Customer journey: understanding and mapping your customer journey

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey is the representation of the successive stages a customer goes through in their relationship with a company. It describes the customer's actions, expectations, emotions, and touchpoints with the brand.

This representation is often visualised as a customer journey map, which highlights key moments, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

The main stages of a customer journey

While it varies by sector, a classic customer journey includes several stages :

• Awareness: the customer identifies a need or a problem.
• Information gathering: they compare available solutions.
• Evaluation: they shortlist a few options and contact providers.
• Decision and purchase: they choose a solution and finalise the transaction.
• Usage and support: they use the product or service and contact support if needed.
• Loyalty and advocacy: they renew their purchase, expand their usage, and recommend the brand.

The role of CRM in the customer journey

CRM is the tool that enables a company to concretely track a specific customer's journey: which emails they received, which conversations they had with a sales rep, which quotes they signed, and which requests they sent to support.

This traceability serves two purposes. In day-to-day operations, it allows for personalised interactions and prevents data silos (for example, a sales rep being unaware of a recent support ticket). At a company-wide level, it allows for the analysis of actual journeys, the identification of friction points, and continuous improvement of the customer experience.

How to map your customer journeys

Best practices for building a useful map:

• Start from representative personas rather than an abstract average view.
• Rely on real data: CRM, support, satisfaction surveys, web analytics.
• Identify touchpoints (website, email, phone, physical store, meetings, customer portal).
• Highlight 'moments of truth', where the experience can significantly shift for better or worse.
• Compare internal perceptions with real customer experiences through interviews or feedback.

Common mistakes

Several typical pitfalls:

• Building a theoretical journey without data or customer interviews.
• Limiting the journey to the sales phase and ignoring usage and support.
• Mapping only once without updating the work as things evolve.
• Confusing the customer journey with internal processes: the customer's experience is not just a reflection of your internal stages.

Questions to ask yourself

To make this process useful for a CRM project:

• Who are our typical customers and what paths do they take?
• Which moments are most critical for them?
• Which journey data is actually available today?
• Which pain points appear most frequently in customer feedback?

Further reading

Once the journey is defined, you can dive deeper with our article on the CRM sales cycle and the one on key CRM features.

Journey mapping is also an excellent starting point for structuring a CRM project scope.

Key takeaways

• The customer journey describes the full set of stages a customer goes through with a company.
• A typical journey covers awareness, research, evaluation, purchase, usage and loyalty.
• The CRM is the tool that makes it possible to track this journey effectively and personalise interactions.
• Mapping must be based on actual data and feedback, rather than a theoretical vision.
• It is a useful prerequisite for any CRM, marketing or customer service project.

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