The customer journey is the path a customer takes from initially learning about your product or service to becoming a happy, loyal user. Mapping this journey allows startups to truly understand their users’ needs, pain points, and desires at each stage.
This process uncovers key insights startup founders can use to develop products that perfectly fit their customers’ needs. It also reveals opportunities to improve messaging, pricing, distribution channels, and retention tactics.
In other words, mapping the customer journey is an essential process for any startup that wants to create delightful customer experiences. Here’s how to do it right.
The key stages of the customer journey
While each customer journey is unique, most follow a similar structure with these key stages:
- Awareness – The customer becomes aware of your product but lacks information about it.
- Interest – They start seeking out information as they move from unaware to aware.
- Consideration – The customer evaluates solutions to determine the best fit for their needs.
- Decision – They decide to purchase your product over competitors.
- Onboarding – The customer begins using your product for the first time.
- Adoption – With successful onboarding, users start fully utilizing your product.
- Loyalty – After positive experiences, loyal users refer others and make repeat purchases.
Understanding customer emotions, questions, and needs at each stage allows you to tailor messaging and features to assist them on their journey.
For example, someone in the Awareness stage needs to understand what your product is and why they should care. Users in the Consideration phase need detailed information about benefits, features, and pricing to evaluate solutions.
Methods for mapping customer journeys
Customer interviews
Sitting down with real customers is the best way to map their actual journeys. A combination of user research and customer development interviews helps uncover:
- How they initially discovered your product
- Their evaluation process and decision drivers
- Pain points and delights during onboarding
- Ongoing usage habits and loyalty status
Customers interviews discover us for the first time to understand their initial perceptions.
We also regularly check in with longtime customers to learn how their usage evolves.
User testing
Observing real people using your product reveals pain points and delights first-hand. You can:
- Ask users to show you how they complete key tasks during onboarding. Where do they struggle?
- Set up remote user tests to monitor facial expressions and capture emotional reactions.
- Use session replay tools to see exactly how customers navigate your app or website.
Where do they get stuck or lost?
Fixing usage hurdles uncovered from testing helps smooth the journey.
Data analysis
Examining analytics can uncover large-scale usage patterns and trends, including:
- Traffic sources: How do most visitors discover your product?
- Conversion funnels: Where do they drop off during signup flows?
- Engagement metrics: How frequently and deeply do they use your product?
- Churn and retention rates: How long do they stay customers?
We analyze our app’s event data to understand the customer journey. Seeing where users struggle to convert or churn helps us focus on product development.
Customer feedback
Actively collecting feedback from customers provides direct insights into their journey.
- Surveys can reveal satisfaction levels, desires, and pain points.
- Support conversations uncover common onboarding and usage hurdles.
- NPS surveys help gauge loyalty and satisfaction over time.
- Reviews offer candid feedback on customer experiences.
Monitoring feedback channels regularly ensures you stay on top of the customer journey.
Journey mapping in action
Let’s walk through a real-world example of mapping the customer journey for a fictional startup: PetPhotos.
PetPhotos offers an app allowing pet owners to take photos of their pets with fun AR masks and effects. The startup wants to map the customer journey to improve user onboarding and retention.
After conducting 50 customer interviews, analyzing their app data, running usability tests, and reviewing app store feedback, here are the key insights uncovered in each stage of the PetPhotos customer journey:
Awareness: Most customers discovered PetPhotos from social media ads. Ad messaging clearly conveyed the fun value proposition.
Interest: Customers researched the app and brand before downloading. They wanted to confirm the effects looked realistic and weren’t cheesy.
Consideration: Price, ease of use, and app quality were the main decision factors. Customers compared PetPhotos with less expensive paid apps offering similar effects.
Decision: Customers ultimately chose PetPhotos because reviews mentioned it was the highest quality with the most pet-friendly effects.
Onboarding: The sign-up flow was quick and easy. However, learning to use the app’s robust photo editing features took time. Many customers left frustrated before fully exploring features.
Adoption: Customers who made it through onboarding easily incorporated PetPhotos into their daily routine and used it frequently. Sharing photos on social media was popular.
Loyalty: Long-time PetPhotos users became brand advocates online. They left reviews, shared photos,
and suggested new effect ideas. But after the novelty wore off some users became less engaged.
With this 360-degree view, PetPhotos gained several key insights:
- Their sign-up flow is quick, but the app lacks proper onboarding education. Many new users don’t know how to take advantage of the app’s full capabilities.
- They can leverage delighted loyal users to organically promote PetPhotos on social media through user-generated content.
- While the app is fun and addictive at first, it needs more ways to engage users long-term after the novelty wears off.
Armed with these insights, PetPhotos can now:
- Improve onboarding flows with in-app tutorials and guides.
- Create social media hashtag campaigns to promote user-generated content.
- Develop more ways to keep users engaged over time with new effects, social features,
and special events.
By mapping the entire customer journey, PetPhotos uncovered key opportunities at each stage of the funnel. Now they can take targeted actions to optimize user acquisition, onboarding, and retention.
Best practices for mapping customer journeys
Follow these best practices as you map your startup’s customer journey:
- Take an outside-in perspective
Avoid making assumptions about the journey based on your internal view of the product.
Talk to real customers to gain an outside-in perspective on their experience. - Involve the entire startup
Get insights from sales, marketing, product, support, and leadership.
Each team interacts with customers and can help reconstruct the full journey. - Take a holistic approach
Don’t just focus on the initial acquisition. Map the entire journey from initial discovery to long-term loyalty to uncover opportunities in each stage. - Regularly update the maps
Customer journeys evolve as your product changes. Revisit the maps quarterly to account for new customer behaviors. - Segment by customer type
Different customers can have very different journeys. Map distinct journeys for key customer segments. - Prioritize key insights
Focus on major gaps and opportunities, not one-off data points. Identify insights with the biggest potential business impact. - Leverage journey mapping insights
Don’t just file the maps away. Embed key insights into strategy planning, roadmaps, and messaging across departments.
Journey mapping brings your customers’ world into focus
You can have the most innovative product and stellar engineering team, but startups still fail when they don’t fully understand their customers’ needs.
Mapping the customer journey illuminates those needs and desires in each stage. It reveals precisely how customers discover, evaluate, and use new products in their natural environments.
While the process takes effort, it provides a 360-degree view of target users so founders can develop truly customer-centric products, messaging, and go-to-market strategies.
Rather than making assumptions, map the journeys to walk in your customers’ shoes. Let their wants, difficulties, and delights guide your startup to success. Their journeys can show you the way.