What Is a Customer Journey?

The customer journey refers to the full lifecycle of a relationship between a business and one of its customers. Rather than focusing on a single transaction or event, the customer journey represents the full duration of a customer-business relationship. This spans every stage or “touchpoint,” from awareness to acquisition to retention through—when applicable—a final interaction.

Customer journeys are related to overall customer experience, but the two terms are not actually synonymous. The “journey” defines the actual interactions—including physical and digital—between a customer and business. The “experience” describes how a customer feels about your company and its brand based on those interactions over time. Many organizations use customer journey maps as a way of charting or modeling the full lifecycle. A journey map can provide a baseline for various kinds of customer journey analytics.

Without defining your customer journey(s), you can’t really understand how people engage with your business. Customer journeys deliver insights into how people first become aware of your brand, what makes them convert or transact, why they leave, and why they come back. Well-defined customer journeys start with better customer analytics. You can unearth new trends or patterns—such as why a particular customer segment drops out of a sales funnel, for example—that allow for continuous improvement. Customer journeys help you optimize your sales, marketing, customer service, and other critical business functions.