Soldiers and their girls window shopping. April, 1943.

Customer Journeys

Customer journeys show the path or steps a customer takes to complete a particular task, such as purchase a product or download a whitepaper. A customer often interacts with several channels (Website, Mobile device, in-store representative) to accomplish a task. Kevin Nichols has written a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to build a customer journey and map content to it. You can download the customer journey content mapping whitepaper on AvenueCX’s website, which is free of charge.

Customer journeys (or cross-channel journeys) are the key component for defining an omnichannel content strategy. A high-level, cross-channel journey might look like this:

For Business to Business:

Cross-channel Journey B2B Example

For Business to Consumer:

Cross-Channel Customer Journey Retail Example

Done well, a consumer journey:

  • Starts with a group of tasks required for a consumer to accomplish certain goals (e.g., purchase a product, locate a store, get support for a purchased product).
  • Creates a series of steps within each task that a consumer will go through, often-times through several channels.
  • Informs which content is necessary at which step in each task to empower the consumer to go to the next step.

Remember that a consumer journey may take several different paths, going through several channels and may not always be linear.

Benefits of a Customer Journey

For omnichannel content strategy, well-designed customer journeys provide the mechanism to create successful content experience. A well-designed customer journey:

  • Puts a consumer at the center of the experience and creates a content experience around consumer needs and perceptions. I.e., consumer-centric content!
  • Provides the structure to help understand customer interaction within the omnichannel content experience.
  • Can be used not only for the content strategy, but also for user experience definition, personalization needs and channel prioritization.

Interested in a workshop on customer journeys? Fill out this form at AvenueCX.com.

Photo: Soldiers and their girls window shopping in the evening. Baltimore, MD. April, 1943.