Mapping The Customer Service Journey to Improve Customer Experience

service journey means

Mapping the Customer Service Journey to Improve Customer Experience

In the days before Google Maps, finding directions to a new location, especially if it was in an unfamiliar city, took careful planning and attention. Routes had to be determined long before leaving, and an extra time cushion was absolutely necessary to accommodate for any wrong turns. In worst-case scenarios, gas station attendants could always be counted on to help guide a lost traveller. With the advent of smartphones, determining directions to a completely unknown locale is now a fairly painless process. Audio turn-by-turn directions make for safer navigation and quicker arrivals, although there may be fewer opportunities for human interactions. Now, a similar revolution is happening on another important route: the customer service journey.

Defining the Customer Service Journey

A customer service journey is the accumulated experiences a customer undergoes when they decide to interact with a brand, or purchase a service or product. Every single touchpoint they have with a brand makes up their journey, and the emotions they experience at each touchpoint have a huge effect on their decision to make a purchase or recommend the brand to a friend. On a recent episode of the Verizon Insights podcas t, Cary Cusumano, Customer Experience Designer, noted that in 17 out of 18 industries, the emotions that a customer experiences predict the level of their loyalty to a brand. (Even above their satisfaction with a product or service.) It is essential for companies to optimize the customer journey whenever possible to build loyal brand advocates and to show empathy to their customers.

Steps on the Customer Service Journey

The best way to show customers empathy is to understand the interactions they have with a brand over the course of their relationship. During the discovery phase, potential customers may interact with a brand through reviews, internet research, advertisements, or talking to acquaintances or friends.  Once someone becomes a customer, companies must invest in meeting their customers where they are. That means making sure that customers can reach out and engage with the brand through a variety of touchpoints, depending on their preferences. The four primary ways customers interact with brands after purchasing a product or service is through phone calls, e-mails, social media interactions, and live chat options. Customers choose each of these options based on their age, location, and lifestyle. A college student at a university may prefer a chat-based option that’s available later in the evening, while a parent may choose to call during a child’s naptime. No matter how customers decide to reach out, responsive companies have several options to best meet different communication styles and time constraints.  

The Need to Make the Customer Service Journey More Pleasant

In order to give customers what they want, brands must be willing to make an investment in each stop  along the customer journey to ensure it is a pleasant one. While money is funnelled into product development or marketing, customer experience is often pushed to the side as an unnecessary expense. However, it’s one of the most important factors to master in order to maintain a competitive advantage.With the advent of social media, interactivity between brands and customers has spiked, and companies don’t always known how to utilize these interactions to build positive impressions. Leadership at companies can feel overwhelmed by the bandwidth and expertise needed to ensure a smooth customer journey. Or, they’re unsure how to put customer service at the forefront of their company culture, even though they recognize that brands that do gain new leads and retain a strong customer base. As technology advances, many industry leaders predicted a de- emphasis on human interaction and empathy. Instead, the opposite is becoming more important. Understanding the routes customers take in relationship to brands, and investing in critical touch points is the only way to make the customer service journey a positive one.

If you’re looking for help implementing a culture of service to let your customers know they come first, our experts can help. For over twenty years, the team at Customer Direct have been leaders in creating positive customer experiences and managing voice, email, chat and social media interactions on behalf of prominent brands.  Delighting customers at every touchpoint on their journey is our passion and our business. Make your business more persona l by providing genuine customer service experiences each step of the way. Contact us today.

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

A customer experiences an interaction that exemplifies a great customer journey experience.

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

  • What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

  • What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

The stages of the customer journey

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

The benefits that come from knowing the customer journey

  • Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
  • Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
  • Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
  • Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
  • Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
  • Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
  • Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
  • Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer-focused companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren't

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

  • Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
  • Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
  • Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
  • Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

Brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2-7%

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

  • Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
  • Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
  • The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
  • Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

  • Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
  • Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
  • Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

An example of a buyer persona

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

  • Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
  • Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
  • Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
  • Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
  • Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

  • Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
  • Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
  • Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
  • Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

  • Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
  • Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
  • Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
  • Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

Customer journey maps are visual representations of customer experiences with an organization. They provide a 360-degree view of how customers engage with a brand over time and across all channels. Product teams use these maps to uncover customer needs and their routes to reach a product or service. Using this information, you can identify pain points and opportunities to enhance customer experience and boost customer retention.

“ Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.” — Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert

In this video, Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how you can include journey maps in your design process.

  • Transcript loading...

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

Customer journey maps are research-based tools. They show common customer experiences over time To help brands learn more about their target audience. 

Maps are incredibly effective communication tools. See how maps simplify complex spaces and create shared understanding.

Unlike navigation maps, customer journey maps have an extra dimension—time. Design teams examine tasks and questions (e.g., what-ifs) regarding how a design meets or fails to meet customers’ needs over time when encountering a product or service. 

Customer journey maps should have comprehensive timelines that show the most essential sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights into customers' thoughts and feelings when proceeding along the timeline. The map should include: 

A timescale - A defined journey period (e.g., one week). This timeframe should include the entire journey, from awareness to conversion to retention.

Scenarios - The context and sequence of events where a user/customer must achieve a goal. An example could be a user who wants to buy a ticket on the phone. Scenarios are events from the first actions (recognizing a problem) to the last activities (e.g., subscription renewal).

Channels – Where do they perform actions (e.g., Facebook)?

Touchpoints – How does the customer interact with the product or service? What actions do they perform?

Thoughts and feelings – The customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you understand how customer experience evolves over time. It allows you to identify possible problems and improve the design. This enables you to design products that are more likely to exceed customers’ expectations in the future state. 

Customer Journey Map

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

An infographic showcasing seven steps to create customer journey maps.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

Before creating a customer journey map, you must ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. Clarify who will use it and what user experience it will address.

Conduct Research

Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence. Leverage customer interviews, surveys, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

Watch user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen talk about how user research fits your design process and when you should do different studies. 

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

List customer touchpoints (e.g., paying a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for more touchpoints or channels to include.

Make an Empathy Map

Pinpoint what the customer does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a given situation. Then, determine their needs and how they feel throughout the experience. Focus on barriers and sources of annoyance.

Sketch the Journey

Piece everything—touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.). Show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including their feelings at every touchpoint.

Iterate and Refine

Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders

Ensure all stakeholders understand your map and appreciate how its use will benefit customers and the organization.

Buyer Journey vs User Journey vs Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

You must know the differences between buyer, user, and customer journeys to optimize customer experiences. A customer journey map is often synonymous with a user flow diagram or buyer journey map. However, each journey gives unique insights and needs different plans.

Customer Journey

The customer journey, or lifecycle, outlines the stages a customer goes through with a business. This journey can vary across organizations but includes five key steps:

1. Awareness : This is the first stage of the customer journey, where the customers realize they have a problem. The customer becomes aware of your brand or product at this stage, usually due to marketing efforts.

2. Consideration : Once customers know about your product or service, they start their research and compare brands.

3. Purchase : This is the stage where the customer has chosen a solution and is ready to buy your product or service.

4. Retention : After the purchase, it's about retaining that customer and nurturing a relationship. This is where good customer service comes in.

5. Advocacy : Also called the loyalty stage, this is when the customer not only continues to buy your product but also recommends it to others.

The journey doesn't end when the customer buys and recommends your solution to others. Customer journey strategies are cyclical and repetitive. After the advocacy stage, ideally, you continue to attract and retain the customers, keeping them in the cycle. 

There is no standard format for a customer journey map. The key is to create one that works best for your team and product or service. Get started with customer journey mapping with our template:

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

The buyer's journey involves the buyer's path towards purchasing. This includes some of the steps we saw in the customer journey but is specific to purchasing :

1. Awareness Stage : This is when a prospective buyer realizes they have a problem. However, they aren't yet fully aware of the solutions available to them.

2. Consideration Stage : After identifying their problem, the buyer researches and investigates different solutions with more intent. They compare different products, services, brands, or strategies here.

3. Decision Stage : The buyer then decides which solution will solve their problem at the right price. This is where the actual purchasing action takes place.  

4. Post-Purchase Evaluation : Although not always included, this stage is critical. It's where the buyer assesses their satisfaction with the purchase. It includes customer service interactions, quality assessment, and attitudinal loyalty to the brand.

All these stages can involve many touchpoints, including online research, social media interactions, and even direct, in-person interactions. Different buyers may move through these stages at different speeds and through various channels, depending on a wide range of factors.

User Journey

The user journey focuses on people's experience with digital platforms like websites or software. Key stages include:

1. Discovery : In this stage, users become aware of your product, site, or service, often due to marketing efforts, word-of-mouth, or organic search. It also includes their initial reactions or first impressions.

2. Research/Consideration : Here, users dig deeper, exploring features, comparing with alternatives, and evaluating if your offering suits their needs and preferences.

3. Interaction/Use : Users actively engage with your product or service. They first-hand experience your solution's functionality, usability, and usefulness to achieve their goal.

4. Problem-solving : If they encounter any issues, how they seek help and resolve their issues fall into this stage. It covers user support, troubleshooting, and other assistance.

5. Retention/Loyalty : This stage involves how users stay engaged over time. Do they continue using your product, reduce usage, or stop altogether? It includes their repeated interactions, purchases, and long-term engagement over time.

6. Advocacy/Referral : This is when users are so satisfied they begin to advocate for your product, leaving positive reviews and referring others to your service.

Download this user journey map template featuring an example of a user’s routine. 

User Journey Example

Understanding these stages can help optimize the user experience, providing value at each stage and making the journey seamless and enjoyable. 

Always remember the journey is as important as the destination. Customer relationships start from the first website visit or interaction with marketing materials. These initial touchpoints can influence the ongoing relationship with your customers.

A gist of differences between customer, buyer, and user journeys.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is valuable yet has limitations and potential drawbacks. Recognize these challenges and create more practical and realistic journey maps.

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

Customer journey maps often risk simplifying complex customer experiences . They may depict varied and unpredictable customer behaviors as straightforward and linear. This simplification can lead to misunderstandings about your customers' needs and wants. As a result, you might overlook customers' diverse and unique paths. 

Always remember that real customer experiences are more complex than any map. When you recognize this, you steer clear of decisions based on simple models.

Resource Intensity

Creating detailed customer journey maps requires a lot of resources and time. You must gather extensive data and update the maps to keep them relevant. This process can strain small businesses or those with limited resources. 

You need to balance the need for comprehensive mapping with available resources. Efficient resource management and prioritization are crucial to maintaining effective journey maps.

Risk of Bias

Creating customer journey maps carries the inherent risk of biases . These biases can arise from various sources. They can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of the maps. 

Alan Dix, an expert in HCI, discusses bias in more detail in this video.  

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

Assumption Bias: When teams make decisions based on preconceived notions rather than customer data.

Selection Bias: When the data doesn’t represent the entire customer base..

Confirmation Bias : When you focus on information that supports existing beliefs and preferences. Simultaneously, you tend to ignore or dismiss data that contradicts those beliefs.

Anchoring Bias : Relying on the first information encountered (anchor) when making decisions.

Overconfidence Bias : Placing too much trust in the accuracy of the journey map. You may overlook its potential flaws.

These biases may misguide the team, and design decisions based on these maps might not be effective.

To address these biases, review and update journey maps with real user research data. Engage with different customer segments and gather a wide range of feedback to help create a more accurate and representative map. This approach ensures the journey map aligns with actual customer experiences and behaviors.

Evolving Customer Behaviors

Customer behaviors and preferences change with time. A journey map relevant today can become outdated. You need to update and adapt your maps to reflect these changes. This requires you to perform market research and stay updated with trends and customer feedback. 

Getting fresh data ensures your journey map stays relevant and effective. You must adapt to evolving customer behaviors to maintain accurate and valuable customer journey maps.

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

Capturing emotions accurately in customer journey maps poses a significant challenge. Emotions influence customer decisions, yet you may find it difficult to quantify and represent them in maps. Most journey maps emphasize actions and touchpoints, often neglecting the emotional journey. 

You must integrate emotional insights into these maps to understand customer experiences. This integration enhances the effectiveness of customer engagement strategies. You can include user quotes, symbols such as emojis, or even graphs to capture the ups and downs of the users’ emotions..

Misalignment with Customer Needs

Misalignments in customer journey maps can manifest in various ways. It can impact the effectiveness of your strategies. Common misalignments include:

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

Not seeing or serving the varied needs of different customer types.

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

Engage with your customers to understand their needs and preferences if you want to address these misalignments. Incorporate their direct feedback into the journey map. This approach leads to more effective customer engagement and satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on the Map

Relying too much on customer journey maps can lead to problems. These maps should serve as tools rather than definitive guides. Viewing them as perfect can restrict your responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Treat journey maps as evolving documents that complement direct customer interactions and feedback. 

Make sure you get regular updates and maintain flexibility in your approach. Balance the insights from the map with ongoing customer engagement. This approach keeps your business agile and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Data Privacy Concerns

Collecting customer data for journey mapping poses significant privacy concerns. Thus, you need to create a balance. You must adhere to data protection laws and gather enough information for mapping. 

You need a careful strategy to ensure customer data security. Stay vigilant to adapt to evolving privacy regulations and customer expectations. This vigilance helps maintain trust and compliance.

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

Take our Journey Mapping course to gain insights into the how and why of journey mapping. Learn practical methods to create experience maps , customer journey maps, and service blueprints for immediate application.

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map requires visually representing the customer's experience with your product or company. Harness the strength of visual reasoning to understand and present this journey succinctly. Instead of detailing a lengthy narrative, like a book, a well-crafted map allows stakeholders, whether designers or not, to grasp the journey quickly. It's a democratized tool that disseminates information, unifies teams, and aids decision-making by illuminating previously unnoticed or misunderstood aspects of the customer's journey.

The customer journey encompasses five distinct stages that guide a customer's interaction with a brand or product:

Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a need or problem.

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

Purchase: The customer decides on a solution and makes a purchase.

Retention: Post-purchase, the customer uses the product and forms an opinion.

Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences.

For a comprehensive understanding of these stages and how they intertwine with customer touchpoints, refer to Interaction-Design.org's in-depth article .

A perspective grid workshop is a activity that brings together stakeholders from various departments, such as product design, marketing, growth, and customer support, to align on a shared understanding of the customer's journey. These stakeholders contribute unique insights about customer needs and how they interact with a product or service. The workshop entails:

Creating a matrix to identify customers' jobs and requirements, not initially linked to specific features.

Identifying the gaps, barriers, pains, and risks associated with unmet needs, and constructing a narrative for the journey.

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

Discuss the implied technical and non-technical capabilities required to deliver this value.

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

The ultimate aim is to foster alignment within the organization and produce a user journey map based on shared knowledge. 

Learn more from this insightful video:

Customer journey mapping is vital as it harnesses our visual reasoning capabilities to articulate a customer's broad, intricate journey with a brand. Such a depiction would otherwise require extensive documentation, like a book. This tool offers a cost-effective method to convey information succinctly, ensuring understanding of whether one is a designer or lacks the time for extensive reading. It also helps the team to develop a shared vision and to encourage collaboration.  Businesses can better comprehend and address interaction points by using a journey map, facilitating informed decision-making and revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured. Learn more about the power of visualizing the customer journey in this video.

Pain points in a customer journey map represent customers' challenges or frustrations while interacting with a product or service. They can arise from unmet needs, gaps in service, or barriers faced during the user experience. Identifying these pain points is crucial as they highlight areas for improvement, allowing businesses to enhance the customer experience and meet their needs more effectively. Pain points can relate to various aspects, including product usability, communication gaps, or post-purchase concerns. Explore the detailed article on customer journey maps at Interaction Design Foundation for a deeper understanding and real-world examples.

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement. This ensures that products or services meet users' needs effectively.

The process fosters team alignment, ensuring everyone understands and prioritizes the customer's perspective.

It helps identify pain points, revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

This visualization allows businesses to make informed decisions, ensuring resources target the most impactful areas.

To delve deeper into the advantages and insights on journey mapping, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on key takeaways from the IXDF journey mapping course .

In design thinking, a customer journey map visually represents a user's interactions with a product or service over time. It provides a detailed look at a user's experience, from initial contact to long-term engagement. Focusing on the user's perspective highlights their needs, emotions, pain points, and moments of delight. This tool aids in understanding and empathizing with users, a core principle of design thinking. When used effectively, it bridges gaps between design thinking and marketing, ensuring user-centric solutions align with business goals. For a comprehensive understanding of how it fits within design thinking and its relation to marketing, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on resolving conflicts between design thinking and marketing .

A customer journey map and a user journey map are tools to understand the experience of users or customers with a product or service.

A customer journey map is a broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It considers physical and digital channels, multiple user personas, and emotional and qualitative aspects.

A user journey map is a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service. It only considers digital channels, one user persona, and functional and quantitative aspects.

Both are useful to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. However, they have different scopes, perspectives, and purposes. A customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience across multiple channels and stages. A user journey map provides a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service.

While user journeys might emphasize specific tasks or pain points, customer journeys encapsulate the entire experience, from research and comparison to purchasing and retention. 

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are tools to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map shows the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It focuses on the front stage of the service, which is what the customers see and experience. It considers different user personas and emotional aspects.

A service blueprint shows how a service is delivered and operated by an organization. It focuses on the back stage of the service, which is what the customers do not see or experience. It considers one user persona and functional aspects. What are the steps that the customer takes to complete a specific task or goal within the service? What are the channels and devices that the customer interacts with at each step?

For an immersive dive into customer journey mapping, consider enrolling in the Interaction Design Foundation's specialized course . This course offers hands-on lessons, expert guidance, and actionable tools. Furthermore, to grasp the course's essence, the article “4 Takeaways from the IXDF Journey Mapping Course” sheds light on the core learnings, offering a snapshot of what to expect. These resources are tailored by industry leaders, ensuring you're equipped with the best knowledge to craft impactful customer journey maps.

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Journey Maps by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

Take a deep dive into Customer Journey Maps with our course Journey Mapping .

This course will show you how to use journey mapping to turn your own complex design challenges into simple, delightful user experiences . If you want to design a great shopping experience, an efficient signup flow or an app that brings users delight over time, journey mapping is a critical addition to your toolbox. 

We will begin with a short introduction to mapping — why it is so powerful, and why it is so useful in UX. Then we will get familiar with the three most common types of journey map — experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints — and how to recognize, read and use each one. Then you will learn how to collect and analyze data as a part of a journey mapping process. Next you will learn how to create each type of journey map , and in the final lesson you will learn how to run a journey mapping workshop that will help to turn your journey mapping insights into actual products and services. 

This course will provide you with practical methods that you can start using immediately in your own design projects, as well as downloadable templates that can give you a head start in your own journey mapping projects. 

The “Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project” includes three practical exercises where you can practice the methods you learn, solidify your knowledge and if you choose, create a journey mapping case study that you can add to your portfolio to demonstrate your journey mapping skills to future employers, freelance customers and your peers. 

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

Indi Young will provide wisdom on how to gather the right data as part of your journey mapping process. She has written two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models . Currently she conducts live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang will walk us through his very practical process for creating a service blueprint, and share how he makes journey mapping a critical part of an organization’s success. Kai is a talented UX pro who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne. 

Matt Snyder will help us think about journey mapping as a powerful and cost-effective tool for building successful products. He will also teach you how to use a tool called a perspective grid that can help a data-rich journey mapping process go more smoothly. In 2020 Matt left his role as the Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software to become Head of Product & Design at Hivewire. 

Christian Briggs will be your tour guide for this course. He is a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation. He has been designing digital products for many years, and has been using methods like journey mapping for most of those years.  

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

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What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the set of steps and interactions from the customer’s point of view needed to achieve an outcome with your company.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the customer journey. A journey map takes a customer’s needs, processes, and perceptions through the entirety of their interaction with an organization, and then diagrams that journey into a visual map. The more touch points a customer has along their way, the more complex the journey map becomes. What the customer encounters and feels as they progress between touchpoints on this journey forms the overall customer experience . Customer journey mapping can shorten and personalize the journey, resulting in a more positive experience.

A detailed customer journey map allows you to identify:

  • Opportunities

To do this, the customer journey focuses on accessing four different factors:

  • What is the customer doing/how is the customer behaving?
  • What is the customer feeling?
  • What/whom is the customer interacting with?
  • What behind-the-scenes processes need to be taking place?

Benefits of customer journey mapping

It’s been said that you’ll never really understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Customer journey mapping allows you to do just that: placing yourself in your customers’ position and gaining a clearer understanding of their perspective. In addition to more clearly defining the realities of your customers’ experiences, journey mapping provides other advantages as well.

Provides an inbound perspective

Inbound marketing depends on your ability to create interesting and useful content to help generate interest and draw in prospective customers. Customer mapping gives you clever insight into your customers’ interests, as well as how they feel about individual aspects and touchpoints as they interact with your business. With this information, you can tailor your content offering to better attract and retain qualified leads.

Encourages proactive service

Identifies and refines target audiences.

Locating and guiding prospective customers through their journey can be expensive, and when your leads fail to become customers, then all of that cost goes to waste. A detailed customer journey map can help you more clearly identify the demographics and traits of those who would be most interested in your services. By understanding their needs, pain points, and goals, you will be better positioned to market to the right audiences.

Improve customer retention rates

The customer journey isn’t designed only for new customers; a complete view of the customer journey provides opportunities to improve any areas that stand out as possibly problematic for returning customers as well. Customer journey mapping can help you identify those who might be considering leaving. By comparing journeys between churned customers, you may be able to identify common issues, which you can then then address to help ensure that future customers keep coming back again and again.

Creates a concise representation of the user experience for your entire organization

It can be difficult to coordinate all departments as your company grows. Sometimes, sales and marketing goals may not be aligned, or might not actually be relevant to your customers wants or needs. Your customer journey map supports a shared vision across departments. When adopted throughout your business, it can become the basis for decision-making, informing goals, supporting strategy, and aligning teams towards creating a better experience for your customers.

Understanding the customer journey

The journey that a customer takes is married to each instance that a customer comes in contact with your company. These instances include pre-purchase, mid- purchase, and post-purchase. When you break these three instances down into their constituent parts, there are seven phases of the customer journey to be aware of.

Out-of-market

This is the phase where a customer is looking to improve their business, and they want the company to be productive and efficient. At this point, they may not have a solution to achieve their goals, but they are open to inspiration and ideas.

A customer uncovers the opportunity to grow and improve their business at this phase—they have identified an issue that could be resolved.

Initial consideration

After customers have identified a solution to their problem, they will begin to research. Stakeholders and a project group work to identify the top brands in the market they need, scope out a project, and review the key functionalities and requirements.

Active evaluation

Customers then take their long list of possible solutions and narrow it down to a short list of brands. Customers contact the vendors on the short list and invite them to a meeting or demo, at which point they will review the solutions based on their trust, expertise, and scalability.

Purchase decision

Once the customer has found the solution and teamed up with a company, they want to get the solution up and running as quickly as possible, and they want a smooth launch process. It is important to ensure that all users are trained and have proper access to consultants or account managers for support.

Once the solution has been rolled out, the customer wants to see fast results. The provider of the solution follows up, implements the solutions, and continues to help the customer fulfill their goals. This phase is where customers become loyal as results are being delivered.

How to create an effective user journey map

Understanding the importance of the customer journey map is only the first step. Before you can enjoy the advantages it offers, you first have to build it. Here, we break down the essential steps you’ll need to consider to create an effective journey map for your customers.

Define the scope for the map

  • Take the time to identify the persona that you are mapping, and provide a single point of view per map to build out a strong and clear narrative.
  • Choose the process that you’ll be mapping and ensure that it has a clear beginning, middle, and end point, and that it relates to the business insights you are seeking.
  • Conduct research using resources such as call center logs, field studies, usability results, and user feedback.
  • Include the goal of your personas and what their expectations are, as well as quantifiable expectations, such as time to completion.

Identify the journey phases

  • Think of the phases of the map as stages along the journey. If you’re mapping the user experience for onboarding, it’s possible that the journey may include setting up training, facilities access, benefits, and more.
  • Choose simplicity and craft a journey map that tells a simple story. That said, be sure to include all relevant information and touch points.

Map the user’s action steps and experiences for each phase

  • Document action steps for each phase of the journey, encompassing the actions that need to be taken. Most often you will have from four to twelve action steps, which may include learning about options, resolving questions, comparing choices, selecting services, etc.
  • For each step, clearly document customer emotions, pain points, and challenges.

Use your journey map to build a shared vision of the user experience

  • Create a journey map visualization and gather feedback from key users.
  • Use the journey map to identify potential opportunities to improve the customer experience and process.
  • Continuously socialize and evolve the customer journey map to improve its effectiveness over time.

Measure your success

The success of your customer journey map relates directly to how positive and successful the overall customer experience is that you are offering. With this in mind, you can use many of the same success metrics as those used to measure and evaluate CX. These metrics include the following:

  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS)

Who should be involved in developing a user journey?

  • Process owners
  • Technology owners
  • Upper management
  • UX or UI representatives, such as an experience architect

Make customer service flow

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CORINIUM: The Customer Experience Perspective

Make Journey Mapping Your Secret To Outstanding Customer Service

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Customer Service Management

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The Digital Journey to Enhanced Customer Experience

What is customer satisfaction?

What is customer service?

What is CRM?

How to capture what the customer wants

Customers now have an unprecedented number of ways to engage with companies, from traditional channels to an ever-growing array of digital modes. Many organizations have responded by investing in digital channels, frequently in an effort to replace traditional modes of engagement. The thinking is that as customers become more technologically savvy, they favor digital channels, significantly reducing the need for live agents and thus saving significant costs. Many companies have expected to save more than 40 percent through reducing live contacts. Yet companies that take this approach often see their customer interactions increase rather than decline, despite significant efforts and resources.

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To understand what such companies got wrong in their omnichannel strategies, one needs look no further than digital leaders. Amazon, for example, has also built self-service and e-care capabilities, but with a key difference. Because self-service has thus far largely proven inadequate—that is, customers still often seek out a live agent on the phone—Amazon steers customers to the channels that are best suited to their preferences while also offering digital live interactions and company-initiated contact. So despite being a digital leader, Amazon has designed an omnichannel customer-care strategy in which live agents still figure prominently to handle complex requests, demonstrate empathy, and resolve issues quickly.

Companies seeking to keep pace with industry leaders must embark on an omnichannel transformation—one that views touchpoints not in isolation but as part of a seamless customer journey. And since customer journeys aren’t simple and linear but a series of handoffs between traditional and digital channels that can vary significantly by customer type, an effective strategy requires an in-depth understanding of what customers truly want. To design an omnichannel experience, companies should follow a sequential process composed of four essential components:

  • Setting the design principles based on an overarching omnichannel strategy.
  • Designing service journeys, ensuring that the end-to-end digital and live-contact journeys address identified customer needs and preferences and have clearly defined digital migration points.
  • Identifying foundational enablers to support the journeys, featuring multiskilled agents and best-practice contact-center operations to engage with customers live.
  • Defining the IT architecture with next-generation enabling technology to support a seamless omnichannel experience.

An omnichannel transformation is the only way for a company to address rising complexity, provide an excellent customer experience, and manage operations costs.

Critical insights to build successful omnichannel strategies

Our research on the future of customer care in 2017 reinforced the importance of omnichannel and digital and the key role that live channels play in creating an excellent experience. 1 For more on the future of customer care, see Jeff Berg and Julian Raabe, “ New technology means new value from contact centers ,” June 6, 2018. Many of the trends we highlighted, particularly the growing number of digital channels, have made the journey to omnichannel more arduous. Three trends in particular are reshaping successful approaches to customer care.

Digital channels have completely changed the ways that customers prefer to interact. Beyond the expectation that information and service will be accessible with a few keystrokes, customers have also become accustomed to engaging with companies through multiple channels. Many customers, for instance, use different channels to gather information on products and to make a purchase. Social media and chat are also rapidly gaining channel share. Companies that believed digital channels would reduce the volume of engagement and the number of touchpoints have been disappointed to find both often continue to increase.

Quality customer care is highly dependent on digital performance. Many companies have subpar digital capabilities that actually increase customer demand for engagement. Indeed, organizations that attempt to migrate customers to digital channels before they are fully ready can trigger the “boomerang effect,” in which customers can keep coming back to a company multiple times in an effort to resolve a problem. In our experience, trying to implement digital care channels prematurely can significantly increase both the number of transactions and the cost per transaction (Exhibit 1).

Individual touchpoints must be seen through the lens of the end-to-end customer journey. While companies can be tempted to focus on optimizing individual touchpoints, believing that the whole will automatically be greater than the sum of its parts, such targeted intervention can magnify variations in service and inconsistencies in other interactions. Moreover, no matter how successful specific tools are (for example, online self-service), companies that lack visibility into where customers are choosing to interact from touchpoint to touchpoint can still experience service breakdowns.

Customers still favor live agents for complex requests. In a British Telecommunications survey, 52 percent of respondents indicated they want to speak to a live agent when they are facing a crisis and need a solution to a problem with a product or service. Even 24 percent of customers looking to complete a routine task, such as paying a bill, sought out a live agent. 2 Nicola J. Millard, “Serving the digital customer 2017,” British Telecommunications, 2017. Companies with strategies that seek to minimize access to live agents at all costs often see lower customer satisfaction without reducing their overall customer-care expenses.

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These trends all conspire to make omnichannel customer care that much more complex. Live agents clearly are not going away; in fact, they are more important than ever for certain kinds of interactions. Digital channels can be invaluable when well executed and integrated, but they can also create issues and increase demand for live agents when poorly managed. Therefore, companies embarking on an omnichannel transformation must ensure that each channel, as well as handoffs across channels, are optimized for each customer interaction. To do that, they must seek to understand what customers truly care about on a granular level.

What really matters to customers

Conventional wisdom can be an insidious obstacle to improving customer care. Companies frequently assume they know what their customers care about. The result is that customer care often settles on standard approaches to resolving issues that aren’t based on actual customer needs and preferences. In general, customer expectations in service journeys fall into three categories:

  • Speed and flexibility, defined as minimum processing time, responsiveness, and needs-based service.
  • Reliability and transparency, including proactive outreach and communication.
  • Interaction and care, consisting of comprehensive competence, personal attention, empathy, and simplicity and clarity.

That said, not all customer expectations fall into predictable categories. Organizations should gather direct, up-to-date feedback from customers to understand what matters most to them. Additionally, not all of the above factors contribute equally to overall experience, so homing in on the most important factors or combination of factors is critical. One company, for example, made speed of issue resolution a top priority because customers were consistently complaining that its service was too slow. In response, customer care redesigned processes and made significant investments to enable agents to move more quickly. It was only when these moves didn’t translate to improved customer satisfaction that the executives realized they needed to get greater visibility into their customers to understand what combination of factors was at play.

An in-depth analysis of data and surveys uncovered some interesting insights (Exhibit 2): customers were dissatisfied when they received fast responses but little information on an issue. The real revelation was that customers were content with longer wait times—provided that they received regular updates and felt fully aware of why issues were taking longer to resolve.

Four steps to a successful omnichannel transformation

The sheer range of variables that customer-care functions must account for—not just on the customer side but also internally—can quickly become overwhelming. But by first establishing some parameters on what good looks like and setting priorities by customer segment, companies can gain clarity on where to direct resources.

1. Define strategy and design principles

Companies must develop a customer-service strategy, or set of principles, that encompasses not only a vision for how to deliver an excellent experience but also how these interactions should feel for their customers. These principles help companies design service journeys that strike the right balance of speed, transparency, and interaction within each channel and that achieve a successful interplay of digital and live channels. Such an approach can ensure that companies apply an omnichannel lens to each service journey rather than focusing on optimizing individual touchpoints (such as interactive voice response, chat, voice, and digital).

To apply an omnichannel lens to the service journey, companies must understand customers by their digital behavior and offer the right channels that best align with the interests of each segment. Not all customers are the same, and it’s how they differ in their behavior and preferences—particularly on digital—that should have an outsize influence on how service journeys are designed. Our research into digital customer experience identified four different personas, and each is receptive to different ways of being engaged.

Digital by lifestyle (23 percent). For these consumers, digital is fully integrated into their lives. They don’t perceive a separation between the digital and traditional worlds—that is, they use social media every day and tend not to watch traditional TV or read newspapers.

Digital by choice (35 percent). Individuals who enjoy the advantages that digital brings, such as Netflix, Skype, YouTube, online check-in for travel, and online banking transactions, have options for how they engage but opt primarily for digital channels.

Digital by need (25 percent). Digital is beyond the comfort zone of these consumers, who engage with digital channels only when necessary.

Offline society (17 percent). Individuals who live in the nondigital world and prefer personal contacts make up nearly one-fifth of all customers. They use bank branches, shop in brick-and-mortar stores, and typically do not use the internet.

Focusing on the right set of customers will help companies prioritize efforts and identify key attributes and characteristics that would motivate each group. Best practice is to design primary service for each segment, using contact volume distribution and persona profiles that differentiate by digital behavior to determine engagement strategies and the necessary investments in each channel (Exhibit 3). For customers who are more tech savvy, the goal might be to promote online self-service and automated tools for basic tasks such as payments and installation updates. Only a small percentage of contacts—around 10 percent—require a highly skilled live agent. These contacts include cancellation requests and complaints, interactions for which the right engagement can turn a potential issue into an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships.

2. Map service journeys

Once companies have gained greater visibility into customer personas, they can design end-to-end service journeys across digital and live channels. These journeys should take into account the migration of a customer across channels to ensure seamless handoffs. It’s also critical to note that customer preferences aren’t static; they will continue to evolve, sometimes in surprising ways, based on the channels at their disposal, demographic shifts, and other factors (such as the influence of digital leaders in raising customer expectations). Companies can use the principles to construct a vision of how the customer journeys would look three years from now in a fully omnichannel world and then develop ambitious solutions that can keep pace with this change.

Understanding the end state of the most important service journeys can help companies set goals accordingly. To start, companies must determine which service journeys are most important in terms of the cost of the journey to the organization, the complexity involved in improving the journey, and how important the journey is to the customer. Companies must also overcome entrenched thinking and assumptions; senior managers, for example, often believe that customer care should seek to resolve issues in one session. However, this perspective can overlook opportunities to strengthen customer relationships. Take the claims process in insurance: if a customer has a car accident, he might feel guilty and could look to agents for emotional support. If an insurer is too focused on first-call resolution and speed, the customer might come away with a negative view of the encounter—and, by extension, the insurer.

Companies should apply a “test fast and learn” methodology. Tactics such as design thinking and ideation sessions with customers can structure these interactions; industry best practices show that “customer-experience labs,” which are built like innovation centers with customers and employees jointly designing journeys, can support the quick implementation and live-testing of prototypes with customers. This rapid, iterative approach can be summed up as, “Test, fail, adapt.”

In addition, quantitative research (including customer surveys) and qualitative efforts (ethnographic research) can offer a comprehensive view of customer groups and segments and open executives’ eyes to customer needs. By conducting this process for the most important journeys, companies can piece the omnichannel experience together—including additional touchpoints, detailed personas, a deep understanding of pain points and delight moments, preferences, and trade-offs about channels.

A look at a typical e-commerce journey reinforces the importance of taking an omnichannel view (Exhibit 4).

A customer might begin online by researching products but then reach out to a live agent to get more information and inquire about inventory. After comparing prices online and through a mobile app, he or she purchases the product online. A call to a live agent to check on the order status confirms the package’s delivery time. When the customer decides to return the product, it sets off an additional round of contact with a live agent to manage the process. Since movement between channels has become a common occurrence, managing this movement seamlessly and providing a consistent experience are paramount to customer satisfaction.

This in-depth consideration of service journeys can enable companies to determine what capabilities they need across technology, people, and the organization.

3. Invest in foundational enablers

To design and implement an effective omnichannel strategy, companies must embrace a culture of customer orientation across all employers and managers. This commitment helps to guide the development of three foundational enablers. First, agile process redesign empowers customer-care managers and agents to move more nimbly, improve transparency, and ensure frontline processes and actions are aligned with overarching business objectives. 3 For more, see “ Bringing agile to customer care .” Agile methodologies create ownership for care groups, deepen their resolution skills, and establish appropriate incentives—all to accelerate progress on a customer-first, omnichannel experience. Companies should establish and test interaction models to confirm that they are providing a seamless experience across channels.

Second, the workforce must have the right service skill sets. An omnichannel transformation also requires a shift in mind-set, from one focused on execution to continuous improvement and problem solving. To support this shift, employees must also build new skills. Care agents who possess the range of skills to resolve the most complex issues are a critical component of the omnichannel model.

Last, these efforts all need to be supported by well-designed and efficient foundational capabilities, from automated measurement that enables a meaningful performance management to routing based on personal attributes, harnessing customer data using advanced analytics. 4 For more, see “ How advanced analytics can help contact centers put the customer first .”

Customer first: Personalizing the customer care journey

Customer First: Personalizing the Customer-Care Journey

Measurement and accountability are also critical to gauge the progress of these efforts. For example, lots of companies measure Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction, among other metrics, at a company level, but this approach doesn’t highlight issues in specific parts of the customer journey. Therefore, measurement must be sufficiently frequent to identify patterns in customer engagement and granular to get an accurate picture of how customer care is performing at crucial interactions in each journey.

Accountability often requires companies to build a cross-functional team. Most companies are still organized by function, so improving a customer journey could involve operations, product development, the back office, legal, and compliance. These functions, when left to their own devices, typically focus on optimizing their area of the process rather than thinking about overall customer satisfaction. Providing an excellent customer experience across multiple touchpoints requires functions to coordinate their efforts more closely. Companies should set up a cross-functional team of senior managers that is responsible for improving the customer journey. They can then convene on a biweekly basis to determine how they can collaborate to reach the business’s goals instead of just focusing on their own function’s.

4. Build out IT architecture

The principles, service journeys, and functional enablers must be supported by an integrated IT architecture that can help to deliver a seamless experience. This architecture consists of the following elements:

Omnichannel desktop. Each agent’s command center integrates chat, cobrowsing, and email via applications. Routing and analyses efficiently direct complex requests to skilled agents, and chat and callback are offered via digital channels using javascript applications.

Omnichannel platform. This platform coordinates all channels used by representatives and routes and manages all incoming requests. An integration platform brings together a customer’s entire contact history and coordinates with the back end. Through a 360-degree customer perspective in the omnichannel desktop, representatives gain access to a self-service portal and can steer the process for customers.

Back-end interfaces. A self-service portal uses back-end interfaces to handle all requests. Data from these interactions are saved in data storage where they are quickly accessible. The portal also interfaces with the back end for synchronized communication.

Advanced analytics and new technologies, such as predicting issues before the customer explains the reason for the call, allow first movers to create “wow moments.” Similarly, algorithms based on natural language processing allow companies to promote behaviors to their agents that could affect customer satisfaction. For example, a system could coach an agent to talk slower or to use more energy in the conversation. New technologies and applications are seemingly arising each day; in the near future, they will enable companies to implement an IT backbone for their omnichannel experience that we cannot even imagine today.

The push to omnichannel is not confined to specific industries. Instead, it emanates from the evolution of customer preferences and behaviors as more channels emerge. And though customers are becoming more tech savvy, their comfort with digital channels only serves to elevate the importance of live agent interactions. Companies that understand this apparent contradiction, truly commit to understanding customer journeys, and build the capabilities to provide seamless omnichannel service will be well positioned to delight customers for years to come.

Jorge Amar is a partner in McKinsey’s Stamford office, and Julian Raabe and Stefan Roggenhofer are partners in the Munich office.

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Service journey quality: conceptualization, measurement and customer outcomes

Journal of Service Management

ISSN : 1757-5818

Article publication date: 4 May 2021

Issue publication date: 17 December 2021

The quality of the customer journey has become a critical determinant of successful service delivery in contemporary business. Extant journey research focuses on the customer path to purchase, but pays less attention to the touchpoints related to service delivery and consumption that are key for understanding customer experiences in service-intensive contexts. The purpose of this study is to conceptualize service journey quality (SJQ), develop measures for the construct and study its key outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses a discovery-oriented research approach to conceptualize SJQ by synthesizing theory and field-based insights from customer focus group discussions. Next, using consumer survey data ( N  = 278) from the financial services context, the authors develop measures for the SJQ. Finally, based on an additional survey dataset ( N  = 239), the authors test the nomological validity and predictive relevance of the SJQ.

SJQ comprises of three dimensions: (1) journey seamlessness, (2) journey personalization and (3) journey coherence. This study demonstrates that SJQ is a critical driver of service quality and customer loyalty in contemporary business. This study finds that the loyalty link is partially mediated through service quality, indicating that SJQ explains loyalty above and beyond service quality.

Research limitations/implications

Since service quality only partially mediates the link between service journey quality and customer loyalty, future studies should examine alternative mediators, such as customer experience, for a more comprehensive understanding of the performance effects.

Practical implications

The study offers concrete tools for service managers who wish to understand and develop the quality of service journeys.

Originality/value

This study advances the service journey concept, demonstrates that the quality of the service journey is a critical driver of customer performance and provides rigorous journey constructs for future service research.

  • Service journey
  • Customer journey
  • Service delivery
  • Customer experience
  • Service quality
  • Service design

Jaakkola, E. and Terho, H. (2021), "Service journey quality: conceptualization, measurement and customer outcomes", Journal of Service Management , Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-06-2020-0233

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Elina Jaakkola and Harri Terho

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

The notion of satisfying customers through service excellence is a cornerstone of service research and practice. During the past decade, managers and researchers alike have increasingly stressed the role of customer journeys as opposed to individual service encounters for the achievement of service excellence and the subsequent competitive advantage ( Rawson et al. , 2013 ). This emphasis aligns with broader marketing research suggesting that the set of touchpoints along the customer journey gives rise to customer experience ( Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Tueanrat et al. , 2021 ). Indeed, a recent industry report suggests that, across industries, companies' journey performance is substantially more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction and business outcomes, such as revenue and repeat purchase, than is firm performance at individual touchpoints ( Duncan et al. , 2016 ).

In the extant marketing literature, the “customer journey” is commonly defined as the series of touchpoints that customers encounter and interact with during their purchase process ( Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Becker et al. , 2020 ). In today's markets, customer journeys are ever more complex, as digitalization has accelerated the birth of a myriad of channels through which customers can interact, search for information and conduct their purchases ( Sousa and Voss, 2006 ; Edelman and Singer, 2015 ). What is more, increasing specialization has fragmented the contemporary service delivery to involve a network of providers ( Tax et al. , 2013 ). Firms must therefore manage expectational, operational and functional interdependencies between various touchpoints ( Dhebar, 2013 ), keeping in mind that clumsy and inconsistent journeys have been identified as an important source of customer churn ( Rawson et al. , 2013 ).

The customer journey is a powerful concept for understanding a customer's path to purchase (e.g. Edelman and Singer, 2015 ). However, the purchase decision-making focus is less useful for supporting service management; as in service-intensive contexts, service delivery and consumption encounters play a major role in the formation of customer experiences, accentuating the importance of touchpoints that customers interact with after their purchase decision (see Lemke et al. , 2011 ). Thus, service researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and design high-quality journeys can benefit from journey constructs that capture the functional and operational interdependencies between touchpoints comprising the service process (e.g. Tax et al. , 2013 ; Rawson et al. , 2013 ; Dhebar, 2013 ).

Extant service research offers valuable methods for analyzing and designing the composition of journeys, such as service blueprinting ( Bitner et al. , 2008 ), customer journey mapping ( Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010 ) and multilevel service design ( Patricio et al. , 2011 ), but it lacks the conceptual tools for assessing the quality of service journeys from the customer's viewpoint. This means that managers are missing the tools for measuring to what extent they succeed in designing their journeys for service delivery, and many service organizations continue measuring perceived service quality at particular touchpoints, or rely on simple aggregate measures, such as the Net Promoter Score. Research on customer experience (CX) also considers journeys, but CX measures predominantly focus on customers' perceptions of their overall experience with a brand (e.g. Brakus et al. , 2009 ) or a firm during the purchase process ( Kumar et al. , 2014 ; Kuppelwieser and Klaus, 2021 ), offering limited insights on the touchpoints related to service delivery and consumption that are critical for service-intensive contexts.

Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize service journey quality (SJQ), develop measures for the construct and study its customer outcomes . Service journey refers to the process or sequence that a customer goes through to access and use a particular service (cf. Tueanrat et al. , 2021 ; Følstad and Kvale, 2018 ; Voorhees et al. , 2017 ). This study adopts a discovery-oriented approach for conceptualizing SJQ ( Zaltman et al. , 1982 ). First, by synthesizing extant theory (e.g. Homburg et al. , 2017 ; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ) and field-based insights from customer focus group discussions, we define SJQ as the degree to which customers perceive the combination of provider-owned service process touchpoints functioning as a (1) seamless, (2) coherent and (3) personalized whole. Second, by building upon the definition and insights from the qualitative study, we develop measures for the SJQ constructs using survey data ( N  = 278) from consumers in the financial services context. Third, we demonstrate the nomological validity and practical relevance of the SJQ constructs by linking them to service quality and customer loyalty using a second survey dataset ( N  = 239) from the financial industry.

This study makes three key contributions. First, the developed conceptualization and measure for SJQ advances extant service research that has, for nearly a decade, highlighted the critical role of journeys (e.g. Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010 ; Ostrom et al. , 2015 ), but offered scant insight into what constitutes the quality of a journey in a service-intensive context. This study develops service process-focused SJQ constructs that capture the key aspects of functional service journeys, putting the emphasis on customer perceptions of the interdependencies between journey touchpoints rather than on individual encounters or the overall evaluation of a firm, thereby complementing current constructs in the area of customer journeys and experience (e.g. Lemke et al. , 2011 ; Kuehnl et al. , 2019 ). Second, this study provides rare empirical support for the notion that the journey quality is a critical driver of customer performance in contemporary service businesses (e.g. Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ). Specifically, we demonstrate that service journey seamlessness, personalization and coherence are central drivers of customer loyalty intentions. Third, the study clarifies the nomological network of service journeys by providing new insights about the theoretical mechanisms through which journey quality affects loyalty. Earlier research has pointed out that the link between journey quality and loyalty is primarily due to improved brand attitudes ( Kuehnl et al. , 2019 ). Our results show that in service-intensive contexts, the journey-loyalty relationship can furthermore be partially explained through improved service quality perceptions. Since the service quality's mediation effect is only partial, we encourage future research to study more closely the role of other alternative mediators, such as customer experience, in linking SJQ to customer loyalty ( Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ). All in all, this research provides new measures for service design, service management and customer experience research, as well as for managers who wish to set goals, understand and develop their performance in service journeys as a strategic priority.

This paper is organized as follows. The next section outlines the key literature streams that offer the conceptual building blocks for SJQ. The subsequent sections report the empirical research conducted; we first conceptualize SJQ and its key dimensions by synthesizing theory-based views and field-based insights into SJQ, second, develop measures for the construct and finally demonstrate its nomological and predictive validity. The final sections outline the study's theoretical and managerial implications.

2. Conceptual underpinnings of service journey quality

The research that can be drawn from to conceptualize service journey quality is fragmented in multiple literature streams. In the service context, many of the dealings between customers and providers take place after the actual purchase decision has been made as the realization of a service offering often involves both parties. SJQ is hence best understood through literature streams that tackle the various stages of the process that consumers go through when accessing and consuming a service.

Table 1 outlines the key literature fields that offer insight into SJQ. The service management and service design research discuss high-quality service delivery processes; customer experience studies identify strategic journey-related goals for service providers and channel management research provides insights on the design and deployment of diverse channels for effective service processes.

The traditional service management literature has highlighted that customers' quality perceptions are affected not only by what they receive as an outcome of the service but critically also by the functional performance of the service process ( Grönroos, 1984 ). This research has mainly focused on the quality of the core service delivery taking place during the service encounter ( Voorhees et al. , 2017 ), typically examining customer perceptions of either a firm's service excellence at one point in time or their overall experience with the firm (e.g. Parasuraman et al. , 1991 ; Brady and Cronin, 2001 ). The studies considering the service encounter's processual nature have analyzed how positive service outcomes are affected by a particular phase or event of the service process ( Stauss and Weinlich, 1997 ; Verhoef et al. , 2004 ; Sivakumar et al. , 2014 ) or the customer relationship ( Dagger and Sweeney, 2007 ). In other words, service management research mostly focuses on individual service encounters or overall service quality rather than on the journey elements that support the functioning of the service process as a whole.

The literature on service design focuses on the customer-centered innovation of new services by emphasizing the user experience, suggesting methods for analyzing customer journeys and aligning the partners in service delivery (e.g. Karpen et al. , 2017 ; Steen et al. , 2011 ; Yu and Sangiorgi, 2018 ). Methods such as service blueprinting emerged as an attempt to gain a broader view of the service process that comprises both joint service encounters and the steps customers take outside the service setting ( Bitner et al. , 2008 ). Subsequent service design studies have expanded the analysis to include complex systems that customers and users navigate to fulfill their needs (e.g. Patricio et al. , 2011 ; Tax et al. , 2013 ). This stream highlights the importance of designing the journey in a holistic manner and incorporating the entire service delivery network to ensure a consistent service experience (e.g. Tax et al. , 2013 ). Yet, the emphasis lies on offering tools for mapping and developing customer journeys, and these studies do not offer constructs for measuring service journey quality from the customer's perspective.

Customer experience research highlights the importance of journeys by defining the customer experience as “customers' nondeliberate, spontaneous responses and reactions to offering-related stimuli along the customer journey” ( Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ). Research on customer experience management (CEM) focuses on sellers' activities for strategically designing and managing experiences throughout the customer journey. Homburg et al. (2017) found that best-practice firms have four strategic goals for designing and improving customer journeys: (1) the thematic cohesion of touchpoints, (2) the consistency of touchpoints, (3) the context sensitivity of touchpoints and (4) the connectivity of touchpoints. Kuehnl et al. (2019) found evidence for the first three of these dimensions. These findings offer tentative insights into the relevant dimensions of SJQ. However, the CX research predominantly studies customer purchase journeys, and the only existing consumer-assessed journey design construct by Kuehnl et al. (2019) emphasizes brand-focused journey qualities relating to the brand experience, brand attitudes and customer loyalty. The CX stream has thus paid very limited attention to the functional and operational touchpoint interdependencies that are critical for service contexts ( Rawson et al. , 2013 ; Dhebar, 2013 ).

Finally, research on multichannel customer management addresses “the design, deployment, and evaluation of channels to enhance customer value through effective customer acquisition, retention, and development” ( Neslin et al. , 2006 , p. 96). Customer channels are the medium through which service providers communicate or interact with customers (e.g. call centers, e-mails, SMS, chats and face-to-face conversations) hence representing platforms for digital or human-served touchpoints ( Halvorsrud et al. , 2016 ; Sousa and Voss, 2006 ). The multichannel literature predominantly focuses on channel choice behavior, such as the drivers for online channel use (e.g. Melis et al. , 2015 ), an optimal mix of channels (e.g. Montoya-Weiss et al. , 2003 ) and the role of specific channels during particular phases of the purchase process (e.g. Verhoef et al. , 2007 ). In terms of SJQ, this stream contributes insights into channel properties that attract and guide customers, especially the importance of integrating channels to enable the easy transitioning from one channel to another (e.g. Montoya-Weiss et al. , 2003 ; Neslin et al. , 2006 ; Barwitz and Maas, 2018 ). However, as noted by Anderl et al. (2016) , channel studies tend to either focus on one single channel or consider the interplay of a few selected channels to understand the consumer's path to purchase. This literature reveals little about the quality of the combination of different types of touchpoints located within a range of channels as the focus lies on the channel strategies rather than on the functioning of the journey for service delivery.

As this literature review demonstrates, the issue of understanding and designing service journeys is relevant for many research streams, but the question as to what constitutes SJQ has not been explicitly addressed so far, and the research lacks valid measures on this topic. The research on service management and service design emphasizes the importance of gaining a customer view of the service process, but does not offer tools for understanding and measuring the functional quality of journeys. Customer experience and channel management research, in turn, focuses on the customer purchase journey and offers little insight into the interdependencies between post-purchase touchpoints that are critical for service delivery processes.

3. Conceptualization of service journey quality

To conceptualize SJQ, we applied a discovery-oriented research approach (e.g. Zaltman et al. , 1982 ). By adhering to this approach's established procedures, we build upon our initial insights from a literature review for a theory-based view and complement and refine it with a field-based view. The existing research offers a good basis for forming an initial, theory-based understanding of SJQ, but since existing studies have not addressed journeys specifically from a service process perspective, we conducted a qualitative study on consumers' perceptions of high-quality service journeys to (1) substantiate and (2) enhance and nuance the theory-based view. The conceptualization process was abductive in nature: we moved between theoretical concepts and empirical observations in an iterative fashion ( Dubois and Gadde, 2002 ), resulting in a synthesis of theory and qualitative insights that allowed us to define the SJQ construct and its key dimensions. The conceptual basis established in this phase also forms a robust foundation for the scale development process in the study's latter stages.

3.1 Theory-based view of service journey quality

The first step of the conceptualization process focuses on forming a theory-based view of the SJQ concept's key content. As our literature review demonstrates, research on service process quality and customer journeys can together offer tentative insights into SJQ. First, many studies stress the importance of designing the journey as a whole and integrating touchpoints such that the journey runs smoothly (e.g. Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Homburg et al. , 2017 ; Sousa and Voss, 2006 ). However, due to the increasing functional and operational touchpoint interdependencies of the service processes, mere excellence in individual interactions may not be enough for successful service delivery if the service delivery touchpoints do not align and work in concert (see Rawson et al. , 2013 ).

Second, many authors highlight that touchpoints and their cues should be thematically consistent and coherent along the journey (e.g. Homburg et al. , 2017 ; Kuehnl et al. , 2019 ). Customers experience and evaluate service cues across touchpoints, and with an increasing number of channels and partners involved in service delivery, they may feel lost if the service touchpoints are very dissimilar (cf. Berry et al. , 2006 ).

Third, research emphasizes the individual and subjective nature of journeys, suggesting that they should be sensitive to customers ' individual needs and channel preferences (e.g. Barwitz and Maas, 2018 ; Patricio et al. , 2011 ). High-quality service delivery should therefore adapt to the needs of the individual customer throughout the whole service process (cf. Dhebar, 2013 ). These three themes – touchpoint integration, thematical coherence and sensitivity to individual customer needs – were adopted as the initial theory-based view for SJQ conceptualization, which was refined and complemented with empirical insights from service-intensive contexts.

3.2 A qualitative study for establishing a field-based view of service journey quality

Next, we conducted a qualitative study to generate an understanding of SJQ by drawing from human experiences ( Gioia et al. , 2013 ). Following Sharma and Conduit (2016) , we took the Gioia approach to first conduct open coding to identify themes emerging from data, to capture any SJQ aspects that are relevant for consumers' lived service experiences. In accordance with the abductive approach, we next integrated the first-order codes into second-order, theory-centric themes iterating between the data and the tentative conceptualizations derived from previous research ( Dubois and Gadde, 2002 ). The qualitative data thus served the purpose of substantiating and refining the theory-based view and formulating service process specific definitions for the tentative themes.

3.2.1 Data collection

We employed focus groups to capture consumer insights into SJQ. Focus groups are a suitable data collection means for explorative purposes because the method allows one to gain insights from a large number of individuals through nondirective inquiry strategies that result in a rich understanding of the studied phenomenon ( Flick, 2018 ). We organized nine focus groups of four or five consumers each, and the participants were both female and male and aged between twenty and forty years ( Table 2 ). The aim of selecting focus group participants was to facilitate the open sharing of views and understandings while ensuring that the generated data would be able to meet the research aim's requirements ( King et al. , 2019 ). The participants were university students with differing backgrounds, thus ensuring some common ground, yet a relatively broad range of views.

Each group discussed service journeys in one of the following service contexts: retail, hospitality, teleoperator and insurance services ( Table 2 ). Service delivery in these contexts often features multiple touchpoints, facilitating the gaining of a rich set of insights. The groups were asked to choose one of the four contexts, wherein each participant had some recent dealings. The participants were instructed to discuss their actual experiences of service processes in the chosen context by focusing on experiences they perceived as particularly positive or negative. The participants were asked to describe their service journeys and elaborate upon the aspects that they perceived as the root causes of their positive and/or negative perceptions of the service process. All these procedures aimed to elicit the recall and identification of critical SJQ dimensions in a nonobtrusive way.

3.2.2 Data analysis

Following the Gioia approach ( Gioia et al. , 2013 ), we conducted a thematic analysis on the data, starting with identifying any journey-specific themes mentioned by the focus group participants as relevant to their positive or negative past service experiences; this stage is akin to open coding as conducted in grounded theory ( Strauss and Corbin, 1990 ). Next, we compared and grouped the first-order codes to identify broader second-order themes related to journey quality aspects by iterating between the data and the tentative theory-based conceptualizations. The first-order analysis adhered to the informants' voices, while the second-order analysis developed a higher level of abstraction and used theory-driven insights to determine if and how the first-order themes may be connected and labeled to suggest concepts that explain the observed phenomenon ( Gioia et al. , 2013 ; cf. Sharma and Conduit, 2016 ).

3.3 Conceptualization: synthetizing theory-based view and empirical findings

By synthesizing previous research with findings from qualitative study, we define SJQ as the degree to which customers perceive the combination of provider-owned service process touchpoints functioning as a (1) seamless, (2) coherent and (3) personalized whole. With provider-owned touchpoints, we refer to touchpoints controllable by the service providers, i.e. brand- and partner-owned touchpoints ( Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ). The rationale is that while modern multichannel service processes may involve a network of service providers and outsourcing partners ( Tax et al. , 2013 ), the customer nevertheless evaluates the process as a whole and often sees each touchpoint representing, and remaining the responsibility of the focal service provider, whether outsourced or not ( Kranzbühler et al. , 2019 ). Thus, the SJQ construct focuses on service delivery touchpoints that service providers are able to design and manage (see Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ). We identify three key SJQ dimensions: seamlessness, personalization and coherence discussed in detail below.

I hit a car at the parking lot and called my insurance company. Their call center connected my call to the insurance payout services and also transferred my details since the person picking up already knew who I was and why I was calling! She told me what would happen next and helped me pick a repair shop. After the call, I got a text and an email with instructions to the repair shop, and the owner of the other car immediately got a call from my insurance company about his compensation, and I did not have to worry about it at all. (I2)
I had ordered from their online store but I could return items at the [physical] store…that was very convenient, not having to pack and send the clothes that did not fit. (R2)
I was trying to activate my new mobile phone subscription, but it was very difficult. I got a letter that instructed that I should register in one place, then confirm in another site, and then activate it in a third place! The salespersons gave totally different instructions. (T1)

These findings find support in existing research, pinpointing that journey touchpoints should be functionally integrated to enable a smooth end-to-end journey ( Homburg et al. , 2017 ). Edelman and Singer (2015) note that firms should streamline journeys so that customers are able to execute complex service processes quickly and easily; and Rawson et al. (2013) recommend shifting from siloed to cross-functional approaches in developing journeys. Combining the qualitative insights with extant research, we define journey seamlessness as the degree to which touchpoints are integrated allowing a customer ' s smooth transition between various service process touchpoints .

The [mobile phone] service provider sent me an ad to promote its special package for young adults; it looked trendy and playful. The firm was also present in our student event; they organized a funny game and gave away energy drinks…Even their sales reps were cool; they called themselves “social media ninjas”—so everything was about the trendy, bold, and youthful brand… (T1)
It is easy since every Ikea store is almost identical, and it feels the same since you can see Ikea colors all the time…their website looks like Ikea since there is blue and yellow. You also see yellow and blue signs in the stores, and you collect stuff in a yellow bag, and they pack them in a blue bag! (R1)
Different service employees had completely different styles of doing things...So their service principles seem to depend on who you happen to ask! (R3)

These findings resonate with the notion of brand cues' thematic cohesion and consistency across touchpoints (see e.g. Berry et al. , 2006 ; Kuehnl et al. , 2019 ). Previous research on customer experience management has indeed recommended that firms should systematically manage and orchestrate “experience clues” across various touchpoints ( Berry et al. , 2006 ; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010 ). Synthesizing the qualitative insights with previous research, we define journey coherence as the degree to which service process touchpoints provide consistent experience cues .

We went to a big concert and stayed in a hotel close by. There were many concert attendees staying there, and the hotel had decided to extend the breakfast time the next morning so that we could sleep in after the concert! That seemed like excellent service. ( H2 )
I needed to file an application for compensation for a broken sink in my bathroom. I could've done that online, by phone, or by visiting their office, but I chose the mobile application since I like to do everything with my phone. (I1)
We were two families with small kids traveling together [on a cruise ship] and had booked family cabins. It was really convenient that all the family cabins were located along the same corridor, and party people were at the other end of the ship. Passengers with prams had their own entrance to the ship, and there was a ship mascot greeting us and handing coupons for free ice cream at the play area, our kids loved it! ( H1 )

Also previous research has noted the importance of designing touchpoints that are sensitive to the customer's situational context ( Homburg et al. , 2017 ; Kuehnl et al. , 2019 ), highlighting that customers should find the touchpoint architecture adaptive to their changing needs ( Dhebar, 2013 ). Combining the empirical and research insights, we define journey personalization as the degree to which the combination of service process touchpoints is tailored to fit the customer ' s preferences and situational context.

4. Service journey quality scale development

4.1 qualitative scale development procedure.

The conceptualization of SJQ enabled us to proceed into building measures for the construct. The scale development follows the established procedures for building new scales ( Churchill, 1979 ; MacKenzie et al. , 2011 ). Specifically, on the basis of the construct definitions and insights from the qualitative study, we built an initial indicator pool for all three SJQ constructs, coming up with 23 total indicators that have been designed to evenly reflect the key domain of each SJQ dimension. Next, we assessed the indicator content validity through a qualitative item-sort task test suggested by Anderson and Gerbing (1991) . Twelve senior scholars were asked to assign each scale item under one SJQ construct definitions or option “other” if it could not be accurately assigned to any one definition. All but one indicator received more than ten out of twelve correct responses, thereby passing the suggested threshold criterial of psa (>0.5) and csv (>0.7). When a reviewer felt unclear about or rated an item incorrectly, the indicator was carefully evaluated, and some wordings were consequently fine-tuned. Finally, we selected the six representative indicators from the item sort test for each dimension to sustain the final scale at a reasonable length – see Appendix for the final scale indicators.

4.2 Data collection for the scale validation

To validate the developed measure, we conducted a consumer survey concerning SJQ in financial services where the process of accessing and using the service typically involves a multitude of touchpoints in different channels. The data were collected in a centrally located downtown shopping center in a northern European town. We randomly approached adult customers and asked them to participate in an academic study that concerned their experiences with their primary financial service providers. We implemented a movie ticket draw as an incentive for consumers to participate and guaranteed full anonymity for each respondent and received N  = 278 responses. The data were deemed adequate for the initial scale validation purpose of the first survey study.

4.3 Assessment of the SJQ scale validity and reliability

The SJQ scale validity was assessed based on confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS 24 software. The initial analysis of the proposed three-factor SJQ model with 18 indicators led to the elimination of two items from the seamlessness construct due to problems with discriminant validity. The elimination of problematic items is possible since the reflective indicators are interchangeable and because the construct is unchanged when an indicator is removed ( Bollen and Lennox, 1991 ). A purified three-dimensional model with 16 items demonstrated a satisfactory fit. The chi-square statistic was significant (222.4; p  = 0.00), but the critical ratio of the chi-square over degrees of freedom was close to 2 ( χ 2 /df = 2.2), thus indicating a reasonable fit. The central fit indices provide support for the scale validity: goodness of fit index (GFI) = 0.91; comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.95; Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.94; standardized root mean residual (SRMR) = 0.042 and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.066 [0.054; 0.078] (c.f. Hu and Bentler, 1999 ). All indicator loadings were above 0.70 and significant at p  < 0.01. Figure 1 summarizes the CFA results.

The Fornell and Larcker (1981) test further supports the discriminant validity because the average variance extracted (AVE) values for all constructs exceeded 0.50, and the squared AVE values of each construct exceeded correlations with other constructs. Construct reliabilities were also satisfactory, as all Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability values were higher than 0.70 (see Table 3 for scale details).

Finally, we compared the proposed three-dimensional model against alternative models, including a null model, a single-factor SJQ model and three two-dimensional SJQ models, to further assess the dimensionality of the construct. All alternative models had poor fit (see Table 4 ), thereby supporting the proposed three-dimensional conceptualization of SJQ. All in all, the initial scale validation stage provided support for the validity and reliability of the scales.

5. Nomological and predictive validity of SJQ

5.1 research model and hypotheses.

The study's final stage focused on testing the nomological and predictive validity of each SJQ construct. For this purpose, we identified the two seminal constructs of customer loyalty and service quality from earlier service research, which are conceptually related to SJQ. Figure 2 below presents this study's research model. Next, we discuss the research model and its hypotheses as well as justify the use of composite constructs to test the hypotheses.

Service journey quality has a positive relationship with customer loyalty.

Service journey quality has a positive relationship with service quality.

The relationship between service journey quality and customer loyalty is partially mediated by service quality.

5.2 Use of composite constructs in the research model

Theoretical constructs are not per se multidimensional or unidimensional, but can usually be operationalized either way, thus representing various levels of theoretical abstraction ( Law et al. , 1998 ). SJQ and service quality represent two theoretically distinctive, although complex concepts in the research model, as both possess multiple unique dimensions. Against this background, both constructs can be meaningfully operationalized at a higher level of abstraction by means of second-order composite constructs ( Hair et al. , 2017 ). The use of hierarchical component models offers two important benefits for this study. First, they can notably reduce model complexity by decreasing the number of relationships in the full mediation model, thereby increasing parsimony ( Hair et al. , 2017 , p. 281). Second, although all studied SJQ and service quality constructs are independent by nature, they are likely to correlate with one another due their conceptual closeness concerning quality in service business settings. Establishing a higher-order structure can reduce potential collinearity issues ( Hair et al. , 2017 , p. 281).

Research should always carefully consider specification of the studied constructs because model misspecification can severely bias structural parameter estimates and lead to inappropriate conclusions about the hypothesized relationships between constructs ( Jarvis et al. , 2003 ). We argue that SJQ and service quality are best modeled as first-order reflective, second-order formative (Type II) composite constructs. We build this argument upon the following four criteria that define whether a construct is more efficiently measured by a reflective or formative perspective: (1) causality between the construct and its dimensions, (2) interchangeability of the dimensions, (3) covariation among the dimensions and (4) whether or not all dimensions have the same antecedents and consequences (cf. Jarvis et al. , 2003 , p. 203). The qualitative study suggests that the three SJQ dimensions form the overall level of the construct rather than a uniformly reflect the construct as dropping one dimension would alter the SJQ's conceptualization. Similarly, the dimensions can but are not required to correlate since a service firm might score high in seamlessness, but at the same time fail to provide personalized service encounters. Finally, one may logically expect that the various independent dimensions can have different drivers and outcomes.

5.3 Data collection

The data collection for testing the research model was conducted in collaboration with a Northern European bank that is classified as the second-largest bank in the country wherein the study was conducted. The bank provided us access to its consumers in one of its branches and drew a sample of 4,757 customers from its customer base. A customer experience-labeled survey was sent to the customers in the university's name as an academic survey. A movie ticket draw was used to incentivize the selected customers to participate in the study. All responses were highlighted to be fully confidential, and the respondents were guaranteed full anonymity for their responses. The data collection with two reminders led to N  = 239 customer responses. The respondents' characteristics are summarized in Table 5 .

5.4 Measures

We employed established scales for all the constructs in the research model. Specifically, we measured customer loyalty using the scale by Zeithaml et al. (1996) , service quality with the measure developed by Cronin and Taylor (1992) and SJQ with the developed scale. In addition, since the study relied on a single-respondent design, we included a common method variance (CMV) marker variable to the questionnaire. For this purpose, we used an a-priori “Consumer Orientation Toward Sporting Events” scale developed by Pons et al. (2006) with four indicators and no nomological relationship with other study constructs, as recommended by the established guidelines ( Lindell and Whitney, 2001 ; Chin et al. , 2013 ).

5.5 Analytical procedures

Since the maximum-likelihood-based SEM is problematic for testing models with formative constructs, we analyzed the research model with PLS modeling using the SmartPLS3.0 software ( Hair et al. , 2012 ). This method is closely suited to studies that build upon formative constructs and complex models with higher-order constructs and mediation effects. We implemented the guidelines established by Hair et al. (2012) to estimate the research model. The modeling of second-order composite constructs follows the guidelines of Becker et al. (2012) as well as Cadogan and Lee (2013) . Specifically, the simulation study conducted by Becker et al. (2012) demonstrates that reflective-formative, hierarchical type II constructs are most effectively modeled by the repeated indicator approach, path weighting scheme and mode B measurement. We further tested the SJQ construct's relationship with the second-order formative service quality construct through its lower-order dimensions (see Figure 2 ), which represents a conceptually superior way to estimate antecedent relations for formative constructs ( Cadogan and Lee, 2013 ). To account for the total effects on service quality, the explained variance in each dimension was multiplied by its weight, and the individual contributions of each dimension were added together ( Becker et al. , 2012 ). The statistical significance of the PLS parameter estimates were tested with a bootstrapping procedure based on 5,000 subsamples. For clarity, we estimated the research model in two parts; we first estimated a simple baseline model with exclusively direct relationships between SJQ and customer loyalty and second, estimated a full model with the service quality construct as a mediator.

5.6 Common method variance

Because the study relies on a single-respondent design, common method variance (CMV) must be taken into account. We relied on both procedural and statistical approaches to assess and control CMV as recommended by Podsakoff et al. (2003) . The procedural means include respondents' guaranteed anonymity, careful scale item development for added clarity and the use of different scale anchors for IV and DV. We also used several statistical means to assess CMV. First, Harman's single-factor test produced seven factors with eigenvalues greater in an un-rotated factor analysis and no single factor explained above 50% of the covariance. Second, we applied Lindell and Whitney's (2001) partial correlation technique to assess the magnitude of CMV effects in construct correlations. Importantly, the marker variable was found to have low (0.06–0.12) and insignificant relationships with other study constructs (see Table 6 ), while the specific data analysis procedures (see Lindell and Whitney, 2001 ) did not exhibit any substantial changes in their correlation coefficients or their significance when controlling for the CMV marker variable. Finally, we applied a measured latent marker variable approach when testing our research model, which has been proven to effectively detect and correct CMV in a PLS analysis (see Chin et al. , 2013 ). Specifically, our full research model includes separate CMV marker variables for all constructs in the model (see Figure 2 ). All marker variable paths were again close to zero and insignificant (see Table 7 for full details). Importantly, the marker variable's inclusion in the model did not change path coefficients or significances; overall, the results indicate that a common method bias is not a major problem for this study.

5.7 Testing the research model and hypotheses

We began testing the research model by assessing the scale validities and reliabilities. The outer model results show that all standardized indicator loadings exceeded the recommended threshold of 0.70 and were all significant at the p  < 0.01 level (see Appendix ). The construct reliabilities were supported, as all Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability values were higher than 0.70. Convergent and discriminant validity were supported because all AVEs were higher than 0.50 and because the AVE's square root exceeded the construct correlations (see Table 6 for scale details). The scale correlations were high, although closely aligned with earlier service quality research findings that have found key service quality constructs and customer performance outcomes to be tightly interrelated ( Brady and Cronin, 2001 ; Dagger and Sweeney, 2007 ). The correlations are also theoretically meaningful since all the studied constructs measured diverse aspects of service performance, including service journey quality, overall service quality and customer loyalty. Finally, a separate test of PLS cross-loadings confirmed that all indicators loaded highest on the construct that they were intended to measure ( Hair et al. , 2012 ).

The inner model evaluation also supported the quality of the model. We examined VIF values of the first-order constructs in relation to higher-order formative constructs and concluded that all values were below the suggested threshold of 5 ( Hair et al. , 2012 ).

The structural model results provide support for all three hypotheses. First, the direct effect model confirms that the developed SJQ measure has a strong, positive relationship with customer loyalty, thus supporting H1 (see Table 7 ). Specifically, the second-order SJQ construct had a path coefficient of 0.76** for loyalty in the direct effect model, thus explaining 60% of its variance. All first-order dimensions had positive and significant weights: personalization (0.40**), coherence (0.38**) and seamlessness (0.29*), thus supporting the predictive validity of all three dimensions for customer performance. The first-order path coefficients to the second-order constructs can be interpreted similarly to formative indicator weights – that is, by indicating the relative contribution of the lower-order construct to the higher-order construct while predicting outcomes in the studied nomological network ( Becker et al. , 2012 ).

Second, the full structural model results support the second hypothesis that SJQ is a central enabler of service quality in today's complex business environment. Interestingly, SJQ was positively related to all dimensions of service quality: reliability (0.85**), assurance (0.73**), tangibles (0.68**), empathy (0.65**) and responsiveness (0.57**). Yet, only two first-order dimensions of service quality contributed significantly to the second-order construct when predicting loyalty. By calculating the total indirect effects ( Becker et al. , 2012 ), SJQ explains 53% of the variance in service quality.

Third, the full mediation model results also support the partial mediation of H3 because the relationship between SJQ and customer loyalty became weaker, yet remained significant when controlling for the service quality mediation link. A separate, bootstrapping-based Preacher Hayes mediation analysis confirms the significance of the hypothesized partial mediation (see Table 8 ).

Specifically, when controlling for the service quality link, SJQ's direct effect on customer loyalty (0.26**) remained substantial and highly significant. SJQ also had a strong indirect effect (0.50**) on customer loyalty through the service quality link. Interestingly, SJQ's total effect on loyalty (0.76**) due to its direct and indirect effects was stronger than service quality's effect on loyalty (0.58**). Finally, a closer look at the dimension weights of the second-order constructs provides insight into the relative importance of the dimensions in the broader nomological network. When broadening the study focus to the full research model with both service quality and loyalty as dependent variables, the SJQ dimension weights slightly changed as the relative impact of personalization (0.56**) and seamlessness (0.28**) became more important compared to coherence (0.21*). In line with earlier findings in banking contexts (see Bloemer et al. , 1998 ; Choudhury, 2013 ), reliability (0.70**) is the dominating dimension of service quality when predicting customer loyalty. Beyond reliability, the tangibles (0.18*) represent the only other significant 2nd order service quality dimension.

6. Contributions and implications

6.1 theoretical implications.

This research responds to calls for the development of a more thorough understanding of what makes service journeys excellent and supportive of superior customer outcomes ( Ostrom et al. , 2015 ), as well as to the managerial need for easily applicable tools for measuring performance in service delivery through complex journeys. The customer journey is considered a key concept for understanding the emergence of customer experiences (e.g. Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ), but extant research has overlooked the development of this concept to fully capture the essence of service processes. This paper informs research and managerial practice by conceptualizing SJQ, developing measures for the construct and studying its relationship with service quality and customer loyalty. Extant journey research spans various literature fields ( Table 1 ), thus rendering the findings relevant for many areas of service research. This study makes three main contributions, which are discussed in detail below.

First, the conceptualization and measure development for SJQ offers researchers constructs that capture the key aspects of functional customer journeys from the service process point of view. This contributes to the service management and experience research by moving the focus from individual encounters or overall service or brand evaluations (e.g. Parasuraman et al. , 1991 ; Brakus et al. , 2009 ; Lemke et al. , 2011 ; Kumar et al. , 2014 ) to the potentially multichannel and multiprovider service journeys as whole. As such, the SJQ construct provides a modern service quality tool that tackles service delivery through complex journeys, whose quality cannot be exclusively understood as an aggregate sum of individual service encounters ( Rawson et al. , 2013 ). For service design research, the SJQ construct offers a set of concrete goals for designing journeys to ensure that cues and touchpoints operate in concert and allow for personalized configurations, and it enables the measuring of to what degree these designed journey qualities are achieved. For customer experience research, SJQ offers a journey conceptualization that captures the key elements that affect CX formation in service-intensive contexts. This supports customer experience management ( Homburg et al. , 2017 ) and complements the constructs developed by Kuehnl et al. (2019) that link brand-focused journey qualities to brand attitudes, brand experiences and loyalty, but scarcely address the operational and functional touchpoint interdependencies relevant for service processes. For multichannel customer management research, the SJQ construct provides a tool for analyzing the performance of channel integration in service-intensive contexts, complementing the existing journey perspective that is purchase-process focused.

This study's second contribution is in confirming that SJQ is a critical driver of customer performance in contemporary service businesses. Specifically, we demonstrate that service journey seamlessness, personalization and coherence act as central drivers for both perceived service quality and customer loyalty intentions. The positive connection between the quality of journeys and service quality is intuitive, yet no earlier study has demonstrated this link. This study's findings indicate that customers' overall service quality assessments are affected by their perceptions of how successfully various service delivery touchpoints operate in concert. This link is evident even though many service quality dimensions focus on personal interactions at a single encounter. It is likely that encounters at earlier stages of the service journey build expectations that affect the customer's interpretation of later service encounters. In other words, high-quality journeys reduce negative surprises and enable the consistent meeting of customer expectations, which builds better service quality perceptions. Thus, this study demonstrates that SJQ represents an important service quality enabler and provides evidence for the assumption that, in today's multichannel, digitalized markets, service excellence warrants the perfection of service journeys (cf. Halvorsrud et al. , 2016 ; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ). This finding is underscored by the empirical finding that SJQ has a stronger total effect on customer loyalty than on service quality.

Finally, this study contributes to the existing literature by clarifying the nomological network of service journeys and the theoretical mechanisms through which journey quality affects loyalty. Our findings reveal that service quality mediates the direct relationship between SJQ and customer loyalty. In other words, improved service quality represents a central mechanism that explains why high-quality journeys can help secure more loyal customers. This result complements earlier studies that have attributed the link between journey quality and loyalty primarily to improved brand attitudes ( Kuehnl et al. , 2019 ). However, this mediation is merely partial, thus indicating that SJQ contributes to customer loyalty above and beyond service quality when controlling for the mediation link. This finding is of great importance because it indicates that the relationship between SJQ and customer loyalty cannot be explained by improved service quality perceptions alone, but there may be other potential mediators as well, such as customer experience (see Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ). This proposition is discussed further in the implications for future research section.

In sum, this research provides new measures for service research, as well as for managers who wish to set goals, understand and develop their performance in service journeys. This study is among the first to develop the concept of service journeys to capture the nature of the process customers go through to access and use offerings in service-intensive contexts, in order to complement the customer journey concept that is predominantly anchored in the consumer decision-making process. In doing so, this study helps organize the pieces of the customer experience and journey puzzle by clarifying and nuancing the nomological network of some of these key concepts of contemporary service research.

6.2 Managerial implications

Contemporary service businesses rely increasingly on numerous interconnected online and personal service delivery channels, as well as diverse partners, in providing a service. This means that firms need to consider and manage various expectational, operational and functional interdependencies between various service delivery touchpoints ( Dhebar, 2013 ). While service design tools, such as blueprinting, have been developed to help in designing functional service journeys, very few tools have been developed for assessing the quality of service journeys from the customer's viewpoint. This is problematic because measuring perceived service quality at individual touchpoints says little about the quality of the service process as a whole, and simple aggregate measures, such as the Net Promoter Score, do not reveal the cause of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This study develops constructs to assess customer-perceived SJQ and provides empirical evidence for the relevance of high-quality service journeys, demonstrating that consumers' SJQ perceptions drive both service quality and customer loyalty. These findings indicate that service providers should invest in the development and monitoring of SJQ instead of just focusing on individual service encounters or overall satisfaction.

Specifically, our results highlight that service journey quality from the customer's perspective is determined by the three key dimensions of journey seamlessness, coherence and personalization. These SJQ dimensions provide managers concrete goals in designing their service journeys. First, journey seamlessness requires that the various provider and partner-controlled touchpoints along the service process are integrated and aligned so that the customer can smoothly transition between the touchpoints, whether outsourced or not. Second, journey coherence can be achieved by thematically integrating all touchpoints and the related “experience cues” to provide a consistent impression of the firm or the brand throughout all service encounters. Third, journey personalization stresses the tailoring of the combination of service process touchpoints to fit the customer's service delivery preferences and the customer's situation. Firms can use the SJQ measures developed in this study to analyze, monitor and develop the quality of their service journeys, as well as to set collaboration and quality goals for partners (see Appendix ).

The three SJQ dimensions can also be used to analyze the functionality of customer relationship models for different customer segments that typically follow distinct journeys (e.g. when customer segments are served through different service channels). Measuring SJQ perceived by different customer segments helps the internal benchmarking of journeys, in order to reveal potential pain points in different journeys and improve performance, particularly for mass segments wherein the customers navigate their journeys independently. We also urge companies to assess whether or not SJQ might be a source of differentiation and thereby a competitive advantage in their industry and to develop their journeys accordingly.

6.3 Limitations and implications for future research

This study naturally has some limitations. Noteworthy is that the SJQ construct does not capture social and customer-owned touchpoints that are outside a firm's influence ( Lemon and Verhoef, 2016 ; Becker et al. , 2020 ), but instead focuses on provider- and partner-owned touchpoints, i.e. the parts of the journey that firms can seek to manage ( Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ). Furthermore, as the SJQ construct focuses on the quality of the service process, it does not cover what the customer receives as the outcome of the service. Therefore, when the aim is to study both technical and functional quality ( Grönroos, 1984 ), the SJQ construct should be used together with complementary measures.

While the conceptualization builds upon a broad empirical basis that includes a qualitative study and two quantitative studies, further research related to the SJQ construct's nomological network is needed. This study has identified initial evidence that service journey quality predicts customer loyalty, but those findings were based on a single-respondent study design with subjective performance measures. Future research should confirm the findings using stronger research designs with objective performance measures and multiple-respondent study designs. Also, since the quantitative study findings are based on data exclusively from the financial sector, future research should investigate the relative importance of the construct dimensions and test the results' generalizability in other empirical contexts. We assume that the developed measure is applicable across service-intensive industries, but this assumption warrants further research. Researchers could study not only brand-focused contexts, such as tourism and hospitality but also contexts such as healthcare, public services, and B2B settings, wherein more functional interdependencies between touchpoints should be a key. Future studies could also examine the SJQ construct's application to experience-centric and hedonic versus mundane services, as well as to different types of journeys.

We call for a systematic research effort that focuses on SJQ and its antecedents, outcomes, mediators and moderators. Various areas of service research – including service management, service design and customer experience management – should more closely study which marketing activities drive seamless, coherent and personalized service journeys. On the outcome side, future research should study SJQ's effects on objective performance and examine whether or not improved customer experience also mediates the performance link. The role of experiential outcomes is emphasized by the study finding that the SJQ-loyalty link is not fully mediated by service quality improvements. Since customer experience refers to customers' nondeliberate, spontaneous responses and reactions to offering-related stimuli along the customer journey ( Becker and Jaakkola, 2020 ), high-quality service journeys should logically be connected to positive customer experiences. Due to the complexity of the customer experience phenomenon, its measurement is challenging. Advances in this area can offer the means to study the suggested experience link in more detail (e.g. the EXQ measure by Kuppelwieser and Klaus, 2021 ), in order to clarify whether and how service journey quality relates to customer experiences. Finally, we call for research attention on the key moderators – that is, those conditions that either strengthen or weaken SJQ's antecedent and outcome sides in different contexts.

service journey means

Confirmatory factor analysis of the three-factor SJQ scale

service journey means

Research model

Connection of the Service Journey Quality concept to extant journey literature

Focus groups

Scale properties and correlations – scale validation sample 1

Respondent characteristics

Scale details for the full research model

Scale details

Note(s) : a Seven-point Likert-scale, anchored by 1- “strongly disagree” and 7- “strongly agree”

b Seven-point rating scale concerning likelihood, anchored by 1- “very unlikely”, 7- “very likely”

c Deleted items

* p  < 0.01

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Corresponding author

About the authors.

Elina Jaakkola is Professor of Marketing at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests focus on value creation, customer/actor engagement, customer experience, service innovation, and knowledge intensive business services and solutions. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and book chapters, for example Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Service Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Business Research, and AMS Review.

Harri Terho is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Marketing at Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland. His research interests focus on value creation in business markets, selling and sales management, the role of technology in marketing and sales, as well as B2B customer experiences and journeys. His research has been published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, and Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing among others.

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

User Team

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

  • E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

  • E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

  • E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

  • E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

  • E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

Content search

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

lightning bolt

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

  • Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
  • Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
  • Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
  • Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

  • Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
  • Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
  • Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
  • Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

Creating the user's backstory is an important part of user journey mapping.

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The complete guide to customer journey management.

14 min read Effective customer journey management requires a keen understanding of how your customers move from touchpoint to touchpoint. Here’s how to understand and optimize every customer’s journey – and how to make proactive changes that boost the entire customer experience.

The interactions your customers have with you are never one-off moments, and they don’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, they form part of an overarching customer journey, which incorporates every single stage of each customer’s road to purchase – and beyond.

Understanding those customer journeys, and building experiences with every step in mind, is how you’ll create interactions that people love, remember, and recommend.

Delivering on those next-level customer journeys requires a deep understanding of how people discover your brand and buy your products, and that means working on a few core practices:

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey orchestration, customer journey optimization, customer journey analytics.

In this article, we’ll be going through the what, why, and how of customer journey management – as well as what mastering it will mean for your customers.

Deliver next-level customer journeys with Customer Journey Optimizer

What is customer journey management?

Customer journey management is the art of being able to understand, map, design, and improve the interactions and processes that make up the entire customer experience.

It’s a discipline stemming from the idea that no matter how a customer interacts with your brand, that interaction is one part of a larger journey and not just an individual event.

It doesn’t matter if a customer is actively researching your products, passively encountering a social media post, browsing in a physical store, or contacting customer support – whatever the interaction, it’s happening as part of an overall journey.

Managing that journey really just means making those isolated moments better, but also ensuring that they’re interconnected and aligned.

When exploring and visualizing customer journey data, we are assessing:

  • Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
  • Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
  • The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
  • The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

The purpose of customer journey management is ultimately to finetune the customer experience until it’s as seamless as possible, that the path towards purchase is frictionless, and that each touchpoint works as part of a broader CX strategy.

Successfully managing customer journeys, then, requires that you can master a mixture of customer data, behavioral science, customer feedback, industry insight, and a dash of business instinct.

Customer journey management: A mindset shift

Building customer journey management processes into your business requires a mindset shift. It’s not something that you can do once and forget about, and nor is it something that’s a quick change. That’s because customer journey management is a multi-faceted task that asks a little bit of every department.

Customer journey flow chart for management

Instead of siloed teams looking after their individual touchpoints or KPIs, true customer journey management needs to have an omnichannel focus. You’ll need to work across departments to deliver more a seamless customer experience no matter how your customers choose to interact with you.

Customer journey management is about pooling your resources to answer the following questions:

  • What journeys are your different customer segments taking?
  • Are customers able to get the answers and solutions they need?
  • Can you track and pinpoint where experience gaps lie?
  • How can you work to proactively fix those pain points?
  • Are you able to monitor the results of those changes?

Customer expectations are higher than ever, and people are much more careful with where they spend their hard-earned money. So it’s vital to be able to offer them journeys that offer zero resistance.

In that sense, customer journey management needs full company buy-in. It’s top-down, as well as bottom-up – where customer journey data informs both individual channels as well as your overarching business strategy.

The benefits of customer journey management

There are two core benefits to customer journey management: stronger business outcomes, and a better customer experience. But you needn’t just take our word for it; there’s strong evidence for both.

PwC , for example, cites that 65% of consumers are likely to become long-term customers if the entire customer journey offers a positive experience, while some 86% will leave a brand after two poor interactions, according to Emplifi. In fact, that same research says that 49% of consumers have done just that, with poor customer experience being the key driver of churn.

From a business outcomes perspective, there are plenty of reasons to ensure that your customer journeys are as polished as possible. Customer journey management means being able to offer customers a more personalized experience, for example, which is a great way to grow an audience of loyal customers.

Some 60% of consumers will become repeat buyers if the experience on offer is a personalized one, and 66% are willing to share personal data if it helps them get that. That shows an appetite for journeys that work better on an individual level. In our own 2022 research , we found that:

  • 63% of consumers said companies need to get better at listening to their feedback
  • 62% of consumers said that businesses need to care more about them
  • 60% of consumers would buy more if businesses treated them better

And then there’s the fact that orchestrating and fine-tuning the customer journey will result in a stronger omnichannel experience – which also boosts sales. Omnisend research found that omnichannel campaigns and experiences can drive as much as 494% more orders than single-channel ones.

service journey means

If you remember nothing else, remember this: customer journey management is an incredibly worthwhile practice to build into your business for three main reasons:

1. You become more customer-focused Customer journey management is about putting your customers at the forefront of your business practices and processes. 2. You can offer more personalized experiences You’ll know more about what makes your customers tick, which will let you tailor your offering to them in a more bespoke way. 3. You’ll break down siloes Customer journey management requires total transparency and teams that talk regularly to one another.

The building blocks of customer journey management

Customer journey management venn diagram

Let’s take a look at each part of the customer journey management framework:

A customer journey map is a theoretical version of the steps a customer persona or segment will take to achieve what they’re trying to do. That might be making their first purchase, making a repeat purchase, or seeking customer support.

The idea, then, is to create multiple customer journey maps for all of these different experiences and list out the steps and touchpoints along the way. This’ll give you an idea of the various processes that take place in any given journey.

You’ll normally create these maps as a team, as part of a journey mapping workshop. There are two stages here: defining your audience personas and outlining their various journeys.

Fo audience personas, you’re really asking who your customers are. What’s their age and location? What do they do for a living? What’s their family status? And what are their goals in relation to your product?

Their journeys can be understood by answering a series of behavioral questions. Who’s involved in the journey? What are the processes and stages? What does the customer think during these stages? What’s the greatest moment of emotional load? What are your customer needs at this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly?

For the most part, this is an experience-driven process, rather than a data-driven one – in that your team should be able to create a customer journey map for a range of customer journeys based on instinct and understanding. These assumptions can then be tested by asking customers as part of your workshopping process.

Need more info? We’ve got a full guide to customer journey mapping here.

Customer journey orchestration and optimization

Once you know what your customer journeys look like, you can think about how to design ones that work best. If your customer journey mapping is a top-level exercise, then customer journey orchestration and optimization are more practical. These use customer data and a cross-team approach to ensure that customers can move from touchpoint to touchpoint smoothly.

Customer journey orchestration often relies on a dedicated team made up of marketing, product, and service personnel, who can work together to create more compelling journeys.

Imagine, for example, that you a customer has recently installed your SaaS tool, but now they’re experiencing an issue. Your customer service team will naturally spring into action here, but great customer journey orchestration would also mean that other teams know what’s happening.

service journey means

Your marketing team, for instance, would know not to bombard that customer with collateral about how great the product is until their issue has been fixed. The product team, meanwhile, would know about the issue the customer is facing and would be proactively working to ensure that the issue doesn’t arise for anyone else.

In other words, orchestration is about designing processes that can be standardized as a ‘best practice’ framework for each and every customer journey.

If orchestration is about designing flows that offer the best possible experience, then optimization is about looking at the ones currently in place, identifying pain points, and working to fix them.

Optimizing customer journeys is a cyclical process, rather than a ‘one and done’ job. Here, you’ll use customer data points, insight from analytics, social listening tools, regular customer feedback, and survey responses to build a picture of both customer behavior and high-priority pain points.

Armed with all that knowledge, you’ll be able to take active steps to improve the customer experience wherever you can.

Imagine, for example, that you know that a lot of your target audience arrives on your website via Instagram ads, but that a high percentage of them bounce without making a purchase. One way to optimize that journey could be to build a series of landing pages that are unique to each segment – with each targeted social ad sending people to a more personalized product offering.

Whatever the case, it’s essential to monitor the success of these initiatives and learn if they’ve worked, or if things still need changing. Optimization is about being holistic and agile, and not ignoring the data and insight available to you.

This brings us to the last part of the journey management process…

While instinct and some level of customer insight will help you map out a range of customer journeys, the ability to orchestrate and optimize things relies on access to customer data.

Customer experience management software is the answer here. The right customer journey management tools can provide masses of insight into the customer experience, help you track KPIs, and offer areas for improvement.

service journey means

This information can come from a variety of sources. Customer behavior tracking can be baked right into digital products and work across platforms to help you better understand their journeys, while AI and natural language processing can listen to and understand customer effort, intent, and sentiment.

When it comes to customer journey management, software like this can help you:

  • Audit journeys you think are happening
  • Find ones you didn’t realize were happening
  • Hear customer feedback from every touchpoint
  • Understand where things need to change
  • Measure the success of those change tactics

Information like this, both real-time and historical, can not only help you monitor the success of your customer journey management efforts but also provide a list of next steps to try, in order to attain better business outcomes.

Because of that, you can think of journey analytics as the engine behind an effective customer journey management approach.

Customer behavior: Bringing it all together

The three-part customer journey management framework is really a series of overlapping processes. Mapping informs orchestration and orchestration informs optimization, but the right analytics and data can inform all three.

So, in order to drive your desired business outcomes, you need to adopt the right tools. Customer experience management platforms, like the one offered by Qualtrics, can help you figure out what your customers are doing, saying, and thinking – and why.

service journey means

That information, alongside a much deeper understanding of who your customers actually are, can help you build personalized customer experiences that allow people to effortlessly float from touchpoint to touchpoint in a way that feels tailored to them.

The Qualtrics CustomerXM™ Platform has been designed to turn customers into fans. It allows you to hear every customer’s voice, fix every broken experience, and increase customer loyalty and spend. Click here to learn more.

Related resources

Customer Journey

Customer Journey Stages 12 min read

Buyer's journey 16 min read, customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, digital customer journey 13 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, request demo.

Ready to learn more about Qualtrics?

How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map [Examples + Template]

Aaron Agius

Published: August 21, 2023

Free Customer Journey Template

service journey means

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

Thank you for downloading the offer.

Did you know nearly 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2021? Why would a customer spend hours looking through a store and adding products to their cart just to close the tab right at the last second?

person creating a customer journey map

Well, here's the thing — understanding your customers' minds can be extremely challenging.

And even when you think you've considered every possible factor, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Download Now

That said, while it isn't possible to predict the customer journey with 100% accuracy, customer and user experience (UX) journey mapping will allow you to understand as much as possible.

This post will explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create a journey map, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

Customer journey stages.

  • What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

What's included in a customer journey map, steps for creating a customer journey map.

  • Types of Customer Journey Maps
  • Customer Journey Map Best Practices

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

service journey means

  • Buyer's Journey Template
  • Future State Template
  • Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer's journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

You might be confused about the differences between the customer journey and the buyer's journey. The buyer's journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from the customer's awareness of an existing pain point to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don't wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand's place within the buyer's journey: that is, the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer's journey. When you create a customer journey map, which we'll discuss further below, you're taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey, instead of leaving them up to chance.

For example, the typical HubSpot customer's journey is divided into 3 stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

At each of these stages, HubSpot has a specific set of touchpoints to meet customers where they are, such as publishing blog posts to help customers learn about their pain points, then nurturing them slowly toward a paid subscription. Within later stages, there are several "moments" such as comparing tools, sales negotiations, technical setup, and so on.

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

At this point, you may be wondering: What are the stages of the customer journey? Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers have realized that they have a problem and a pain point to solve for. At this point, a customer may not yet know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. The aim is to help customers navigate their new pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Educational content may include:

  • How-to articles and guides
  • General whitepapers
  • General ebooks
  • Free courses

Educational content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

  • Social media
  • Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and their offerings.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded solution marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

  • Product listicles
  • Product comparison guides and charts
  • Product-focused white papers
  • Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

  • Your website
  • Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, brands deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying their products as easy and simple as possible. No more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

  • Free consultations
  • Product sign-up pages
  • Pricing pages
  • Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

  • Providing a dedicated customer success manager
  • Making your customer service team easily accessible
  • Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to their family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience , from your website content to your sales reps, from your social media team to your product's UX. Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they will likely recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

  • Having an easy-to-navigate website
  • Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
  • Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
  • Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

  • Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, it's advisable to carry out a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software such as Service Hub .

To visualize the specific stages of your customers' journey, it's essential to create a customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how the customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward on the surface — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it is a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

Within this process, the customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this data gathering is not simply for the sake of the data itself but to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys only sometimes happen linearly. Instead, buyers often take a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages in the customer journey.

  • The Buying Process
  • User Actions
  • User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Customer journey map template service

Whether the goal is big or small, it's important to remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that is relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map can help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

3. User Actions

customer journey mapping: user actions

This element of the customer journey map details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

customer journey mapping: user research

Similar to the section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they are researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

customer journey mapping: solutions

As the final element in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team will brainstorm potential ways to improve your buying process so that customers encounter fewer pain points as they journey.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, a display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

  • Use customer journey map templates.
  • Set clear objectives for the map.
  • Profile your personas and define their goals.
  • Highlight your target customer personas.
  • List out all touchpoints.
  • Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.
  • Take the customer journey yourself.
  • Make the necessary changes.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot's free customer journey map templates .

The offer includes templates that can help you map out your buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

Utilizing these templates can help your sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. With this deeper understanding, you can come up with improvements to your product and provide a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into filling out your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating a map in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about? What experience is it based upon?

Based on this, you should create a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer.

Having a clear persona helps remind you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research.

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

  • How did you hear about our company?
  • What first attracted you to our website?
  • What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
  • How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
  • Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
  • Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
  • Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
  • Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you've learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, you'll need to narrow your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so if you group too many personas into one journey, your map won't accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don't worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there's no overlap.

This is essential in creating a UX journey map, as it gives you insight into your customers' actions.

If they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they are quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early?

If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints can help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customer might come across you online. These might include:

  • Social channels
  • Email marketing
  • Third-party review sites or mentions

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.

Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

Consider the following touchpoints as you create your UX journey map.

Customer Actions

List your customers' actions throughout their interaction with your brand. This might be a Google search for keywords or clicking on an email.

You may wind up with a long list of actions, and that's fine. You'll get a chance to rationalize your information later.

It's important to recognize when customers are expected to take too many actions to achieve their goals. Reducing the number of steps a customer needs to take can feel risky but pays off in higher conversion rates.

Customer Emotions & Motivations

All marketing is a result of cause and effect. Likewise, every action your customers take is motivated by emotion. And your customers' emotions will change depending on which part of their journey they're at.

A pain point or a problem is usually the emotional driver of your customer's actions. Knowing this will help you provide the right content at the right time to smooth the customer's emotional journey through your brand.

Customer Obstacles & Pain Points

Get to know what roadblocks stop your customer from taking their desired action.

One common obstacle is cost. For example, one of your customers could love your product but abandon their cart upon discovering unexpectedly high shipping rates.

Highlighting these potential obstacles in your customer journey can help you mitigate them. For example, you could provide an FAQ page that answers common questions about shipping costs.

6. Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.

Your customer journey map is going to touch on nearly every part of your business. This will highlight all the resources that go into creating the customer experience.

So taking inventory of your resources and the ones you'll need to improve the customer's journey is essential.

For example, maybe your map highlights that your team doesn't have the tools to follow up with customers properly. Using your map, you can advise management to invest in customer service tools to help your team manage customer demand.

And by including these new tools in your map, you can accurately predict how they'll impact your business and drive outsized value. This makes it much easier to convince gatekeepers and decision-makers to invest in your proposals.

7. Take the customer journey yourself.

Just because you've designed your map doesn't mean your work is done. This is the most critical part of the process: analyzing the results.

How many people click on your website but then close out before making a purchase? How can you better support customers? These are some of the questions you should be able to answer with your finished map.

Analyzing the results can show you where customer needs aren't being met.

By approaching this, you can ensure that you're providing a valuable experience and making it clear that people can find solutions to their problems with your company's help.

The whole exercise of mapping the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it out yourself.

For each of your personas, follow their journey through their social media activity, reading their emails, and searching online.

8. Make the necessary changes.

Your data analysis should give you a sense of what you want your website to be.

You can then make changes to your website to achieve these goals. Perhaps this is adding more specific call-to-action links, or it's writing longer descriptions under each product to clarify its purpose.

No matter how big or small the changes are, they will be effective as they directly correlate with what customers listed as their pain points.

Rather than blindly making changes in the hopes that they will improve customer experiences , you can feel confident that they will.

And, with the help of your visualized customer journey map, you can ensure those needs and pain points are always addressed.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work in progress.

Reviewing it monthly or quarterly will help you identify gaps and opportunities for further streamlining your customer journey. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks.

Keep all stakeholders involved in this process, which is why you should consider visualizing your maps in a collaborative tool such as Google Sheets.

Additionally, consider having regular meetings to analyze how new products or offerings have changed the customer journey.

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Template

free editable customer journey map template

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. By utilizing it, you can outline your customer's experience and how your product can improve their lives.

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Depending on the specific purpose of the map, you can choose the proper one.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely-used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They are best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Customer Journey Map Example: Current State Journey Map

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Customer Journey Map Example: Day in the Life

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company.

Based on their current experience, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in.

These maps are best used for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Customer Journey Map Example: Future State Journey Map Example

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

Customer Journey Map Example: Service Blueprint journey map

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

  • Set a goal for the journey map.
  • Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
  • Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
  • Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
  • Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
  • Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what you need the UX journey map to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

You might be telling yourself, "This doesn't seem necessary for my company or me. We understand the needs and pain points of our customers." This may be true at surface level.

However, breaking down the customer journey phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps toward maximizing customer success.

After all, everything you do should be about solving customer problems and helping them achieve long-term success with your product or service. See other benefits below.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than trying to discover your customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers about your company and what's turning them away.

You can create content that will attract them to your company and keep them there.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It shows you moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, suppose it's around the holidays, and you anticipate a customer service surge .

You can send a message to your customers letting them know about your team's adjusted holiday hours.

You can also tell them about additional support options if your team is unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needs immediate attention.

Customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be hard to coordinate all the departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are.

They often have sales and marketing goals based on things other than what real customers want.

A clear customer journey map can be shared with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support.

And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service.

Based on this rationale, you can't deny the importance of a customer journey map. Thus, we've created the following steps for crafting the best map to help your company and customers prosper.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

The goal of a company is to get its customers from point A to point B.

While it's up to the business or organization to decide what that goal is, it typically involves purchasing a product or service. Potential customers and clients need to be led along this journey.

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

  • Current State Template
  • Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
  • A Day in the Customer's Life Template
  • Customer Churn Mapping Template
  • Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates can help organizations gain new insights on their customers and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

free editable customer journey map template

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

B2B customer journey map example

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

ecommerce customer journey map example

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

future BTC customer journey map

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

customer journey map example for retail

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

The mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in the Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

current state customer journey map template

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

day-in-the-life

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

Customer journey map template future state

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, in the fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

Customer journey map template service

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Customer journey map template buyer

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage in their buying journey.

Many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing your journey for the customer or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success in your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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What is Customer Journey Mapping? Simply explained.

Finally demystify this things which every customer experience professional is talking about these days.

Published in:  Journey Mapping / Last update: August 2020

In order to fully understand what customer journey mapping is, we need to explore its relationship to the customer journey and the customer journey map. We'll get to that in a minute. 

The relationship between Customer Journey Mapping, the Customer Journey and the Customer Journey Map

First, let's start with a practical definition of customer journey mapping. To put it simply:

Customer Journey Mapping is the ongoing activity of making the steps a customer goes through in order to achieve a specific goal explicit, in a visualization that looks like a map, including the needs and emotions of the customer throughout the entire process.

A very important part of the journey mapping process is gathering the actual data that goes into the map through qualitative user research. How else would you know what to visualize?

So, don't be misled into thinking that journey mapping is just about the visual aspect of the map. Journey mapping is just as much about analyzing data and structuring it in a meaningful way.

Customer Journey Mapping is an ongoing activity

These days, professional journey mapping tools have made it possible to take the journey mapping process online and collaborate on a journey map even when you're not physically in the same space.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is often also referred to as simply a journey map. The previous section already gave it away in large part, but let's zoom in a bit closer on what a journey map is.

A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the steps, activities and situations a customer goes through in order to achieve a specific goal, including the needs and emotions of the customer. It keeps evolving and is never done.

Customer journey maps literally come in all shapes and sizes. This can be quite confusing if you're new to the practice.

But it's not that strange when you think about it. Take geographic maps as an example. Sometimes you want a very detailed map that helps you navigate on street level, but while planning your next summer holiday, a map with a worldview might be what you need.

The same goes for customer journey maps. High-level journey maps act as a strategic compass, while detailed maps help you plan actions and allocate resources on a day-to-day level.

The Customer Journey Map is a visual representation

More than Metrics (company behind  Smaply ) wrote a very interesting article that digs deeper into  the similarities between journey maps and geographic maps .

Why a journey map and not a journey flow or journey chart? What is so special about maps? 

We have to look at the purpose of a map.

Maps help you understand where you are today and navigate to where you want to be tomorrow.

You create a journey map because there's a situation that you want to improve. You want to create a better future. A map helps you make better and more informed choices about the steps you need to take toward that desired future state.

Maps help you to navigate

When you're in the field of creating a better customer or employee experience, a major part of your work revolves around navigating complexity. That's why you see so many different types of maps used in this field.

What is a customer journey?

Now we get to what is maybe the most important question: What is a customer journey?

When you have a clear answer to this question, figuring out what you need to visualize in your journey map becomes much easier.

The Customer Journey is a story with a beginning, middle and end, which describes how a customer (the lead character) tries to achieve a desired goal (the destination).

When your lead character isn't a customer but rather an employee, user or patient, then the customer journey becomes an employee journey, user journey or patient journey.

The Customer Journey is an evolving story

Now, here's the thing that makes customer journeys so powerful... 

This way of reasoning helps you see how your services fit into the bigger story—how they can help the lead character achieve their desired goal.

This is essentially what "outside-in thinking” or "customer-centricity" is all about.

The Relationship Between Customer Journey, Customer Journey Map, and Customer Journey Mapping

It's time to bring together the 3 elements we've discussed and see how they relate to each other.

We can summarize it this way:

  • The Customer Journey is the evolving story .
  • Customer Journey Mapping is the ongoing activity of capturing, documenting and envisioning the story.
  • The Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the story.

Looking for more?

I hope that you found this article helpful and that it gave you some clarity.

There's of course much more to be learned about journey maps and journey mapping.

The relationship between Customer Journey Mapping, the Customer Journey and the Customer Journey Map

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

#How the Hotjar team mapped out the ‘customer using a heatmap’ journey using sticky notes

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

#A customer journey map example from Airbnb, starting when a user needs to book accommodation and ending after their stay in an Airbnb property

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

#A visual recap of your 2 and 1/2 days working on a customer journey map

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

#Website analytics from tools like Google Analytics are foundational to mapping customer journeys

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

#Get real-time input from your website users with Hotjar Surveys

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

#Use this empathy map canvas template to kick-start your customer journey mapping workshop

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

#An example of a customer journey map template with different stages and themes

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

service journey means

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

service journey means

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

service journey means

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

<#Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

Service blueprint vs. journey map

CJM in Miro

Table of Contents

Understanding journey maps.

A journey map is a visual representation of a customer's experience with a product or service over time. Creating a customer journey map is pivotal in business because it enables a comprehensive understanding of the customer's perspective, encompassing interactions, emotions, and pain points. A journey map consists of stages, touchpoints, and channels, and may be used in real-world scenarios like understanding the user experience on an e-commerce platform.

Understanding Service Blueprints

A service blueprint, on the other hand, is a tool used to visualize the service delivery process from the customer's and service provider's perspectives. It is essential in a business context as it aids in identifying potential problem areas in service delivery. Components of a service blueprint include customer actions, frontstage and backstage interactions, and support processes.

For example, a restaurant may use a service blueprint to streamline its order and delivery process. You can refer to the service blueprint template as an illustrative example that demonstrates how the service delivery process can be effectively visualized.

Service blueprint vs. journey maps and their importance

Journey maps and service blueprints are important tools for any profession that requires a deep understanding of customer experiences and the intricacies of service delivery.

They are especially valuable for those in roles related to customer experience management, product or service development, and process optimization. For instance, UX/UI Designers, Customer Experience Managers, Service Designers, and Product Managers frequently use these tools to understand and enhance user interactions with their products or services. Additionally, Business Analysts and Process Improvement Specialists use service blueprints to visualize and improve service delivery processes.

Service blueprints vs. journey maps: similarities

While journey maps and service blueprints each have their unique attributes, they share key similarities that reinforce their value in enhancing customer experience and service delivery.

Customer-centricity: Both tools center around optimizing the customer's experience with a product or service.

Visual representation: They use graphical elements to simplify complex interactions and processes.

Holistic approach: Each offers a comprehensive view of the customer journey or service process.

Basis for improvement: They highlight gaps and inefficiencies to guide service improvement initiatives.

Cross-functional collaboration: Both tools promote teamwork across departments within an organization.

Customer journey maps vs. service blueprint: differences

In understanding the nuances of a customer journey map vs. service blueprint, their key differences highlight their unique applications:

Perspective: A journey map zeroes in on the customer's perspective, while a service blueprint covers both the customer's viewpoint and backstage service delivery processes.

Focus: Journey maps trace the customer's experience over time, whereas service blueprints offer a comprehensive snapshot of the entire service process.

Service blueprints vs journey map: when to use them

Utilize a journey map when you need to understand the customer's emotional journey, needs, and pain points. On the contrary, when you want to optimize the whole service delivery process, considering both customer interactions and the behind-the-scenes activities, use a service blueprint.

Service blueprints vs journey map: benefits and limitations

Journey maps excel in providing insights into customers' emotions and experiences, while service blueprints provide a comprehensive view of the service process. However, journey maps might lack the details of the delivery process, and service blueprints might not capture the emotional aspect of the customer experience.

Questions to consider

When should my business use a journey map over a service blueprint? A business should use a journey map when the goal is to understand the customers' experiences, emotions, and interactions at each touchpoint.

Can journey maps and service blueprints be used together? Yes, journey maps and service blueprints can be used together to provide a comprehensive view of the customer experience and the service process.

What are some common mistakes to avoid when creating a journey map or a service blueprint? Common mistakes include not involving all stakeholders, not considering the customer's perspective, and overlooking important steps in the service process.

How often should my business update its journey map and service blueprint? The frequency of updates depends on changes in the business environment, customer behavior, or service process. However, regular reviews are recommended for continued relevancy.

Discover more

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

Benefits of customer journey mapping

The 7 steps of the customer journey

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

How to make a customer journey map?

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The Service Journey is an approach to living and serving well. To making a real difference people can see and feel. It encompasses four simple phases: Learn, Discover, Act, and Celebrate. We love these words because they transcend organizational formulas. They have no borders. They are the essence of Lions and Leos. If the past 100 years have taught us anything, it’s that as we serve, we grow. And we were never meant to stop.  Service is our journey. Let’s explore it together.

Insight is often more valuable than instinct: if we aren’t informed about what’s happening around us, our impact may fall short. So, we cultivate an awareness of local needs and how they connect to a larger global narrative. We seek new information and turn it into insight. Learning positions us to be effective.

Opportunity awaits anyone willing to learn. Knowledge sharing equips us to leverage our strengths, bridge gaps through partnerships and encourage innovation. This process of discovery unifies our focus and prepares us for action.

Our mission is service, and service is visible. Its effects are measurable. Equipped with insight and inspired by opportunity, we practically support our communities, our regions, and our world together. Through action we fulfill our mission. Our Project Planners are a great way to get started!

Serving humanity in over 200 countries, we take pride in the unique expressions of kindness found in each of our local clubs across the world. When we share our stories and report our impact, we unify our organization, inspire our communities, and capture the attention of a global audience. Celebration elevates the experience and impact of service.

Training opportunity

The Service Journey Learning Course is a highly engaging way for Lions and Leos to learn key phases of Lions service. You can find the course by using your Lion Account login credentials to access the Lions Learning Center (LLC) and searching for "Service Journey." By taking the course, you will:

  • Get to know the global causes and learn how to serve in new ways
  • Learn each component of the Service Journey Toolkit and how to use the tools in service projects 
  • Identify ways to inspire and promote club service 
  • Find out how to report and celebrate service successes

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How to Map the Service Desk User Journey for Better User Experiences

  • By Nancy Louisnord
  • Published on May 16, 2019
  • Category: Employee Experience , ITSM , People , Service Desk

Service Desk User Journey

The customer journey has received a significant level of coverage recently – here’s an  example – because it’s primary purpose is to improve customer experience and this is an overwhelmingly important initiative for many organizations. Providing a quality customer experience means devising a plan and sticking with it, but doing so requires a little customer journey mapping . Let’s call it service desk user journey mapping.

Why use customer journey mapping?

Customer journeys help you identify opportunities for improvement where measurements and statistics can’t find them. Even if you’ve got service level agreements (SLAs) or other measurements that monitor the quality of your service delivery, there’s no guarantee that you’ll always be able to identify your opportunities for growth and improvement. This is where customer journey mapping enters the picture.

When painting this picture, you must step into your customer’s place to understand what they’re facing. The most basic way to think of this is how they experience working with you. So, ask yourself if it’s easy to request technology or a required service from your IT service desk. Are you doing a great job of helping your users, or customers, to feel informed about their needs and your processes when they speak with members of your service team?

This also means considering their experiences after they receive the services you provide. So, when they receive a laptop, for example, is it working as it should, handling functions properly, and are they able to get to work on the machine from the moment your team hands it over. If there are any questions users have later on, is your team easy to reach?

Well, the best way to find out the answers to these questions is to answer them. Start customer journey mapping. Here are a few important steps.

Mapping the service desk user journeys

The best place to start any story is at the beginning. Here, at TOPdesk, we start with one. The one journey is usually the one that most users experience when they deal with your service desk. It might be a specific service request. Identify the instance in which most of your users engage with your service desk then map this experience from the user’s perspective.

When mapping the journey, engage all relevant parties. It can be pretty easy to forget that your team’s engagement with the user should be part of the experience.

The user experience is a joint responsibility. So, avoid creating a one-sided journey map. Involve all teams that work on a specific service. Using the example of a new laptop being provisioned for an employee, the user journey doesn’t just involve the service desk, but also the IT colleagues that prepare hardware and software for the machine. Thus, include them in the process for this part of the map.

During this journey, you’ll likely have an idea of what you think the journey is or should be. This means you have an understanding of what the experience should be – the ideal – and what’s realistically achievable for your service desk team. This ideal is going to change based on the experience you’re offering. In the laptop example, if you plan to deliver a fully-configured laptop that users can enjoy immediately without any follow up versus a machine that only offers the basic setup but gives customers the freedom to pick more apps and settings for themselves, the journey for these two experiences is going to be very different.

Create a persona to map

For the experience you want to map, you need a user to tie to it. The user has a job title – what is it? To identify this, consider taking a look at the most likely person to use your services? It’s a great place to start.

Next, determine how this person contacts you? By phone? Email? What do they expect from you, specifically? What level of service do they require? As you evolve and grow these efforts, you might wish to develop multiple personas, but start with one for the first user journey.

When creating the persona, interview those in your organization and talk to them about their experience, and collect details about it. Ask about their expectations and if these have been met. Different stages should be considered and discussed. Find out how easy it was to request a new laptop, how well your agents answered questions after the laptop was delivered, and everything that lies between. As the interviews wrap and the mapping begins, make sure to plot the real journey based on your conversations with users not just what you want from it.

All of the touchpoints with users can be pinpointed through user interviews and can include all communication during the service provision. Make sure you include the entire journey from start to finish. If you’re issuing a new laptop, your customer’s journey doesn’t end upon delivery. How do your customers feel about the aftercare you offer?

Maintain the service desk user journey map!

With the customer journey ready, maintain it, even build upon it. Create additional opportunities to map other journeys and other user experiences. As well, don’t forget to generate opportunities for users to provide feedback based on their own journeys – this shouldn’t be overlooked. Ultimately, this exercise leads you to creating a better service desk for your users, and an improved organization overall.

Would you like to read an article on the ITIL 4 service desk ?

The Why and What of Change Management (and Change Enablement)
ITIL 4’s ITAM Practice and the Software Support and Maintenance Review Process
5 Steps to a Better Problem Management Process
10 Top Tips for Better Release Management
4 Steps Towards a Great Service Catalog
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What is ITIL?
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Nancy Louisnord

Nancy Louisnord

Nancy Louisnord is the Global Chief Marketing Officer of Manta, responsible for the company’s global marketing programs and product marketing strategy. With more than 15 years of international leadership experience in the B2B IT SaaS industry, she is a sought-after presenter at conferences and one of HDI’s TOP 25 Thought Leaders and HDI’s featured contributors. Manta offers a comprehensive data lineage platform that gives companies complete visibility and control of their data pipeline. Manta has helped companies reduce incidents through proactive risk analysis, accelerate digital transformation, and enhance governance by building trust in data.

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What is the Customer Journey? Definition, Stages, Examples

service journey means

In the world of business, understanding the customer journey is crucial for success. By knowing what customers are thinking at each stage of their journey with your business, you can create more relevant and targeted marketing messages, develop better products and services, and provide a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience. 

But what even is a customer journey? In this article, we're delving deep into the meaning of the customer journey, exploring its various stages and providing real-world examples from different industries. 

What is the customer journey? Definition

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through to purchase and use a product or service. It begins with the customer becoming aware of your brand and ends with them becoming a loyal customer or advocate.

The customer journey is not always linear, and customers may move back and forth between stages as they learn more about your product or service and make their purchase decisions.

It also depends heavily on the industry you’re working in and the product or service you’re offering, since this can impact the way the customer interacts with your brand and your product. 

Why is the customer journey important?

Understanding the customer journey is important for businesses because it can help them improve the customer experience and increase sales.

By mapping and understanding the customer journey, businesses can engage with their customers at the right time and with the right message, making interactions more relevant and meaningful.

A happy customer is more likely to make a purchase and become a loyal customer, and having a solid grasp of the customer journey and improving the customer experience helps you improve brand loyalty and grow your customer base. 

The stages of the customer journey

stages of customer journey

The customer journey is not a one-size-fits-all model; it varies from industry to industry and from one customer segment to another. However, a standard journey can be divided into five main stages:

  • Awareness –  this is the stage where the customer becomes aware of your brand and its products or services. This can happen through various channels, such as advertising, social media, search engines, or word-of-mouth.
  • Consideration –  once the customer is aware of your brand, they will begin to consider whether or not it is the right choice for them. This is where they will compare your products or services to those of your competitors and read reviews from other customers.
  • Decision –  this is the stage where the customer makes the decision to purchase your product or service. This decision is often influenced by a variety of factors, such as price, features, benefits, and the customer's overall experience with your brand.
  • Post-purchase –  once the customer has purchased your product or service, they will use it and evaluate their experience. This is where they will form an opinion about your brand and decide whether or not to purchase from you again in the future.
  • Advocacy –  if the customer is happy with their experience, they may become a brand advocate and recommend your products or services to others. This can happen through word-of-mouth, social media, or online reviews.

Examples of customer journeys

Understanding the theoretical framework of the customer journey is essential, but seeing it in action through real-world examples can provide deeper insights into how different businesses and industries leverage this concept.

Example 1: E-Commerce - Amazon

  • Awareness:  A customer browsing the internet encounters Amazon ads while searching for various products online.
  • Consideration:  The customer clicks on Amazon's link, explores product listings, reads customer reviews, and adds products to their shopping cart.
  • Decision:  After comparing prices and reading reviews, the customer decides to purchase a laptop.
  • Post-Purchase:  The laptop arrives on time, and the customer enjoys a seamless experience. In case of any issues, Amazon's customer support provides quick solutions.
  • Advocacy:  Pleased with their experience, the customer leaves a positive review, recommends Amazon to friends, and may join the Amazon Prime program for additional benefits.

Example 2: Hospitality - Marriott Hotels

  • Awareness:  A traveller researching accommodations for an upcoming trip comes across Marriott's website or mobile app.
  • Consideration:  The traveller explores different Marriott properties, reviews amenities, checks prices, and reads guest reviews.
  • Decision:  Impressed with the reviews and amenities, the traveller books a room at a Marriott hotel.
  • Post-Purchase:  During their stay, the traveller enjoys a comfortable room, excellent service, and various amenities. The hotel staff is attentive to any requests or concerns.
  • Advocacy:  Delighted with the experience, the traveller leaves a glowing review on a travel website, shares photos on social media, and recommends Marriott to fellow travellers.

Example 3: Software - Microsoft Office 365

  • Awareness: A small business owner hears about Microsoft Office 365 from a colleague.
  • Consideration: The business owner researches Office 365 online, watches demo videos, and reads case studies about other businesses benefiting from the software.
  • Decision: Convinced of the benefits, the business owner subscribes to Office 365 for their company.
  • Post-Purchase: Microsoft offers excellent customer support and resources to help the business owner get the most out of Office 365. Any issues or questions are addressed promptly.
  • Advocacy: Satisfied with the software and Microsoft's support, the business owner recommends Office 365 to other business owners, becoming an advocate for the product.

These examples illustrate how the customer journey varies across industries and customer segments. In each case, the customer's path involves distinct stages, and the brand's ability to cater to the customer's needs at each stage significantly impacts the overall experience.

Creating a customer journey map

To effectively leverage the concept of the customer journey, businesses must map it out. Mapping the customer journey involves creating visual representations of the stages and touchpoints, which can help identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where personalization is most critical. Here's how to create a customer journey map:

  • Identify Customer Personas.  Start by understanding the different customer segments or personas your business serves. These are distinct groups of customers with different needs and behaviours.
  • List Key Touchpoints.  Identify all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. This includes your website, social media, email, phone calls, physical stores, and any other relevant channels.
  • Map the Stages.  Create a visual representation of the customer journey, beginning with awareness and ending with advocacy. For each stage, detail the customer's goals, emotions, and actions.
  • Highlight Pain Points.  As you map out the journey, identify pain points where customers may encounter challenges or frustrations. This can include slow website loading times, unclear product information, or poor customer service.
  • Optimise the Journey.  With a clear map in hand, prioritize areas for improvement. These improvements might involve website enhancements, better customer service training, or more personalized marketing campaigns.

Challenges of mapping the customer journey

While optimising the customer journey is crucial for businesses, there are common challenges that companies may encounter along the way. You need to be aware of these challenges and develop strategies to overcome them:

  • Lack of Data.  Insufficient customer data can hinder personalization efforts. To address this, businesses should invest in data collection and analysis.
  • Inconsistent Customer Experience.  Inconsistent experiences across different touchpoints can be frustrating for customers. Maintaining brand consistency is vital.
  • Overwhelming Options.  Too many options during the consideration stage can overwhelm customers. Businesses should guide customers with relevant information and recommendations.
  • Inadequate Post-Purchase Support.  Neglecting the post-purchase stage can lead to customer churn. Offering excellent post-purchase support is essential.
  • Ignoring Negative Feedback . Negative feedback is an opportunity for improvement. Ignoring it can damage a brand's reputation.
  • Failure to Adapt.  Customer preferences and behaviour change over time. Businesses must adapt and update their customer journey strategies accordingly.

Final thoughts

The customer journey is not just a concept; it's a strategic framework for building lasting relationships with customers. By defining the stages, mapping the journey, and leveraging technology, businesses can create exceptional experiences that lead to customer 

Remember that the customer journey is not static; it evolves as customer preferences change and technology advances. By defining the stages, mapping the journey, and leveraging technology, businesses can create exceptional experiences that lead to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

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Service Journey Strategies logo and link to homepage

  • What’s a Service Journey
  • The Structural Conflict
  • Real-World Solutions

Transform Customer, Employee and Business Outcomes

Journey focus:   Shift from a silo to a journey focus to better align customer experience (CX) activities, technology, data, people and process to improve the results of your customers' service journeys.

Individual centric:   Shift communication capabilities from segments to the individual to improve personalization, relevance and conversions.

We will help your organization improve customer, employee and business outcomes by becoming journey focused and individual centric.

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Service Journeys Impact Critical KPIs

What's a service journey, the structural conflict that is a barrier to maximizing cx success.

Your vertical siloed structure conflicts with customer service journeys that traverse horizontally across siloed responsibilities.

We are dedicated to helping overcome the conflict to produce great CX and business results. Find out how.

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Your CX Problems & Opportunities

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Remove Friction from Channels, Experiences or Journeys

The vertical siloed view, dataflow and other factors create friction within service journeys.

Friction results in a non-optimal experience such as undesired channel shift, or churn out of the service journey.

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Align Critical CX Activities, IT and Dataflow

The vertical silo focus is a barrier to aligning five critical CX activities and related technology and dataflow.

As a result, there is a challenge to generating timely and actionable CX intel. This inhibits the ability to deliver personalized real-time touchpoints via channel of choice.

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Address the Structural Conflict

There are always incremental CX improvements that can be made.

Until the foundational conflict between the siloed vertical focus and horizontal service journeys is resolved, customer-centricity and a smooth end-to-end customer journey will be elusive.

Our Solutions, Your Results

Opportunity: remove friction from channels, experiences or journeys.

Our Solution: Service journey blueprinting sprint #1 is used to identify friction and develop and prioritize solutions. Sprint #2 tests solutions in order to design and help implement relevant solutions at scale.

Your Results: Reducing friction by addressing backstage processes makes the organization more efficient. This reduces costs and improves employee experiences while improving customer experiences and business results.

Opportunity: Align Critical CX Activities, IT and Dataflow

Our Solution: Conduct a current state to best practices gap analysis of five critical CX activities and their IT and dataflow in order to design and help implement a roadmap to close the gap.

Your Results: The gap analysis and roadmap will highlight how to generate actionable service journey intel in real-time in order to develop and deliver:

  • The right touchpoint
  • At the right time
  • To the right person
  • With the right message
  • Via the right channel
  • Creating the right experience and results for that service journey

Opportunity: Address the Structural Conflict

Our Solution: Integrated Service Journey Model to identify the service journeys and layer service journey roles, responsibilities, measurements and accountability over your current departmental structure

Your Results: Enterprise alignment of CX strategy, people, processes, IT and dataflow to service journeys. This transformation is foundational to achieving customer-centricity and the related defendable competitive advantage.

Why Service Journey Strategies

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Unlike other consulting firms we apply an “ agile, results-first ” approach.

  • We learn from results-first improvements quickly executed in “sprints”
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Our experts apply deep expertise to your opportunities.

Design and implementation support are provided by consultants with an average of 17 years of CX experience.

Our experts are located and work around the world.

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Our agile, results-first approach enables us to quickly align strategy, people, process, technology and data.

Achieve real and quantifiable CX, service journey and organizational transformation.

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We helped one of the world’s most recognizable consumer electronics brands rethink and improve customer experience in their outsourced contact centers.

FINDING ANSWERS The client’s attempts at customer journey mapping yielded inconsistent results and lacked actionable recommendations. We provided a more practical, outside-in approach.

OUTCOMES Service Blueprints helped the client visualize points along the service journey that caused friction and frustrated customers. We also identified a set of practical recommendations to help the client improve customer experience.

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Project lead, project manager, transform your end-to-end customer journey, resources made for you.

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Case Study – How Addressing Silo/Journey Friction Improved KPIs

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Four Stages To Implementing a CX Transformation: From Mapping To Dataflow to Your Journey Model

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The Six Rethinks

Happening soon, copc® service journey thinking (sjt) live virtual training, have a question.

  • Quality management systems: An introduction

How do successful businesses thrive in our ever-more competitive world? Some are driven by a charismatic leader; others rely on the power of the collective. But there is one ingredient which, from corner store to corporate powerhouse, is essential for healthy long-term success. Quality.  

That is why effective quality management is an imperative for any successful business today. In our age of innovation and rapidly shifting expectations, keeping pace with the times means committing to a journey of continuous improvement. And achieving this goal requires a foundation of sound quality management systems.  

An effective quality management system (QMS) provides the means to consistently meet consumer expectations and deliver products and services with minimal waste. In today’s highly competitive global economy, having a QMS in place is the prerequisite for sustainable success. 

Table of contents

What is a quality management system .

In the most simple terms, a quality management system is a clearly defined set of processes and responsibilities that makes your business run how it’s supposed to. Each organization tailors its own QMS, comprising a formal set of policies, processes and procedures established to elevate consumer satisfaction. A QMS guides organizations as they standardize and enhance quality controls across manufacturing, service delivery and other key business processes. 

The core benefits of a QMS include: 

  • Elevated consistency and standardization of processes and outputs 
  • Reduced errors and increased operational efficiency 
  • Improved customer satisfaction through the delivery of quality products and services 
  • Continuous evaluation and improvement of organizational operations 

What is a digital QMS? 

A QMS can be delivered digitally rather than using paper checklists and forms. This saves organizations time, mitigates risk and minimizes the chance of human error. Implementing a digital QMS requires meticulous planning and execution, and needs to be designed to comply with relevant regulations and industry standards, incorporating robust digital security measures to protect data. 

All of these approaches call for expert guidance. 

Types of quality management systems 

A QMS may be based on either domestic or international standards. Different QMSs respond to different needs and scenarios, and organizations can choose to implement just one, or integrate a blend of different approaches. Among the most common are: 

  • Standardized systems : These set the bar for established standards and agreed-upon codes and practices, such as certifications against ISO standards. ISO 9001 outlines requirements for a comprehensive QMS and provides guidance for organizations looking to implement or improve their quality management strategy. 
  • Total quality management (TQM) : TQM is a management philosophy centred on customer satisfaction through the active participation of every employee. Its goal is to support the continuous improvement of quality across all levels and business functions. 
  • Lean management : Inefficiencies can result in unnecessary waste. Lean management strives to maximize customer value while minimizing waste using tools like value stream mapping, which helps fine-tune an organization’s processes for optimum efficiency. 
  • Six Sigma : Although perfection is almost impossible to reach, the pursuit of it is still worthwhile. Six Sigma uses data-driven techniques in the pursuit of producing near-perfect products and services, with a defect rate of 3.4 per one million opportunities. While that’s not perfect, it is pretty close. 

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Benefits of using a quality management system 

There are numerous reasons to establish a QMS. Standardized processes improve efficiency and enhance productivity through the reduction, or even elimination, of redundancies and waste. Defect prevention reduces costs associated with reworking or scrapping. 

QMS audits excel at recognizing potential problems before they occur, thereby significantly reducing risk. What’s more, a QMS streamlines the record-keeping process, with improved documentation facilitating traceability and accountability  – and aiding in regulatory compliance . A QMS also functions as a troubleshooting process, providing performance metrics and built-in audits to uncover weaknesses, establishing a solid foundation for improvement.  

Consistent quality leads to happy, satisfied customers who become informal brand ambassadors within their communities. So they create further business opportunities and the potential for increased market share. Any real-world example of a QMS will aptly demonstrate this: Companies who have built a successful quality system are more likely to achieve their business goals, driving higher-loyalty, frictionless customer journeys. 

Why is a quality management system important? 

Every organization wants to strive for excellence. Because, ultimately, the quality of a product or service is what the customer gets out of it and is willing to pay for. Quality management plays a crucial role in delivering a superior experience, which in turn influences a company’s growth and performance.  

Here are six good reasons to consider investing in a quality management system: 

  • Brand reputation : This is priceless, of course. A brand is more likely to gain international recognition when an organization surpasses established quality benchmarks. 
  • Customer retention : Consistently meeting, or exceeding, customer needs and expectations fosters loyalty. When high standards are met or surpassed, why would customers go anywhere else? 
  • Business sustainability : Consistently delivering excellence ensures and maintains a steady supply of customers. Doing business sustainably, and producing minimal waste, is the best way to grow and future-proof an organization. 
  • Compliance : Meeting regulatory, safety and quality standards is a must and a QMS seamlessly facilitates this process. 
  • Competitive edge : Higher-quality products and services give businesses a competitive advantage in complex times. 
  • Staff engagement : Employees who feel they are involved in quality improvements tend to experience higher engagement and productivity. 

Journey to excellence 

Developing an effective quality management system doesn’t happen overnight, but requires careful planning and execution. So, what are some of the key steps to success for an organization starting out on its QMS journey? 

  • Secure leadership commitment : Building a QMS requires alignment at the executive level. 
  • Document processes : Identify and thoroughly document procedures associated with existing quality processes. 
  • Define metrics : Performance-tracking metrics should be determined to ensure they meet QMS requirements. 
  • Training : All employees will need initial and ongoing training in order to build understanding and engagement with the QMS. 
  • Audits : Regular self-audits on processes and procedures will ensure compliance and effective implementation. 
  • Review system performance : Regularly assess system performance in order to make improvements as needed. 

It’s important to note that while the steps outlined above provide a high-level overview, building and sustaining an impactful QMS takes considerable effort and commitment across multiple areas of an organization.

ISO 9001  Quality management systems

The bottom line 

In today’s competitive marketplace, maintaining high-quality standards is more crucial than ever. As a business owner, you’re aware that customers will continue coming if they know that you will deliver them the product or service they need. This calls for company processes that are reliable, effective, trustworthy and streamlined – aligning business objectives and bottom lines with consistency and excellence. While this may sound like a no-brainer, how do you ensure a formalized process that documents each step, the desired outcomes, ways to improve, and the end results? 

A quality management system may be just the solution you’re looking for. 

Fact-Checking Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address

Here’s a look at how some of President Biden’s claims and those of the senator who delivered the Republican response, Katie Britt, stacked up.

By The New York Times

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An overhead view of the House, with President Biden speaking to a packed chamber.

President Biden delivered his third State of the Union address on Thursday, arguing that life in the United States had improved on his watch — a message that effectively served as a campaign message as he faces off against his predecessor and rival, Donald J. Trump.

Republicans offered their own take, with Senator Katie Britt of Alabama giving a rebuttal that argued that the country was worsening under Mr. Biden.

Mr. Biden’s address largely consisted of political messages and factual statements, but some of his comments warranted additional context. Ms. Britt also made some misleading statements.

Here’s a fact check.

Angelo Fichera

Angelo Fichera

“15 million new jobs in just three years — a record.”

— President Biden

This needs context.

Mr. Biden is correct that from January 2021 to January 2024, the United States added nearly 14.8 million jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data .

That is a growth of about 10 percent in three years. However, it is worth noting that Mr. Biden came to office as jobs were beginning to return after huge losses during the coronavirus pandemic. Total jobs are now about 3.5 percent higher than the prepandemic peak in February 2020. About half of the 22 million jobs lost in 2020 had returned by the start of the Biden administration.

“In fact, my policies have attracted $650 billion in private sector investment, in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, creating tens of thousands of jobs here in America!”

This figure is a White House estimate of private investments made in various industries during the Biden administration. Officials calculate it by looking at public announcements of investments — not necessarily dollars spent — across industries targeted by Mr. Biden’s legislative accomplishments. Those include the CHIPS and Science Act , Inflation Reduction Act and $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law .

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“I am cutting our carbon emissions in half by 2030.”

Mr. Biden has a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the United States roughly in half by 2030. But it is not at all clear the policies he has put in place will get the country there.

The Inflation Reduction Act, Mr. Biden’s landmark climate law that invests $370 billion in clean energy, helps put the country on track to cut emissions by about 40 percent. But some big things still need to happen to realize those cuts, like changes to permitting to help build more transmission to connect clean energy to the grid.

Meanwhile, some of Mr. Biden’s big climate regulations on things like automobiles and power plant emissions are undergoing changes, making it even more difficult to reach that 2030 goal.

“We’ve already cut the federal deficit over a trillion dollars.”

Under Mr. Biden’s watch, the federal deficit dropped to $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2022 from $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2021 — but much of that reduction was attributed to the expiration of coronavirus relief spending. The deficit then rose in 2023, to about $1.7 trillion.

And the deficit actually grew larger than the official numbers suggest: When adjusting for a student-loan forgiveness program that was factored into the numbers, but then struck down by the Supreme Court, the deficit in 2022 was actually closer to $1 trillion and $2 trillion in 2023.

The deficit remains higher than it was before the coronavirus pandemic. In fiscal year 2019, the deficit was about $984 billion and lower in years prior. And the national debt has grown to about $34.4 trillion today, from about $27.8 trillion in January 2021.

“You know, there are 1,000 billionaires in America. You know what the average federal tax is for these billionaires? They are making great sacrifices: 8.2 percent. That’s far less than the vast majority of Americans’ pay.”

This is misleading..

Mr. Biden was referring to a White House study, released in 2021 , that used a “more comprehensive measure of income” than is currently assessed. But it is not technically the tax rate paid under existing federal law.

The report in question included gains made in unsold stocks, which are not taxed until the asset is sold. It estimated the average federal income tax rate paid by the 400 wealthiest families in the United States to be 8.2 percent.

Under the law now, the top 1 percent of earners in the United States are currently estimated to pay an average federal income tax rate of more than 20 percent, according to an analysis by the Treasury Department in November.

The White House has argued its report presents a more accurate view of the tax rate paid by the wealthy.

“Many of my friends on the other side of the aisle want to put Social Security on the chopping block.”

Republicans are not currently calling for cuts to Social Security, though some have in the past suggested changes , such as having the program be brought up for regular renewal rather than treated as mandatory spending. Many have distanced themselves from that concept.

Mr. Biden also could have been referring to a budget put forward last year by a large conservative group on Capitol Hill, the Republican Study Committee.

That plan, light on details, called for “modest changes” to the Social Security for people who are “not near retirement” — including benefit formula adjustments and shifting the retirement age for future recipients “to account for increases in life expectancy.”

But it did not outline specific figures and emphasized that it would not affect benefits “for any senior in or near retirement.”

It’s unclear whether such a proposal would gain enough support among Republican lawmakers to pass. Former President Donald J. Trump said in a video address last year that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” (He, like Mr. Biden, has also not put forward a clear plan for keeping the program solvent.)

The Republican Study Committee, for its part, said in its budget that not addressing the program’s finances will lead to cuts. Social Security’s main trust fund is currently projected to be depleted in 2033, meaning the program would then be able to pay only about three-quarters of total scheduled benefits.

“From our small towns to America’s most iconic city streets, life is getting more and more dangerous.”

— Senator Katie Britt of Alabama

Recent federal data does not support the notion that crime is on the rise. The F.B.I. ’s annual crime report for 2022 showed that murders in the United States dropped just over 6 percent compared with the year earlier and, overall, violent crime also dipped. Available F.B.I. data for the first three quarters of 2023 shows that homicides were on track to drop significantly , among declines in other categories of violent and property crime.

The Republican Party wants “families to grow. It’s why we strongly support continued nationwide access to in vitro fertilization.”

Republican lawmakers, like Ms. Britt, have largely said they support I.V.F. treatments after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children, prompting some facilities in the state to halt or restrict the treatments. But many have also suggested the issue should be left to state legislatures, rather than be pursued through federal legislation.

Asked on “CBS Mornings” whether discarding embryos should be considered murder, Speaker Mike Johnson said that while he supports I.V.F. , state legislatures — not Congress — should handle the issue. (Alabama lawmakers passed a bill on Wednesday to protect I.V.F. providers from civil and criminal liability.)

One Republican senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, recently blocked a quick passage of a bill proposed by Democrats to protect access to I.V.F. and other fertility treatments nationwide. Ms. Hyde-Smith said she supported access to the treatment but argued that the bill was a “vast overreach that is full of poison pills that go way too far.”

Before the ruling in Alabama, Republicans had in recent years put forward legislation that would recognize a fertilized egg as a person entitled to equal protections under the 14th Amendment. If signed into law, it could restrict I.V.F. treatments.

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Oscars: christopher nolan says first oscar win for best director “means the world”.

Nolan was previously nominated in the category for 2017's "Dunkirk."

By Beatrice Verhoeven

Beatrice Verhoeven

Deputy Awards Editor

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Christopher Nolan

Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan won the Academy Award for best director, his first Oscar ever, on Sunday night.

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Nolan was nominated alongside Justine Triet ( Anatomy of a Fall ), Yorgos Lanthimos ( Poor Things ), Jonathan Glazer ( The Zone of Interest)  and  Martin Scorsese  ( Killers of the Flower Moon ).

Throughout the awards season, Nolan has received many accolades, including best director at the BAFTAs, Critics Choice, DGA, and Golden Globes. This is his first Oscar: He has been nominated in the best director category for 2017’s Dunkirk . His first Oscar nomination was for his Memento screenplay in 2002.

Oppenheimer won seven Academy Awards including best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr., best actor for Cillian Murphy, best score, best editing, best cinematography and of course, best picture.

Notably, this year, Scorsese earned more Oscar nominations for best director than anyone alive. With Killers this year, Scorsese had 10 best director nominations, surpassing  Steven Spielberg , who has nine. Scorsese has won the category just once — for 2006’s  The Departed . On that front, Spielberg still has one up on Scorsese, having won the category twice (for 1994’s  Schindler’s List  and 1999’s  Saving Private Ryan ).

When the Oscar nominations were announced, fans were outraged that Barbie  director  Greta Gerwig  was  notably snubbed  in the best director category. But following last year’s omission of any female filmmaker in the category,  Anatomy of a Fall ’s Triet received a nomination. Gerwig was a notable snub , as the  Barbie  director, throughout the  awards  season, received various best director nominations (the Directors Guild of America, the Golden Globes, Critics Choice) and wins (Palm Springs International Film Fest). She was also on various pundits’ prediction lists for best director,  including from  The Hollywood Reporter.   Even host Jimmy Kimmel made a dig at the notable snub during his opening monologue.

Last year,  no woman was nominated for best director . The nominees were Martin McDonagh ( The Banshees of Inisherin ), Todd Field ( Tár ), Ruben Östlund ( Triangle of Sadness ), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert ( Everything Everywhere All at Once ), and Steven Spielberg ( The Fabelmans ). That was also in a year in which many Oscar contenders were helmed by women: Sarah Polley for  Women Talking , Gina Prince-Bythewood for  The Woman King , Maria Schrader for  She Said  and Charlotte Wells for  Aftersun,  who were all omitted.

Bigelow won for  The Hurt Locker  in 2009, Zhao won for  Nomadland  in 2020 and Campion won for  The Power of the Dog  in 2021. Zhao was nominated in the category alongside Fennell for  Promising Young Woman , which was the first time more than one woman was nominated in the category.

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Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data scraping

Midjourney blamed a near 24-hour service outage on ‘botnet-like activity’ from two accounts linked to the stable diffusion creator..

By Jess Weatherbed , a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Share this story

A cartoon illustration shows a shadowy figure carrying off a red directory folder, which has a surprised-looking face on its side.

Midjourney says it has banned Stability AI staffers from using its service, accusing employees at the rival generative AI company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to scrape Midjourney’s data.

Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2nd that acknowledged an extended server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in user galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6th, Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” — which the company specifically links to Stability AI employees — was behind the outage.

A screenshot taken from MidJourney’s Discord channel discussing action against Stability.AI employees.

According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre on X , who listened to the call, Midjourney said that the service was brought down because “someone at Stability AI was trying to grab all the prompt and image pairs in the middle of a night on Saturday.” St. Pierre said that Midjourney had linked multiple paid accounts to an individual on the Stability AI data team.

In its summary of the business update call on March 6th (which Midjourney refers to as “office hours”), the company says it’s banning all Stability AI employees from using its service “indefinitely” in response to the outage. Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that will similarly ban employees of any company that exercises “aggressive automation” or causes outages to the service.

St. Pierre flagged the accusations to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who replied on X, saying he was investigating the situation and that Stability hadn’t ordered the actions in question. “Very confusing how 2 accounts would do this team also hasn’t been scraping as we have been using synthetic & other data given SD3 outperforms all other models,” said Mostaque, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model currently in preview . He claimed that if the outage was caused by a Stability employee, then it was unintentional and “obviously not a DDoS attack.”

Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming to have sent him “some information” to help with his internal investigation.

The situation is otherwise still developing, and no additional updates have been provided since that conversation on March 6th. At the time of writing, neither Midjourney nor Stability AI have responded to the Verge ’s request for comment.

It does seem odd that scraping activity from just two accounts allegedly managed to cause such an extended server outage. The irony of this situation also hasn’t been lost on online creatives , who have extensively criticized both companies (and generative AI systems in general) for training their models on masses of online data scraped from their works without consent. Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have both been targeted with several copyright lawsuits , with the latter being accused of creating an artist database for training purposes in December .

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‘Embracing the spirit of Sewa is a powerful way to positively impact the world and promote a more compassionate and interconnected society.’

Kindness, humility and equality: how the Sikh tradition of Sewa can transcend cultural boundaries and foster unity

At the heart of selfless service in Sikhism is the genuine desire to alleviate the suffering of others

At the core of Sikhism lies the philosophy of selfless service, known as Sewa .

Sewa is a principle that transcends religious boundaries and holds universal relevance. The philosophy encourages individuals to engage in acts of kindness, compassion and service without expecting anything in return.

While deeply embedded in Sikh tradition, people of all backgrounds can adopt the principles of Sewa to enhance their day-to-day lives.

Start small

Sewa is not so much about a set of specific actions but about the intent behind those actions. It emphasises performing service with a pure heart and without expecting any kind of personal gain. The driving force behind it is the genuine desire to alleviate the suffering of others.

Sewa can be as simple as performing daily acts of kindness. Holding the door for someone, helping a neighbour with groceries, or offering a kind word to a stranger are all examples of selfless acts. Individuals can create a positive ripple effect in their communities by making these actions a regular habit. In more direct ways, one can engage in volunteer work. Whether it’s contributing time at a local soup kitchen, participating in community cleanup projects, or offering assistance at a local charity.

Recognise the divine

Sewa promotes the idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the divine, and serving others is a way to break down societal hierarchies.

Sikhs are taught to see the presence of God in everyone and everything. This concept is beautifully integrated into the practice of Sewa. When engaging in selfless service, try to recognise the “divine spark” within the person you are helping. This recognition transforms Sewa into a sacred act, and a direct expression of devotion to the divine present in all.

The langar – a central aspect of Sikhism where a free meal is served to all – exemplifies this principle. By serving food without discrimination, Sikhs embody the belief that everyone, regardless of background or faith, is a manifestation of the divine.

At the heart of Sewa is the principle of humility. Sikhism teaches us that true service requires people to shed their ego and approach every act of kindness with a sense of humility. By humbling oneself, individuals acknowledge the interconnectedness of all beings and recognise that each person, regardless of their social status or background, deserves respect and compassion.

Humbleness in Sewa is not just a superficial display but a genuine acknowledgment of the equality of all human beings. The intent of doing Sewa is rooted in compassion, kindness, and selfless dedication to serving humanity.

Show empathy

Sewa extends beyond physical acts to include emotional and intellectual support. Mentoring someone in need, offering guidance, or simply being a supportive friend are potent ways to practise selfless service. By uplifting others, individuals can create a supportive and harmonious environment. Understanding the struggles and challenges others face is an aspect of Sewa. By actively listening, empathising, and helping, individuals can build connections and foster a sense of unity within their communities.

Embrace the spirit

Engaging in selfless service – or Sewa – promotes personal growth and can give youa sense of purpose and fulfilment, contributing to overall wellbeing. It can also create a more robust, more resilient community. By actively participating in the wellbeing of others, you contribute to creating a supportive and interconnected society.

Sewa transcends religious and cultural boundaries, fostering unity among people from diverse backgrounds. In essence, embracing the spirit of Sewa is a powerful way to positively impact the world and promote a more compassionate and interconnected society.

Jaswinder Singh is co-founder and acting chief executive of Sikh Volunteers Australia, which delivers food to disadvantaged groups around Australia

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Jason Kelce on the Sentimental Muscle Tank He Wore for NFL Retirement Speech: 'Part of This Journey with Me'

The retired Eagles center shared how the shirt was a staple during his 13 season career

AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Jason Kelce  candidly revealed why he kept it casual for his NFL retirement announcement .

The former Philadelphia Eagles center shared in the latest episode of his New Heights podcast with brother Travis Kelce exactly why he chose a low-key look during Monday's press conference. 

During the episode, the 36-year-old explained how he decided to wear the cut-up muscle tank with the Eagles logo.

“I guess I start out the day. That's the first choice you got to make. You're like, ‘What am I going to wear to this thing?’ Like a suit and ties is what most people wearing. But that wouldn't feel right. Like I don't think you know, for me —”

“It’s not a wedding,” Travis, 34, quickly interjected. “That’s the only time I’ve ever seen you wear a suit and tie.”

“I’ll wear a suit and tie when I have to that's about it,” confessed Jason. 

The retired NFL player explained that he considered all of the possible t-shirt options he could wear, including a Cleveland Heights or Eagles shirt. But after opening one of his drawers, he found the winning shirt. 

He explained how he wore, practiced and lifted weights in that shirt every year. “And I'm like, ‘You know what this shirt, in some ways, was a part of this journey with me. More than anything else in this closet. So I’ll wear this.’”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Along with paying homage to his 13-season career with his shirt, he also had his trainer, Joe O’Pella, wrap his ankles one last time.

“My trainer, one of the trainers at the Eagles has been battling cancer all season long and he's been there my entire career too,” explained Jason, adding that Pella is currently in “remission” and doesn’t “have any signs” of cancer. 

“But he wasn't able to tape me for any of the games this year and he taped my ankles my whole career. So he taped my ankles for the press conference one last time,” revealed Jason. 

“So I had ankle tape on with sandals. So yeah, that was what went into, I guess the attire,” concluded the NFL star.

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