While it’s obvious that attracting and retaining customers is essential to a business’s success, many organizations actually lack a framework for analyzing key interactions they have with their customers. Interactions ranging from initial conversations with a member of your sales team to troubleshooting technical issues can determine whether a customer continues to support your business over the long run.

All of these interactions make up the customer journey, and understanding these steps is key to their continued satisfaction and your business’s continued success. Businesses with a strong strategy for analyzing and improving their customers’ journeys can provide their customers, employees, and other stakeholders with an overall better experience.

To help your business better understand the customer journey, this guide will explore three questions that can help you improve your own customer journey strategy:

What is the customer journey?
Why does the customer journey matter?
How can my business improve the customer journey?

While this may be a new way of looking at customers’ experiences with your business, remember that the principles behind it are ones that your business likely already values. Approach customers with empathy, aim to create frictionless experiences, and constantly strive to improve how customers interact with your business.

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey consists of all of the interactions customers have with your business in the entire course of your relationship. This includes their initial discovery of your business by interacting with marketing materials, their first sales process and purchase, their use of your product or service, the support and communication they receive from your business, and the efforts your business makes to retain them as a customer over time.

On the surface, the customer journey looks like a simple series of interactions. However, businesses interested in developing a holistic customer journey strategy need a more nuanced understanding of the other concepts and elements that inform a journey, including:

Customer experience. Customer experience (CX) is somewhat synonymous with the term customer journey, but it also refers to the broader framework and programs that businesses develop to improve their customer interactions. Specifically, a CX program is a dedicated effort a business makes to collect feedback from customers after key touchpoints in their journey to learn how these pivotal moments can be improved. Your journey mapping and strategy fall under the broader umbrella of CX management.

Moments of truth. A moment of truth, or pain point, is a high-stakes touchpoint in the customer journey that can often determine whether a customer sticks with a business or not. For example, a customer contacting a software provider’s support line for assistance to solve an urgent problem with the product would be considered a moment of truth. In this scenario, the customer is likely frustrated and a poor interaction may lead to them seeking an alternative service. By identifying moments of truth in your customer journey, your business can actively implement improvements to minimize negative emotions, show empathy to the customer’s struggles, and provide a solution.

Voice of the customer. Voice of the customer (VoC) refers to your customers’ perspectives on your business. This includes their expectations, likes, dislikes, and any other feedback they have provided. By surveying your customers, you can better understand their unique voice and how changes in your business impact them. A VoC or feedback collection program should be an integral part of your broader CX efforts.

How exactly these concepts and programs should be approached will depend on how your customer journey and communication channels are constructed. For example, a business that uses automated communication for the majority of the process will have different moments of truth to consider than one that focuses more heavily on building one-on-one relationships with individual clients.

Why does the customer journey matter?

Customers find and stick with your business for many reasons. They might first find you through your standout marketing strategies or stellar reputation in the space. They might stick around because they appreciate your brand’s philanthropic efforts and identity or feel that your product is superior to your competitors. Among these reasons, customers will heavily weigh the service they experienced and the process of making a purchase at your business.

Your customer journeys matter because all of the individual interactions and factors at play contribute to your ultimate likelihood of retaining their long-term business, which should be a primary goal for any organization.

In other words, the customer journey your business offers will directly and indirectly impact how customers view your business and if they will buy from you again. There are other benefits to improving your customer journey as well, such as:

Improved customer loyalty. Customers who feel that your business created a positive experience for them, showed empathy for their struggles, and implemented their feedback will likely feel increased brand loyalty. This means they will likely be retained not just as long-term customers but as active promoters of your brand.

Faster response time. Part of building a customer journey strategy involves creating a process for responding to negative feedback. For example, during a moment of truth that goes poorly, a customer might fill out a survey that reflects their negative experience. With an effective program in place, your business will be able to reach out to the customer quickly to resolve their issues, potentially saving your relationship with them.

Better data collection. Deliberately monitoring your customer journey will allow you to collect more data on your customers, their needs, and preferences. This information can be used for marketing purposes or planning new activities and products they might like.

CX and the customer journey are continuous processes, and regularly reassessing what goes into them at your business will allow you to keep up with changes in customer preferences. Make sure to routinely collect feedback during pivotal touchpoints to check if your improvements have succeeded, as well as how customer needs naturally shift over time.

How can my business improve the customer journey?

The customer journey can be improved through deliberate tracking, analysis, and implementation. Just like many other internal processes at your business, such as communication, budgeting, and project management, there are software solutions that can help you monitor and generate reports on your customers’ journeys.

Explore CX software solutions that have customizable survey tools, allowing you to tailor them to ask pertinent questions about your customers’ experiences during critical moments in their journeys. Before designing these surveys, consider your customer journey map.

The customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers or customer segments interact with various parts of your business during their journeys. It considers a business's different audiences, each touchpoint, and can help explain why certain outcomes happened.

PeopleMetrics’ guide to customer journey maps walks through the six core components of creating a map for your business:

Determine your objectives. Establish a specific goal for your map to help focus your efforts. This will be related to the overall scope of your customer journey map. For instance, does your map cover the entire customer journey or hone in on a specific moment of truth?
Define your personas. Take a look at your customer data to create personas. These personas represent various groups of customers with shared characteristics, such as their product or service tier, motivations, common pain points, and goals.
Break the journey down. Work with your team to break down the customer journey into distinct steps. Consider the voice of the customer during this step by dividing the customer journey based on what actions the customer is taking, rather than what may be happening internally at your business.
List all touchpoints. Working through the steps you just identified in the customer journey, list all of the touchpoints customers have with your business in each stage. Consider both actions the customer takes and processes that happen internally that may impact the customer’s experience along the way.
Compile touchpoints. Identify which touchpoints are relevant to the customer journey in question and organize them based on your map’s overarching purpose. Pay special attention to potential moments of truth and other critical touchpoints—referencing past customer feedback can help you identify these.
Test your customer journey. Present your map to your team for feedback. Discuss touchpoints they would consider as moments of truth, and make adjustments based on their feedback. Study your customer interactions going forward to see if they follow the course you’ve outlined, collect more information, and make tweaks over time.

If you have difficulty organizing your customer journey map, remember that these journeys are a continuous, non-linear cycle. Try zooming in on specific points of the customer journey to make better sense of moments of truth, rather than analyzing your customer journeys as a potentially overwhelming whole. Doing so can help you identify outcomes related to individual interactions, which can easily get lost when looking at the entire customer journey at once.

Your business should strive to make your customers’ experiences with your business as frictionless and positive as possible. By analyzing your customer journey and taking steps to improve it, you can retain more customers, build brand loyalty, and stay up to date with changing preferences. Improve your customer journey by mapping it out, creating surveys, and investing in new tools to support your organized, intentional approach.

About the Author:

This is a guest post contributed by Sean McDade.

Sean McDade has been helping companies optimize customer experiences for over twenty years. An angel investor in the Philadelphia region, he is also the founder, CEO, and visionary of PeopleMetrics, a leading provider of experience management software and advisory services. In addition to working with a number of leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, he is the author of two books.