Understanding the End-to-End Customer Journey

Understanding and documenting the ENTIRE customer journey allows companies — large and small — to get a holistic view of their customer experience and motivations along every step. This understanding should influence every decision and the process of documenting it can reveal opportunities and friction points throughout the entire organization:

• Marketing + Sales: Messaging, positioning, identify and prioritize channels for incoming leads, how and when to reach more prospects in your target personas.
• Growth/Sales: convert more leads, identify new product opportunities (such as new features or markets)
• Customer Support + Success : increase engagement with active customers. Improve Retention and revenue per customer with upsells and adjacent product opportunities.
• Product + Operations: help prioritize and shape the product roadmap, Data: identify which moments and actions to track — important KPIs, Improve operations with new tools or internal processes around supporting customers and delivering your product.

What is the Customer Journey?

The significant moments and steps that a customer goes through from the time they realize they have a problem to searching for and validating a solution (ie. your product) to when they are actively using your product and engaging with your company.

Documenting the entire journey allows all stakeholders to take a holistic view of the customer when making major or micro decisions and always consider the context of where the customer is in their journey and what matters at that moment. Your customer’s experience with your brand and product spans multiple people, departments, touchpoints, pieces of content and happens over a period of time during which their understanding of your product and their own needs are evolving.

Also — every interaction is an opportunity to reinforce your value, improve your relationship and learn from your customer.

4 parts to the Customer Journey

I like to think of the journey in 4 different phases where customers will interact with every part of your company from sales & marketing to using your product (support + operations). #1–3 can be referred to as the ‘Buyer’s Journey’ and can be in any order depending on the product or market.

1.PROBLEM/SEARCH & EDUCATION

This is when the customer realizes they have a problem and begin their search for a solution. During this phase they might do research on their problem and look for potential solutions, ask friends, etc. [marketing]

2. DISCOVERY/EDUCATION:

Once they are aware of your product this phase involves educating themselves on your product (and probably other simultaneously), understanding how it will solve their problem and probably learning more about your company.

Note that In a lot of cases, when customers are searching for a solution they have a few key ‘features’ in mind and they want to understand as quickly as possible if your product can do X or Y before they invest more time in learning about it.

In this phase the customer will generally interact with your content and sales or try the product if its a self-service freemium model.

3.CONVERSION

When the customer makes a decision to buy or sign up or becomes an active user and get value from the product.

For a sales-led process the ‘conversion’ normally happens when the customer decides to ‘buy’. Whereas in a self-service model the conversion would include signing up, trying, gaining value from a product before becoming a paying customer. And in freemium models many might never become paying customers but instead become an important channel to drive growth. So conversion can be defined multiple ways — even for multiple personas within 1 product.

4.ONGOING USAGE

All touchpoints and activity once the customer is an active user of the product including ‘distribution’ and customer support.

How to Document the Customer Journey

So what does a successful customer journey look like for your product?

For each persona (or use case) make a list of each step the customer takes and identify the following:

• Action they must take to progress to the next step (there may be multiple)
• Customer motivations at each step (more on these below)

Hint: If you are really starting from scratch just pick your most obvious persona and use case and you can always add variations later. The goal is to get an end to end journey on paper.

The Process

Here is a tried and true process for doing this that will result in the best results:

1. COLLABORATE WITH YOUR TEAM

Talk to everyone who interacts with your customers before, during and after conversion to get a clear idea of what happens and what matters. The goal is to get a glimpse into the customers’ state of mind at each step and understand what they need to advance to the next step.

2. COLLECT DATA POINTS & FEEDBACK

Data: Pull in marketing data, attribution, product usage data. If your product has an online sign-up/on boarding sequence then the order of actions and information they use and choices they make at each step are vital. I personally love watching hotjar videos to see what new users do inside a product. Usually after watching about 5 you have a good idea of what needs to be improved.

Qualitative feedback: The most valuable data you have are the email/chat content from inbound leads, sales interactions and then existing customers.

3. TALK TO CUSTOMERS?

Yep — they are best source of information on getting insights into your customer journey! But come up with your own journey first and then use discussions with customers to validate and expand on each step and motivation so that you can ask the right questions.

BASIC TOOLS TO GET STARTED?

So, the important part is that you start writing and start thinking about each step. Ideally you want to use a medium that allows for frequent changes and is easy to share and iterate on.

1. Whiteboard or large piece of paper — always start here to sketch out ideas and ideate during meetings! I like to use one column for each step. Then transfer the ideas to ‘paper’ in an organized format.
2. Google docs/sheets — This is an easy one as everyone uses it and you can share and comment.
3. Notion — my personal favourite because it allows columns (very helpful for showing multiple decision points and motivations) and tables once you’ve firmed up your different stage/steps and you can use the tag feature.

Identify customer motivations for each step

As you define each step in your journey, you want to try to include the following ‘Motivations’ for each one. And if you’re mapping at the micro level (for a specific feature or in-product events) these can get really detailed.

First define the step and the action they need to take to advance to the next step (these can be multiple actions) and then add the following information for each one:

1. WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO THE CUSTOMER What matters to them and what do they need to accomplish at each step? Note that this is heavily related to their persona. So for each personas the needs and motivations might differ at each step.
2. WHAT DO THEY NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL? You’ve already defined what a ‘successful’ journey looks like so you have already defined the action that needs to be taken to move to the next one — what information or input or result or feedback does your customer need in order to take that action.
3. WHY ARE THEY TAKING THIS ACTION ? So once you understand what matters to them at that moment and the information or input they need to take the action to advance to the next step, you can ask what is the goal in taking that action — in other words what do they expect or want to happen next. By understanding the customer’s goal in doing X or wanting Y you can identify opportunities or friction points.

Talking to Customers

Once you’ve documented all the steps in your journey and come up with your best guesses about the motivation of your buyers or customers at each step, you can dig in and look for validation as well as more in-depth feedback from your customers (and potential customers if its early in the journey)

By asking these questions below you will get the information you need to understand the motivations

New customers

WHERE DID YOU HEAR ABOUT US? Find out what other solutions they looked for, where they looked and what was important to them.

WHERE/WHAT DID YOU SEARCH AND WHY? What channels did they go to first and what were they looking for? What keywords or categories or problem were they searching for?

WHY DID YOU CHOOSE US? What drew them to you? What gets them excited? What was the AHA moment?

HOW CAN WE IMPROVE? Be specific. Ask detailed questions about each step you’ve identified and get your customers’ feedback.

PROSPECTS: As prospects come through your funnel you want to gather some of the same information and additionally find out why they don’t choose your product over other solutions or where they drop off in your process . If one of your goals is to attract new customers/channels/segments or identify new features to g, the top of the funnel customer journey — frequently called the ‘buyer journey’ — feedback from prospects will be a good source of data. Sales people are usually really keyed into the ‘buyer mentality’ and needs early in the journey and can provide a list of micro-steps and motivations.

What to ask existing customers

So the deeper we get into the journey the more specific your questions should be around your product, the problems that it solves and how people use it.

When you’re talking to customers its really important to note the persona and what is important to them in their job as their feedback needs to be considered in terms of this context.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE THING/FEATURE ABOUT THE PRODUCT?Ask follow up questions on this one — why do you like that, what does it do for you,

WHAT IS YOUR LEAST FAVOURITE THING OR FEATURE? The goal is to get them to talk about friction points or things they wished the product could do. Always ask them why something matters so understand the impact it has (there are usually multiple ways to solve a friction point if you understand the real problem is creates)

Key Motivations and Steps

Here are a few of the key questions you want to make sure you know the answers to when documenting your journey and talking with customers. Usually for early stage startups these are the fundamental challenges they need to solve in order be successful.

1.PROBLEM/SEARCH What is the problem, where are they searching? [improve marketing]

2.EDUCATION — Product Positioning: What are the alternatives? What is hard about them? What makes your product unique or better? [content + sales]

3.CONVERSION What is the AHA moment? How do you get them to it? (Product + Sales)

4.ONGOING USAGE How can you increase usage? How can you add more value? GET REFERRALS! [Product + Customer Support & Success + Operations]

Product Micro-Improvements

Here are some examples of specific results or deliverables achieved through this process. Normally the process of documenting turns up lots of these!

New Opportunities

• Update marketing and sales content
• Improve and automate customer communications
• Improve and automate onboarding and education
• Create new metrics and ways to track them
• Identify specific channels and messaging
• Identify new features or adjacent product opportunities

Friction Points

• Identify confusion and improve communications
• Understand how customers want to interact/reach you
• Identify common stumbling blocks during onboarding or usage
• Identify need for new/better technologies