The retail customer journey has the same skeleton as any other, awareness through advocacy, but the internet has scrambled how customers actually move through the stages. The diagram looks linear; real shoppers bounce backwards and sideways. Here are the five stages, how to measure each one, and the points where retailers most commonly lose customers between them.
Twenty years running a business will teach you a fair bit about customer service, but it's not everything. So we asked twelve small-business owners and customer service experts a single question: what's your personal, number-one customer service must-do? The answers are sharper, weirder and more actionable than the textbooks.
A journey map sitting on a Confluence page generates no value. The point is using it to find and remove the customer pain points it surfaces. Here's how to use a journey map operationally, instrumented with transactional feedback, cross-referenced with complaints, and walked end-to-end as a customer, so the pain points get found and fixed instead of just documented.
Most journey-mapping workshops end with a colourful wall and a flat result. The difference between the ones that drive change and the ones that don't usually comes down to planning, goals, persona selection, attendee list, pre-work. Here's the step-by-step process for running a customer journey mapping workshop that actually produces actionable output.
Customer journey mapping is having a moment, and the moment includes some genuine disadvantages most enthusiastic write-ups skip. Here are the real advantages (retention, cost reduction, better cross-functional comms) honestly weighed against the disadvantages, so you can decide whether journey mapping is worth the time and money in your business right now.
Most teams think they have a clear view of their customer journey, until they sit in a room together and discover everyone's view is different. That's why journey mapping workshops work. This long-form guide walks through the B2B journey-mapping process step by step, from problem identification through implementation, with the practical detail to run the workshop yourself.