What is a Customer Journey?

Our vision of the customer journey

Defining Customer Journeys is a key step before implementing any Feedback Management program.

The Customer Journey enables us to reconcile the satisfaction of a customer (or group of customers) with operational reality.

The customer journey can be represented as the chronological sequence of events experienced by a customer in relation to his or her experience. Like customer typologies (VIP, New comer, etc.), the customer journey is necessarily simplified. It omits the many options available to customers. Certain key moments will be common to several customer journeys.

Why define customer paths?

Defining customer journeys enables us to structure our questionnaire around key moments, following the chronology of the customer experience, and to analyze customer feedback in greater detail.

Let's take the example of 2 customer journeys for the same furniture store:

• Route 1 ("In-store sales"): In-store visit, interaction with a salesperson, demonstration, checkout, collection.
• Route 2 ("Online shopping"): Visit the website, buy online, collect (in-store).

As we can see above, the customer experience is very different depending on the route taken. But Withdrawal is common to both. If the store manager is to analyze satisfaction with the Withdrawal stage, he or she will undoubtedly need to distinguish between the 2 routes. This will give him an operational understanding of any problems encountered. It is also possible to have disparities between the two routes. If the website boasts a 5-minute pick-up time, but it actually takes 1 hour, it's a safe bet that the satisfaction of customers who took Route 2 will be lower than that of the others.

To sum up

Customer paths structure the Feedback Management program. Composed of key moments, they also enable a more detailed analysis of customer feedback.