Customer Journey

Nobody buys a product out of nowhere. Beforehand, there’s usually a longer path: you see an ad, search online, compare prices, read reviews, and eventually make a decision. This entire path is called the customer journey. The term refers to all the touchpoints between a person and a company, from the first glance to long after the purchase. It doesn’t mean an actual journey, but rather a mental map of these steps. Companies chart it to see where things are going well and where people frustratedly give up.

Why companies trace the path to purchase

Anyone selling a product usually only sees the outcome: it was bought, or it wasn’t. What happens in between remains invisible. This is exactly the gap the customer journey is meant to close. It reveals the point at which prospective customers are lost.

An example from online retail: of a hundred people who add an item to their cart, on average only about thirty actually complete the purchase. The others abandon it. If a shop discovers that most people drop out precisely at the point where shipping costs are mentioned, that’s a very concrete insight. It can display the costs earlier or eliminate them altogether. Without looking at the whole path, nobody would know where the problem lies.

For investors and business journalists, the term is interesting precisely because it’s directly tied to money. A company that shortens its checkout process by two clicks can noticeably increase its revenue without spending a single cent more on advertising. That’s why customer journey analyses regularly show up in quarterly reports and investor presentations.

From awareness to recommendation

The journey is usually broken down into several phases. First comes awareness: someone learns that a product exists at all. Then comes consideration, where comparing and researching take place. After that comes the decision, meaning the actual purchase. And finally, the post-purchase phase, involving delivery, support, and the question of whether the person will come back.

Each phase consists of individual contact points, referred to in industry jargon as touchpoints. A touchpoint can be an ad on Instagram, an email, a physical store, or a phone call with customer service. Companies collect data on how many people reach each of these points and how many move on. From these numbers emerges a kind of funnel: many at the top, few at the bottom.

This is where software comes in. Analytics tools log clicks, time spent, and drop-offs. Increasingly, AI systems evaluate this data and detect patterns that humans would overlook, such as a specific user group always failing at the same form field. One distinction is important here: the customer journey describes the path from the customer’s perspective. The often-confused sales funnel describes the same process from the seller’s perspective, as a pure sequence of numbers.

Where you encounter the concept in everyday life

You experience deliberately designed customer journeys constantly, without them being labeled as such. When you install a game and a brief tutorial guides you through the first steps, that’s planned. When a streaming service sends you a reminder three days before your trial subscription expires, that’s planned too. These moments were laid out on the drawing board beforehand.

In business news, the term usually comes up in connection with marketing software. Companies like Salesforce, Adobe, or HubSpot earn a large share of their revenue by measuring and automating such paths. When personalized customer experiences are mentioned there, it’s almost always about the customer journey.

A common misconception is imagining the journey as running in a straight line from top to bottom. In reality, people jump back and forth, abandon it, return weeks later, and switch between phone, laptop, and physical store along the way. Good analyses take this into account. Poor ones assume a clean funnel and therefore produce numbers that help no one.