Customer Journey refers to the sequence of experiences and emotions a customer goes through, from showing interest in a product or service to making a purchase or using it, often likened to a journey. Companies use customer journeys to understand what marketing strategies are effective for their products or services. This article explains the basics of customer journeys and explores their future potential.

The Principles of Customer Journey

Customer journey is a highly useful marketing tool that visualizes the process customers go through until they purchase or use a product or service. It helps in understanding the psychology behind the customer’s purchasing process and reveals appropriate strategies, media, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each phase. This article explains the background of the emergence of customer journeys and how they have evolved to date.

What Is the Background Behind Its Emergence?

The background that led to the emergence of customer journeys lies in the diversification of consumer purchasing behavior, driven by the proliferation of the Internet and social media. In the past, consumers obtained information about products or services from mass media such as television or newspapers and followed a simple purchase process by buying from stores or via phone. However, with the widespread adoption of the Internet, consumers gained access to a wealth of information through various digital media. As a result, the process became more complex, with consumers comparing and evaluating vast amounts of information and making purchases through channels that suited their lifestyles. Additionally, consumers started seeking emotional satisfaction over convenience, and the experiences and opinions of buyers began to significantly influence other consumers through platforms like social media. To adapt to the diversification of consumer purchasing processes, companies needed to understand when and what information consumers were seeking. This gave rise to the concept of the customer journey. The birth of the customer journey is attributed to OxfordSM, a UK-based management consulting company, which developed it in 1998 to establish a corporate mission and brand position for an international train service connecting the UK and Europe. Subsequently, OxfordSM used customer journeys across various fields, leading to its wider recognition. In Japan, the concept of the customer journey gained widespread recognition in 2017 with the publication of Philip Kotler’s book ‘Marketing 4.0.’

The Evolving Ideals of Customer Journeys

The current ideals of the customer journey aim to capture the entire journey from the customer’s perspective, leading to purchase or utilization. It seeks to clarify customer needs and behavioral patterns specific to each phase. However, even after the emergence of the customer journey, consumer purchasing processes have continued to evolve significantly. As a result, challenges and issues have been identified in the various marketing applications of customer journeys since their emergence.

The True Reasons for the Criticism of Being ‘Outdated’

The ever-evolving nature of digital media, like the internet, smartphones, and social media has led to increasing diversification and complexity in consumer purchasing processes. The criticism of the Customer Journey concept for being ‘outdated’ stems from the attempt to capture it using fixed patterns that do not align with the current realities. In actual purchasing processes, customers can be influenced by various factors and stimuli, leading to unpredictable behaviors and emotions. For example, even if a customer has an initial interest in a product or service, they may lose their purchase intent due to other appealing options or changes in their mood. Furthermore, customers continue to compare products or services even after making a purchase, researching reviews and recommendations to reevaluate their choices. As a result, the real purchasing process unfolds non-linearly, with many aspects that cannot be fully captured by the current Customer Journey concept

The Changing Customer Journey Over Time

The customer’s buying process has become significantly more complex over time, and it is expected to continue evolving with the emergence of new media and novel forms of purchasing processes. However, the fundamental purpose of the customer journey is not to accurately capture the buying process but to clarify effective marketing strategies for each phase. The essence of the customer journey is to identify touchpoints where customers interact with products or services and to provide optimal communication and services by satisfying their desired experiences and emotions. Therefore, even as the customer’s journey undergoes changes, it’s essential not to lose sight of the core of the customer journey and to devise and execute effective strategies for each phase. Let’s utilize the customer journey as a tool in our business to achieve this.

The Secrets to Creating a Successful Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer journey, illustrating customer behaviors, emotions, and needs. It is a tool used to understand customer decision-making and actions, optimizing targeting and communication strategies. The benefits of a customer journey map lie in visualizing the customer’s purchase process, enabling the identification of appropriate responses for each phase. Furthermore, when it is used as an overarching marketing guide within an organization, the map facilitates sharing the customer’s perspective, allowing team members and stakeholders to work collaboratively on tasks and initiatives with a shared sense of purpose.

Key Points for Creating a Customer Journey Map

When creating a customer journey map that can be effectively used in the field, there are several important considerations to keep in mind. Here, we will explain two of the most crucial points.

Linking Phases with Customer Emotions

In a customer journey map, you should establish phases that encompass the customer’s journey from their initial encounter with the product or service to the purchase and subsequent repurchase. Typically, the following phases are considered:  

    To enhance the effectiveness of a customer journey map, it’s crucial to accurately define the emotions that customers experience at each phase. People go through various emotions before purchasing a product or service. For instance, during the awareness phase, there might be curiosity and interest, while in the consideration phase, expectations and concerns can arise. These emotions are the source of customer needs. To meet those customer needs, it’s essential to provide information and experiences tailored to each phase of the customer journey. For example, for customers who have high expectations during the awareness phase, you should convey the attractiveness of the product or service. For customers who have concerns during the consideration phase, you may need to emphasize functionality and cost-effectiveness. Connecting customer emotions accurately to each phase in this way leads to the development of effective strategies. To understand customer emotions in each phase, it’s crucial to base your insights on objective information, such as survey results. Customer journey mapping is a concept that involves thinking about your business from the customer’s perspective. That’s why it’s essential to incorporate not only your own assumptions and hypotheses but also the actual voices and data of your customers. Conduct qualitative research, such as interviews and surveys, to uncover customer emotions in each phase.

Learning from Real-life Examples from various Industries

■Fashion Industry

In the fashion industry, Customer Journey is used to improve online shopping websites. It aims to uncover the emotions experienced by customers at each phase leading up to their purchase of clothing on the online shopping site. It helps understand why customers visit the site, their needs, factors influencing their purchase decisions, barriers they encounter, satisfaction after purchase, and their likelihood to repeat purchases. This information is used to enhance aspects such as website design, content, search functionality, recommendation features, as well as delivery and returns services.

■Travel Industry

In the travel industry, Customer Journey is employed to enhance travel booking websites. It involves breaking down the process of customers searching for and booking travel plans on these websites into several phases. During each phase, the emotions felt by customers and the experiences they seek are identified. By understanding the emotions associated with travel and the key decision points during comparison and decision-making, improvements are made in the website’s usability, information availability, pricing, promotions, reviews, and user-generated content. These real industry examples demonstrate how Customer Journey is used to analyze and enhance the customer experience in different sectors, leading to improved services and customer satisfaction.

■Education Industry

In the education industry, Customer Journey is used to improve online English conversation services. It involves breaking down the process from when customers show interest in online English lessons, take free trial lessons, to becoming paying members, into several phases. The goal is to express the emotions customers may experience during these steps. By clarifying customers’ objectives and motivations for English learning at each stage, their satisfaction and dissatisfaction with free trial lessons, and their expectations and concerns when transitioning to paid memberships, improvements are made in the usability and appearance of the website or app, lesson content, teaching staff, pricing plans, and cancellation policies.

■Medical Industry

In the medical industry, Customer Journey is utilized to encourage visits to dental clinics. It expresses the emotions customers may have towards dental clinics for each action leading up to their visit. By doing this, it clarifies the motivations and barriers to visiting dental clinics, criteria for choosing a dental clinic, factors influencing decisions, and satisfaction and repeat intentions after visiting. This information helps with the branding and advertising of dental clinics, as well as improvements to websites, appointment systems, reception, and medical services.

■Food and Beverage Industry

In the food and beverage industry, Customer Journey is used to encourage visits to restaurants. By understanding the emotions customers experience before visiting a restaurant, it helps reveal their motivations, needs, and criteria for choosing a restaurant. Based on this information, restaurants adjust their menus, pricing, and services. They also use these insights to improve their websites and reservation systems to increase customer visits.

Steps to Utilize

A customer journey map is not meaningful if it’s only created. Its true value is realized when it is actively utilized in marketing efforts. Therefore, here we will explain the steps to effectively utilize a customer journey map.

Integration with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The emotions and behaviors set for each customer phase in the initially created customer journey map are merely hypotheses. Therefore, to improve the map’s accuracy, it’s essential to validate and refine these hypotheses. To facilitate this validation, it’s crucial to align the customer’s psychology and behavior in each phase with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are metrics used to measure a business’s objectives and outcomes. For instance, for an online shopping website, KPIs may include metrics like website traffic, time spent on the site, conversion rates, and purchase amounts. Clearly defining KPIs for each phase of the customer journey map enables the validation of hypotheses regarding customer psychology and behavior. For example, if your customer journey map hypothesizes that “customers increase their purchase intent by viewing detailed product pages,” relevant KPIs might include “number of visits to detailed product pages” or “conversion rate from detailed product pages to the checkout page.” Measuring these KPIs helps determine the validity of the hypotheses. Therefore, when formulating hypotheses for your customer journey map, it’s essential to be mindful of their alignment with KPIs. Without this alignment, it becomes challenging to assess the effectiveness of specific actions in each phase.

Sharing Within the Team

A customer journey map is an effective tool for marketing strategy development, but to maximize its effectiveness, sharing it within the team is essential. Marketing activities in a company involve various departments and staff, such as development, advertising, and sales. By sharing the customer journey map among these stakeholders, it becomes possible to share insights into the psychology and behavior of the target customers, as well as the appropriate strategies for addressing them, enabling effective marketing activities. To facilitate sharing within the team, it is effective to involve various departments from the early stages of creating the customer journey map. When input from various departments is taken into account, a more realistic picture of customers at each phase can be envisioned. Moreover, by allowing each department to incorporate their opinions and insights into the customer journey map, it can increase their affinity for the map. Additionally, displaying the customer journey map in a visible location where many people can see it is also an effective approach. This ensures that stakeholders are constantly keeping the customer journey in mind. Furthermore, referring to the customer journey map in regular settings such as marketing meetings and project progress reports can further promote a common understanding among the team.

Creating a Customer Journey from Qualitative Research

One crucial point in creating a customer journey is how well you can envision a realistic customer persona. The closer to reality the imagined customer in the customer journey is, the more effective the marketing strategies derived from it will be. There are various methods for envisioning customers, but one of the most effective approaches is using the results of qualitative research. Qualitative research is a method that allows for a deep dive into the psychology of customers during the purchasing process, and it has a high compatibility with the concept of the customer journey. Here, we will explain the process of creating a customer journey using data from qualitative research.

The Purpose of Creating a Customer Journey Map

The purpose of creating a customer journey map is to develop marketing strategies from a customer-centric perspective. Therefore, when creating a customer journey map, it is essential for the creator to adopt a customer-centric viewpoint. However, employees working in a company typically observe customers from the company’s perspective, so the seller’s perspective can be easily reflected in the map. If a customer journey map with a strong seller’s perspective is created, there is a risk of overlooking the genuine needs and challenges of the customers. To address this, qualitative research findings can be highly beneficial. Qualitative research involves collecting information such as customer opinions, impressions, motivations, and reasons through methods like interviews and surveys. Qualitative research results contain valuable insights into customer psychology. By using this information as the basis for the customer journey map, it becomes possible to create a map that aligns more closely with the customer’s perspective.

Using Qualitative Research to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map using qualitative research involves the following steps:

① Phase Assumption

First, we begin by assuming the various phases within the customer journey. The method of assumption may vary depending on the nature of the marketing activities, but generally, the following phases are considered:  

    By considering each phase, the points to be investigated become clear.

② Conducting Qualitative Research

Conduct qualitative research to explore purchasing behavior and customer psychology at each phase. Qualitative research is conducted using methods such as interviews and surveys. In particular, interview techniques that involve direct conversations with customers are valuable for delving deep into customer psychology, making them important sources of information for creating customer journey maps. In qualitative research, asking questions like the following can help in understanding customer psychology:  

③ Analysis of Qualitative Research

Analyze the results of qualitative research and create a report on purchase behavior and customer psychology for each phase. Qualitative research involves analyzing the qualitative aspects, extracting customer psychology from obtained keywords and phrases, and summarizing it in a report.

④ Creating a Customer Journey Map

Based on the research results, reconstruct each phase and create a customer journey map. Important elements for creating a customer journey map include the following:

    By following these steps, you can create a customer journey map that better reflects real customer psychology.

Predicting the Future of Customer Journeys

Customer journey mapping has been used for many years as a tool to speculate on the customer’s purchasing experience. However, with the advancement of technology and changes in society, customer journeys are evolving. Here, we will discuss predictions for the future of customer journeys, which are undergoing significant changes due to factors such as the integration of technology.

Changes Due to Technology

In recent years, new technologies such as Big Data and AI have brought significant innovation to marketing, and these innovations are also having a major impact on customer journeys. Particularly, the evolution of AI has the potential to significantly change the way customer journeys are conducted. One of the main reasons for this is the possibility that AI could replace traditional sources of information for customers, such as websites and social media, which have been the primary means of information gathering. This could have a more profound impact on customer journeys than the shift from mass media to digital media. AI can use customer data, including preferences and behavioral history, to provide customers with personalized information. For example, it can automatically generate information and reviews about products or services that customers are interested in and present them to customers. Additionally, through interactions with customers, AI can uncover customer needs and challenges and suggest solutions. If AI becomes the primary source of information gathering, it is expected to have a significant influence on customer purchasing behavior and decision-making.

Synergy Between AI and Customer Journey

If AI becomes the primary source of information gathering, customer journeys may potentially become simpler than they are today. The reason behind this is that most phases of the customer journey could be adequately handled by AI. For instance, during the awareness phase where customers become interested in products or services, AI can provide customers with personalized content based on their preferences and behavioral history. In the consideration phase where customers compare and evaluate products or services, AI can engage in conversations with customers to uncover their needs and challenges and propose solutions. In this manner, the presence of AI alone could potentially support a significant portion of the customer journey. Moreover, AI can also function as a tool for collecting and analyzing customer information. It can collect and analyze information from customer inquiries and conversations to understand and analyze customer concerns, needs, and psychological states. In the future, effectively incorporating AI into one’s customer journey could become a central challenge in marketing.

New Possibilities in Marketing

In an era where AI becomes the primary medium for marketing, AI will serve as the face of companies. Interactions with customers, such as information gathering and inquiries, may be primarily handled by AI. In such a scenario, companies will need to invest in optimizing AI to be a representation of their brand and values in order to gain strong customer support. Hence, marketing activities will focus on nurturing AI as the core of marketing and ensuring that AI understands the company’s products, services, brand, and values, and can communicate them optimally to customers. Consequently, marketing may transition from an era of using various media to an era of nurturing AI as the central medium. Marketing is entering an era of new possibilities, and we might be the generation witnessing this significant transformation.

Summary

Throughout this explanation, we have discussed Customer Journey. In today’s world where there is an abundance of products and information, the number of products that customers buy out of necessity has decreased. Therefore, customer satisfaction plays a decisive role in many purchasing decisions. That’s why analyzing the psychology and behavior of customers using Customer Journey is crucial. Customer Journey is evolving with the changing times, especially with the advancement of technologies like AI, which have a significant impact on it. However, the fundamental goal of satisfying customers remains unchanged. To continue achieving high results in marketing, considering the utilization of the customer journey can be highly beneficial.