Customer journey: definition and customer journey map

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey is the path a customer takes in their relationship with a company. It runs from the first need to use and to service after the purchase.

The CRM vendors HubSpot and Salesforce France give similar definitions: the set of stages, or the sum of interactions, of a customer with a brand. These are vendor definitions, not standards.

Lemon and Verhoef call for combining the firm’s view with the customer’s. You also need to spot the triggers that make customers continue or abandon the journey. Customer experience is the broader notion; the journey is how it reads over time.

Customer journey, buyer journey, user journey: what are the differences?

The three terms partly overlap, but they do not cover the same scope.

Both uses of “user journey” coexist. State the one your team uses at the start of the project.

What are the stages of the customer journey?

Lemon and Verhoef split the customer journey into three overall stages. Prepurchase runs from need recognition to consideration. Purchase covers choice, ordering and payment. Postpurchase brings usage, consumption and service.

Purchase is usually the shortest stage. The model builds on earlier work, including Howard and Sheth (1969). Postpurchase is the domain of customer loyalty.

Finer breakdowns vary from one source to another.

None of these breakdowns is official. For the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), the phases change from one scenario to another and are set from data.

A journey that loops: the “messy middle”

Between the trigger and the purchase, the journey is not linear. That is the conclusion of research by Google, carried out with The Behavioural Architects. Alistair Rennie and Jonny Protheroe published it in July 2020 (How people decide what to buy lies in the ‘messy middle’).

In this “messy middle”, the shopper switches between two modes as many times as needed. Exploration widens the choice; evaluation narrows it. The study focuses on six biases: category heuristics, power of now, social proof, scarcity, authority, power of free.

A fictitious cereal brand, boosted with five-star reviews and 20% extra for free, took 28% of preference from the favorite brand. A fictitious car insurer boosted on all six biases won 87%. These are simulated scenarios; the article does not specify the countries.

On a map, plan for steps back between comparison and choice. This is where follow-ups such as retargeting or lead nurturing come into play.

What is a customer touchpoint?

A touchpoint is an interaction that matters in the customer’s experience, whether or not it comes from the brand. Lemon and Verhoef sort them into four categories, depending on who controls them.

Each category can appear at each stage, with a weight that varies by product. Customer-owned touchpoints dominate after the purchase, during use. The line between brand and partner can blur: the authors cite an app that depends on Android and iOS updates. In an omnichannel customer journey, these categories intersect.

Reviews, forums, AI engines: the touchpoints the brand does not control

Reviews from other customers, forums and advice from friends and family belong to the fourth category. According to Lemon and Verhoef, their effects can match or exceed those of advertising. They rely on a study by Baxendale et al. (2015).

Note these touchpoints on your map, at the stage where the customer looks at them.

How do you create a customer journey map in 7 steps?

A customer journey map visualizes the process a person goes through to reach a goal (Journey Mapping 101, NN/g, 2018). The method below combines the rules of NN/g and of Lemon and Verhoef; the order of the steps is a proposal by Elev8 Lab.

1. Set the goal: choose a known business goal, for example reducing drop-offs on a quote request.
2. Choose the actor: one point of view per map. The actor is a marketing persona built from interviews.
3. Gather the data: interviews, customer verbatims, customer service requests, analytics explorations.
4. Define the phases: from the scenario’s data, not from a generic model.
5. Describe the experience: actions, thoughts and emotions, in the customers’ own words if possible.
6. Place the friction points: touchpoints by category, with the triggers for abandonment.
7. Note the opportunities: each lead gets an owner and a metric.

For Kate Kaplan (NN/g, 2016), a map should always serve a known business goal (When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps). Otherwise, it produces nothing actionable. Customer journey mapping also helps break down silos: each department leaves with the touchpoints it is responsible for.

What does a customer journey map contain?

According to NN/g, every map contains five elements. Here is a fictitious example to illustrate them; it does not describe any real customer.

• Actor: the office manager of a small business, looking for an IT maintenance provider.
• Scenario and expectations: get a clear quote, without needless follow-ups.
• Phases: search, compare, request a quote, decide, get started.
• Experience: she reads reviews, hesitates in front of a long form, gets annoyed by a reply that ignores her pricing question.
• Opportunities: shorten the form (marketing, tracking of submitted requests); give a price range from the first exchange (sales team).

Journey map, experience map, service blueprint: which one to choose?

These related tools differ in scope and point of view.

NN/g presents the experience map as the parent of the journey map (UX Mapping Methods Compared, 2017). The same institute advises against imposing these definitions on a whole organization.

What data should you use to analyze a customer journey?

A customer journey analysis combines what customers say (interviews, verbatims, customer service) and what your tools measure.

In Google Analytics 4, path exploration shows journeys as a tree graph, starting from an event, a page or a screen. A backwards path works back from an end point, for example a purchase. Each step shows the top 5 nodes by default, and up to 20; the rest is grouped under “Others”.

Funnel exploration shows where users succeed or fail at a task, over 10 steps at most (Google Analytics Help, accessed on October 19, 2026). It reveals the funnel steps that bring down the conversion rate.

For the digital customer journey before the visit, open the Performance report in Search Console. Its queries show the words that make your site appear in Google. The CRM and customer service tickets cover postpurchase.

What your tools do not see of the journey

In France, some trackers require prior information and consent from the user. This applies to personalized advertising and social media share buttons. Some audience measurement trackers are exempt under conditions (CNIL, Cookies and trackers: what does the law say?, in French, September 29, 2020; the CNIL is the French data protection authority). Users can accept, refuse and withdraw their choice.

Elev8 Lab’s reading: a journey observed in your tools only contains the visitors and contacts that were measured. It misses refusals of consent-based trackers and offline contacts (phone call, trade show, word of mouth). It also misses social and external touchpoints.

How do you measure the customer journey?

Measure the journey end to end, not just each touchpoint. Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan and Conor Jones, McKinsey partners, explain this in the Harvard Business Review in 2013 (The Truth About Customer Experience). Tracking satisfaction touchpoint by touchpoint gives a distorted picture: customers seem happier than they are. The authors suggest managing key journeys as a whole, even if it takes years.

One or two metrics per stage are enough. Set them in your digital strategy. For loyalty, two metrics compete.

Dixon’s study covers more than 75,000 people in contact with a call center or a self-service channel (Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers). Going above and beyond makes little difference to loyalty there. Elev8 Lab’s reading: CES, studied on service contacts, fits after a request for help; NPS covers the whole relationship.

Attribution models split the credit for a sale among the measured touchpoints. Lemon and Verhoef point out a limit: touchpoints located at different stages have endogenous effects. Conclusions and budgets can then be skewed.

Customer journey and SEO: one intent per stage

Each stage of the customer journey matches a search intent. A customer who is discovering their need does not type the same words as one comparing two offers.

Method proposed by Elev8 Lab:

1. For each stage of your map, list the Search Console queries that match it.
2. Type each query into Google and read the SERP to qualify the search intent.
3. Assign a single piece of content to each intent.
4. Choose the format according to the moment in the journey: that is the role of content marketing.

Example: “customer journey” calls for a definition, then a mapping method, which is a discovery intent.

What mistakes should you avoid with a customer journey?

Six common mistakes in a customer journey project:

• A map with no business goal, which produces nothing actionable (NN/g).
• A map built in a meeting room, without interviews or customer verbatims.
• A single map for all audiences, instead of one point of view per map.
• Satisfaction measured touchpoint by touchpoint, which flatters reality (HBR, 2013).
• A funnel assumed to be linear, when the shopper loops (Google, 2020).
• A measured journey mistaken for the real journey.

A useful customer journey starts from a goal, an actor and real data.