat, email, text, or phone calls.
Whatever the channel, it’s the job of marketing to meet them on that channel and keep them moving forward on the customer journey. Most important, your marketing messages (and your CX!) should be consistent across all the channels you use to interact with customers. Most customers don’t stay on one channel. Even when making a purchase they might “switch lanes,” by starting an order on your website but completing it later using the app on their phone.
Providing a frictionless, omnichannel experience for your customers can make all the difference in their ability to have a positive customer journey. Learn more about this process here.
Commerce can be an emotional business for consumers. Even the most mundane purchases can be a source of stress. Have you ever tried to buy a bag of chips or a candy bar from a vending machine only to be left disappointed and snack-less because the machine failed to meet expectations? (This YouTube video says it all.) Now, imagine how consumers feel if they experience such “fails” when making big-ticket purchases.
The customer journey can feature many pain points. Broken links may prompt a customer to navigate away from a company’s e-commerce website and make their purchase with a competitor. A consumer placed on hold for more than 10 minutes when calling their bank not only hangs up, but decides to switch banks. Improper processing of a patient’s insurance results in a huge bill — and that patient leaving a bad review online and never using that doctor again.
So, it’s vital to identify existing and potential pain points, including those that may prompt a customer’s journey in the first place, and explain how the company can provide solutions. In either case, move fast to offer solutions and make things better for the customer.
The last (but not least) component of the customer journey is performance measurement. Did you meet your business goals, and did you do the best you could do to move the customer beyond the sale to advocacy?
Metrics can be more than just a barometer of how well you are doing; they can point you to ways to improve the customer experience. For example, perhaps you discover that your conversion rate is low. This could indicate that customers are having issues at the checkout stage and are unable to complete purchases successfully. Perhaps a pop-up screen is not working properly or there is an issue with payment instructions?
There are plenty of key performance indicators (KPIs) available to help you measure how well your customer journey program is working. This resource from Hotjar can help you learn about useful KPIs you may want to employ. Also, see this post on our website to understand the role of KPIs in measuring the success of your marketing efforts.
Your business goals no doubt include building your brand, consistently expanding your customer base, and retaining more customers. Understanding the entire customer journey is essential to your success on all fronts.
Even if your aim is to get one specific customer to make one purchase, you still have to get that customer through the awareness, discovery, and consideration stages first. Optimizing the customer journey, and making it as frictionless as possible, is how to make that happen.
Let’s look at some of the positive outcomes that can result from this focus.
Here are five ways your business can reap tangible benefits by optimizing the customer journey.
Improving your understanding of your customers makes it easier to create accurate buyer personas to drive your marketing strategies. When you know your target customer, including their preferences and motivations, it can help you to fine-tune your marketing and ad content and attract more new and repeat business.
When you focus on providing a well-optimized customer journey that aligns with your target customers’ needs and behaviors, you can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales and marketing strategies by improving your ability to, among other things:
Optimizing the customer journey helps to lead more customers to the post-purchase stages of the journey: retention and advocacy. And, as we understand from the oft-cited research of Frederick Reicheld, inventor of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), businesses that increase customer retention by just 5% can grow their profits by 25% to 95%.
Understanding the customer journey helps you identify the most effective channels and touchpoints for interacting with your target customers. This, in turn, allows you to be more efficient in allocating your marketing resources, which is a significant benefit when budgets are stretched.
It’s also useful when you have a generous marketing budget to work with because you can avoid wasteful spending. Plus, with the right processes and tools in place to optimize all aspects of the customer journey, including phone calls, you will be better positioned to defend your marketing spend.
Making sure each step of the customer journey meets or exceeds expectations helps you deliver a CX that is not just positive, but also enjoyable. And when you earn a reputation for providing a superior experience, it can help you attract and retain more customers.
Don’t assume that your competitors are making the point to optimize the journey for their customers, or that they are doing it well. There is always room for you to take the pole position. Later in this guide, we’ll explain various ways you can uplevel the customer journey so it becomes a significant differentiator for your business in the marketplace.
Earlier in this guide, we noted that the customer journey is not the same as the customer experience. However, we also explained that they are intertwined to a great degree, in that a smooth customer journey can impact the quality of the CX. Here’s how.
The customer journey is replete with opportunities to make customers feel like VIPs, from offering personalized recommendations and content through digital channels to showing a customer you know who they are and what they’re looking for when they pick up the phone to call your business.
How can you achieve the latter level of personalization? With artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools like Invoca PreSense.
Here’s how PreSense helps you personalize customer interactions. Say you’re an insurance provider, and a customer has been on your website researching your policies. Like many customers who make complex or big-ticket purchases, they decide to call your business when they are ready to buy.
PreSense collects data from the caller’s digital journey, including insight into their intent, and uses that information to route calls to the right agent to handle their request. The agent receives a screen pop that shows them who is calling, why they are calling, and what they did on your website or app prior to the call.
These simple but vital details empower the agent to greet the caller by name and make the conversation relevant to their interests. That leads to a happy customer who, in this case, also becomes the owner of a new insurance policy.
Phone calls are a critical yet often overlooked channel for advancing the customer journey. Using tools like PreSense that make it possible for your customers to transition seamlessly from digital channels to the phone so they can interact with your business in the way they prefer is the essence of providing an omnichannel experience.
A key component of the customer journey is problem-solving. Smoothing the customer journey involves anticipating and proactively removing pain points and barriers, as well as providing customers with workable solutions. The more seamless the journey, the more rewarding the CX.
However, there’s even more to it. With a well-designed customer journey, your business can become even more adept at problem-solving by:
At the beginning of this guide, we discussed how journeys can easily get derailed and how that creates stress for customers. If those issues are serious enough or occur frequently, they also erode customers’ trust in the brand or business.
When you prioritize efforts to create a seamless customer journey, you will be better positioned to deliver a great CX which helps you build and maintain trust and credibility with your customers. After all, all customers want to engage with businesses that are dependable and deliver what they say they will deliver when they say they will deliver it.
You will likely find that customers who make it through all six stages of the customer journey are more willing to give detailed feedback and provide insights into your products and services and their overall experience (including their experience with your journey). You can use this information to make improvements to both your customer journey and your CX that can help you drive repeat business and earn new customers, too.
Now, we’ve arrived at the portion of the guide where we’ll take you through the six customer journey stages that we outlined above. As you’ve learned, the journey begins with awareness, moves to discovery, and then to consideration and purchase. After the purchase, the journey continues, ideally, with retention and advocacy.
We describe each customer journey stage below and recommend KPIs to measure your performance at each stage.
Without awareness, the customer journey can’t commence. Awareness occurs when a consumer realizes they have a problem and becomes aware that your product or service might be able to help them.
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can help target audiences connect with relevant resources online during this stage. Other tactics and tools that can help you gain traction in the awareness stage include infographics and social media posts. About 62.6% of the global population uses social media and platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. You can use social media advertising platforms to target specific audience segments and raise awareness with relevant ads and informative sponsored content.
KPIs:
This is the stage where the consumer conducts most of their research. They are starting to realize that their problem is solvable but they haven’t yet decided who they want to help them solve it. So, they gather more information to use in their decision-making.
SEO is an important factor at this stage, too. If the consumer is conducting online searches, you must appear in those searches, organically or through paid search ads. Optimizing your website, blogs, and content for SEO will help you be discovered.
During discovery, many consumers will also be on the lookout for relevant reviews, testimonials, and recommendations from other customers to validate potential solutions. So, make sure you’ve responded appropriately to all customer feedback online, good or bad. Also, if you don’t do this already, ask happy customers to provide reviews and testimonials and draw attention to them (e.g., publishing them on your website).
KPIs:
Here’s where the customer journey gets serious. The consumer has finished their initial research and is now trying to decide which business has the right product or solution for them. At this stage, they are likely to compare the features, benefits, pricing, and the overall value of your offerings with those of other providers who have piqued their interest.
Steps you can take to position yourself well for consideration include confirming that your product pages are up to date, your website does not have broken links, your web content is optimized for mobile, and you are prepared to interact as seamlessly as possible with customers across all relevant channels online and offline (e.g., by phone).
KPIs:
Congratulations, your customer is ready to make a purchase! At this critical phase, you need to be mindful of any potential obstacles that could derail the journey. Are you making it easy for consumers to buy from you? For example:
It’s also a good idea at the purchase stage to reinforce the fact that you are a trustworthy business. Use security badges and other icons, such as awards and money-back guarantees to demonstrate credibility and deepen the buyer’s trust.
KPIs:
Now that you’ve secured your customer’s first purchase, what you really want is to encourage them to keep coming back for more.
You can lay the foundation for future purchases by supplying customers with reward or loyalty cards, special offers, and purchase suggestions, such as “Customers who bought this also bought … ” You can also continue to deliver relevant content to them such as alerting them to new product releases, the ability to upgrade or trade-in, and more.
KPIs:
Phew! It was a long road but you finally made it to the last stage of the journey with your customer. Now, your customer is primed to become your advocate.
Advocacy can take many forms, including online reviews, referrals, and testimonials. Don’t be afraid to ask for all of the above. And yes, you should ask. Never assume that just because your customer had a great CX and a smooth journey that they will take the time to say something positive about your business.
Simple actions, like providing a feedback form or quick survey, can go a long way toward prompting your customers to engage in advocacy.
KPIs:
When traveling, people often rely on maps to guide their journeys. Maps can also be effective tools for managing and optimizing the customer journey.
A customer journey map is exactly what it sounds like — a visual representation of the customer journey. Sales and marketing teams use customer journey maps to identify all the points of interaction between the consumer and your business, including potential pain points.
Customer journey maps can vary in the depth of data they include, but generally, the more relevant the data they feature, the better.
There are some common elements you should include in your customer journey map, all of which will help your team better understand CX. They include some of the five key components we’ve already discussed, as well as the six customer journey steps we also outlined above:
There is no single format for a customer journey map. To create an effective visualization, consider following these customer journey map stages.
Since a map is a visualization, it helps to see what a customer journey map looks like. We offer three examples below. (By the way, did you know that you can also use Google Analytics to create a customer journey map?)
We’ve discussed in detail what the customer journey is, why it is important, and how optimizing it can create benefits for your business. But how do you improve it?
Customer journey mapping will help identify the areas that need to be improved. These strategies will help you initiate those improvements.
The proliferation of mobile technology and devices coupled with increasing pressure on consumers’ time makes having an omnichannel experience in almost any segment of commerce today a must.
Virtually no one buys a car today by heading to a dealership to do their initial research. They research online first, compare makes and models, call to check availability and pricing, and shop for financing. Once they’ve completed their consideration stage, they might then go to the dealership for a test drive and to make a purchase.
Providing your customers with all the tools and communication points they might use on their customer journey — website, app, social media, chatbot, phone, in-person, etc. — and making sure they can move between them seamlessly to interact with your business when and how they want to will help propel them forward along their journey.
The customer journey map can also help identify critical customer touchpoints. These are all the key interactions customers have with your brand. This could be reading an ad online, communicating via chatbot, talking with a live agent, visiting a store, or making a phone call to customer service. By analyzing these critical touchpoints, you can determine where friction enters the journey and correct it.
Managers spend much of their time trying to spot issues in how customer service agents handle customer phone calls. So much so that there’s little time to actually solve the issues.
Quality assurance (QA) in customer service and contact centers is a laborious task when conducted manually. Managers simply do not have the time to listen to hours of call recordings, let alone grade them effectively. Besides, if they did try to spend more time grading calls than they already do, they would have even less time available to coach agents and help them build their skills. That’s not an ideal situation for anyone involved.
AI tools for the contact center can handle QA by tracking agents’ performance and delivering results to managers in real time for improved targeted coaching. Automated QA also objectively grades calls for a more consistent picture of performance across the organization.
The customer journey generates a wealth of valuable customer and performance data. Regularly gathering and analyzing this data from a wide range of sources can provide insights into trends and patterns that can help you fine-tune the customer journey.
One of the most widely used sources for this process is Google Analytics. It has custom dashboards that you can populate to reflect various stages of the customer journey.
One of the most valuable resources you can use to understand the quality of the customer journey is the customer, of course. Collecting customer feedback via surveys, questionnaires, or reviews is a powerful tool for businesses looking to optimize the customer journey.
One of the best forums for customer feedback is phone conversations. Customers say things over the phone that they might not write in an online survey or live chat. Phone calls provide insight into the true VoC, which can be captured with call tracking and recording software.
AutoNation, for instance, uses Invoca’s software to capture VoC insights at scale, and it uses those insights to provide a personalized buying experience.
You can use online and offline data to personalize the customer journey and reinforce the omnichannel experience. One-third of marketers surveyed by Adobe would prioritize personalization because they consider it most important to marketing in the future. Meanwhile, marketers surveyed by Econsultancy and Monetate stated that the biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%).
Merging online data with offline data, such as the content of customer phone calls, solves that problem, especially if you use AI automation to speed the process. Tools like real-time personalization solutions, social media analytics, predictive analytics, marketing automation, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, can be fed with online and offline data.
If a customer visits your website and picks up the phone to call, you can push that offline data to your real-time personalization platform so you can design a returning web visitor experience that makes it easy for that potential customer to call again.
Another way to improve the customer journey is to proactively shape it for the customer. This is possible when you really know the customer, and it is a practice often seen in the retail sector.
How do you shape the customer journey? With data, of course. Online and offline data allows retailers to build a complete picture of the customer and use that knowledge to proactively meet the customer at the right place, at the right time. Customer analytics allows retailers to accurately predict customer behavior rather than reacting to it.
You can also shape the journey by using personalization and hyperpersonalization strategies, and by (you guessed it!) providing a seamless omnichannel experience.
Two emerging trends will have an impact on customer journey mapping in the future. These trends are guided by technology and customer expectations.
Generative AI is the technology du jour in almost every sector of the economy today. As we’ve mentioned already, AI has huge implications for marketers in helping to gather and combine data from online and offline interactions and quickly analyze data to reveal trends to be used to personalize the journey and create a seamless omnichannel experience.
We’ve also touched on the role predictive analytics can play in proactively shaping the customer journey and journey mapping. In the future, AI will no doubt drive further advances in how businesses and customers interact. But today, marketers don’t have to wait. They can already take advantage of AI-powered automation tools capable of smoothing and personalizing the customer journey.
Invoca’s AI-driven revenue execution software, as an example, can intelligently route calls to the right agent, provide the agent with information about who is calling and why, record the call so it can be analyzed, and gather voice of the customer insights to improve the customer experience. Revenue execution platforms can also provide real world training examples to help coach personnel in the front line interacting with customers over the phone.
Customer expectations and behaviors are constantly changing and adapting timely and effectively to these changes is an ongoing challenge for marketers. Being flexible with the ability to pivot is the hallmark of a good marketing operation.
Having a robust data-gathering and analysis capability can keep you up-to-date with customer behaviors and preferences. If you have enough big data, you can even engage in predictive analytics to stay ahead of your customers’ needs.
Revenue execution platforms can be an invaluable tool in marketing’s quest to create the perfect customer journey. Here’s more insight into why and how:
Conversation analytics data provides the unique insights, derived from the VoC, that can help drive your ability to personalize — even hyperpersonalize — the customer experience. Personalization promotes customer engagement and loyalty, drives revenue, and can differentiate you from your peers.
For more insight into the benefits of CX personalization and the role of technology in furthering this strategy, read Invoca’s blog post, “How to Personalize Customer Experiences with Data Analytics.”
Revenue execution aids the creation of a seamless omnichannel experience by connecting a customer’s online and offline interactions.
Invoca’s revenue execution platform intelligently routes calls based on online activity and arms agents with all the information they need to personalize the customer’s offline experience.
To dive deeper into the ways revenue execution can help you create a seamless omnichannel experience, check out Invoca’s ultimate guide to omnichannel marketing.
Reveue Execution creates a huge, searchable database of real-world interactions that managers and agents alike can use to create training modules and onboarding programs for better agent performance.
Invoca’s platform also takes the responsibility for quality assurance away from the manager by automating and objectively grading QA. Managers can use the results to address issues and create coachable moments for their teams without the drudgery of assembling, subjectively analyzing, and scoring calls.
Get more details on how Invoca’s AI can help you maximize every contact center interaction.
Revenue execution promotes high customer retention and greater customer loyalty by identifying common customer issues and flagging them.
Invoca’s Signal Discovery detects commonly used phrases and tone in customer conversations to alert teams to potential issues so that they can proactively address problems and course correct, when and where needed.
Find out how retirement home operator Spectrum Communities used Invoca to proactively address customer concerns during the recent pandemic.
Revenue execution delivers very detailed customer feedback and insights even when you don’t overtly ask the customer for them. AI’s ability to scan, sort, and analyze literally millions of words in transcripts and recordings can isolate and group insights and actual customer feedback to provide businesses with VoC intelligence.
Learn more about how Invoca’s voice of customer analytics can help you improve marketing performance and drive higher ROI.
The customer journey is a long and, often, winding road. As such, it can have potholes and roadblocks (pain points and friction) but it can also lead to exciting “destinations” for your business (sales, happy customers, and more).
How you tend to the customer journey, and the steps you take to make the customer experience along that journey as smooth as possible, will determine if consumers become your customers, and remain your customers or even evolve into enthusiastic advocates for your brand.
Applying the best practices outlined in this guide, and using robust tools like Invoca’s revenue execution platform and features such as PreSense and Signal Discovery, can help you transform your customer journey — both online and offline — so you can delight your customers and maintain a distinct edge over your competitors.
If you have customer journey questions for AI to answer, Invoca can help. Learn more about how our technology helps businesses to enhance their customer journeys:
You can also book a demo with our team today to see how Invoca can help you improve your customer experience, and much more.
