Customer Journey

The customer journey refers to the comprehensive sequence of interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand, organization, or product, beginning from the initial awareness and extending through all stages of engagement, including post-purchase interactions. This concept has evolved into a crucial element of modern marketing strategies, as businesses aim to enhance the overall customer experience by analyzing various touchpoints and channels. Historically rooted in advertising, the understanding of the customer journey now encompasses multiple stages, such as interest, desire, and action, as well as ongoing customer retention efforts.

Various models, such as the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) model, have been developed to map the customer journey, illustrating the transition from awareness to purchase and beyond. Practitioners increasingly utilize customer journey mapping, which visually represents the steps a customer takes, to inform strategic business decisions. This mapping can focus on specific interactions, such as online engagements or in-store experiences. In the digital age, the landscape of the customer journey has expanded with social media and online search capabilities, requiring businesses to adopt a more nuanced understanding of customer behavior and emotions throughout their relationship with a brand.

Published in: 2021

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Subject Terms

Customer Journey

Abstract

The customer journey is the sum total of a customer's interactions with and feelings about an organization, product, or brand from the moment he or she first becomes aware of it until the end point of the relationship. It is a model for considering the customer experience that emphasizes the idea of movement and change in that experience. Businesses and consultants seek to improve the customer journey by examining its touchpoints and channels, and increasingly rely on sophisticated analytics to measure the business's performance with respect to the customer experience.

Overview

The customer journey is a narrative that describes a customer or potential customer's relationship with a brand or company over time. Understanding the customer journey has become a key component of marketing strategy. While paying attention to customer journey originated in the advertising industry as a way to better understand and improve the impact of advertising, in the twenty-first century, businesses and marketing agencies pay attention not just to that initial impact, but to the many stages of the journey, including post-purchase touchpoints such as reviews, customer service or technical support interactions, and customer retention. More dimensions of customer experience are also considered, because of the many ways in which customers may interact with brands in the age of social media.

By 2015, when Accenture conducted a survey of executives, numerous firms had chief customer experience officers, vice presidents of customer experience, or customer experience managers, including Google and Amazon. Such officers are responsible for studying and improving the customer experience at the firm, including the customer journey. While historically marketing firms have focused primarily on metrics that emphasized the value customers create for firms, this has changed in the twenty-first century as qualitative studies have been embraced and firms have embraced conscious management of channels and the customer journey.

Further Insights

Though marketing is typically thought of as a modern science that took off in the "organization man" period of the 1950s, the idea of the customer journey was actually introduced no later than 1898, when the pioneering advertiser Elias Saint Elmo Lewis, then only 26, introduced a model to the advertising industry that was later made famous in Edward K. Strong's 1925 book the Psychology of Selling and Advertising. Lewis had used the slogan "attract attention, maintain interest, create desire," later adding "get action," a slogan that emphasized the importance of advertising and brand messaging in shaping the first steps of the customer journey. Strong called this the AIDA model, though it's not clear that Lewis himself ever actually used the term, standing for attention, interest, desire, action.

AIDA. The AIDA model is one of several models used in advertising, marketing, and consulting that are known as hierarchical models or models of the hierarchy of effects. Hierarchical models are a way of mapping the customer journey, but have generally been presented as linear and sequential—and as stimulus-response models, which is to say, models of the way that the stimulus of advertising can be used to lead to the response of a purchase. In the case of the AIDA model, that journey is straightforward.

First, something about the brand or product attracts the customer's attention. Usually, especially in Lewis's and Strong's discussions, this meant advertising—the purpose of the model was in part to show the importance of advertising because of its role in the first stage of the customer journey. Other things, however, could be responsible for the customer's initial awareness of the brand, including word of mouth, involvement of the brand in a news story, or simply passing the store on the street or seeing the product in a window. Advertising is a way to give the company control over that initial attention, by trying to have the first word, rather than relying on word of mouth or sightings in the wild.

Interest is essential. A customer's attention is engaged in the first place by something of personal interest. Sustained interest gets and keeps the customer going on the journey. The customer has some reason to believe the brand may be of benefit or be compatible with his or her lifestyle.

After taking an interest, the customer learns enough and develops enough positive feelings about the brand that it becomes something he desires. The reason Lewis originally stopped here is because this is essentially the goal of advertising: to create in the customer the desire to have the product. This is the necessary precondition for sales.

Lewis eventually added "get action," or action in the AIDA model, meaning the stage at which the customer goes from wanting to have the product to buying the product. While it may seem that it could have been left unsaid, including action as a stage is a reminder that the company can take steps to make this stage easier, and that there are various strategies for doing so. The customer should have no trouble making the purchase, for instance—it should be available and easy to find.

A purchase can be made more likely by keeping the price down, especially when it comes to a product that has competitors in its category or is something the customer has a desire for but no actual need for. The business or advertiser can also guard against the possibility that the desire created in the third stage doesn't lead to the customer taking action by buying a competitor's product. A hamburger commercial that makes the customer hungry still also needs to encourage that customer to go to a particular burger retailer instead of the first burger restaurant the customer sees. This is one reason why saturating regions with franchise locations is a technique used by both McDonald's and Starbucks—meeting the demand of customer's sudden cravings depends on proximity, which assists both in impulse purchasing and in making the brand a regular part of a customer's routine.

In the advertising industry, the AIDA model remains one of the most common ways of approaching the customer journey, and is used to determine how different advertising messages can be useful at different stages. AIDA and other hierarchical models are also discussed in terms of the "purchase funnel." Each stage of the model involves a progressively smaller number of people. Attention involves the greatest number—everyone who ever encounters any mention of the product. Of those, not all will be interested in it. Not all who become interested in it will develop a desire for it. Not all who want to purchase it will end up doing so. Different strategies are used to encourage passage from each stage to the next. The advertising that is most effective at getting consumers' attention may not be as effective in convincing them to commit to a purchase.

Other Models. Other hierarchical models include the DAGMAR (defining advertising goals for measured advertising results) model, which involves steps abbreviated as ACCA: awareness, comprehension, conviction, action. The tie to AIDA is clear, and this is not a radically different model, but a modification, first proposed in 1961 by Russel Colley. According to Colley, comprehension (rather than interest) and conviction (rather than desire) are subtly different ways of constructing the middle stages. In the twenty-first century, the AISDALSLove (attention, interest, search, desire, action, like/dislike, share, and love/hate) model was introduced by Bambang Sukma Wijaya. Wijaya's model also resembles AIDA, with key additions: Search represents a stage sometimes discussed with respect to AIDA, in which the modern well-informed consumer searches for more information about the product; the Internet and social media enable consumers to look more actively for information about a product rather than passively relying on the information that makes its way to them. The other stages reflect the consumer's experience after purchase, an important part of modern thinking about the customer journey that was neglected by the AIDA model.

Issues

The idea of the customer journey is relevant to various management and marketing discussions and sometimes appears under other names; "customer experience" and "customer lifestyle," for instance, are different terms for very similar concepts. Customer lifecycle management is an approach to marketing that establishes metrics for customer experience in order to indicate the performance of a business, focusing primarily on the aggregate experience as represented by metrics like customer acquisition, retention, upselling, and win-back (the number of lapsed or former customers the business is able to attract back). Customer experience is also similar to user experience, a term generally used in website and app design and computer products.

Mapping. A common technique that is recommended in marketing is customer journey mapping, which extends beyond the linearity of the hierarchical models. A customer journey map is usually an infographic, combining words and images to tell the story of the customer's journey from first contact through repeat business over the long term. Not all customer journey maps deal with the entirety of the journey. Some may focus on initial contact, or in-store experiences, or other touchpoints, depending on the needs for which the map is being prepared. These infographics are used to help organizations learn about their customers in order to inform strategy decisions. The traditional form is something like a flowchart or timeline, with descriptions of and relevant data pertaining to each touchpoint. Although the map is usually a single image, it can also be a PowerPoint presentation or video.

Often maps are used to illustrate customer journeys through specific channels—for instance, it can be especially useful for a business that does not operate solely online to map the digital customer journey, which can involve both websites and apps. A store that sells products both in their physical locations and online can benefit from looking at how the customer journey varies between channels and how the store's social media presence is involved. A consultant for a restaurant may produce a customer journey map that looks at the customer's interactions with the restaurant's website (perusing the menu and special events) and related websites or apps, such as looking at reviews on Yelp or in a local message board, or making a reservation online. Here the customer journey can include numerous post-purchase touchpoints, such as posting a review online, interacting with the restaurant on social media (from a comment to simply liking it on Facebook), or posting geo-tagged photos of the meal on Instagram.

A common type of limited-scope customer journey map focuses on the transition or "conversion" of a customer interacting with a brand online to interacting with a physical retail location—having encountered the brand online, the customer then takes the steps to seek out the physical location, whether to make a purchase or learn more. This is particularly important for brands that cannot be meaningfully purchased online, but benefit from online and social media advertising—such as gyms, restaurants, grocery stores, and special events like circuses or fan conventions.

The research that goes into customer journey maps can be either qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative research is necessary for the kinds of metrics mentioned above, and could include figures on the reach of advertising, the click-through rate of online and social media ads, customer retention, the number of positive and negative social media mentions, and so on. Market research firms and related businesses have long provided this kind of research among their services, and there are numerous companies and products that specialize in analytical research about a product's online presence. For instance, most companies would benefit from knowing how users find their site—which web searches led them to the product or company website, which indicates whether they were specifically looking for that product or had searched for a solution to some problem (e.g., "winter dry skin care," "best hamburger in Boston," "good books for a six year old").

Companies can also conduct surveys and focus groups, which are especially common ways of finding out about the first stage of the customer journey. Respondents may simply be given a list of brands and asked which ones they have heard of, and what their impressions of those brands are, or they may be asked if they remember seeing a particular advertisement in order to gauge that ad's reach. Qualitative research can also include simple anecdotal data, such as interviews with customers about their purchasing experiences or observations of in-store interactions.

Terms & Concepts

Channel: A channel, in the context of customer experience discussions, is where an interaction between a customer and a business, product, service, or brand takes place (e.g., physical location like a store, an online website, an advertisement, a flyer in the mail).

Customer Experience: Customer experience, often abbreviated CX, is the sum of the customer's interactions with an impressions of an organization over the course of their relationship; it can be discussed in terms of the customer journey, the environments the customer encounters, or customer touchpoints. Customer experience includes not simply the narrative experiences of the customer, but the customer's emotions and attitudes toward the experience.

Customer Journey: Customer journey is a concept with great overlap with customer experience, but focuses on the totality of the customer's relationship with a company or brand from the moment the customer becomes aware of it. Arguably the difference is primarily semantic, but the term journey here focuses attention on the fact that there is an origin point and a destination, and changes along the way.

Customer Journey Map: A customer journey map is a visual tool for representing the stages of the customer journey for a given product or company.

Customer Life Cycle: The customer life cycle is the progression of steps a customer goes through in the customer journey; customer life cycle management is the analysis of metrics related to these steps in order to gauge the performance of the business.

Customer Touchpoint: A touchpoint is any interaction between a customer and a business, product, service, or brand, from a customer's visit to a physical location to receiving a flyer in the mail or watching a commercial on television.

User Experience: User experience, or UX, is conceptually similar to customer experience but consists of the interactions and impressions of a user over the course of that user's time using a product; it is especially used with reference to websites, apps, and computer products. The user in this case may also be a customer (such as on a store website or a brand website hoping to interest the user in the brand's products or services), but not all customers are users in this sense. User experience is rarely used with reference to the design of a car, for instance, or a pair of shoes.

Bibliography

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Customer Journey

On this Page

Subject Terms

Customer Journey

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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