How do you use it?

Customer journeys can have different steps depending on the type of business you are describing. The differences will be mostly noticable in the second half of the journey; for example, many types of products are not purchased regularly but only once or occasionally. Therefore it may be helpful to customize the journey for your particular business.

Next, it can be helpful to identify the steps that are most important for your business. Typically, for starting businesses the focus is on the first few steps: building awareness, and getting your customer to make their first purchase. For established businesses it is much more about building loyalty and word-of-mouth.

Which steps are important can also depend on your situational factors. For example, a restaurant at a crowded tourist area doesn’t need to focus on building awareness (because they are clearly visible) or on getting regular purchases (because most tourists won’t come back). In contrast, a restaurant that is hidden will have to rely much more on building awareness and preference, and may want to focus on advocacy (word-of-mouth).

After you have identified the most important steps for your business, you need to identify for each step how you get your customer to make it. How do you get them from unaware to aware, from aware to preference, etcetera. Typically the first couple of steps are about communication (advertising, social media marketing, word-of-mouth), while the later ones are about your offering (product, service, experience).

This way, you end up with a set of priorities for your business to focus on.

How do you teach it?

I normally ask my students to create their Customer Journey in 3 steps: (1) define the steps of the journey, (2) decide which of these steps are the most important, and (3) decide what you need to do to get your customers to make each step.

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