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What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

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Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty

A version of this tutorial originally appeared in the free Primer app .

In an ideal world, the journey people take to become loyal customers would be a straight shot down a highway: See your product. Buy your product. Use your product. Repeat.

In reality, this journey is often more like a sightseeing tour with stops, exploration, and discussion along the way—all moments when you need to convince people to pick your brand and stick with it instead of switching to a competitor.

Staying on top of all of these moments might seem overwhelming, but mapping your customer’s journey can help. It can give you and your team a greater understanding of how your customers are currently interacting and engaging with your brand, and also help illustrate how your products and services fit into their lives, schedules, goals, and aspirations.

Let’s take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping.

1. Find the sweet spot where your customers’ goals and your own align

Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any marketing and communication you deliver during the customer journey should be focused on helping your brand reach those goals.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that your customers’ goals might be different from yours. For example, let’s say your goal is to sell more sunglasses with new, improved lenses that have a better profit margin. Meanwhile, your customers’ top concern might be getting sunglasses that match their personal style. Lens protection could be their second or even third priority.

Consider how your marketing and communication strategies can help your customers reach their goals while also getting you closer to yours.

2. Identify all of the communication touchpoints in your customer’s journey

When do you traditionally communicate or engage with customers? Make a list of these moments and group them based on when they happen during the journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

Now find communication touchpoints you may have missed. Track what actions and interactions between your brand and your customers happen just before and after each of the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages.

For example, you might decide that a major moment in your purchase stage is when your customers are guided through your website to buy an item in their shopping cart. But you might notice other communication touchpoints right before that purchase moment, like your website confirming to customers that an item has been added to their shopping cart, then suggesting related products.

Looking for all these touchpoints can quickly bog your team down in a lot of details and micro-interactions. To avoid that, prioritize the moments that get you closer to achieving your business goals.

3. Recognize pain points and moments of delight

How might your customers feel at the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages as they attempt to achieve their goals? For example, could your customers be happy that your website makes browsing easy, but frustrated at how confusing it is to purchase a product?

Find the moments where your customers might have negative experiences. Who on your team is involved in those touchpoints? Your web designers? Your marketing team? Your copywriters? Are there other team members who could collaborate and improve the situation?

Say a customer likes how your online ad describes your product. But when they go to your store, salespeople present the product differently. That’s an opportunity for your copywriters and salespeople to better align their language and sales pitches.

4. Experience the customer journey yourself

Imagining how your customers might feel during their journey is valuable, but actually experiencing it for yourself can uncover much-needed insights.

If your business is run online, open a browser and experience what it’s like to be your customer. Similarly, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, go into a location that sells your product. Afterwards, ask yourself about the main communication touchpoints you encountered. Did they work well? Did they help you complete your journey? What was missing?

And don’t forget about the competition. Become one of their customers and experience the journey they’ve created. Then ask yourself all of the same questions.

5. Visualize your customer journey map

Go beyond just writing down your customer journey and communication touchpoints, and actually create a visual map of them. This doesn’t need to be a polished, heavily-designed visualization. Simply write each of your touchpoints down on individual sticky notes or papers, then pin them in order to a wall.

By doing this exercise, you’re helping your team take a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey. You can organize your thoughts and collaboratively brainstorm new ideas for changing or adding to your communication at these touchpoints.

Make sure to create hypotheses around why new communication touchpoints will improve the customer journey, then implement and test them. If your hypotheses are wrong, go back to your journey map, reassess, tweak, and improve.

Yes, the journey mapping process can be fairly intensive, but it can have a big impact on your business. That’s why it shouldn’t be just a one-time event. Customer tastes can shift, new technology can become available, and your brand itself might evolve. So it’s important to do journey mapping at least once a year and evaluate what communication touchpoints are still working and what needs to be revisited.

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Stuart Hogg is a marketing consultant who has worked with a number of Fortune 500 brands. He created “Journey Mapping: Connect the Customer Dots” for the Primer app.

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Digital customer journeys: from awareness to advocacy.

13 min read Just understanding a customer’s needs and wants is no longer enough. You need to know not only what they think and feel about every online interaction with your product, but also what they might do in the future. This is where digital customer journey mapping comes into play.

Customers expect not only a high-quality digital experience ; they also expect to be treated as individuals. Their online experience must be personalized, relevant, and tailored to their wants, needs and interests. And where customers have high expectations , it follows that they have low tolerance for a below-par experience.

Now, more than ever, customers will abandon a purchase or a brand with a single click if they’re not happy, and move onto another brand that seamlessly delivers what they want. A recent study from the XM Institute asked large organizations to evaluate the quality of the experiences they deliver across different channels. Less than 30% rated any of their digital experiences as “good” or “very good”.

Modern customers are digital kangaroos, able to hop from brand to brand and product to product, on any device. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your brand’s path to purchase is as easy as possible, to stop them from hopping off to a competitor.

How do you do this? With digital customer journey mapping.

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

What is a digital customer journey?

This is the path to purchase and retention – from first noticing the product to buying and using it. The journey combines all the touchpoints (i.e. points of interaction with your business) a customer has, and collects consumer data, transaction information, cross-device browsing history, and customer service interactions. There are five stages in the digital customer journey:

• Awareness: this is the point at which a customer notices your product . Awareness can come from a multitude of channels: social media and word of mouth from friends, influencers and brand advocates, search engine suggestions, adverts, marketing emails, blogs, SMS, apps, loyalty programs, and affiliate marketing.
• Consideration: A customer likes what they’ve seen, so they start to think about and research the product. They’ll visit your website, engage with a chatbot, sign up for free trials, demos, webinars, look at discounts, and check online reviews and testimonials.
• Purchase: To buy online, customers will create an account (or log into their existing one), fill their shopping cart, may be upsold or cross-sold, apply discounts, choose an electronic payment option, check out, and leave a review about the purchase.
• Experience: This is how well the order is fulfilled, and includes: shipping and delivery, tracking, online help center, support content (FAQs, instructions and assembly guides), chatbots and assisted chat, guarantees, follow-up emails and social media interactions.
• Loyalty: Loyalty programs , personalized rewards, newsletters, and social media interaction are all well and good. But creating an emotional connection with the customer, and ensuring they receive the value they expect from the brand is the new approach to loyalty: is the product good quality? Did the customer receive good support ?

What exactly is a digital customer journey map?

When you map out the digital journey graphically, including all the devices, and touchpoints your customer interacts with, you’ll understand how they make decisions, connect and interact with your brand. You can also identify and rectify any pain points that make the customer experience less than seamless.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

• You’ll walk in your customers’ (virtual) shoes : Employees sometimes find it difficult to empathize or understand the customer’s perspective. They may try to second guess what customers are feeling, rather than experiencing the journey themselves. By collecting feedback at touchpoints along the journey, the customer can express how they are feeling (frustrated? Happy? Disappointed? Cared for?) and employees can jump in to solve issues and make the customer experience smoother and more enjoyable.
• The whole company will work together: All too often, organizations work in silos: not only communication silos (when different teams don’t speak to each other) but also system and data silos that hold customer information that’s specific only to that part of the journey.  It’s the lack of a 360 view of the customer and seamless sharing of insight that creates this fragmented experience. With a customer journey map and centralized customer information, everyone, across all departments, knows where they fit in and what their role is in delivering a seamless experience.
•   You’ll inform your content marketing and content creation: Customers buy more if your content is relevant and targeted to them. Your customer journey map will help you build a full 360° picture of your customers: demographics , behavior , and psychographics , so you can target new and returning buyers.
• You’ll be able to predict customer behavior: Not only will journey mapping give you valuable insight into customers’ wants, needs, feelings, actions and aspirations, you’ll also be able to use the data to predict and influence how customers will behave.
• You’ll be able to identify gaps: when you map out each stage of the journey, and then map out your existing processes, you can not only uncover gaps, but also identify what your highest value journey touchpoints are. Without mapping, you could be focusing on optimizing touchpoints that are not really that influential, while missing a more important point.

Creating your digital customer journey map

The first thing to understand is that you have no control over a customer’s journey. A customer will go where they like, on whichever device or platform they choose, negotiating the touchpoints to achieve their goal of a satisfactory purchase. Your role is to build an omnichannel framework that anticipates where they are going to go and supports their goal.

• Base it on your sales funnel:  You will probably have the basis for your digital customer journey already – your online sales funnel (awareness, interest, decision, action). Use this as a guideline to define how many touchpoints your customers have, and how each interaction funnels into the next.
• Put your customer hat on: Walk through all the stages of your sales funnel as a customer would, noting the touchpoints. What social media would they interact with? Does your website have the right information? How easy is your booking process? How helpful are the after sales people? Is the loyalty scheme attractive? Would you be happy to recommend your own product ?
• Customize your touchpoints: You know which social media platform attracts most customers, how to respond to reviews so your business demonstrates it cares about customers, how your purchase process works, how good your aftersales team is, and how you reward loyal customers. These are the touchpoints that are specific to your company. When you bolt them onto your customer journey map and collect feedback about each of them, you’ll be able to see if they are performing as well as you think they are.
• Create personas: As companies scale, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of individual customers. This is where personas come in: these are fictitious customer types based on real customers, using demographic and psychographic profiles that include age, gender, socioeconomic background, lifestyle, interests, opinions, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. Each persona travels along their customer journey in a slightly different way, enabling a company to recognize the differences and cater to every type of customer.
• Use customer journey mapping software: Customer journey solutions are now so sophisticated that they can give real-time visualizations of your customers moving towards purchase and beyond, capturing their online interactions with your brand. AI-enabled software will flag any touchpoint where customers are struggling and highlight any places where they drop out. Not only can you jump in and fix the problems, you can also measure the impact that improving the customer experience at those points has on the company’s bottom line.

Data you can collect with digital customer journey mapping

These are just some of the types of data you can collect along your digital customer journey. When you feed all these into a single platform for analysis, you’ll be able to see how they relate to each other, and where they have knock-on effects.

• Web-browsing data: Every time someone clicks onto your website, you can track their activity on the site and see how they are interacting with your brand. You can also see what devices they are using to access your site.
• Mobile app data: If a customer is using your mobile app, they already have a degree of loyalty. Mobile apps yield more customer information from profiles, sign-ins, and location.
• Sales data: You can track a customer’s purchase history and shopping habits over time. Do they buy immediately, leave items in their shopping cart, or abandon their cart periodically? Don’t forget sales that didn’t happen – finding out why not is valuable for understanding what needs to improve.
• Advertising data: Who has clicked through to your site from an advertisement? This data will give you information about customers who are just starting out on their journey with you. You can marry advertising data with sales data to test the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
• Loyalty data: Your best customers are usually those in your loyalty program. By analyzing who they are and how they use your brand, you’ll be able to target people just like them.
• Survey data: Want to know what customers think of your brand? Ask them. Sending surveys at touchpoints along the customer journey can give you quality information about what’s working and what’s not.
• Social media listening: Increasingly, customers interact with brands through social media. Understanding the nature of this interaction can help develop your social, as well as general marketing strategies .
• Aftersales data: Information from your customer services department can reveal a wide range of issues: product quality, delivery reliability, areas that need product support. How customers are treated after they’ve made a purchase is pivotal to whether they become loyal, or not.

What about B2B digital customer journey mapping?

Whether you’re selling B2C or B2B, the main principles of journey mapping are the same. After all, although you are trading with companies, you are still selling to people within those companies – there are just more of them, and your feedback processes will need to be a little different.

When you map B2B journeys , you need to bear the following in mind:

• More types of people are involved in a B2B journey than a B2C one: Therefore, you’ll need to create more customer personas. For example, if you’re supplying an online finance platform, you will have to deal with the CIO, executives, managers, tech personnel and the call center assistants. All these people are your customers, segmented by persona.
• B2B customers are more valuable: Building business relationships can take years of investment, and if you lose a business customer, you might lose a lot of revenue as a result. You’ll need to prioritize and segment your customer personas by business value: the CIO has more purchasing power than a single call center assistant, for example.
• B2B customer feedback is different: Because much B2B is built on personal interaction and recommendation, business people often know each other. It’s more acceptable to pick up the phone and talk through a problem than send out a generic survey. Your feedback techniques will have to be much more personalized to each of your B2B customers, so that they feel heard, and still special.

An example of a customer journey map template

The brands that thrive in this new reality are those that understand what customers want in digital and take action to deliver the experiences they expect. Here’s a customer journey template for you to start mapping out your digital journey.

To learn more about customer journey management take a look at our free online course below:

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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Venngage Customer Journey Mind Maps

Learn the value of your user's pain points and needs, and improve the experience of your customers with Venngage's customer journey mind map templates.

Not a designer? Not a problem. With Venngage's beginner-friendly user journey map tool, making a journey map has never been easier. 40,000+ businesses trust Venngage to improve their marketing strategies!

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• Jun 3, 2022
• 10 min read

The eCommerce customer journey and how to map it

Think about the last purchase you made.

How long did it take you to click ‘buy’? How many different sites, ads, emails, and stores did you check out before finally fetching your wallet?

Suffice to say that the typical buyer journey is anything but linear. Few shoppers convert right away, and every brand is challenged with adjusting their eCommerce marketing strategy to anticipate buyer movements both online and offline.

So, what can you do to stay ahead? Let’s talk more about what the eCommerce customer journey entails, and how to map your customer’s path to purchase when starting your business .

What is the eCommerce customer journey?

5 stages of the ecommerce customer journey, what factors affect the customer journey, customer journey mapping: why it’s a must, how to map the buyer journey for your business, example of a journey map.

Every so often, a buyer will take a relatively straight path to purchase. They'll search for a product, find your item, and within the same sitting, they'll complete the purchase.

But much more often, customers will be “pinballed” between various touchpoints. They’ll see between 6,000 to 10,000 ads in a day as they’re scrolling through their phones, checking their emails, or listening to Spotify. Then, once they decide to do some shopping, they’ll likely hop between Amazon, your site, and a competitor’s shop.

The eCommerce customer journey is the sum of all of these interactions (see our guide on what is eCommerce ). It begins with the moment a customer becomes aware of your brand to when he or she finally makes a purchase.

Some buyers will convert within mere days—while others may take several months or years. Tipping the scale towards the former outcome will require understanding the core stages and touchpoints of the customer journey and knowing how to make the best impact on your buyers.

Your customers’ overall journey can be broken down into five key stages.

01. Awareness

Your customer stumbles across your brand for the first time. Be it through an ad, social media, word of mouth, or SEO–they are now aware of your products. However, as noted earlier, many will not convert right away. Some may not even be looking to purchase anything at all.

At this stage, you’ll want to make sure you understand how people are finding your brand and who they are. Are they the buyer personas you expected to reach? How do demographics, acquisition source, and other factors affect what action your audience takes next?

While many visitors at this stage may just be “window browsing,” you’ve at least built some sort of brand recognition. Now it’s time to do something with it: retarget people, learn more about their interests, and guide them towards products that are most relevant to them.

02. Consideration

At this point, your buyer shows actual interest in your product. They’ve got their eyes on a particular product or set of products, and are deciding which one is worth buying.

Some may be trying to decide whether your item is a need versus a want. Others may be checking out product specs to make sure that your item is worth the price. Still others may be deal hunting or checking out options on competitive sites.

In any case, you’ll want to track which product pages people are spending the most time on, which products they’re comparing, and what other brands are on their radar. How can you convince them that your product is better? What can you do to build their confidence in your brand or incentivize a purchase?

03. Decision

Alas, your buyer makes a purchase on your site—assuming that the checkout process is easy and buyer friendly.

Your number one goal here is to make sure that the checkout process is seamless. Create a simple checkout flow, offer multiple (and secure) payment options, communicate your return policy, and provide all the information buyers need to feel supported by your brand.

Buyers should know when to expect their packages and any fees associated with their purchase. Don’t let any unwelcome surprises or lack of information lead to customers canceling their orders early.

04. Retention

Once a buyer makes their first purchase with your brand, they’ll ideally become a repeat customer . A positive customer experience—including excellent customer service, on-time delivery, and a multichannel marketing strategy—can work together to build customer loyalty .

Note that even though you’ve won the first sale, you’ll need to continuously earn a buyer’s patronage time and time again. Be consistent in your messaging. Engage buyers frequently. Offer incentives or employ strategies for upselling and cross-selling .

05. Advocacy

Happy customers have the potential to attract other happy customers. Buyers at this final leg of the customer journey are (hopefully) so happy with your product and/or service that they’re eager to spread the word to their friends and family.

Of course, this isn’t a passive activity. You’ll want to proactively nurture brand ambassadors by creating a customer loyalty program , hosting giveaways, showing appreciation, and taking other steps to inspire advocacy.

Your customers are a moving target. Between their unique preferences and backgrounds—plus their prior experiences with brands—there are tons of factors that shape the way they make their purchases.

As you track the various ways that customers interact with your brand, consider how trends like the ones below can make a big impact on the buyer journey.

Social and economic changes - e.g., the recent pandemic. These events tend to spur shifts in buying behaviors and expectations, as many types of businesses and buyers alike adapt to new realities. With each shift, consumers tend to get smarter and potentially pickier on what defines a good value and how to spend their money.

Convergence of online and offline shopping - Omnichannel retail isn’t just a concept anymore. Today, the lines between the offline and online worlds are increasingly blurred—with digital native brands like Warby Parker opening physical showrooms, and longtime retailers like T.J. Maxx investing more in online commerce. Curbside pickup, BOPIS, and in-store returns are just the beginning of what’s to come; brands should expect the customer journey to entail a greater mix of online and offline touchpoints, regardless of whether a customer originated online or not.

Corporate responsibility - Brands today are expected to do good. Inactivity or a difference in values could shape a customer’s engagement with your brand at any point of the buyer’s journey.

Choice paralysis - The proliferation of brands and products online have the ability to frustrate consumers. Make sure that your website is organized in such a way that customers know exactly where to find what they’re looking for. Make it easier for them to filter out noise and/or compare similar options. The last thing you want is for an overabundance of options—or poor site design—to deter your customers from buying. Learn more about combatting choice paralysis .

While customer journey mapping is an imperfect science, the benefits are undeniable.

In fact, 30% of surveyed retailers reported significant improvements in customer lifetime value and customer advocacy after investing in digital customer experience (CX). Roughly 23% reported an increase in average order size as well.

This exercise can help you to achieve multiple goal including:

Getting more clarity over how buyers interact with you - By carefully mapping your customer journey, you can gain a clear understanding of your buyers and their habits. A map helps you to see things from the buyer's perspective rather than your business’s perspective.

Improving customer retention rates - A map helps you to identify when and why prospective buyers are dropping. For example, an ill-worded message or one displayed in the wrong place at the wrong time could be all that’s causing buyers to regress in their journey. By making strategic changes and reducing friction in the customer experience, you can enjoy an easier time attracting and retaining buyers.

Sharpening your focus and organization - This exercise will force you to lay everything on the table–from all of your marketing campaigns to all the possible interactions a customer may have with your brand. From there, you can determine the health of each channel, who owns which touchpoint, and realistic goals for each event.

Increasing revenue - When you understand how buyers interact with your business in detail, you can more accurately cater your communications, offers, content, and promotions to influence sales. It’s all too easy to rely on assumptions or old habits when engaging customers. A journey map helps to shed light on biases and pain points that you may not have known were there before.

So how do you actually map the customer journey? Here are five steps to get you started.

Step 1. Describe your buyer personas

Before building a map, you must clearly define your target customer types. Are you looking to engage parents, young adults, or consumers with specific hobbies?

Your personas should include as much detail as possible. Make sure to base them around real data—not made-up, fake, or idealistic data. Talk to various stakeholders, interview your customers, consult social media, or perform user testing.

In other words, don't build a buyer profile based on what you think a customer should look like. Create your buyer personas using actual data you gathered from the places where they hang out and from talking directly to your target audience.

Step 2. Define the main character of your map

Now, you can decide which set of customers you’d like to analyze as part of the journey mapping process. The map will look different for each type of buyer you target, and trying to address all of them at once will only muddy the data.

To start, pick the most common persona (i.e., the most valuable or largest cohort). You’ll have an easier time collecting data this way, plus taking meaningful action from your journey map.

Step 3. Analyze on-site behaviors

As an initial step, check out the behaviors on your website and jot down the top pages that people enter your site from, where they exit or bounce, and which ones are the highest converting. Tools like Google Analytics and Wix Analytics can help to fill in these blanks.

To get more specific, make sure to filter your data according to criteria that’s most relevant to your buyer persona: geo, new versus returning users, and device (to name a few).

You may already start to see areas where people drop off and opportunities to optimize your site. You can additionally gain insight into what your buyer is more interested in buying based on where they linger on your site (though note that this could be heavily influenced by how accessible a page is from other areas of your site).

Step 4. List all other customer touchpoints

List out all the ways that your target buyer can interact with your company, both on and off your site. Include things like:

Social media

Review sites

Publications

Popup stores

Onsite banners

Physical stores

Marketplaces that you sell on

Help center

Loyalty program

Seasonal promotions

From here, you’ll want to list out all the possible actions someone could take from each channel. For instance, when someone interacts with a blog, he or she may subscribe to your newsletter, download a piece of content that you promote, click to another blog—or even request a demo. Alternatively, your visitor may bounce.

The purpose of this exercise is to audit all the CTAs you include on a single page, as well as links and other messaging that may influence a visitor’s behaviors. You’ll moreover want to look into whether reality aligns with expectations.

When you compare your list of expected behaviors with the data you gathered from Google Analytics, Wix Analytics, and other sources—do the results align? How can you better define the purpose of each channel, and match your goals with a visitor intent?

Step 5. Visualize the journey

Finally, you can document all of your findings into one easy-to-reference map. The scope of your journey map can vary depending on your goal. For instance, you could show the complete customer journey (as shown below) or hone in on just a part of it where you see the most room for improvement.

A map may cover everything from a buyer’s emotions, to their actions, to roles and responsibilities on your team at each stage. It can serve as both a tool for predicting buyer behaviors and keeping your team organized.

That said, there are several types of journey maps you can create:

Current state map - This shows how customers interact with your brand today. You could use it to compare behaviors between two different segments of buyers, or to uncover how customer emotions and behaviors vary depending on how they find your products (as an example).

Future state map - This illustrates the ideal journey that you want your customers to take. It helps your team rally around specific goals and identify critical points of a customer’s journey.

Day in the life map - This is similar to a current state map, except that it doesn’t start and end with a buyers’ interaction with your brand. It aims to understand all of their daily activities and lifestyles, with the goal of developing new, meaningful touchpoints.

Service blueprints - This takes a simplified version of one of the maps above, then adds in details about the various people, technologies, and processes that take place behind the scenes. The purpose is to audit and optimize how your team functions in the background to support the customer journey.

Let’s imagine that you own an online shop for pet supplies. You want to create a current state map in order to see how your core customers (new dog owners) are interacting with your brand. Your map may look something like this.

This helps your team keep track of the most effective campaigns, products, and channels. You’ll likely look to expand upon this map soon, as you get even more granular in your research or launch new campaigns.

There is no right or wrong way to create an eCommerce journey map. The framework outlined here is just meant to provide a good starting point. Once you have a baseline, you can continue to modify and rework your journey map to fit your unique business.

Remember that the customer journey is constantly evolving. Re-evaluate your eCommerce journey map once a quarter or at least once every six months. Aim to reduce friction in the customer journey and put assumptions to the test.

Allison Lee

Editor, Wix eCommerce

Allison is the editor for the Wix eCommerce blog, with several years of experience reporting on eCommerce news, strategies, and founder stories.

• Sell Online

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Designing Customer Journeys for the Post-Pandemic World

• Gene Cornfield

Three factors to consider.

While using customer journeys to guide what teams build and how they operate is common practice, small differences in approach produce vastly different results. But today, as we enter a new stage of profound change, those differences will be more important than ever to business performance. The author offers three simple but critical factors that will determine whether your post-pandemic customer journeys will help amplify or impede business growth. First, be customer-centric, not company-centric. Second, create flexible journeys based on need-points, not touchpoints. Third, measure (and optimize) customer journeys and experiences. Small and midsize businesses have a window of advantage here. While larger companies might have greater resources and reach and some have recognized the need to pivot their customer journeys, experiences, and operations for new realities, for many, forward progress will be mitigated by operational, organizational, and cultural inertia.

As vaccinated millions step tentatively back into an in-person economy poised for growth , the relationships they had with companies they preferred before will resume — but on a trial basis. Spending loyalties will be cemented (or potentially lost to others) based on how well companies understand customers’ new priorities that were forged by the degree of uncertainty, fear, strife, or loss each individual experienced. These considerations will influence not only what customers choose but also how they go about choosing. Your customer journeys must change to reflect your customers’ new preferences and behaviors.

While using customer journeys to guide what teams build and how they operate is common practice, small differences in approach produce vastly different results. But today, as we enter a new stage of profound change, those differences will be more important than ever to business performance. Companies that have adopted different approaches to customer journey and experience practices have seen more than six times greater growth in year-on-year profitability.

Regardless of one’s industry, whether B2C or B2B, the following three simple but critical factors will determine whether your post-pandemic customer journeys will help amplify or impede business growth.

Customer-Centric, Not Company-Centric

Customers happily serve as the engine of business outcomes when doing so is a byproduct of achieving their own intended outcomes. Every time a customer achieves their purpose, the company that enabled them to do so receives revenue or some other value (loyalty, advocacy, etc.).

Opportunities for Midsize Businesses in 2021

But the vast majority of customer journeys I see focus on company outcomes. They guide marketing or sales or service teams, perhaps inadvertently, to manipulate customers toward a business outcome. This practice is so engrained that we have a name for it: The funnel.

The least customer-centric companies often have a single customer journey that is essentially the vertical funnel turned on its side, like a livestock chute through which customers are prodded toward a fate of the company’s choosing. The corralling pens customers pass through — awareness, interest, evaluation, intent, purchase, loyalty — are all in the context of a product and what the company wants, not what customers want.

Many other companies have recognized that customers engage in multiple journeys over the lifetime of their relationship; however, those different journeys are typically aligned to and named for specific outcomes, such as acquisition, retention, or upsell. The question for these companies is: Which customer segments wake up with a burning desire to be acquired? Which think their lives would be so much better if only they could be retained or upsold? These journeys, too, are entirely company-centric. Customer-centric journeys start and end with the outcome customers are trying to achieve: Their intended purpose.

For example, the pandemic has spurred many people to relocate from cities to suburbs . Many are first-time homeowners, unsure what tools they might need for planned improvements or unplanned repairs. Some might want to build a treehouse with their kids but don’t yet have a specific model chosen or the plans, instructions, or tools to realize it. What new offerings, journeys, or experiences might manufacturers of power tools create to enable customers to achieve this purpose?

A traditional journey might start with ads or emails with images of a family building a treehouse that link to the company home page, and then expect the customer to discern what tools or other things they need. Without further guidance, customers will likely leave the company’s site (and the company-designed journey) for a search engine, which provides links to numerous articles, blogs, or competitor sites — any of which might better help the customer achieve their purpose and, as a result, prompt them to purchase elsewhere. The company-designed journey might include stalking customers around the web with retargeting ads. But not only is this practice being phased out , it squanders marketing spend by trying to bring customers back to a site that doesn’t address key needs in their journey.

A more customer-centric journey might start with the ads or emails described above, but link to a section of the company website organized by types of projects, from decks to sheds to treehouses. They might show multiple treehouse designs, filterable by size or the type of trees for which each is suitable. The detail page for each treehouse might show a video of the project from start to finish to build confidence in the customer and excitement among the family. All the tools and parts required might be listed, with options to buy them a la carte or as a full package. Each purchase might include assembly plans with illustrated instructions, and a mobile device–optimized step-by-step version, with guidance on what age child can handle each task so all family members can participate safely. Options for contactless delivery or curbside pickup at a local retail partner could be presented. The company might include an offer from a partner like DoorDash or Grubhub for lunch/refreshment delivery, to address that part of the journey.

Companies can better drive growth by creating journeys that align with their customers’ purposes, then develop and operate experiences that enable customers to achieve them. This isn’t to say companies shouldn’t be trying to influence customer decisions along the way. Influence can be more effective when journeys and experiences are customer-centric, designed not as a path to purchase, but as a path to purpose .

The tool company above influences purchases by designing an offer, journey, and experience that addresses customer purpose. They could influence future purchases by triggering an email a few weeks later asking customers how the treehouse project went or if they need help. Doing so demonstrates commitment to the customer’s purpose, which can influence loyalty and future purchases. If the email also encourages customers to post finished treehouse photos on Instagram (which can also appear on the webpage for that treehouse), the company aligns with customers’ desire to share family accomplishments, which might influence others to buy.

This customer-centric, purpose-led approach is even more important for B2B companies. Longer buying cycles mean keeping prospects engaged in longer journeys with more interaction points. It’s also more challenging when decisions involve multiple people, each on their own journey, with varying purposes depending on their role. Marketing and sales teams can increase win rates by aligning individual journeys to each person’s purpose, while managing the group’s purposes collectively in a multi-buyer journey.

Flexible Journeys Based on Need-Points, Not Touchpoints

Customers have greater choice than ever before in terms of how and where they engage. And being forced in the last year to interact only via phone, websites, apps, chats, text, or social channels means customers are more comfortable with these methods than before.

This democratization of new interaction channels has made it more important that customer journeys not be rigidly tied to specific touchpoints. For example, a customer journey that portrays a linear series of interactions — customer sees offline ad, then goes to search engine, then is directed to landing page on website, then is retargeted on Facebook, then comes back to website and provides email address, after which an email to customer is triggered, etc. — is only useful as an example of what could happen if all the stars aligned — or if customers were willing to follow the script.

But customers don’t follow scripts. They follow impulses, urges, whims, and preferences, often in unplanned moments of opportunity. So it’s important that journeys are not aligned to specific touchpoints according to what the company wants to happen. Rather, the company should seek to understand the series of need-points customers traverse in order to make decisions that achieve whatever outcome they ultimately intend.

For example, a person whose purpose is to quit smoking might traverse a journey of need-points, from understanding the easiest way to quit, which method is best for them, how fast it will work, where they can buy it, how quickly they can get it, and (once received) how they use it. Each customer might choose from a variety of touchpoints at each moment of need, depending on their preferences or context at that moment.

It’s your job to be present with the content, expert, recommendation, answer, or product relevant to the customer need at that point, in any and all of the channels a customer might choose, including any operated by the company (website, app, chatbot, call center, salespeople, stores, branches, etc.) or by third parties (search engines, review sites, blogs, retail partners, etc.).

The company that successively addresses these needs most relevantly, clearly, and quickly at any potential touchpoint is likely to maintain engagement and influence throughout each customer’s journey until each achieves their ultimate purpose — and generates value for the business.

Measuring (and Optimizing) Customer Journeys and Experiences

Company outcomes depend on the number of customers who successfully achieve their intended purpose. The better a company measures and manages how well they’re enabling customers to progress across need-points, the stronger the resulting business outcomes.

Teams can measure the effectiveness of their customer journeys — and the experiences based on them — using Customer Performance Indicators (CPIs), which I’ve written about before . This method measures how well a company is performing for customers at each need-point. The better a company performs on outcomes important to customers (CPIs), the better it will perform on outcomes important to the company (KPIs). And because certain need-points in the journey will influence customer decisions more than others, companies should prioritize performing well on CPIs in these moments that matter .

You may find that some need-points are specific to certain customer segments. So, while revising journeys and experiences for your largest or most valuable customer segments is advisable, catering to the unique needs or preferences of other segments should be added over time. Do this by creating off-ramps and on-ramps to and from your main journeys, as a map would depict side roads merging onto a major thoroughfare.

For example, the simplified insurance journey from my previous article reflects three key need-points: Fast Quote, Best Price, and Payments That Fit My Budget. Some customers may need to understand the benefits of bundling home, auto, or other insurance policies before looking for a fast quote.

So another need-point (and CPI) for Understanding Bundling Benefits might be added with an on-ramp to the main journey. This helps marketers ensure they have relevant content for the new need-point (at all touchpoints), and designers can ensure a more relevant and seamless experience for more customers, which results in more customers won.

Looking Ahead

If your company has already adopted these practices, you’re well-positioned to thrive. Simply refine your customer journeys and experiences for how customer needs and values have evolved. For those still using company-centric, linear journeys rigidly tied to specific touchpoints or measuring only business outcomes, now is the time a change in approach will pay off the most.

Small and midsize businesses have a window of advantage here. While larger companies might have greater resources and reach and some have recognized the need to pivot their customer journeys, experiences, and operations for new realities, for many, forward progress will be mitigated by operational, organizational, and cultural inertia. So, until larger or slower players ultimately get there, opportunities abound for more nimble companies to better align with customers’ new purposes and forge new relationships that accelerate growth and strengthen loyalty by providing them with greater confidence in a still-uncertain world.

• Gene Cornfield is Global Lead for the High-Tech Industry at Accenture Interactive. He also leads Accenture’s global cross-industry Chief Marketing Officer peer group.

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Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

Published: August 15, 2023

When creating the ultimate digital customer experience, no business is complete without a solid online presence. In fact, 65% of consumers said their experience on a website or app is "very important" in their decision to recommend a brand.

Anymore, though, it's not enough to simply launch a site and call it a day. You need to craft a digital customer experience that's engaging, user-friendly, and delightful for your audience.

Not sure where to start? Consider this your guide to digital customer experience — what it is, why it matters, recent trends, and how you can apply it to your business.

Table of Contents

What is digital customer experience?

The importance of a good digital customer experience strategy, digital customer experience vs. customer experience, digital customer experience best practices, digital customer experience trends.

• Digital Customer Experience Examples

Digital customer experience, or digital CX, refers to the total online interactions a customer has with your brand. Most interactions take place on your website or app. Yet other channels like social media, email, and live chat also play a role in how customers connect with your brand online.

Creating a delightful online experience with your product or service has become increasingly important.

Any number of competitors can meet the needs of your target audience, but if they look forward to interacting with you, they won't look to anyone else.

Digital CX touchpoints, such as chatbots and online forms, are just the beginning of a larger experience structure.

A thorough and thoughtful customer experience strategy gives you more control over how customers perceive your company.

It also helps you discover what your audience enjoys and dislikes about their experiences so you can actively improve, attracting return customers back to see what's new while also delighting new leads.

For example, those new leads should be able to easily navigate through the content on your website and understand why they should purchase from you.

Returning customers should have access to customer success and support features built into your app's user interface.

In addition to reaching consumers where they are in the customer journey, a seamless digital experience is crucial when it comes to customer satisfaction.

In a recent survey, FullStory found that 74% of customers expect companies to use existing technologies in new ways to create better experiences. What's more, 75% of customers expect optimal experiences through new technologies.

A good digital CX strategy can help you do just that.

It lets you anticipate and map out how users move across your online channels. Plus, good digital CX facilitates a cohesive experience that nurtures customers through every stage of your flywheel .

As part of HubSpot's "Gain Grow Retain" podcast series, Gainsight Customer Success Evangelist Dan Steinman joined the show to discuss digital customer success.

Listen below to hear Steinman discuss the importance of digital CX for your business.

Digital customer experience is a key component of customer experience.

We know that customer experience, or CX, is the impression you've left on your customers throughout their entire journey with your brand. CX is a combination of customers' interactions with your people and your products.

Think of digital CX as the online arm of your company's CX strategy. It's the digital mediums your customers use to interact with those people and products. And, the perception they take away based on their experience.

Now that we've introduced you to the concept, let's review some best practices you can use to optimize digital CX at your company.

• Know your audience.
• Create an omnichannel customer experience.
• Pay attention to mobile experiences.
• Adopt analytics.
• Collect customer feedback.
• Conduct user testing.
• Think like a futurist.

1. Know your audience.

Before creating a digital experience that your customers will love, you have to know who your customers are .

Buyer personas are a great way to understand who is buying your product and why. Personas make it easier to tailor your digital CX strategy to meet your target audience's specific needs and desires.

Collecting online forms from potential leads is the best way to let people interested in your offering introduce themselves and their needs.

Commonalities among answers on initial forms can help you better understand how you are first perceived. They can even indicate what you can provide in the future to meet more of your customers' needs.

Crafting, tracking, and revising the customer journey from beginning to end is critical for building excellent CX.

Mapping out the customer journey can help you determine which digital touchpoints are most important for your customers so you can optimize those points.

Luckily, there are advanced marketing reporting tools specifically tailored to help you develop your digital customer experience.

2. Create an omni-channel customer experience.

Omni-channel experiences generate customer delight by providing more communication options for your targets. To meet them there, you must know where your customers are .

Customers want to engage with a business through the platform that they're comfortable using.

Being forced to learn and work with an interface that is unfamiliar because the company hasn't gotten its digital ducks in a row? That's a negative customer experience you can avoid.

So how do you build something better for your customers? Multichannel is faster and easier at first to simply get a presence where your customers are, but your real goal should be an omni-channel experience.

The key differences between a multichannel and an omni-channel strategy are data syncing and CX continuity .

Image source

The more channels you support, the happier your customers will be, making them more likely to buy from your company again. But it's not enough anymore to simply exist on multiple channels.

Omnichannel CX ensures those channels speak to each other so that valuable customer details aren't lost in the spaces between platforms. Think of it like the notes in a customer account.

They allow later reps to review the customer's history with your brand.

These insights help reps craft a more personal, meaningful, and informed interaction.

In the same way, data syncing between channels creates that omnichannel experience where customers can recognize that your business has it together and is ready to effectively help them wherever they are, whatever the issue.

Plus, an omnichannel strategy ensures you're creating a more consistent customer experience. CX continuity is something most customers couldn't define but can absolutely sense.

When experiences with various digital mediums are dissimilar for your customers, the continuity of your brand is noticeably disrupted. That disjointed experience feels unreliable, reducing customer confidence.

When you engage customers on the mediums they're already using — and create a seamless experience between those mediums — it's much easier and more pleasant for users to interact with you and the content you work so hard to create.

3. Pay attention to mobile experiences.

Whether you have a detailed website or a handy app, it's important to focus on the mobile experience. After all, over 90% of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online.

That's because smartphones allow customers to compare companies while they shop. They can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors before they make a purchase.

If your website or app doesn't seem to fit their needs, chances are your products won't either.

When designing your digital customer experience, make sure it's mobile responsive. That means when it's displayed on a tablet or phone, the interface automatically adjusts to the smaller screen.

This dramatically affects the user experience and makes it much easier to navigate through your content.

4. Adopt analytics.

Like any other part of your business, you should be actively looking for new ways to improve your digital strategy. Fortunately, that's easier to do if you have reporting tools that monitor your digital customer experience.

For example, there's software available, such as Google Analytics and Apple's App Analytics , to track the features and pages that customers use most and help your team identify points of friction within the app or website.

With analytics, you can pinpoint where leads are abandoning purchases and can work proactively to prevent churn.

Or, for returning customers, you can review their favorite tools and adjust your page navigation so they're easier to find when users revisit your site.

Outside of your website or app, you can also measure other aspects of your digital CX. If you use email, you can identify ways to better personalize your outreach approach to improve open rates.

Or, if your brand is on social media, you can monitor brand sentiment and track engagement to further optimize your content.

Understanding how customers engage with your offers helps your team effectively refine your digital CX strategy.

5. Collect customer feedback.

Another way you can gather information is by asking customers for their feedback. Have them complete a survey after using your website or app and ask if they would recommend it to their peers.

You can use a Net Promoter Score, or NPS, survey to gather both qualitative and quantitative data on your digital customer experience. This should give you a good idea of how customers are reacting to your content.

Sample survey questions may include:

• On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?
• Which product/service features do you value and use the most?
• How can we improve your experience on our app?

6. Conduct user testing.

User testing is another way to determine how much customers enjoy using your digital properties.

In this environment, a select group of customers is asked to test your product. Then, they provide feedback on specific aspects of the user experience.

This gives you the chance to tweak your website or app before releasing it to the rest of your customer base.

While there are a few different types of user tests, the most popular one is usability testing .

Usability tests assess how easy it is to use and navigate your product. Participants are asked to perform a simple task. Then, they're evaluated on their ability to complete it.

This shows your development team how user-friendly your website or app is.

7. Think like a futurist.

The digital world is changing at a breakneck pace — literally overnight in the case of Open AI's ChatGPT, which took the world by storm on November 30th, 2022 — which was a Wednesday.

What is your company doing to improve customer experience next Wednesday?

The future develops one day at a time, so you need to think about your CX strategy like a living thing that grows and changes quickly.

Your digital CX strategy in 2023 may look a lot different when 2024 rolls around — nobody would be surprised if you find you need to pivot more than once.

As technology advances, trends will emerge and influence customer perception.

Pay close attention to those trends and how your target customers respond to them, be bold enough to try to create some trends yourself, and be prepared to evolve what digital CX looks like for your business.

Speaking of trends, let's review a few digital trends that businesses are following (so far) in 2023.

• Improvements in AI
• Increased Number of Chatbots
• Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities
• More Focus on Predictive Analytics
• New Augmented Reality Tools
• Personalized Customer Experiences
• Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

1. Improvements in AI

When we think of artificial intelligence (AI), we often think of sentient robots that mimic human actions.

While these ideas make for excellent sci-fi villains, they aren't accurate representations of how AI is used in modern business, even with the recent warp forward in AI Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Most AI is used to automate business functions that assist employees. This saves hundreds or thousands of hours. AI can also help personalize experiences for the customer.

One of the best-proven ways AI helps improve the customer and employee experience is to incorporate AI into email newsletters.

Companies can send identical messages to their entire customer base that come across as personal, genuine, and sincere.

To accomplish this without burdening employees with hand-customizing thousands of emails, they use AI to pull data from the CRM and personalize each message with the customer's information.

This makes the email look and feel like it was written specifically for that person.

AI continues to develop in leaps and bounds, so you should expect lots of new features to appear in your marketplace over the next few months — and strap in because the next few years will be wild.

We know that changing this fast can drive some fear, but right now, one of the best ways to stay competitive is to take advantage of these improvements in AI.

At HubSpot, we're excited about this new wave of technology and are rolling out new AI features, including Content Assistant and ChatSpot .

Customers crave personalized experiences, and AI offers incredible opportunities to deliver to users what they want and need in the digital space.

2. Increased Number of Chatbots

Chatbots are about to explode in the retail space in North America and Europe because of how financially accessible NLP has become for medium and small businesses due to ChatGPT.

In the past, bots were very limited and could only perform a predetermined series of actions. This made for dull customer experiences that often did not provide the needed solutions.

There's still a lingering stigma that chatbots are just talkative phone trees that lead nowhere until you ask for a human being to speak with.

The good news is that chatbots are improving along with AI like a tide raising the ship. Juniper Research forecasts that global retail spend on chatbots will increase by 470% over the next five years.

This spending trend will significantly reduce the pressure on customer support teams to answer routine questions.

What's more, these automated systems companies are investing in can perform another layer of routine operations, such as opening tickets and assigning them to the proper representatives that can actually address that customer's issue.

With bots, support agents can refocus their time and energy on complex or time-sensitive cases that are more likely to result in customer churn. Chatbots were predicted to save businesses 2.5 billion hours by 2023 — and that was before the quantum leap in natural language processing in late 2022.

Like your overall digital CX strategy, chatbots can't simply be set up and left to do the work.

They require a hand at the helm to determine how to improve the customer experience at critical points along that journey to help the chatbot grow more useful to those customers, giving them the best possible experience.

When you can, spend a few minutes with this video that remains at the heart of the chatbot wave and provides guidance on using chatbots for your business.

3. Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities

Customers don't want to wait long (or at all) for support if they don't have to. More companies are focused on finding ways to help customers quickly help themselves.

In addition to chatbots, this may include:

• Knowledge bases. These searchable databases allow customers to find resources about your products and answers to FAQs. This makes the information-seeking process faster for customers. Plus, it releases some of the burden on your customer service team.
• Workflow automation. This involves setting up self-operating processes that run manual tasks, saving time and resources. For example, a customer requests a return on your website. An email is automatically triggered to send them the return label, rather than waiting for a customer service rep.

4. More Focus on Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics determine how customers will react to changes in your business. These reports help business leaders understand customer behavior and the company's role in their customers' lives.

As AI and machine learning continue to improve, we can expect predictive analytics to become a fundamental tool used by companies with a digital presence.

These reports will be built into the internal user interface and updated with the most recent customer data. That way, business leaders will have all the information they need to confidently make decisions for their company.

5. New Augmented Reality Tools

Augmented reality (AR) presents fun new opportunities to improve digital customer experience. If you're unfamiliar with AR, it's a technology that supplements real images with digital elements, such as graphics or text overlays.

Here's an example from the NFL's Carolina Panthers.

There's a lot of potential for the use of AR in customer service. For example, some brands have used it to supplement in-person customer experience by displaying product information as customers shop.

When a customer is in the store, they might use their smart device to scan a product and see data such as customer reviews and product details.

This reduces friction during the buying process, making it easier for customers to find the product or service that's right for them.

Another popular AR trend is the "try-as-you-buy" experience. If your company operates mostly online, you can let customers test out your products by using an AR version on their computer.

That way, customers can avoid the hassle of buying your product or asking for a sample only to return it a few weeks later.

6. Personalized Customer Experiences

According to research, 70% of consumers would willingly provide personal data if they knew it was being used to improve their experience.

This means customers are willing to give you information. In return, they ask that you meet them where they are in their customer journey.

One great way to personalize the shopping experience for a customer is to send them an email with product recommendations based on their recent browsing or purchase history.

It communicates to your customers that you are using data to help them, making it easier for them to find what they want and need.

As you continue to collect customer data, it will be easier to create personalized customer experiences.

Not only will you have a stronger understanding of your customer base, but you'll also have the technology needed to distribute content effectively.

What's more, you'll be able to automate this personalization to maintain a delightful customer experience as your business grows.

7. Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

With all of this data comes great responsibility.

Yes, customers are willing to share their data with you. But they expect it to be protected and used for the right reasons. Data breaches and security compromises push customers away from your brand.

Make sure you're up to date on the latest privacy laws and regulations that affect the way you do business with your customers.

Developing and maintaining trust is critical in any relationship, so be sure you are doing your due diligence to protect sensitive information entrusted to you.

• Warby Parker's Virtual Try-On
• Apple's Omni-Channel Experience
• UNICEF's Chatbot for Societal Change

1. Warby Parker's Virtual Try-On

Warby Parker is a retailer of low-cost, quality prescription eyewear, sunglasses, and contact lenses.

If you're interested in buying a pair, the WP app lets you virtually "try on" the frames before buying them using AR technology — all from the comfort of your couch.

They cleverly harnessed the mobile experience after noticing that people would come to their stores and take pictures of themselves in different frames.

They'd share those photos with friends and loved ones, gathering opinions and having a good laugh.

Warby Parker embraced this shopping behavior that developed with the rise of camera phones and folded it into the customer experience to delight their shoppers with something fun and new.

They were uniquely positioned in 2020 because they were already helping their customers shop from home using AR on mobile devices.

They had prioritized meeting their customers where they were both at home and on mobile, where 90% of users accessed the internet, and it worked out in their favor.

Loads of companies got on board with the AR shopping trend because it was a natural fit for their customers and their products.

Consider makeup shopping during a pandemic. Sharing lipstick samples at the store went from questionably hygienic to being perceived as a blatant health hazard.

Embracing AR, makeup retailers built digital customer experiences where their shoppers could upload a picture and see various shades on themselves from the comfort and safety of home — with a low-friction path to checkout if done well.

What we like: Warby Parker's digital customer experience strategy of embracing AR created more value than the obvious. These virtual shopping opportunities offer customers access to more products than can be kept on hand in store.

Even more meaningfully, they improve access for customers with mobility challenges and low-income customers who don't have ready access to transportation.

More people than ever now have access to the low-cost prescription eyewear they need, thanks to Warby Parker’s choice to think like futurists.

2. Apple's Omni-Channel Experience

Apple is a greatexample of a company that has created a seamless digital customer experience based on the customer's data.

Through iCloud, customers always have access to their data — like messages, photos, and contacts — and this is true regardless of which Apple device they're using.

It goes beyond Apple devices as well. Simply signing into iCloud from any device with an internet signal lets them access their digital storage.

This has made each iCloud user's digital life fit more harmoniously with their physical life in ways that affect connectivity and culture.

Consider one service they offer: AirDrop. Once upon a time, you had to store a file on a single, physical device.

Sharing it was a multi-step process that could be tripped up by file size, your recipient not having the right program, and other tedious problems of mismatched technology.

So much friction just trying to share a file — all while sitting right there at the same table! Oof.

With two AirDrop-enabled devices, you can just choose a file to send and tap AirDrop. It automatically transfers to the other nearby device, and you can move on with your idea sharing and projects much faster.

Pro tip: Some folks use digital storage far more than others, so Apple's iCloud storage comes in various sizes and prices. Their goal is to provide what people need to maintain their own continuity of experience.

3. UNICEF's Chatbot for Societal Change

Chatbots and touchstones of the digital customer experience are being used in innovative new ways to build better real-life experiences.

UNICEF re-directs the last step in the digital CX process — continually adapting and improving the customer experience. They take that idea and apply it to societal problems in the real world.

U-Report is a chatbot-based polling system created by UNICEF that asks questions about social issues, and those who sign up and reply are called U-Reporters.

Critical feedback is collected from these under-served populations worldwide, most often from young people in developing countries.

It's strange to think of U-Reporters as customers, but they are the target population served by UNICEF.

UNICEF provides communication access points on several digital platforms to meet their target populations where they are. U-Report gives these populations a voice that can finally be heard via a digital experience.

UNICEF then uses the feedback to inform its policy recommendations. These recommendations are presented to regional leadership, helping people in power understand and improve societal issues where they have enough influence to help.

What we like: Retail companies and non-profit organizations alike are getting more creative with using chatbots. This is at the heart of thinking like a futurist for the sake of those you serve — creating trends above and beyond.

Bringing It Back to Business

Customers want access to your brand whenever and wherever they decide they're ready to interact. Right now, digital channels are the place to be.

Whatever you're in the business of, prepare to be responsive to change. Be bold, get creative, and prioritize finding new and innovative ways to delight those you serve by continually optimizing your digital customer experience.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

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14 Customer Experience Fails that Companies Can Learn From

How Customer Experience Has Evolved Over the Last Decade [+ 2024 Trends]

Memorable Examples of AR in Customer Experience [+Tips for Implementing the Technology]

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

User Flows: 8 Tips For Creating A Super Smooth User Experience

11 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference? [+ Examples]

What is Omni-Channel? 20 Top Omni-Channel Experience Examples

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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How to create an ecommerce customer journey map (with examples)

In the highly competitive world of ecommerce, selling great products is not always enough. Customers expect fantastic experiences during every interaction with you—and if you don’t deliver them, your competitors will.

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So: how do you find the best opportunities to optimize your funnel, improve conversions, and grow your ecommerce business? With a little help from your new friend, the customer journey map .

Find new ways to grow ecommerce sales

Hotjar shows you what key user segments are doing on your site, so you can fix the problems hurting your conversions.

What are ecommerce customer journey maps?

Customer journey maps visualize the steps your customers take when moving through your conversion funnel . 

A basic map, like the one below, simply shows the key touchpoints customers go through on their journey.

An example of a simple customer journey map from CartsGuru

More sophisticated maps integrate detailed insights about the customer, such as their actions, thoughts, and needs, at different touchpoints. This allows you to take a walk in your customer’s shoes and find ways to improve your ecommerce user experience (UX) .

A map from MarketingMag.com.au revealing customer thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint

Some customer journey maps also integrate quantitative data into each step. By tracking key metrics—like your Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, or customer effort score—you’ll get a data-informed view of the weak points in your journey.

A customer journey map from Tallwave incorporating quantitative data

4 (very good) reasons to create customer journey maps

Sure, your company as a whole has a basic understanding of what customers do . But does every department have a consistent, detailed view of what they’re experiencing ?

Customer journey maps provide exactly that, bringing several key benefits with them: 

1. Understand your customers’ motivations, drivers, and point points

In ecommerce, buying journeys are rarely simple. They usually entail a range of emotions, questions, and pains—ranging from “how quickly can I get this awesome dress?” to “am I really getting the best deal?” and “why is this so complicated?”

Customer journey maps give you an at-a-glance view of these vital insights, helping your entire company empathize with your audience.

2. Get your teams working together

Improving the customer’s journey, even at a single touchpoint, often requires multiple teams.

For example, imagine your new customers are confused about how to use your latest product. In this case, your customer service team could report their feedback to your content team. Your content team can then create educational product videos to provide helpful (and necessary) guidance.

Cross-team coordination like this is faster and easier when your company has a shared view of the customer’s experience.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify who owns what

Imagine a scenario where a customer buys a product and feels it doesn’t meet their expectations. When they contact your company, should customer support help them, or a technical product expert?

For growing companies, the lines of responsibility often get blurred. Customer journey maps help you determine which team is responsible for key actions and support at each step of the way.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

With a clear overview of the customer’s journey, your team can quickly home in on the touchpoints where something’s going wrong.

For example, you might realize many customers are landing on your product page, but few are completing purchases. 

By mapping out the next steps they take and gathering data about their experiences, you discover that customers are dropping off at the shopping cart

A closer look at your behavior analytics data clearly shows visitors find the shopping cart UX confusing

With this knowledge, you can take action to simplify your customers’ shopping cart experience and track whether it helps you increase conversions .

What are the stages of the customer journey?

It’s important to remember that every customer’s journey starts before they land on your ecommerce site, and long after they make a purchase.

Most marketers consider the following stages when mapping out a customer journey:

❗️awareness.

Your customer’s journey starts when they become aware of a desire or challenge that your product addresses. This is where you can start appealing to them with content and marketing campaigns.

In the later stages of awareness, your customer educates themselves about the different products you have available.

💭 Consideration

In this stage, the customer considers whether your product is right for them. They may be trying to choose between several similar products or comparing your product with a competitor’s.

💡 Decision 

Your customer has decided your product is right for them , but is weighing up final hurdles like price, delivery time, and payment options. To complete the purchase, they’ll also have to navigate your checkout process.

💰 Retention

After the sale, your customer’s evolving perception of your company will depend on delivery, support, and the product itself. If your customer has a positive experience, they may continue spending with you.

❤️ Advocacy

A remarkable experience may result in a customer becoming an advocate at the end of their journey. This could mean telling others about your company, discussing your products on social media, or positively reviewing your business on public platforms.

How to create a customer journey map for your ecommerce company

Every customer journey map is different—the data you include will be unique to your company. But if you’re an ecommerce business of any size, there are five steps you’ll need to take:

Define your goal

Are you trying to get more sales from visitors on mobile? Or more customers advocating for you? Or perhaps reduce the bounce rate on your checkout page? 

By agreeing on a goal with your team, you can build your customer journey map with the right insights, metrics, and analyses in mind.

Gather relevant, accurate data

For your customer journey maps to be of maximum efficacy, you’ll want to gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data . The more data you have, the better—but the data you include in your map should always relate to your overall goal.  

For example, let’s imagine that your goal is to increase sales. In this scenario, you could:

Learn how customers navigate your store across the shopping journey by conducting usability testing

Use surveys and interviews to understand what information customers need during the consideration phase

Gather behavior analytics data to uncover pain points and signs of frustration during the checkout process

Gauge overall satisfaction by tracking customer NPS across their entire pre-purchase journey

💡Pro tip: using Hotjar? Your job just got easier! With our Surveys and Feedback tools, you can ask visitors both closed and open-ended questions. For example, ask customers to rate your product page, then follow up by asking how you could improve it. 

And when you’re gathering customer data, consider our new product for user-research automation, Hotjar Engage , which makes it easier than ever to interview customers and run seamless user testing.

5 types of user data you need to create a customer journey map

If you choose to create a customer journey map, you’re already engaging in data-driven marketing . Make your maps as useful as possible by taking relevant information from a wide range of sources.

1. Website journey data

Google Analytics (GA) is an essential part of your ecommerce website analysis toolkit. Its reports and dashboards give you a high-level overview of how people use and move through your site. What’s more, Google Analytics has a range of segmenting capabilities that let you gather data relating to your defined user personas.

For example:

The Behavior Flow report shows you the paths customers are taking through your site and where they drop off

The Conversion Path report shows you what platforms your customers are using at each stage of their journey

💡Pro tip: make your analysis easier by connecting GA to Hotjar with our Google Analytics integration . Then, leverage User Attributes to filter Hotjar data for specific audience segments you identified with Google Analytics.

2. Behavior analytics data

Now that you know what journeys your visitors take, you’ll want to see what they’re doing on each page. This is where behavior analytics tools, like Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings , can help.

Scroll heatmaps show you where people stop scrolling on your product and support pages, showing you which parts of your page go unseen

Click heatmaps show you where people are clicking most, indicating how intuitive your UX design is and giving you ideas for improvements

Recordings let you rewatch individual journeys to find out how customers behave, where they get stuck, and what they do before clicking your call to action ( CTA )

3. Email queries, chat logs, and customer support logs

Your company’s everyday conversations with customers are a gold mine of insights. They reveal what users commonly get frustrated with, what information they need, and how often specific problems occur.

Ideally, use a tool to categorize and log queries and support requests from your customers. You can then hold regular reviews with your sales and support teams to see how the trends fit into your customer journeys.

Customer support platform Intercom visualizes common conversation topics

4. On-site and email surveys

Asking your customers for feedback is an effective way to understand their experiences at different parts of their journey. In addition to getting subjective, descriptive feedback, surveys also give you quantitative data (like NPS scores) to support optimization efforts.

Following an interaction with customer support: email a survey that asks respondents to rate their customer satisfaction level. Include an open-ended question prompting customers to describe what you could do better.

Following a successful purchase: target shoppers with an on-site survey asking them to submit an NPS. Then, track how this score changes as you update and improve to your checkout process.

5. Customer interviews

Having one-on-one discussions with customers is a great way to dig further into their needs, motivations, and pain points. You might find it helps to offer customers an incentive to speak with you, but satisfied customers will often do so for free. 

However, don’t focus solely on happy customers. Performing exit interviews with regular customers who change to another supplier can reveal a weak link in the customer journey.

❓Did you know? Hotjar recently added Engage , a user research tool, to our platform. Engage makes it easy to book, conduct, and analyze customer interviews, so you can find new insights more easily.

Create user personas for the customers you’re trying to serve

Depending on your goals, you might want to create multiple maps for different ‘types’ of customers. For example:

New customers + Existing customers

Actual customers + Ideal customers

B2B customers + B2C customers

Creating separate maps for your different customer types ensures more accurate, actionable maps. However, you’ll need a clear idea of who these customers are and how you can identify them. That’s why it’s a good idea to create a user persona for each distinct customer you’re trying to help.

An example persona from UXPressia

💡Pro tip: with Hotjar User Attributes, you can cross-reference data from other platforms to get insights into specific user segments. For example, use Google Analytics to create a segment of new users who visit your site after clicking an ad, then watch Recordings of their journeys.

Why are user personas helpful in customer journey mapping?

Depending on your goals, you may be interested in different user personas: to improve sales of a specific product, you’d want to understand the needs and actions of customers who bought that product. To increase repeat purchases, on the other hand, you’d need to know how existing customers navigate your site and what they need from future purchases.

In both cases, you’d want to see how their journeys differ from other customers and visitors. Understand what they do on their journeys, and you’ll find ways to serve them better.

By analyzing the journeys of people who buy your flagship product, you learn that they often visit a competitor’s site to compare products. Using this insight, you add a table that compares your product with others, keeping visitors on your site and boosting sales in the process.

By analyzing the journeys of existing customers, you learn that they begin looking at related products in your range around three months after an initial purchase. Accordingly, you start sending automated emails around month three to grow sales while increasing customer delight .

Note: traditionally, marketers created user personas with demographic information like gender, sex, and age. Today, many marketers find it helpful to use the jobs to be done (JTBD) framework.

JTBD views user personas less in terms of qualities and more in terms of goals, motivations, and desired changes . Of course, this is perfect for customer journey mapping!

Unravel your customer referral paths

Your customers interact with your ecommerce business in various places, both online and offline. Understanding how these touchpoints fit together—and delivering a consistent experience across them—is the goal of omnichannel marketing.

In some cases, their journey will be a straight line:

The prospect enters ‘best winter jackets’ into a search engine

They immediately find your blog, click through to your store, and make a purchase

A week later, the customer receives their order and goes on social media to share their satisfaction with the product

However, in other scenarios, the journey will be more complex:

A prospect hears about your clothing brand from a friend 

Weeks later, they see your brand on Instagram, visit your store, and sign up for your newsletter

The prospect then visits two other physical clothing stores to compare jackets 

A day later, they receive an email from you offering a 10% discount on jackets they previously viewed—they return to your online store to make a purchase

The customer has a small issue with the order and calls your customer support line to resolve it

As a business, you might want to serve the second customer better so they can become an advocate, too. But to map out their journey accurately, you need to know where they came to you from—in other words, their referral path.

Combine data from your different tools to understand your customer referral paths

Building an accurate map of omnichannel journeys is challenging but not impossible. Ideally, you’ll look at data from two different tools.

Look for referral paths in Google Analytics. The Behavior Flow report tells you where website visitors are coming from (e.g. organic search or email). 

Use surveys to fill in the gaps. For example, when a customer signs up to your email newsletter, send a survey to ask how they discovered your brand.

Combining both these data points gives you a more complete customer journey map. And if you’re using Hotjar, our Segment integration helps you view survey responses for different audience segments by leveraging User Attributes.

Create (and update) your maps

Having gone through the previous four steps, you can build maps for each key customer persona. Your team is now in a great place to analyze and improve critical touchpoints along the customer journey.

But don’t forget that your business is always evolving, so your maps need to evolve with it.

Update journeys as they change. As you add new products, features, and marketing funnels, map out the new journeys your customers take.

Track and update key metrics. If you’re including quantitative data in your maps, like NPS or CSAT scores, track changes and update your maps every quarter.

Start mapping your ecommerce journeys today

The more complicated your customer journeys are, the more opportunities you have to delight—or disappoint—your audiences. Customer journey maps give your company a shared framework for improving their experiences across the entire conversion funnel .

But remember: your customer journey maps are only as good as the data you used to create them. By researching the what , how, and why of your customers’ behavior, you’ll build effective customer journey maps that drive real impact.

Solve your biggest conversion challenges

With tools like Recordings, Surveys, and Feedback, Hotjar helps understand why visitors don’t convert—and gives you the insights and information you need to make them.

Ecommerce customer journey map FAQs

Can customer journey maps help us improve our web design.

Customer journey maps help you zero in on parts of the customer journey that need the most attention: i.e. the points where customers are falling off or feeling dissatisfied with their experience. 

You can then gather data around these conversion bottlenecks using behavior analytics platforms like Hotjar. If your research reveals a problem with web design , you can apply ecommerce CRO and web design principles to improve the page. Take a look at some recent web design examples to see how the best companies in the world are doing it.

How do early-stage ecommerce companies benefit from customer journey maps?

If your company is in an early stage of growth, you probably don’t have the resources to optimize your whole funnel. Customer journey maps help you identify the parts of your funnel to prioritize so you can use your resources efficiently. 

You can then start gathering data and using ecommerce design metrics to inform future improvements.

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Home CX Customer Experience

Digital Customer Journey: Definition, Stages & Examples

Defining the digital customer journey (DCJ) our customers follow is critical to offering a good user experience. This process that finally leads to the purchase must be optimized if we want good results.

That is why more and more companies recommend products or services that might interest you. Even streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix suggest movies or series that you might like, personalizing user experience. The most exciting thing about this is that these strategies are not coincidental. There are many efforts behind it, such as building a great customer experience strategy through the use of tools like the customer journey .

LEARN ABOUT: Perfect Customer-First Strategy

One of the greatest challenges for companies is learning what their customers want. How do you live up to their expectations? What are the exact moments and places that most influence their buying decisions?

LEARN ABOUT: Time to Value

If you want to learn more about what is digital customer journey, its five stages and read some examples, this is the right article for you.

Content Index

• Digital Customer Journey Definition
• Optimizing your Digital Customer Journey

The five stages of the Digital Customer Journey

• Example of Digital Customer Journey

What is Digital Customer Journey?

The Digital Customer Journey (DCJ) is the process carried out by a user. It goes from the moment the user identifies they have a need, to the moment they acquire a product or service to satisfy or solve it.

This process or journey comprises five different phases: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and customer advocacy . The user will decide on either buying or discarding your product/service, depending on how every interaction with your brand within those 5 phases makes them feel. And remember, the best way to attain a good visualization of user interactions, touchpoints and all stages is through a user journey map .

In each phase there are different touchpoints . This term refers to the contact points where the user and the company meet. The DCJ is built to identify these points of contact. Of course, this journey is not the same for all users. Depending on the type of consumer, their trip will be different; thus, their relationship with these customer points of contact will vary.

The DCJ is not only a descriptive tool of a process but also a practical one. It is the first step in an optimization process that leads to better sales opportunities and more satisfied customers.

Learn how to create your  customer journey canvas  and download our template.

Why optimizing your Digital Customer Journey is a good idea?

The focus on customer experience has surpassed the price and the product as a brand differentiator. The strategy’s success is based on the communication of different areas within an organization. But, mainly, on understanding the importance of their role in digital customer experience .

Today, the main trends that stand out in the management of relationships between companies and clients are: a more informed, hyper-connected, self-sufficient, demanding and much more emotional consumer. Similarly, the transformation of the opening of multiple channels and their correct integration to the contact, self-service and customer experience channels regarding a product or service.

Here lies the importance of the Digital Customer Journey. While the purpose of any marketing strategy is to execute a purchase, the process the customer goes through is now as relevant as the purchase itself. In other words, if the customer does not have a pleasant, frictionless experience during their purchase journey, they will most likely not reach their destination.

If you like reading about what is the digital customer journey, you might find interesting learning about customer journey vs customer experience: the difference .

Let’s look at the different phases in the case of the online customer journey.

Awareness (pre-sale)

The customer awareness or discovery phase is where the user realizes they have a need. Keep in mind that “the need” is a broad concept in the customer journey.

A need may be, for example, that you want to try the new flavor of a brand of candies. You didn’t know that flavor existed, and suddenly, you discover it. Or, for example, you feel like getting a massage based on a post you saw on your Instagram feed.

Discovery can be offline, for example, in a conversation with friends, in a shop window, or in a TV commercial, before going online. In general, the entire customer journey can start offline and go digital.

LEARN ABOUT:  Customer Journey Mapping Tools

If you like reading about customer journey, you might find valuble to learn how to build your own Customer Journey Map .

In this case, where we’re talking about a 100% digital process, the most common way to get to the awareness phase is through advertising, whether on social networks, websites, or search engines or even through sponsored articles in the media.

It is also possible to discover it through recommendations on social networks, where influencer marketing strategies come into play.

Be that as it may, this first stage is passive for the user, requiring no effort from the user’s standpoint. They discover they have a need based on observing Ads or by listening to a friend talk about a specific brand, for instance. If they decide to investigate further, we move on to the next phase.

2. Consideration (pre-sale)

Digital consideration is the second phase of the digital customer journey. At this point, the user begins to think about what they have discovered and consider if and where to buy it.

Here it begins the search process. The brand can reach the user through SEO and SEM content strategy by sending out email campaigns, reviews on third-party websites or sponsored articles, etc…

Consideration is perhaps the stage where most companies invest more money since it is where everything is at stake. The business needs to attract the user with various digital marketing strategies in order to compete and win the first spot in the mind of the consumer. 

At this point is when the potential client has to understand what you offer that the competition does not give. And as we have already mentioned, it is not only an informative process but also an emotional one.

At the consideration stage, it is crucial to differentiate from the competition and offer the added value of your brand. It is not only about solving the need once but about truly understanding the user persona that is targeted so that later down the line, they become loyal customers. 

3. Purchase (post-sale)

Finally, it’s time to buy. We cannot express enough how the shopping experience in a digital customer journey is crucial. For instance, if the website usability is poor, you leave. In case there are too many steps or you can’t pay with your preferred payment method, you also leave.

Cart abandonment is a crucial problem in many e-commerce. Within the company’s digitization strategy, optimizing the sales process is essential to not lose all previous work.

Your potential client is lost because they instead go to an alternative where the process is more accessible. For this, it is necessary to make the purchase as easy and frictionless as possible for the customer. If they feel that it is becoming a hassle to purchase something at your online commerce, they turn around to your competition. 

You can make the purchase process easier by offering alternatives such as data autofill, having different transaction payment methods or providing competitive shipping options, for instance. These actions are essential, so the purchase is not lost at the last moment.

4. Retention (post-sale)

Once the purchase is over, we move on to retention. If your experience in customer service has been positive, it will be much easier to convince your customers to stay. 

How do you do that? It could be a telephone after-sales service, reaching out to the customer through a digital channel and touching base with them to offer extra support with their purchase. Responding promptly to the customer will aid to get a better impression of your business and, most importantly, increase the customer’s lifetime cycle rate. 

There are different strategies your marketing and customer success team can implement to build longstanding customer relationships. That could be sending out additional resources to add more value to the purchase, creating a customer online community, and keeping the CX experts following up with online surveys to learn more about their current experience with the brand, to name a few.

In the Retention phase, the key is to make the client feel that they’re important to the business. 

5. Advocacy (this is where every business wants customers on)

Lastly, we need these satisfied customers to recommend us to other potential customers. In this sense, the voice of the customer (VOC) must be listened to. As we explained in our article on what VOC means, this methodology puts the customer and their impressions at the center.

If you find it interesting reading about the voice of the customer, you might want to review these VOC survey questions and templates . 

We can know what our NPS is and what we need to change to achieve these recommendations through customer satisfaction surveys. Considering that retaining a customer is much more profitable than getting a new one, profitability will most likely skyrocket if our retained customers recommend us.

Example of Digital Customer Journey: Purchasing a guitar online

Now that every stage of the digital customer journey is explained let’s go over all of the phases in a simple example. 

Let’s say you want to purchase a guitar. In the awareness phase, you discover you’d like to learn to play a musical instrument. Maybe the mobile phone “heard you” speak with your friends about your interest to learn to play the guitar, and now your social media and every website you visit are bursting with Ads of companies wanting to sell you the “best guitar in the market.” The awareness or discovery stage doesn’t require any effort from the user other than reading the Ads that show up on your digital channels. 

The next stage, consideration , is when you start to notice you might ponder on the idea of the purchasing process of a guitar. Now the search process has begun, and you’re actively looking for the best guitar that fits you. In this stage, you could be doing things like watching YouTube reviews, reading a blog post about “the top 10 best guitar alternatives for beginners,” and even comparing prices from different e-commerces such as Amazon, Best Buy, or an official musical instruments online store. Once it’s decided where you want to purchase your product, you go to their website to order it. But then you get a couple of unpleasant surprises. The website user experience is terrible because the pages take a lot of time to load. Even when you manage to overcome such inconvenience with a lot of patience, the site marks an error whenever you’re trying to do the transaction with your card. Given your e-shopping experience got stuck, now you go to your second online shop website of preference. This time you can navigate through the website quite faster, and the payment transaction with your card gets through with ease. 

The second option you had to go for instead of the first one continues bringing in a great customer experience. What happens in the retention stage? Well, they said the approximate delivery date was going to be in a week, but you got your guitar within 3 days! Plus, it comes in a nice box with a personalized note from the business thanking you for the purchase and offering flexible return policies. Besides, you’ve also received downloadable resources and provided customer access to an online community portal where you can connect with other users and get support from the company’s Customer Success team. All of these actions may seem like a bonus, but they aim to make the client feel special, so the next time you need to purchase any other instrument or an extra set of new strings, you buy with them.     

Finally, if you’re happy with the guitar and the service they continually provide post-sale, you might start recommending them to other people, be it in person or by writing a review on their website.

This may take some time to get here, so the sum of what the business does in all the previous stages (especially retention) is critical.

 This is the part where you, as their customer, are so happy with the product and their service that you start genuinely advocating for them.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

In conclusion…

• The Digital Customer journey is the process carried out by a user when interacting with your brand to satisfy a need with your product or service. 
• There are 5 stages the user goes through Discovery, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
• Touchpoints are a critical part of a DCJ because they are your company’s points of customer contact, end to end.
• The success of your company relies on the optimization of your DCJ. Remember, the customer’s process is as relevant as the purchase itself.
• Great customer experiences can be obtained through the use of a powerful customer experience management platform.

If you’d like to boost customer loyalty at your company, QuestionPro CX can help you achieve it with our extensive toolbox set of features, including the creation and deployment of CX surveys, NPS flexible dashboards, sentiment analysis , customer churn prediction, closed-loop feedback system to address customer issues better, and more! 

Do you have a CX program and don’t know where to start or how to incorporate a CEM? Share what’s your current business challenge, and we will offer you different proposals tailored to your needs.

Try QuestionPro CX today if you want to boost customer loyalty by efficiently processing large amounts of data in real-time and turning them into fact-driven action support. 

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Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices: From Buyer to Advocate

Craft your customer's path to advocacy! Map their journey, understand emotions, personalize touchpoints, and track metrics for continuous improvement.

Journey Onward: Mapping Your Customer's Path to Advocacy

Welcome, fellow brand explorers! Prepare to embark on a captivating quest – charting the transformative journey of your customers as they evolve from hesitant buyers to passionate advocates. This eBook is your ultimate guide, packed with practical best practices and insights to illuminate the "why" and "how" of customer journey mapping.

But first, let's set the stage:

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Imagine a detailed map, not of geographical landscapes, but of emotional terrain. A customer journey map chronicles the steps your customers take – from initial awareness to post-purchase delight (and hopefully, beyond!). It's a visualization of their interactions, emotions, and decisions at every touchpoint with your brand.

Why Should You Map the Journey?

Think of this map as your compass, guiding you to:

Uncover hidden desires:

Data dives and customer interviews unveil aspirations, frustrations, and hidden motivations, allowing you to tailor experiences that resonate deeply.

Pinpoint friction points:  

Identify roadblocks like confusing checkout processes or unresponsive customer service, helping you smooth the path and prevent churn.

Spark emotional connections:  

Understand the emotional ebbs and flows of your customer's experience. Create touchpoints that inspire, delight, and foster lasting loyalty.

Ignite advocacy:  

Define what an "advocate" truly means for your brand, then optimize the journey to nurture that passionate support and word-of-mouth praise.

Best Practices for Mapping Your Customer Journey:

Let's equip you with the tools to craft a map that sings:

Know Your Tribe:

Delve deeper than demographics. Use surveys, social listening, and customer reviews to understand their dreams, anxieties, and aspirations. Craft vivid personas that paint a picture of who they are and what they seek.

Define the Destination:  

Advocate isn't a one-size-fits-all. Decide what actions truly demonstrate loyalty in your context – social media mentions, community participation, brand ambassador programs? Map the stages of advocacy, from initial purchase to unwavering champion.

Plot the Path:  

Leave no touchpoint behind! Map every interaction, online and offline, from pre-purchase research to post-purchase support. Consider emails, social media, in-store encounters, even product packaging – every experience shapes the story.

Embrace Emotions:  

Don't just map actions, map the emotional rollercoaster. Pinpoint moments of excitement, frustration, and delight to understand what truly moves your customers.

Beyond the Map:

Taking action and embracing the curves:.

Your journey map isn't just a wall decoration – it's a blueprint for action:

Metrics Maestro:  

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with your advocacy goals. Track customer satisfaction, engagement, referral rates, and brand sentiment to measure the impact of your efforts.

Data-Driven Decisions:  

Continuously iterate and refine your map based on data insights. A/B test touchpoints, gather customer feedback, and let data guide your optimization efforts.

Personalize the Journey:  

Treat your customers like individuals, not data points. Use your map to personalize experiences, address pain points proactively, and nurture relationships at every stage.

Remember, no two journeys are exactly alike! Embrace the beautiful (and messy) reality that customers navigate your brand in unique ways. This is where:

Scenario Planning:  

Explore "what-if" scenarios to anticipate potential challenges and opportunities. Proactive planning helps you stay ahead of the curve and adapt to evolving customer behaviors.

Customer Journey Canvas:  

This visual tool allows you to map the journey collaboratively, fostering brainstorming and ensuring diverse perspectives are included.

Customer Journey Metrics:  

Moving Customers Forward, Smoothly and Successfully:

Finally, remember that your map is only as powerful as the insights it generates. Track key metrics throughout the journey to identify:

Friction points:  

Where are customers getting stuck? Are they struggling to find information, facing confusing processes, or experiencing unresponsive service? Analyze data to pinpoint and address these bottlenecks.

Opportunities for Engagement:  

Are there touchpoints where customer engagement dips? Explore ways to inject excitement, offer personalized support, or provide valuable resources to rekindle their interest.

Moments of Truth:  

Identify critical decision points where customers choose to move forward or abandon the journey. Optimize these moments to ensure a smooth transition and encourage continued engagement.

Journey Onward, Fellow Explorers!

Remember , customer journey mapping is a continuous adventure. With these best practices as your compass, proactive planning as your shield, and data-driven insights as your torch, you'll illuminate the path to brand loyalty, spark passionate advocacy, and watch your customers transform from hesitant buyers to unwavering champions, singing the praises of your brand everywhere.

Your journey map is a compass, not a destination. Continuously refine it, celebrate victories, and let data guide you towards loyal, passionate advocates!

Delve deep: Use data, interviews, and personas to uncover hidden desires and frustrations. Define what "advocate" means in your context.

Optimize every touchpoint: Map all interactions, online and offline, and pinpoint moments of excitement, frustration, and delight. Use data to identify friction points and opportunities for engagement.

Embrace the flow: No two journeys are alike. Plan for "what-if" scenarios and use metrics to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and optimize moments of truth.

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How to Create an Exceptional Customer Journey

As an outbound product marketer, you’ve probably heard of the sales funnel. But what is the marketing funnel, and how does it work?

Your role as an outbound product marketer extends beyond the buyer journey . You also have a crucial responsibility for the entire customer journey , which involves the overall experience that a customer has with a company, from initial awareness and consideration to post-purchase support and advocacy. By providing exceptional customer experiences throughout the entire journey, you can turn customers into brand advocates who promote your products or services and help drive future sales . 

You also need to continually monitor and analyze customer data to optimize your efforts and ensure that the customer journey is always evolving and improving. Let’s explore the various stages of the marketing funnel and the decision-making process for buyers while examining the specific role of outbound product marketers in each phase.

The 3 main stages of the marketing funnel

• TOFU (top of the funnel)
• MOFU (middle of the funnel)
• BOFU (bottom of the funnel)

More on the sales funnel What Is a Sales Funnel and How Do You Build One?

Top of the Funnel: Problem Recognition

The initial stage of a marketing strategy is critical for engaging the target audience and introducing them to the product and its solution. As an outbound product marketer, your focus should be on identifying the specific need that your product meets and effectively communicating this message to your target audience. Developing a unique value proposition and a compelling selling point is crucial to highlight the ways your product can serve your audience and stand out from competitors.

Amazon Prime’s shipping service is a shining example of a value proposition that satisfies customers’ need for speed and convenience. By providing a two-day shipping service, Amazon stands out from its competitors, addressing the needs of its customers in a way that resonates with them. As an outbound product marketer, your goal is to create a value proposition that is equally compelling, resonates with your target audience and sets your product apart in a crowded market. 

Middle of the Funnel: Information Search

When potential customers recognize that they have a problem that requires a solution, they enter the information-seeking phase. To establish trust with these customers before they make a purchase, it is critical to work closely with your content team to provide them with real value through informative content , such as articles, guides and e-books.

Google is an outstanding example of a company that places a high emphasis on providing potential and existing customers with helpful content. Google provides blogs, guides and even an academy to enable customers to not only understand how Google’s solutions can address their specific needs but also to guide them on how to apply these solutions easily.

By doing so, Google proves that it is offering the best choice, as customers can use the solutions without the need for external support. During this stage, buyers want to ensure they are choosing the right solution. Providing testimonials at various touchpoints, such as the company’s website, social media accounts and emails , will aid buyers in validating their decisions. As an outbound product marketer, it is critical to collaborate with your content team to provide potential customers with informative content that can help establish trust and provide value during the information-seeking phase. 

MOFU (Part 2): Evaluation of Alternatives 

As buyers seek to determine whether a specific product is the right choice or not, they typically want to explore other alternatives. This is a crucial stage in the buying journey where searchable content can help establish your product or service as the preferred solution. As an outbound product marketer, you will need to collaborate with marketing teams, specifically the demand generation and SEO teams, to develop effective targeting strategies that include ads, creatives and keyword lists while also ensuring SEO-friendliness and being always on.

Simultaneously, you will need to work with third-party blogs and websites, such as G2.com, to provide reviews and endorsements of your products, as well as to compare them with those of your competitors. This approach provides buyers who want to make a decision with testimonials and valuable information to assist them in selecting the most appropriate solution.

By working closely with your marketing teams and third-party websites, you can effectively communicate the unique value proposition of your product and establish it as the preferred choice for potential customers during the evaluation stage of the buying journey .

Read more about marketing How to Hire the Right Senior Marketer for Your Startup

Bottom of the Funnel: Purchase Decision 

At this stage, potential buyers are required to make a decision, and this is where you must provide further validation to persuade them to proceed with the purchase. Buyers are likely to withdraw from making a purchase if they are not entirely convinced that your product/solution is the right one for them. As an outbound product marketer, your role is to provide additional content that offers additional testimonials and case studies that demonstrate how your solution has helped other clients, along with positive reviews. This approach provides further validation and supports potential buyers in making an informed decision. 

However, at this stage, any negative reviews can have a significant impact on the buyer’s decision and cause negative consequences. As a result, apply a flywheel model, which is a customer-centric marketing approach that emphasizes creating a positive feedback loop that generates momentum and drives growth.

The 3 key stages of the flywheel model

• Attract : Here, you need to attract potential customers to your product by creating compelling content and promotional campaigns that resonate with your target audience. 
• Engage : Once you have attracted potential customers, the next step is to engage with them by providing valuable content, personalized messaging and exceptional customer service. 
• Delight : The final stage is to delight your customers by providing them with an exceptional experience that exceeds their expectations. Delighted customers are more likely to become loyal customers and advocates who promote your product to others.

BOFU (Part 2): post-purchase behavior 

In the post-purchase stage, prioritize successful retention marketing strategies and deliver a meaningful customer experience . This stage is critical as it helps with retaining customers and driving growth to your business. As an outbound product marketer, your focus should be to collaborate with CX teams to create personalized experiences and work with the customer loyalty team to build loyalty programs that encourage advocacy and retention.

Tesla has successfully integrated a referral program as a core component of their marketing strategy. The program enables customers to share a unique referral code with their acquaintances, and, in return, participants receive a lucrative reward of 1,000 miles of free supercharging with the purchase of a new Tesla car. Additionally, each successful referral gives them an opportunity to win a Model Y monthly or Roadster supercar quarterly, creating an element of excitement and exclusivity. To make the experience seamless and engaging, Tesla has developed a dedicated app that tracks the entire program and provides users with an effortless and rewarding experience. 

By focusing on post-purchase retention marketing strategies and creating loyalty programs, you can not only retain customers but also create product advocates who will inspire other customers to adopt your products.

Excerpted from Cracking the Product Marketing Code: Craft Winning Go-to-Market Strategies for Market Domination by Iman Bayatra. Copyright © 2023 Packt Publishing. All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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5 Stages of Ecommerce Customer Journey & Ways To Improve

By Mashkoor Alam

20 April, 2024

When people decide to buy something or use a service, they go through a series of steps before making the final purchase. If there’s friction or if, at any stage, the potential customers don’t feel satisfied, they might decide not to choose the product or service you offer. So, ecommerce businesses must engage customers and meet or exceed their expectations at every stage of the journey. This is why having an engaging and optimized customer journey map is important.

This guide discusses all the touchpoints and different stages of an ecommerce customer journey and how you can identify where your potential customers are dropping off. It also discusses how you can improve the overall experience for your potential and existing customers.

Table of contents

What are the stages of an ecommerce customer journey, stage 1: awareness, stage 2: consideration, stage 3: conversion, stage 4: retention, stage 5: advocacy, why is a good customer journey important, strategies to improve customer engagement and retention, connect at every stage, optimize for all devices, proactive customer support, provide personalized experiences, gather and use more data.

The ecommerce customer journey can be divided into five different stages. You must know what these stages are, how they affect customer experiences and their relationship with you, and how you can improve them at every level. Let’s take a look at each stage one by one.

Let’s have a look at the stages of the customer journey so you can have a better understanding of your customer's experiences on your ecommerce platform.

The awareness stage is when people first learn about your product, service, or brand. This is the stage during which they realize they need or want something.

This stage gives you insight into how people are finding you. This can be because of your SEO strategy, paid marketing, or social media. You can also learn what people are looking for. You can even use an on-site survey that asks them how they found you.

If you’re not able to reach enough users or have users who don’t proceed past this stage, it could be because of one of these reasons.

• You’re using marketing channels that your target audience doesn’t use.
• You’re advertising on the platforms where your target audience is not there.
• You’re not offering anything unique and don’t stand out from the competition.
• Your messaging about your offerings is unclear or not engaging.

The consideration stage is when potential customers actively look into different offerings to solve their needs or problems. They compare products, services, and brands to see which one suits them best. In this stage, customers engage with your products, by viewing them, going through the product descriptions, asking questions and so on.

This stage will give you an insight into customer preferences, like what kind of products are the users looking for, how they browse through your products, what kind of product thumbnails on listing pages work for you and so on. You can use session recordings and heatmaps to better understand where your customers focus more.

If customers are leaving or dropping off at this stage, it may be because of one of these reasons:

• The cost of your products is too high.
• Unclear or insufficient information about products.
• The customers don’t trust your brand.
• A competitor is offering similar products at better prices.

The conversion stage is when potential customers decide to buy a product or service after thoroughly researching the market.

This gives you an idea that your efforts are in the right direction and helps you improve or streamline your efforts. This part of the journey is also a great time to run post-purchase survey on your website or even send an AMP email with a rating scale where customers can rate their purchasing experience within the email itself.

If you see that customers are dropping off at this stage, that is, during the conversion, it can be because of one of the following reasons:

• The checkout process is too long and complex.
• The customers aren’t sure if they’ll get the product after they place an order.
• The cost of shipping is too high.
• You’re not offering the mode of payment that the customer wants.

Retention is about keeping customers engaged with a product, service, or brand over time, building loyal customers, brand loyalty, and long-term relationships. This is the stage in which the customers keep coming back to you and purchasing from you.

The data from this stage will allow you to determine whether the product that a customer purchased from you met their expectations. You can also learn what different activities or offers work with your customer base.

If you’re unable to retain your customers or if they don't come back after the first purchase, it might be because of the following reasons.

• Poor or lack of customer support.
• The products you sell are of poor quality.
• There is no motivation to buy, like sales, discounts or offers.

Advocacy is when satisfied customers actively promote and recommend your product or brand to others in their network. They share their positive experiences with others.

This stage gives you an idea of how well you’re doing. If you have customers who advocate your products and brand, it might be because you’re providing exceptional customer service, good quality products, value for money and so on. You can try social media listening tools to track mentions of your brand.

If you don’t see your customers advocating your brand, it might be because:

• You’re not doing anything exceptional.
• You’re not providing any incentives.

A good customer journey is vital for business success. It boosts conversions by meeting customer satisfaction and expectations and speeds up the journey from the awareness stage to the advocacy stage, leading to faster conversions and building lasting customer relationships. Here’s why you want to have a customer journey that is good.

• Customer retention: A good journey makes customers happy at every next step, providing them with a good user experience and keeping them satisfied and coming back for more. This leads to more engagement, increased loyalty and repeat purchases from repeat customers.
• Increased sales A good customer journey reduces the friction for a potential customer to become a customer. This increases conversion rates, sales and profits.
• Word-of-mouth marketing: Satisfied customers tell others about their experience, promoting your brand and bringing in new customers.
• Stand out from competitors: If you provide your customers with a good customer journey experience, it’ll help you to stand out from the pool of competitors. Customer persona are often more inclined to choose a brand that provides the best customer experience.

The first step in improving your ecommerce customer journey is to identify the stage at which customers churn. Once you’ve identified that, you can figure out the reason for churning and experiment with different strategies to reduce the drop-off rate. Here are some strategies that you might want to consider for improving your overall customer journey.

Make sure that you interact with your customers at every point or at every stage along their journey. Whether it's catching their eye with ads in the awareness stage or helping them make the right choice by recommending products in the consideration stage, it improves the overall user experience and keeps your customers engaged.

Since a lot of people use mobile phones and tablets to browse through online stores, make sure your website is optimized for all devices. This will allow you to provide your customers with a good customer experience on all devices and make it accessible. You must test your website on different platforms and devices to identify and fix any glitches and you can even consider launching an ringcentral app for your ecommerce store.

Have a good customer support team that can solve customer problems proactively. Train them well and provide access to the right kind and amount of customer data so they are well-equipped to identify and solve customer issues quickly and accurately. You can even use an AI chatbot to help you answer usual queries and cut down on the volume of customer support calls.

Personalize the customer experience for each customer by using things like tailored emails special offers based on their interests and recommended products on product pages based on their purchase history. Use customer data to better understand your customers and provide them with personalized content and product recommendations based on their age, gender, location, preferences and so on. This will make their shopping experience better and keep them coming back for more.

Keep collecting data about what your customers like and don’t like. This will help you better understand your customer base, the market and the competition. It’ll also help you in better marketing and utilizing your resources in the right place at the right time.

To make your business is successful, it's important to focus on improving every step of the ecommerce customer journey mapping. A good customer journey map can help you identify and set better and more realistic business goals. This can be done by using analytics tools and engaging with your prospective customers. A smooth user experience can help you overcome issues like shopping cart abandonment. It's also important to align your marketing strategies with the customer journey and offer an easy-to-use experience across different channels. By doing these things, you can create a successful ecommerce customer journey map that helps your business grow.

1. What are the key metrics to track in the customer journey?

In tracking the success of an ecommerce customer journey, key metrics to monitor include conversion rate, average order value, customer lifetime value, bounce rate, traffic sources, cart abandonment rate, customer retention rate, etc.

2. How can small businesses improve their ecommerce customer journey?

Small businesses can enhance their ecommerce customer journey by offering personalized communication, exceptional customer service, optimizing checkout processes, leveraging social media, implementing loyalty programs and omnichannel marketing.

3. What role does personalization play in the customer journey?

Personalization in the customer journey enhances trust, satisfaction, and customer loyalty by tailoring experiences to individual needs and preferences. By analyzing customer behavior, preferences, and pain points along the customer journey, companies can adapt and enhance not only their offerings but also the user experience they provide to their customers.

4. What are the best tools for analyzing the ecommerce customer journey?

To analyze the ecommerce customer journey effectively, consider using Google Analytics, Hotjar, Shopify Analytics, WooCommerce Analytics, Mixpanel, Woopra, Kissmetrics, UXCam, Mouseflow, Glassbox, and SessionStack.

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Customer journey stages

Key Takeaways:

• There are five stages to the customer journey: awareness, consideration, purchase/decision, loyalty, and advocacy.
• While the high-level stages are the same, there are nuances among the B2C and B2B customer journey stages.
• Not every customer journey is linear; the stages for each customer may not fall in the same order.

Table of Contents

No matter the type of business, each customer takes a journey with a brand. During this journey, customers progress from hearing about a business or service to engaging the business and then (ideally) sharing their positive experiences with friends and colleagues. In short, the customer journey is how customers go from being a target audience to loyal fans. 

Before improving or optimizing the customer journey , it’s critical to first understand the customer journey stages.

What are the stages of the customer journey?

There are five main stages of the customer journey. Each stage represents customer touchpoints between clients and a company. In many cases, organizations outline these stages on a customer journey map. 

It’s important to note that not every customer journey is linear and follows these stages in this order. But in general, companies look at the five customer journey stages as:

1. Awareness - This is when a potential customer becomes aware of your company and services. They could become passively aware, such as by seeing an advertisement, or they may become aware proactively, such as by searching for companies in your area that offer the services you do.

2. Consideration - At the consideration stage, the potential customer is now aware of your company and that you offer services that could fit their needs. During this stage, prospective customers weigh their options and evaluate your services against your competition. They may be completing activities such as checking online reviews or inquiring with trusted friends or colleagues to learn what others say about your brand. In doing so, they seek a clear answer on whether to purchase from your brand.

3. First purchase/decision - A potential customer reaches this stage when they have all the information they need to decide whether your company can meet their needs within their determined budget and scope. The individual or purchasing team goes from being a potential customer to a customer. Depending on the perceived importance of the purchase — as well as the personality of the buyer — it may take a long time to reach this phase.

4. Retention/loyalty: - The retention phase focuses on keeping your customers happy and engaged. As your customers use your product or service, they make repeat purchases and continue to buy again from your company. During this stage, you are also focused on providing excellent customer service.

5. Advocacy - In this stage, customers to whom you have delivered value that exceeded their expectations are doing their own marketing work for your company. They voluntarily talk about your business and encourage their colleagues and friends to try your services for themselves. Customers who share positive reviews about your company show that you deliver on brand promises you’ve made. Not all customers will reach this stage, but your goal should be to plan programs that ensure many of your customers will become loyal advocates for your brand.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map visually represents the entire customer journey or lifecycle. It covers all five customer journey stages and the different interactions or touchpoints across channels, including social media, in-store, website, or email. Journey maps may also include information about customer or buyer personas .

For example, a customer’s first touchpoint with your organization may be a paid search ad, which is the starting point on their customer journey map. The map then charts all of that user’s interactions and may have branching points for choices they could make.

Customer journey mapping is valuable for any organization looking to improve customer experience, customer retention, and loyalty.

Stage 1: Awareness stage

The awareness stage is a potential customer’s first impression of your brand, so it is worth a significant investment. They may encounter your brand passively by viewing an online or in-person advertisement. Or, they may have actively discovered your brand while researching a problem using a search engine. 

You should aim to educate prospective customers about your brand and offerings through ads, social media accounts, your website, and other high-level touchpoints (also known as “top of the funnel” touchpoints).

This customer journey stage aims to meet the right customers at the right time. It’s all about getting your brand name in front of your ideal customers, even if they don’t know they need your service.

Using analytics platforms has greatly improved marketers’ efforts to reach their target audience effectively. Examples of these platforms include Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence , Dstillery , Audiense , and Adverity . These platforms can provide rich data about potential customers, such as location, age, choice of device, and conversion rates. Choose an analytics platform that fits your marketing practices and goals.

Best practices for the awareness stage

• Target the channels your prospects use most - Using data from a consumer analytics platform, develop strategies that keep your brand front and center on the channels your customers use most. For example, if your potential audience is more senior and primarily on Facebook and Instagram, skip advertising on TikTok. 
• Focus on education - Create content — such as infographics and blog posts — that help educate consumers about why they need a product or service like yours. 
• Skip the hard sell - Avoid coming on too strong with sales tactics. Give your customer the content and space to learn about your product and brand.

Awareness stage content examples

The type of awareness phase content you develop will depend on your audience and whether you’re in the B2B or B2C space. In some cases, social media ads may be the right fit. Other companies may have more success with downloadable content like eBooks.

Once potential customers see your brand, keep them engaged with easy-to-digest information about your services and offerings. Awareness stage content can include:

• Infographics
• Free courses
• Social media posts/ads
• General eBooks related to your product category or industry
• General videos related to your product category or industry
• Paid search ads
• General whitepapers related to your product category or industry
• How-to articles and guides

Stage 2: Consideration stage

In this stage, a potential customer is now aware of your brand and is researching whether your company or product is what they need. This customer journey stage aims to move the customer to further engage with your brand and closer to a purchase or decision.

During the consideration phase, you must ensure your offering stands out among the competition. A customer in the consideration phase may spend time on your website, review your social media pages, engaging with your sales team, and seek out what others say about your brand. This can include Google, G2, Capterra, Yelp, or Facebook reviews. They may also ask experienced friends, colleagues, or family members for recommendations.

Many items are outside your control during this phase: your potential customer’s needs and budget, your competitors, online review websites, and individuals who have prior experience with your brand or your competitor.

Best practices for the consideration stage

While there are some factors you cannot control during the consideration phase, you have many opportunities to portray your brand as the best choice for prospective customers. 

• Take ownership of reviews - Responding to past negative reviews or past customer service complaints can show that your company is moving in a positive direction. Addressing significant issues from past reviews shows potential customers that your team takes customer service seriously.
• Highlight your differentiators and value - Consumers in this phase are likely comparing your brand to others. Make sure your brand’s key differentiators are featured throughout your consideration phase content. Review your website’s product and service pages to ensure they are easy to understand and highlight your product’s value.
• Build trust - A consumer is more likely to select a credible, trustworthy brand. Remember this as you’re developing content. Use customer quotes to boost credibility and avoid making unsubstantiated claims about your product or brand.
• Consider using third-party research - C onsider bringing in an expert third party to review your brand’s web presence — including properties you own and control and those you don’t. During this exercise, your marketing team can partner with other key business units to identify positive changes you can make to ensure your brand stacks up well against your competition during the consideration phase. 

Consideration stage content examples

Consideration phase content should highlight how your offering is the right choice. In some cases, content can overlap in other stages of the customer journey, such as the awareness phase.

Some types of marketing content that can be helpful during the consideration phase include:

• Case studies and customer testimonials
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused videos
• Product-focused white papers
• Retargeting ads on social media that target prospects who have been on your website

Stage 3: First purchase/decision stage

By now, the customer has gathered all the information they need about your brand — such as case studies or online reviews — and is ready to purchase. At this stage, they decide between your brand or product and your competition. This phase is significant because it demonstrates that the customer has confidence in your brand and may lead to a purchase or sale.

The main players during this stage are the customer and your sales team. Your customer service or implementation teams may also be involved if the purchase includes an integration or installation process.

Best practices for the purchase/decision stage

• Eliminate purchase barriers - Take the necessary steps to make the buying process as smooth as possible. If your company uses an online storefront, ensure your checkout process is straightforward. Consider providing resources to help them with financing, if needed. And if there is an integration or installation involved, get your customer success or implementation team involved as soon as possible.
• Provide incentives - Look for ways to move a deal or a purchase across the finish line. Discounts, coupons, or add-ons are some ways you can motivate customers to purchase. 
• Offer references - If appropriate, offer to connect prospects to existing customers. Having conversations with individuals who are happy with your product or service may help convince the consumer to move forward with your brand. 
• Collaborate with sales - Touch base with your sales contacts regularly to find ways to improve the purchasing process. 

Purchase/decision phase content examples

Once a customer is ready to make a purchase, they likely understand the value of your product. They may, however, require additional resources to convince internal stakeholders or blockers. Content types you may want to create for this stage of the customer journey include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Limited time product promotions or coupons – “Sign up within 48 hours and save 25%!”
• Influencer videos

Stage 4: Retention/Loyalty stage

The overarching goal of this phase is to keep your customers happy, so they become loyal, lifelong customers.

59% of U.S. customers say that once they’ve found a brand they love, they are loyal for life. However, just because a customer has made an initial purchase with your company doesn’t mean your work is finished. Your team still has opportunities to educate the customer on the value of your brand, paving the way for additional purchases, upsells, or contract renewals. 

Retaining customers is crucial, as selling to or retaining an existing customer is much more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. Optimove estimates that it costs businesses five times as much to market to a new customer than a current customer. 

What’s more, keeping repeat customers happy makes your job easier. Semrush found that your chances of selling to an existing happy customer are between 60 and 70%. Your chances of selling to a new customer are between 5 and 20%. 

There are many players in the retention phase including:

• Your customer
• Your marketing teams who can help to keep your brand top-of-mind for your customer
• Your customer service team, who is responsible for quickly and effectively remediating any issues that arise
• Your analytics teams, who can provide insight on customer data
• Your product team, who is responsible for providing suggestions on which new products or additional offerings may be relevant to specific customers or developing new features for users
• Your sales teams, who can individually reach out to target customers with personalized offers and upsells

Best practices for the retention stage

• Leverate your customer data - Now that your customer has purchased from you, you have valuable data about them. Use this data to send them regular, personalized communications with opportunities for upselling them with premium offers or cross-selling for related product purchases.
• Make it easy to contact your team - Ensure your company is easy to contact — especially if a customer has encountered an issue. Provide your phone number or support email in a prominent location on your website and in all of your email communications. And consider adding a chatbot to your website if you have a team to support it.
• Maintain regular communication with your customers - Keep customers in the loop with regular newsletters and updates about your products and company.
• Collaborate with customer success - While you may have collaborated closely with the sales team up to this point, now is the time to work closely with your customer success (CS) team. Collaborate to identify ways to improve the customer experience through content and communication. 
• Establish a seamless onboarding process - Work together with your CS colleagues to develop an onboarding journey that helps customers fully understand how to use your product or service.
• Create a knowledgebase or FAQ - This resource can help customers find answers to questions and troubleshoot issues without needing employee resources.

Retention stage content examples

One key aspect of the retention phase is to provide best-in-breed customer service. If a customer runs into an issue with your service, your customer service team should work diligently and quickly to solve the issue so that the customer maintains a positive image of your brand.

Another aspect of this customer journey stage is proactively following up with customers. This involves sales teams reaching out to customers individually to ensure all is well with their services and to provide support when needed. Proactive communication also involves marketing teams sending out meaningful, relevant emails that may include:

• Information on the latest product offerings
• Suggestions for cross-sell/upsell
• Personalized offers based on prior purchases
• Rewards for loyalty

Other retention phase content examples may include:

• SMS texts or push notifications
• Customer newsletters 
• FAQ/knowledgebase documents or webpages

Stage 5: Advocacy stage

The advocacy stage aims to enable your most loyal customers to recommend and advocate for your brand.

Customers can become vocal supporters of your brand when they have positive and meaningful experiences with your products or services. This support can drive significant results for your organization, with 81% of U.S. and U.K. customers stating that they trust product recommendations from family and friends over brand messaging. 

You should aim for all customers to reach the advocacy stage. When you understand the needs of your customers and meet or exceed customer expectations through high-quality products and services, as well as exceptional customer service, they become loyal and are more likely to tell others about their experiences with your brand.

The advocacy phase involves your customers, your brand, their contacts, and how they share information about your brand with the people they know. For example, a loyal customer may share your Instagram profile with a friend looking for a service you provide. Another loyal customer may forward a relevant product marketing email to a colleague who has never heard of your brand. When the customer journey comes full circle in this manner, the new contact (potential customer) enters the first stage of the customer journey — the awareness phase.

Best practices for the advocacy stage

• Simplify referrals - Make it easy for your loyal customers to refer their friends, colleagues, and family to you. Encourage social media shares and provide intuitive ways for customers to tell friends about a product or service.
• Provide referral incentives - Encourage advocacy by incentivizing referrals with discounts, coupons, or loyalty points.
• Look to competitor referral programs - Consider researching what your competitors offer for loyalty programs and referral rewards.
• Give opportunities for feedback - Periodically survey your customers and conduct NPS, or customer satisfaction, surveys to identify potential advocates for case studies or testimonials. These ratings will also highlight key areas for improvement.
• Acknowledge customer feedback - If a survey reveals a consistent complaint or issue with your product or service, address it with your customers by highlighting fixes in newsletters or social media posts.

Advocacy stage content examples

• Highly personalized offers and incentives sent via SMS text or email
• Social media giveaways 
• Customer profiles or features on social media or email newsletters

Do customer journey stages differ from B2B vs. B2C?

The five high-level journey stages are the same for B2B and B2C businesses. However, the specific actions and best practices may vary from stage to stage. For example, in a B2C industry, there is typically only a single decision-maker, and the dollar amount strongly influences the length of the consideration phase. With B2B, there are often multiple decision-makers or account contacts. Depending on the client and business, these may include legal, security, and other teams.

B2B vs. B2C customer journey stages

While the high-level stages are the same, there are nuances among the B2C and B2B customer journey stages. Some differences may include:

• Email marketing is targeted to different decision-maker types for B2B - Email marketing for B2B vs. B2C audiences will speak to the differing values and goals of the different decision-makers at each business type. For example, B2B decision-makers may value security, cost savings, marketing segmentation, and solving concrete business problems. Consider creating specific email marketing campaigns to speak to these considerations.
• Social media marketing is more relevant for B2C - In general, social media marketing is more relevant to B2C industries than to B2B, though it can play a role in both. Specifically, marketing for a B2C audience during the awareness and consideration phases should focus more on social media.
• Referrals are very important for all industry types - Referrals are necessary across virtually all B2B and B2C industries. However, loyalty and referral programs will look different across B2B vs. B2C and between different industry verticals.
• Adjust marketing materials for industry type - Be nimble and poised to adjust your marketing content for B2B vs. B2C. For instance, more formal marketing materials such as eBooks and white papers are more impactful for B2B industries. On the other hand, free courses or coupons may be more critical for B2C.
• Initial touchpoints will differ - Conferences or industry conventions are important customer touchpoints for B2B, especially for the awareness and consideration phases. In the B2C world, the early touchpoints may be social media ads or paid search campaigns or out-of-home ads like billboards.

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11 Top Customer Engagement Platforms in 2024 [+User Reviews]

April 10, 2024   •   28 min read

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In this article, we'll delve into the world of customer engagement platforms, exploring their significance in today's digital landscape and highlighting the 11 top platforms of 2024. By leveraging these platforms, businesses can navigate the intricacies of customer engagement , ultimately fostering stronger connections and driving growth. But before we start, let’s understand the basics and know what a customer engagement platform is.

What is a customer engagement platform?

Why use customer engagement software, how does a customer engagement tool work, 11 best customer engagement platforms, how to evaluate the best customer engagement tool vendor, key features of the customer engagement platform, benefits of leveraging customer engagement solutions, how sprinklr's customer engagement platform caters to different industries.

A customer engagement platform is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool designed to enhance customer experiences and streamline communication between businesses and customers. These platforms enable businesses to interact with customers through various interaction channels, such as emails, websites, apps, live chat , chatbots and automated texts. The goal is to improve the customer response rate to overtures and drive the desired outcome. 

You know what's tougher than keeping up with the Kardashians? Keeping up with your customers! That's where customer engagement software swoops in like a personal assistant who knows your customers better than they know themselves.

But it's not just about making them feel good; it's also about being smart. With powerful customer interaction analytics , you can track their every move (in a non-creepy way, of course) and tailor your interactions to fit their real-time needs perfectly. It's like having a crystal ball that tells you exactly what your customers want before they even know it themselves.

And let's not forget about efficiency. Customer engagement software streamlines your channels, interactions and teams, so you can spend less time juggling tools and more time wowing your customers.

So, why use customer engagement software? Because in a world where customers expect personalized, seamless experiences, it's a power tool that sets you apart from the competition. Plus, who doesn't want a little magic in their business strategy? But for the magic to happen, the intent needs to be right, and this starts with how a customer engagement tool work.

Learn More: A Complete Guide to Customer Engagement Models  

Using a customer engagement tool offers businesses a panoramic view of their customers, unlocking insights into individual journeys and preferences. This tool not only personalizes interactions but also streamlines operations through automation, freeing up teams to focus on strategic engagement.

Moreover, it empowers businesses with customer engagement metrics driven by first-party data to enhance decision-making and optimize engagement strategies. Here's a breakdown of how these tools work in practice in these nine steps :-  

Gather data from different sources like websites, apps and social media 

Combine and store data in one place for a clear view 

Divide customers based on demographics, behavior and preferences 

Personalize interactions and messages for each customer group 

Engage customers through email, SMS, push notifications and social media 

Automate tasks like sending emails and responding to queries 

Analyze customer behavior and campaign performance for insights 

Collect feedback through customer surveys to improve products and services 

Continuously refine strategies based on feedback and analytics 

We have listed 11 prominent customer engagement platforms with their best features, pricing information, trial availability and customer reviews for easy comparison. Find the right fit for your organization and start delivering personalized customer experiences right away.

⚠️ Important Note for Readers:  

The below tools are in no particular order of ranking or popularity. Still, they are independent picks by Sprinklr’s editorial team based on our research and publicly available information in the review sites. It is crucial to note that software or platforms may evolve over time, and the company may address some of these concerns in newer updates or versions. 

Sprinklr Service is a customer engagement platform that helps your brand provide consistent service across all customer service channels . By combining case management and agent interactions, Sprinklr ensures a seamless service experience for customers and enables your team to respond cohesively. Trusted by top brands worldwide, Sprinklr Service helps you connect with your customers seamlessly. 

Sprinklr's customer engagement platform offers a suite of powerful features to drive customer interaction and satisfaction. With unified customer profiles, agents gain a holistic view of each customer, enabling personalized responses and more effective engagement. Advanced personalization powered by Sprinklr AI+ ensures tailored experiences based on deep customer insights.  

The platform's omnichannel support allows seamless interactions across all channels, meeting customers wherever they are. Additionally, Sprinklr provides a comprehensive framework for collecting, analyzing and implementing customer feedback, empowering brands to continuously improve and enhance their engagement strategies. 

🚀 Top features

1. Personalization

Sprinklr's platform leverages Sprinklr AI+ to deliver tailored experiences. This includes tone moderation for different users and scenarios, ensuring appropriate and empathetic interactions. The platform also enables precise case-agent mapping, ensuring that each customer is connected with the right agent for their needs. Additionally, Sprinklr AI+ facilitates smart responses, allowing agents to provide quick and accurate answers to customer inquiries. This personalized approach helps brands build stronger connections with their customers, leading to higher satisfaction and brand loyalty. 

2. Conversational AI

Sprinklr's Conversational AI capabilities enable businesses to provide seamless customer self-service options through advanced chat and voice bots . These bots are designed to handle complex customer service scenarios , reducing the need for human intervention and improving efficiency.

The best part?

Sprinklr bots are omnichannel in the sense that they follow the build-once-deploy-across approach. No-code chatbots can be implemented across social networks and instant messaging platforms without coding or design efforts, keeping customers engaged no matter where they choose to connect with businesses. 

3 . Advanced analytics

Sprinklr's AI-powered audience insights analyze real-time digital signals to help businesses understand their customers better. By identifying audience affinities, businesses can create custom segments, uncover new opportunities and maximize ROI. Additionally, Sprinklr Insights enables businesses to capitalize on critical demographic and behavioral insights, such as media preferences and product interests. This helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of their audience and improve engagement strategies. 

Overall verdict

Sprinklr's customer engagement platform boasts an impressive G2 rating of 4.6 stars , offering a wealth of disruptive features, from generative AI enrichment to intelligent virtual assistants. 

One of the key benefits of Sprinklr is its ability to integrate with mainstream and upcoming social media platforms seamlessly, enabling businesses to connect with customers directly through comments and direct messages. 

However, some users may find Sprinklr's vast features to be overwhelming, and they may experience a steep learning curve, which can be shortened with the help of personalized onboarding and success managers. 

Overall, Sprinklr Service is a powerful tool for managing customer engagement across social media platforms, offering advanced analytics, workflow automation and customization options, which make it a valuable asset for businesses looking to enhance their online presence.        

Customer testimonial

💪 Strengths  

I love that it takes care of the job and seems to hold down the fort well when the volume is huge. It also seems to have reliable, trustworthy data information. It also seems to be a great deal of personalisation when creating queues, creating rules for each queue for special needs, so thumbs up there!  

💡 Areas for improvement

Sprinklr's vast features can be advantageous, but some users may find them to be too much for them.

Pricing : $249 per seat. Check pricing details here . 

Trial : 30-day free trial.

Zendesk's customer engagement platform is a versatile solution known for its robust customer service tools . It enables teams to manage service requests across major channels like email, live chat, voice, SMS and social media, all from a unified workspace. The platform's Suite plans to offer additional features such as customizable help centers, community forums and the Answer Bot chatbot for instant customer assistance.

🚀 Top features  

Help center 

Answer bot 

Sales tools

One of the key benefits of Zendesk is its ability to integrate with other tools and platforms, allowing for a seamless workflow. Users can easily integrate their customer documentation or knowledge base , making it easier for Level 1 support to deflect common issues. Additionally, Zendesk offers multiple levels of support, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.

However, some users may find Zendesk's pricing to be on the higher side, especially for smaller businesses. There are also some limitations, such as difficulties in identifying multiple people's efforts on a ticket and occasional latency issues.

Overall, Zendesk Support Suite is a powerful tool for managing customer support interactions, offering a wide range of features and integrations. While it may have some drawbacks, its benefits in terms of efficiency, organization and customer satisfaction make it an asset for businesses looking to enhance their customer service operations.

💪 Strengths

Zendesk Support Suite is a cloud-based customer support software that enables me to provide better customer service across multiple channels. I like how it integrates email, chat, phone, social media, and self-service options in one unified agent workspace. It also has powerful features such as automation, reporting, and analytics that help me optimize my workflows. Using their Talk add-on is also an amazing feature as customers can call or text the same number!

💡 What could be better

There is not much to dislike about Zendesk Support Suite, as it is a comprehensive and user-friendly solution for customer support. However, if I had to mention something, I would say that the pricing could be more flexible and affordable for smaller businesses. Also, some of the advanced features and integrations require a bit of technical knowledge and customization, which can be challenging for non-experts. But overall, these are minor issues compared to the benefits and value that Zendesk Support Suite offer

Pricing : Plans start at $19 per month for Zendesk Support

Trial : Free trial available.

Intercom's customer engagement platform is a comprehensive solution that empowers sales and marketing teams to engage with prospective customers proactively. The platform offers a range of features, including in-app messaging, chat conversations, customer surveys , shared inbox and knowledge base builder, making it ideal for businesses seeking a full-service customer communications platform.

🚀 Top features   

User-friendly interface 

Conversation history 

Macros and AI technology 

Alerts and notifications 

Unified inbox 

Users appreciate its user-friendly interface, which allows for easy engagement and access to conversation history. The platform's use of AI technology, macros and alerts helps streamline communication and build relationships with clients. Additionally, its ability to integrate with other tools and platforms makes it a convenient and efficient solution for customer service .

However, some users have experienced issues with Intercom's search functionality and occasional bugs. The platform's pricing structure and the learning curve for certain features have also been cited as drawbacks. Overall, Intercom is praised for its effectiveness in managing customer interactions, making it a valuable tool for businesses looking to enhance their customer service efforts.

The AI addition to the product in the last year has been amazing and a huge help to our customer support team. I would also say that the ability to create dynamic outbound engagement workflows via the Series tool has been paramount for our onboarding and nurturing strategies.

💡 What could be better   Certain aspects of Intercom are quite a learning curve, unfortunately. Creating workflows, organizing users/companies, and trying to add certain automations can be difficult to learn and time-consuming. You have to give certain aspects of Intercom a fair bit of time to get the hang of it. Fortunately, it is only for additional items and not your everyday sections of Intercom. I have been working with Intercom for almost one year now and I'm still trying to find time to allow myself to be better familiar with workflows to improve my day-to-day tasks. The help articles can sometimes be a little difficult to follow which makes it hard to use them when wanting to learn certain areas in Intercom.  

Pricing: Starts at $39 per seat

Trial: Free trial available

HubSpot is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that offers a wide range of tools to streamline and enhance your interactions with customers. With its suite of products, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub and Operations Hub, HubSpot consolidates customer interactions onto a single platform. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, HubSpot offers flexible plans to meet your needs, with many valuable features available for free. 

Marketing Hub 

Service Hub 

Operations Hub 

HubSpot is a customer engagement platform that offers a wide range of features across its various hubs, including Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations. Users appreciate its intuitive interface, CRM integration and onboarding process. The platform offers a variety of out-of-the-box automation for chatbots , workflows and dashboards. It enables active engagement with website visitors, automated collection of customer feedback and visualization of data trends. However, some users find HubSpot's cost breakdown and modular charges for each module to be a drawback.

HubSpot service hub integrates with the sales hub. The best thing about using this is that the service agent has a much more detailed view of the customer just a couple clicks away, including usage and engagement, for example. This can help the agent determine next course of action and offers.

The ability to connect a custom survey triggered by a ticket to said ticket is limited, sometimes you want to do a custom survey based on an interaction but that is connected on the contact level and not also on the ticket level, making it harder to know which interaction it originated from

Pricing: Starts at $50 for two seat

Kangaroo offers a robust loyalty and rewards platform designed to enhance customer engagement, acquisition and customer retention through gamification. With its tiered pricing plan, Kangaroo provides a range of features to suit different needs, from basic reward points and redemption to advanced offerings like email and SMS marketing. The platform also includes reporting tools to help you understand customer behavior and optimize your campaigns. With integrations with ecommerce and POS systems, Kangaroo makes it easy to enroll and reward customers seamlessly.

Integration with POS Systems 

Communication tools 

Loyalty rewards programs 

Customer support 

Kangaroo Rewards is a versatile customer engagement platform that offers a range of features to enhance loyalty and customer satisfaction. Users appreciate its seamless integration with POS systems like Lightspeed and Shopify, making it easy to manage rewards programs and communicate with customers. The platform's ability to streamline communication through various channels like email, text and push notifications is a standout feature.

However, some users have noted issues with the email template builder and the transition to a new version. Overall, Kangaroo Rewards is a solid choice for businesses looking to implement a comprehensive loyalty and rewards program, with room for improvement in certain areas like email marketing and user interface design.

Kangaroo rewards will help us maintain a strong connection with our customers through consistent communication, loyalty rewards and analytics. We just kicked off the rewards program my customers are already excited. We selected Kangaroo because it integrates with Lightspeed (Pos) and Shopify. Our previous systems were separate for in-store and online. With Kangaroo, we can ensure the customers have one system to capture everything. Kangaroo offers a robust approach to cater to a lot of the needs of my store and my customers, making it a WIN-WIN for everyone.

The email template builder has some kinks that should be worked out to make the formatting and look better. Also, they are currently moving to a new version and you lose some abilities in the new one that you had in the old version .

Pricing: Starts at $59 per license

Klayvio is an AI-powered marketing platform that revolutionizes customer engagement through automated email and SMS campaigns. Its advanced features include customer segmentation for targeted messaging, personalized emails from templates, dynamic content based on customer data and interactive surveys. With detailed tracking reports and seamless integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, Klayvio empowers businesses to effortlessly connect with customers on a personal level, regardless of their size or industry.

  🚀 Top features   

Customer segmentation  

Automated email flows 

Integration with Shopify 

SMS marketing 

Personalized email templates 

Overall verdict  Klaviyo appears to be a powerful and effective customer engagement platform that is particularly well-suited for e-commerce businesses. Users appreciate its ease of use, automation capabilities and advanced segmentation features, which allow for targeted and personalized messaging. The platform's integration with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, as well as its support for multiple channels, including email and SMS, make it a versatile tool for engaging with customers. However, some users find the pricing to be on the higher side, and there are occasional issues with customer support responsiveness. Overall, Klaviyo seems to be a top choice for businesses looking to enhance their customer engagement efforts.

One key tool I enjoy using on Klaviyo is its amazing segment feature which allows me to effectively categorize clients. This becomes very useful in unveiling eCommerce trends particularly with first-time buyers. The uses of integrating a loyalty program are almost invisible; it helps to improve our marketing strategies. Workflows are also a cinch to introduce, which is useful when you think about adding them for critical steps like abandon cart situations and welcome emails.

The gif-creating option on Klaviyo is a little restricted in my opinion. It would be also great if they could add more interesting moving objects that attract attention to demonstrate our products in email campaigns and thus make the companies who intend to improve their relationship with customers use the service.

Pricing: Starts at $35 

Trial: Free trial available 

Optimizely is a customer engagement platform that empowers businesses to deliver exceptional digital experiences. With its suite of tools, Optimizely enables companies to create and optimize personalized experiences across web, mobile and other digital channels. The platform's key features include A/B testing, multivariate testing, personalization and analytics, allowing businesses to tailor their content and offerings to individual customer preferences. By leveraging Optimizely, companies can drive engagement, increase conversions and ultimately, deliver more value to their customers.

Comprehensive content management 

Seamless integration with other tools 

24/7 customer support 

Visual campaign calendars 

Overall verdict  Optimizely is praised for its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features that support end-to-end content management, from ideation to publishing. Users appreciate its seamless integration with other marketing tools like HubSpot and its 24/7 customer support. The platform's ability to streamline workflows, provide data-driven insights and offer visual campaign calendars is highly valued. While some users note a learning curve for new features, Optimizely's customer support is commended for quickly resolving usability issues. Overall, Optimizely is hailed as a versatile and efficient tool for customer engagement.

Throughout my position, working with Optimizely closely, its outstanding flexibility took the core focus that I appreciate. Content managers like us need UX to be engaging for our audiences and the software allows us to customize how the audience can interact with product easily. It is quite beneficial to have a workflow tool that provides necessary oversight and approval processes as provided by Optimizely as a CMS administrator. It makes our operations more efficient and facilitates effective implementation of content.

Nevertheless, I must remark that complexity with Optimizely can be a challenge sometimes, especially in supporting our testers. Sometimes, when updates made on a website are released, the same are found to have interfered with already existing tests and thus giving rise to some remakes.

Source: G2   Pricing and trial information: Available on request

Twilio is a customer engagement platform that empowers businesses to build personalized, scalable communication experiences. Twilio's cloud-based platform provides a wide range of communication APIs and tools, enabling businesses to engage with their customers through voice, SMS, chat, video and email.

API for Alerts 

Customer Journey Feature 

Messaging Reliability 

Documentation Quality 

Authentication Services 

Integration with CRM

Twilio offers a wide range of communication APIs and tools that are highly reliable and versatile, making it an essential platform for businesses looking to engage with their customers across various channels. Users appreciate Twilio's ease of integration, especially for features like OTP verification, automated notifications and personalized customer journeys. The platform's ability to handle sensitive data securely, such as in healthcare settings, instills confidence among users. 

However, users highlighted some areas for improvement, particularly in terms of customer support responsiveness and cost concerns. While Twilio's documentation is comprehensive and its SDKs are user-friendly, some users have experienced challenges with complex setup processes and limited customization options. Additionally, concerns about pricing, especially for SMS and voice services, have been raised.

One of the best things about Twilio is how easy it makes verifying identities with OTPs (One-Time Passwords). It's super reliable and fast, which is crucial for keeping things secure. Plus, it's flexible enough to integrate into different platforms seamlessly. Overall, Twilio's OTP verification is a lifesaver for keeping accounts safe without causing headaches for users.

💡 What could be better  

One downside of Twilio is its requirement to make a payment before sending OTPs to unverified numbers. It would be helpful if they offered a few free trials or a minimum number of chances to try before requiring payment. While the overall experience is positive, this initial barrier can be a bit frustrating for users who want to test the service before committing to payment.

Pricing: Starts at $15 per month

Mixpanel offers a comprehensive suite of analytics and engagement tools, allowing you to track user behavior, analyze data and create personalized experiences. With Mixpanel, you can gain valuable insights into your customers' journey, optimize your marketing strategies and ultimately drive growth and retention. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, Mixpanel provides the tools you need to engage your customers effectively and achieve your business goals. 

Real-time data analysis 

Event tracking 

Funnel analysis 

Customizable reporting 

User behavior analysis 

Mixpanel appears to be a powerful and versatile customer engagement platform that provides deep insights into user behavior. Users appreciate its real-time analytics, event-tracking capabilities and customizable reporting features. However, some users find it challenging to navigate and set up, especially for beginners. Pricing is also a concern for some, as it can be expensive for smaller businesses. Overall, Mixpanel seems to be a valuable tool for businesses looking to understand their customers better and make data-driven decisions to improve their products and services.

💪 Strengths     My team and I use Mixpanel every day to track App-activity of users, session-level user behaviour, refunds and revenue and performance of students enrolled in our programs. The best part about Mixpanel is the reliable tracking of every user end-to-end, right from clicking on a UTM link, performing a transaction and returning back to our platform for another action.

The formatting of dashboards is not very user-friendly in Mixpanel — in fact, the custom formatting options are also irrelevant. Often, we require the same report to be shown dynamically in Trends or Chart format, as per user selection but that is not possible.

Pricing: Starts at $20 per month

Trial: Free trial available   

Typeform’s customer engagement platform offers a unique approach to gathering insights and fostering engagement through beautifully designed surveys and forms. With Typeform, you can create engaging surveys and forms that capture valuable customer insights, helping you to tailor your products and services to meet customer needs effectively.

Seamless data collection and management 

Responsive forms for both desktop and mobile devices 

Seamless integration with Google Sheets and Zapier 

Typeform stands out as a remarkable platform for creating engaging and interactive forms and surveys. Users consistently praise its intuitive interface, which makes form creation a breeze even for those without technical expertise. The ability to customize forms to match branding, integrate with various software and create conditional pathways based on responses is highly appreciated.

Customers particularly enjoy the user-friendly design and the ease of integrating Typeform with other tools like Google Sheets and Zapier, streamlining data collection and management processes. The platform's flexibility and versatility make it suitable for a wide range of applications, from lead generation to e-learning.

While users find Typeform's pricing slightly higher compared to some alternatives, its features and functionality more than justify the cost. Some users express a desire for more flexibility in pricing plans and additional features like the ability to edit submitted responses.

I love how easy it is to create a form that can be used across different platforms. We use it embedded on our website to collect data from users in the form of a quiz. We then use their quiz results for user insights and also to help guide them to the best product in our store.

💡 What could be better   I dislike that I don't need Typeform as much as I want to. I enjoy the experience of using it and the insights it offers; however, the monthly subscription costs aren't worth it for me or my business.   Perhaps, at a future date, I will be able to think of a reason to justify the cost and the time it takes to build a valuable questionnaire.

Pricing: Starts at $25 per month

Iterable is a cross-channel marketing automation platform that sets the gold standard for customer engagement tools. Designed for lifecycle marketers and customer success teams, Iterable empowers you to create personalized customer experiences across the entire customer journey.

With Iterable, you can seamlessly leverage channels like email, SMS and push notifications to engage your audience in meaningful ways. Its robust features include automations across various marketing channels, audience segmentation based on demographics and behaviors, and real-time campaign management and analytics.

User-friendly interface for building campaigns 

Custom Events for tracking campaign success 

Seamless integration with various platforms 

Ability to create personalized campaigns 

Easy creation of data feeds for email templates 

Intuitive design for campaign creation 

Iterable appears to be a powerful and flexible customer engagement platform with a lot of positive feedback. Users particularly appreciate its robust features, user-friendly interface and the ability to create personalized customer journeys. The platform's API, live chat support and frequent updates also receive praise.

However, some users mention areas for improvement, such as the need for a more robust CDN for image hosting, better design editor features for reusing content blocks and more advanced reporting capabilities. Despite these minor drawbacks, Iterable seems to be a highly recommended platform for companies looking to enhance their customer engagement strategies, especially for those with complex marketing needs.

Iterable has revolutionized our marketing efforts with its user-friendly interface and powerful features. I have been a user of Iterable for over a year now and we use it 5 times minimum in a month. The intuitive design makes campaign creation a breeze, while robust segmentation and automation capabilities have significantly boosted our engagement and conversion rates.

Building content catalogs could have been more user-friendly. For example, it won't read anything from the sheets except just the text. It could have been a lot better if we could copy-paste paste, play around with texts easily. (Bold, bullet points, spaces etc.)   About pricing, I think end of the year, being a bit flexible about agreed contract limitations (yearly email sent, users etc.) wouldn't hurt a healthy long-term business relationship. It feels a bit unfair that pricing will go dramatically up if we exceed our limits by just 5%, for example.

Pricing: Starts at $500 per month

When choosing a customer engagement vendor, it's essential to cut through jargon and buzzwords to find a solution that truly meets your needs. Here's a straightforward guide to evaluating the best customer engagement vendor:  

By evaluating vendors based on these criteria, you can find a customer engagement solution that meets your company's needs and helps you build lasting relationships with your customers.

When you choose a customer engagement platform for your business, check out if the platform has these 14 key features:

🙇Live chat enables real-time customer support and issue resolution.

👤Chatbot enables AI-powered chatbots to provide immediate responses, enhancing customer satisfaction.

📺 Video chat offers personalized and proactive support, reducing wait times and improving service.

📗 Knowledge base captures, manages and shares knowledge across the organization for better customer service.

📱Social media channels social media customer engagement , enhancing brand visibility and customer interaction quality.

💱 Advanced segmentation divides users into smaller categories based on various criteria such as demographics, behavior, preferences and interactions with the brand for personalized communication.

📝 Advanced personalization customizes communication based on user needs and wants

😀 Behaviorally triggered automation delivers relevant messages based on user actions, improving engagement.

📈 Analytics and tracking provide insights into customer interactions and behavior for informed decision-making.

➕ Integrated A/B testing allows for experimentation to improve customer experience.

Customer engagement platforms (CEPs) are essential for businesses seeking to enhance customer experiences and drive growth. These platforms offer a range of benefits that can transform how businesses interact with their customers. Here are 11 key advantages of using customer engagement solutions.

1. Revenue growth

Engaged customers are more likely to adopt and upgrade products, leading to increased revenue. Research shows that engaged customers can contribute to a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue and overall relationship growth.

2. Reduced customer support needs

Customer engagement platforms help reduce the volume of customer support requests by enabling businesses to provide proactive support and guide customers to find answers themselves. This leads to more efficient customer success at scale.

3. Competitive advantage

Customer experience is a key differentiator in today's market. By prioritizing customer engagement and using the right tools, businesses can build superior customer experiences, setting themselves apart from competitors.

4. Stronger customer relationships

Customer engagement goes beyond transactions, fostering stronger relationships and building customer loyalty . By engaging customers across multiple channels and touchpoints, businesses can build a deep connection with their audience.

5. Increased customer retention

Engaged customers are more likely to stay loyal to a brand, resulting in reduced churn rates. By consistently nurturing customer relationships and addressing pain points, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

6. Cross-selling and upselling

Customer engagement platforms help uncover valuable consumer insights , enabling businesses to personalize recommendations and target cross-selling and upselling offers. This leads to higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime value .

7. Increased subscribers and audience reach

By delivering valuable and relevant content through various channels, businesses can attract and retain subscribers, expanding their subscriber base and reaching a wider audience.

8. Shorter purchase cycles and better conversion

Engaging prospects throughout their buying journey can accelerate the decision-making process, resulting in shorter purchase cycles and improved conversion rates.

9. Word-of-mouth marketing

Engaged customers can become brand evangelists, actively promoting and recommending a business to others. This can drive organic growth and enhance brand reputation.

Understanding and optimizing customer engagement is crucial for organizations, and a robust platform is essential. Sprinklr's customer engagement platform offers the tools to not just succeed but excel in this area. Consider these three scenarios:

Scenario 1: Low engagement with Ad campaigns  

Industry: E-commerce  

An e-commerce company is experiencing low engagement with its ad campaigns, resulting in poor conversion rates and ROI. 

Solution:  

Sprinklr offers a holistic solution for root cause analysis and campaign optimization.

AI-powered audience insights analyze customer behavior and identify segments not engaging with ad campaigns. Using these insights, you optimize ad content for these segments.

With our omnichannel social advertising suite , you can manage and track ad campaigns across channels.

You can also amplify campaign reach by promoting on social media using Sprinklr's social media management tool .

Finally, you can engage with customers directly to build relationships and improve campaign effectiveness.

All this helps e-commerce businesses tackle low engagement, optimize ad content for specific segments, manage and track campaigns across channels and amplify reach through social media.  

Need inspiration? 

Take a cue from SONOS, a top consumer electronics goods brand that tripled its return on ad spend (ROAS) using Sprinklr. Read the full story here>>

Scenario 2: Increasing User Adoption and Retention for a Tech Startup

Industry: Tech  

A growing tech startup launched a new product and was looking to increase user adoption and retention. They wanted a platform that could help them track user interactions, gather feedback and iterate on their product based on customer insights. 

Solution : Using AI-powered analytics tools, track user interactions and gather feedback. Then, utilize advanced audience insights to understand user behavior and preferences. With this data, iterate on the product to better meet customer needs and improve user adoption and retention.

Why 9 of the top 10 tech companies trust Sprinklr to create memorable products and experiences

Scenario 3: Improving customer onboarding for a financial services firm  

Industry: Financial Services

A financial services firm is facing challenges in onboarding new customers efficiently, leading to delays and a poor initial customer experience. They want to streamline the onboarding process to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn. 

Solution : Journey analytics tools understand the customer journey and identify bottlenecks in the onboarding process. Then, a robust AI platform like Sprinklr AI+ tailors the onboarding experience based on individual customer needs and preferences and enables seamless communication between internal teams involved in onboarding. 

Whether you're looking to personalize marketing campaigns, manage customer engagement programs or enhance social media reach, Sprinklr has the tools you need. Sign up now to streamline your customer interactions, gather valuable insights, and improve customer satisfaction. Start your free trial today and unlock the potential of Sprinklr for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

Customer engagement is the ongoing interaction between a brand and a customer, encompassing all touchpoints and communications to foster loyalty, satisfaction and emotional connection.

The difference between a CRM and a customer engagement platform (CEP) is that CRM focuses on managing customer data and interactions, while a customer engagement platform goes further by facilitating personalized, multichannel interactions, fostering deeper relationships, and enhancing overall customer experience.

Yes, compliance is typically ensured in customer engagement platforms through features like data encryption, access controls and adherence to regulatory requirements such as GDPR or CCPA.

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Issac Thomas

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