A introduction to customer journeys

1. What is a Customer Journey?

The term "customer journey" often refers to the complete lifecycle before, during, and after a purchase or customer relationship. Market Partner defines this differently. Every single situation where the customer interacts with you is a customer journey. On a micro level, your customers can undertake dozens of customer journeys. Together, they form a sum of experiences that create the overall impression the customer has of your company.

Good customer journeys are as frictionless as possible. Friction is anything that hinders or bothers the customer—making it harder for them to do what they want.

Here are some examples of friction that diminish the customer experience:

A form that asks for too much information

A cluttered website where you can't find what you're looking for

Long wait times on customer service calls

Difficulty understanding which product you need, and an unclear offer on important points.

Systematically working to remove friction from each customer journey is highly beneficial and is the only recipe for satisfied customers, assuming the core product is good. Satisfied customers tell others about you and are your best ambassadors. They are often more loyal. Dissatisfied customers are unhappy because they have encountered friction in a customer journey, and most do not voice their concerns.

Poor customer journeys lead to worse sales results, negative word-of-mouth, and customer churn. By building better customer journeys, you are, in other words, building a healthy, strong, and sustainable business.

Here are more examples of customer journeys you are likely familiar with:

Customer Journey

A customer journey is viewed from the customer’s perspective and focuses on ensuring a positive experience—not just during the sales phase—but throughout the entire customer lifecycle, across all situations and touchpoints. This includes face-to-face interactions as well as the experience of using our digital channels.

Buyer´s Journey

The buyer’s journey encompasses a buyer’s path from problem recognition to finding a solution, often defined in three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

The Sales Process

The sales process is a description of what the company does from the first contact with a potential customer until the sale is completed. It focuses on what we as a company want to achieve and how we can ensure that we extract value from a customer relationship during the sales phase.

3. Why Should You Work on Customer Journeys?

One negative experience can be enough for you to lose a sale, gain a dissatisfied customer, or receive a bad review. Similarly, one positive experience can create satisfied and loyal customers who recommend you to their friends and colleagues or praise you in digital channels.

By systematically working on the most important customer journeys, where users experience a lot of friction, you can reduce negative experiences, increase the positive ones, and build a sustainable and ever-stronger brand—a well-oiled "engine," if you will.

4. Customer Journeys Occur at All Stages of the Customer Lifecycle

Customer journeys occur at all stages of a customer's lifecycle. If we put on our business glasses, we can place each customer journey into one of the company's core processes. Market Partner primarily works with customer journeys in the following core processes:

1. Marketing

2. Sales

3. Delivery and use

4. Customer service

5. Customer follow-up.

In each of these core processes, many micro-customer journeys occur. Market Partner has developed a method to identify these, which you can see examples of in the next two paragraphs.

5. Customer Journeys in a Typical B2B Company

Below is a standard example of customer journeys in the B2B market. The five core processes mentioned in the previous section are presented linearly in the sequence they appear in the value chain. There are two key points to note here:

First, marketing is placed before sales in the timeline. While this is common in B2C, in many B2B companies today, the opposite is true: sales identifies and contacts potential customers, while marketing acts as a support function for sales. This is, in most cases, an outdated model. It is far more cost-effective for marketing to play the role of generating market awareness and attracting ready-to-buy prospects for sales to work with. After the digital shift, customer behavior has changed—sellers no longer hold the power, and customers can acquire all the information they need independently. Marketing's task is to position your business as the preferred choice.

Second, we’ve chosen to differentiate between customer service and customer follow-up. While they are closely related, systematic work requires nuance. The main distinction lies in who initiates contact. Customer service is initiated by the customer (reactive), when they have a question, problem, or complaint. Customer follow-up is initiated by the company (proactive) as a process to maintain the customer relationship and ensure customer retention.

The five core processes, as shown in the model below, do not necessarily occur linearly over time. The need for customer service can arise at any stage in the customer lifecycle—from marketing to delivery and usage. Customer follow-up can take place during delivery or even beforehand. All processes are mutually reinforcing and can trigger new opportunities for sales or contract renewals. It’s therefore more accurate to view them as interconnected, mutually reinforcing processes in a flywheel:

markedspartners-kundereisekart-b2b kundereiser-svinghjul

6. Customer Journeys in B2C and eCommerce

The example below shows customer journeys in an online store (eCommerce). Here, there are often fewer customer journeys in the sales phase than in a B2B business, as most eCommerce companies rely on self-service and the customer making the purchase without assistance from a seller. If one succeeds in reducing friction in these customer journeys, it can contribute to additional purchases, subscription renewals, and prevent churn (customer loss).

7. How to get started with customer journeys?

The example below shows customer journeys in an online store (eCommerce). Here, there are often fewer

Feel free to use the search models above and map out which customer journeys exist in your business today. Which one you should prioritize first depends on factors such as:

- Which customer journeys affect the most?

- Which is easiest to improve?

- Which has the greatest potential?

When you start, ensure that the team working on the customer journeys has a "holistic view." It's easy for salespeople or marketers to look at the journeys in their own silos – but to work systematically with customer journeys, we must both see the whole across all processes and, when necessary, put on the micro lenses to see the details in each customer journey.

Look at each customer journey from the outside, from the customer's perspective. Walk in their shoes. They want to accomplish what they need with the least effort and friction. Friction is anything that complicates, distracts, delays, or confuses in the customer journey and contributes to a poor customer experience.

Friction can lead to a customer abandoning a purchase, but even customers who complete the purchase can be dissatisfied due to friction. View each customer journey as an opportunity to positively surprise the customer. This creates the WOW feeling, word of mouth, and can be what it takes to turn your customers into "fans" and ambassadors.

Data is a prerequisite for creating personalized experiences today – and scaling this with automation. Most processes today generate data that you can use to build good customer journeys throughout the customer lifecycle.

The more successful customer journeys you manage to create, the more profitable the business will become.

An introduction to customer journeys