The simple and straightforward way of interacting with customers in a traditional retail business model is a thing of the past.

In a traditional retail setup, a customer would simply walk into the store after seeing an ad, poster, or some other form of marketing communication, or through word-of-mouth recommendations. Then they would interact with a salesperson in the store to know about the offerings and experience the products. Finally, they would pay at the counter and go home. If they like the in-store experience and find the products useful and durable, they will come back. From a retailer’s point of view, the aforementioned customer journey, from brand discovery to purchase and customer retention, everything was linear and easy to manage.

But that is not the case anymore, as online retail keeps evolving every day and customers keep interacting with brands in more diverse ways than ever before. For instance, customers may:

1. Discover your brand/products through any medium, say, a digital ad, search engine, or social media.
2. Research your products anywhere, from your product pages, or customer reviews and ratings, to a third-party blog post.
3. ‘Experience’ your products through any means, from the direct experience in your brick-and-mortar store to VR experiences offered on an e-commerce site.
4. Purchase from any storefront, be it your own e-commerce store or any of your social media storefronts.
5. Contact you through email or personal messaging, apps, or social media for customer support and post-purchase engagement.

These infinite choices of mediums to engage with customers make it extremely hard for businesses to create a competitive advantage and succeed by optimizing every customer touchpoint. This is because businesses have to judiciously spend resources on these touchpoints; after all, every business has a limited budget.

Moreover, not every touch point is necessarily essential. For instance, a customer buying shoes for the first time from a brand may want to experience the product directly before purchasing to verify if the shoes fit their feet properly and find the right size. So, it would be more efficient and effective to optimize the in-store experience and optimize specific touchpoints like these at every stage of the journey to create a seamless e-commerce customer journey. This can be achieved by creating e-commerce customer journey maps.

In this article, we will explore the significance of customer journey mapping in the e-commerce ecosystem and the steps involved in creating a customer journey map.

Index

1. Introduction

2. What is a Customer Journey in E-commerce?

3. Stages of E-commerce Customer Journey

    – Awareness

    – Consideration

    – Purchase

    – Retention

    – Advocacy

4. What is Customer Journey Mapping?

5. Elements of a Customer Journey Map

    – Customer Persona

    – Stages of the Customer Journey

    – Touchpoints

    – Channels

    – Emotions

    – Pain Points

    – Moments of Truth

    – Opportunities

6. Importance of E-commerce Customer Journey Mapping for Improving Customer Experience

    – Efficiency Improvement

    – Effectiveness of the Purchase Process

    – Understanding Customers

    – Identification of Goals

    – Creating Synergy Amongst Teams

    – Strategic Planning

    – Pain Point Mitigation

7. Types of Data Required for E-commerce Customer Journey Mapping

    – Website Journey

    – User Behavior

    – Logs

    – Surveys

    – Customer Interviews

    – Market Research

    – Competitive Analytics

    – Social Media Observation

8. Preparation for E-commerce Customer Journey Mapping

    – Define the Scope

    – Set Your Goals

    – Build Customer Personas

    – Map All the Touchpoints

    – Data Collection

9. Steps Involved in Creating a Customer Journey Map

    – Trace the Customer Journey Through Stages

    – Capture Customer Behavior, Actions, and Emotions

    – Map Customer Journey Paths

    – Make Visual Representations

    – Share with Stakeholders

    – Constant Monitoring and Updating

10. Key Takeaways

11. FAQs

What is a customer journey in e-commerce?

An e-commerce customer journey is the entire process that a customer undergoes while making an online purchase. It encompasses the entire spectrum of interactions between the customer and the online store, from initial product discovery to conversion, post-purchase support, ongoing communication, and beyond. A customer journey map acts as a comprehensive roadmap that details the steps customers typically take throughout their online purchasing experiences that shape their relationship with the online store.

Key Takeaways

1. E-commerce customer journey mapping is essential for businesses to understand and optimize customer interactions throughout the buying process.

2. The customer journey in e-commerce consists of five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy.

3. Elements of a customer journey map include customer personas, stages of the journey, touchpoints, channels, emotions, pain points, moments of truth, and opportunities.

4. E-commerce customer journey mapping helps improve efficiency, effectiveness, understanding of customers, identification of goals, team synergy, strategic planning, and pain point mitigation.

5. Data required for e-commerce customer journey mapping includes website journey, user behavior, logs, surveys, customer interviews, market research, competitive analytics, and social media observation.

6. Preparation for e-commerce customer journey mapping involves defining scope, setting goals, building customer personas, mapping touchpoints, and collecting data.

7. Steps for creating a customer journey map include tracing the journey, capturing behavior and emotions, mapping paths, making visual representations, sharing with stakeholders, and constant monitoring and updating.

What are the stages of e-commerce customer journey?

Following are the five stages of an e-commerce customer journey.

1.    Awareness

This is the initial stage where the customer comes to know about your business, brand, and products through a search engine, social media, other marketing communication, or even word-of-mouth recommendations from close ones.

2.    Consideration

In this phase, the customer evaluates your offerings and compares them with what your competition offers, before making a purchase decision.

3.    Purchase

After thoroughly considering the pros and cons of your product and other alternatives, the customer finally decides to purchase from you. They complete this phase of the journey by making a purchase decision, going through the checkout process, and completing the purchase from any one of your storefronts.

4.    Retention

Every business wants to retain customers more than find new ones. They achieve it through post-purchase engagement, which not only includes customer support but also other forms of communication preferred by the customers, such as email marketing, newsletters, product suggestions, offers and discounts, sharing knowledge resources, interacting with customers through social media, etc. All these activities culminate in customer engagement, convincing them to make repeated purchases, and ultimately ‘retaining’ them.

5.    Advocacy

In this stage, the customers are satisfied with the brand and product offerings and ‘advocate’ for the brand. They recommend the brand and products through reviews, social media posts, and word of mouth to their friends, family, and relatives.

In all these five stages of the customer journey, there can be many obstacles or shortcomings. These hurdles pose a challenge for e-commerce businesses and prevent them from achieving a seamless e-commerce customer journey that enables a frictionless and smooth transition from one phase of the customer journey to another through the conversion funnel. You can learn more about the importance of a seamless e-commerce customer journey from this article.

So, every commerce business must understand how customers interact with them at various stages of the customer journey and optimize these touchpoints. This is where the customer journey mapping comes in.

What is a customer journey map?

The customer journey map is one that visually captures the customer experience of a business, brand, or product, tracing the journey of the customer through various phases of the purchase process, and outlining the interactions of the customer with the business at various touchpoints.

The purpose of a customer journey map is to understand how a customer interacts with the business and the inconveniences and issues they face at various touchpoints. It further provides insights on the emotions, customer behavior, motivations, and pain points of the customer at every stage of the customer journey. Through customer journey mapping, you can gain insights on the problems that your customer is facing during the customer journey and address them one by one so that you can offer a seamless e-commerce customer journey, achieve customer satisfaction, and create a competitive advantage for your business.

What are the elements of a customer journey map?

Following are the elements of a customer journey map:

1. Customer Persona

Customer personas define the typical profiles of various customer segments of an e-commerce business. A customer persona may include their demographics: age, gender, geographical location, etc. It may also encompass their product interests, preferences, and behaviors.

2. The five stages of the customer journey

The customer journey map visualizes the five stages of the customer journey, namely awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

3. Touchpoints

A touchpoint is a point of interaction between the customer and a business at a given stage of a customer journey. For instance, the product description page on your website is a touchpoint for the customer during the product research phase, as it acts as a place to identify whether the product suits their needs and compare them with the competitors’ offerings. Similarly, at every stage of the customer journey, there will be numerous touchpoints, such as social media interactions, customer support chats, etc.

4. Channels

The difference between a touch point and a channel is that a touchpoint is a point of interaction and the channel is the medium through which the interaction occurs. For instance, in the aforementioned example, visiting a product page on your e-commerce site for product research is a touchpoint, while your website is the channel through which the customer interacts with your business. Channels include online platforms, physical stores, mobile apps, etc.

5. Emotions

The customer journey map captures how a customer feels emotionally at every touch point. For instance, the customers may feel excited with the personalization built into the e-commerce store design that gave them an exclusive discount when they made the purchase decision but frustrated with the post-purchase support they received through a primitive customer support chat. The customer journey map clearly captures these emotions in various touch points and identifies where your business shines and where you fall short in terms of e-commerce customer experience management.

6. Pain Points

The e-commerce customer journey map identifies challenges, problems, or obstacles that customers endure during their customer journey. It identifies the factors that impact their progress through the subsequent stages, prevent conversion, and lead to dissatisfaction.

7. Moments of Truth

The customer journey map also captures certain crucial points in the customer journey – points where customers take action, make decisions, or form perceptions about your business, brand, or products that impact their overall experience, trust, or loyalty. For instance, they may judge an online store to be trustworthy based on instances where they get quick refunds after a short interaction with customer support during the retention phase.

8. Opportunities

Finally, a customer journey map lists out areas of opportunity for the e-commerce business to focus on to enhance the customer experience, address pain points, and create memorable interactions to build loyalty and advocacy.

By analyzing and understanding these elements, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers’ experiences and develop an action plan to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Why is e-commerce customer journey mapping important for improving customer experience?

Improving the customer experience involves understanding customer behavior, identifying the problems they face at various stages of the purchasing process, and addressing those issues. Customer journey mapping enables you to capture all that and create a seamless customer journey free from issues and inconvenience for the customers. Following are some of the ways in which e-commerce customer journey mapping helps improve customer experience management.

1. Mapping improves the efficiency of the customer journey

With the increasing number of interactions with the business, the number of touchpoints also increases. But not all the touchpoints are essential.

For instance, if you have an efficient AI-powered chatbot on your e-commerce website that clarifies common queries instantly and if you also provide customers with a WhatsApp number for customer service, then it increases the number of instances where customers write to the Whatsapp number with those frequently asked queries, which they could have clarified themselves using the chatbot without human intervention. This will cost you more, reduce the efficiency of customer support, and impact customer experience if they have to wait for a long time to get a reply on WhatsApp. So, businesses should remove unnecessary touchpoints and streamline the customer journey.

A customer journey map accurately pinpoints unnecessary steps or touchpoints and lets you make the process efficient and customer-friendly.

2. Effectiveness of the Purchase Process

Customer journey mapping helps you verify the effectiveness of the customer journey. If the customer journey does not match your customer base’s expectations and preferences, then it can affect the effectiveness of the process and the customer experience.

For instance, if you have designed text-heavy product pages for a customer base, who do not spend too much time reading about the product, then they may not engage with the content that you have provided. In that case, customer journey mapping will reveal the difficulty that customers face in understanding the product. It will reveal that you may have to redesign the product pages with more visual content, demo videos, and guides to mitigate the customer experience and improve customer satisfaction.

3. Understanding the Customers

Customer journey mapping helps you understand your customer base, their interests, behavior, and preferences. It helps you unravel the customers’ perspective on the customer journey. When you can see it from their point of view, you can optimize the e-commerce customer journey to meet their needs and improve customer experience management.

4. Identification of goals

Customer journey mapping enables you to analyze data and gain insights on what you need to achieve to provide a seamless e-commerce customer journey. It gives clarity on what needs to be done to succeed and helps you set data-driven SMART goals. When your goals are realistic, accurate, and time-bound, you can deliver what customers need at the right time and ensure a good customer experience.

5. Creating synergy amongst teams

Mapping the customer journey helps you allocate roles and responsibilities better for your teams and helps them work together better.

For instance, by mapping the customer journey, you can determine that a new user needs the help of a sales guide to help them through the product features and suitability for their needs. So, you can find a way to redirect the new users’ chats to a salesperson instead of allocating a post-purchase service and support executive by default. This will improve customer experience and improve the efficiency of your teams.

6. Strategic Planning

Customer journey mapping helps decide the future course of action. For instance, if there is a downward trend in customer retention, you can identify the factors driving it, forecast the trend based on other external factors, and plan customer engagement drives to address those factors. A customer journey map acts as a strategic compass that guides businesses toward innovation, scaling, and improvements.

7. Pain Point Mitigation

Through customer journey maps, you can identify and address the customers’ pain points throughout the customer journey and improve customer experience management.

You can also proactively assess the customer journey and embrace a culture of continuous improvement, allowing businesses to adapt to constantly changing customer needs in real time and maintain a competitive edge in the e-commerce landscape.

What are the kinds of data required for e-commerce customer journey mapping?

Data collection is one of the most important steps in customer journey mapping, and you must collect data from the following sources:

1.    Website Journey

You can use analytics tools to collect the data on how users navigate your website and how they reach your website – say through a digital ad, how they reach a landing page, click specific links that lead to product pages, and then reach the checkout process and beyond. It can show the paths they are taking and where they stop and leave. Tools like Google Analytics also show the platforms the customers use during the different stages of the journey.

2.    User Behavior

You can use tools that track user behavior on your e-commerce website and generate reports capturing where users click on the page, where they scroll to, which parts of the webpages they miss out, where they struggle to logically navigate to the next step/link, and what they do before choosing to interact with your call for action.

3.    Logs

You can collect the recorded customer support calls and chats, email queries, and all other user interactions to dig out the information on most common problems, frequency of occurrence of the same problem, etc., and identify trends and problems to find out the most pressing issues and obstacles in the customer journey.

4.    Surveys

There are numerous points in a customer journey where you can collect quantitative and qualitative data through surveys. For instance, you can ask about the shopping experience, immediately after a purchase. You can send an email to rate the customer experience with the online store. You can ask about the customer support experience after a customer support interaction.

5.    Customer Interviews

You can directly interact with customers and ask for qualitative feedback regarding their needs, preferences, interests, and pain points. You can incentivize these interactions with exclusive offers and discounts.

6.    Market Research

You can collect data from market research, industry studies, and academic studies related to your sector, industry, and product segments.

7.    Competitive analytics

You can do a comparative study on the customer journey maps of your competition. It helps you benchmark and identify the contemporary best practices in the industry.

8.    Social Media Observation

You can monitor the perception of customers on the purchase process and customer journey through social media. You can observe online reviews, feedback, comments, and tagged posts to identify trends, list down customer grievances, and look for ways to improve the customer experience.

How should you prepare for e-commerce customer journey mapping?

E-commerce journey mapping starts with some groundwork. Following are some of the preparation work that you may have to do.

1. Define the scope

Customer journeys are long and complicated, and covering everything in one map takes a lot of time and effort. It is easier to narrow down the scope of the exercise to cover high-priority areas that need to be addressed as quickly as possible. For instance, if customers face difficulties with resolving product issues, the scope is limited to the retention and post-purchase engagement stages of the e-commerce customer journey. You can create a customer journey map to address that.

2. Set your goals

You need to set the goals for the customer journey mapping exercise within the defined scope and clarify your intent. After all, without the ends, the means lead you nowhere. For instance, you can set goals for the aforementioned scope to create a customer journey map that identifies issues with customer support and find ways to improve customer service responses to product issues.

3. Build customer personas

Create customer profiles from every segment of your target audience based on demographics, interests, needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviors. A customer persona can be as follows:

Name:

Age:

Gender:

Geographical Location:

Interests:

Needs:

Pain Points:

4. Map all the touchpoints

You must identify and map all the touchpoints that the scope of the exercise covers. For the aforementioned example, the touchpoint includes all the instances of customer interaction with the customer support team, including customer chat support, telephone calls, email queries, complaints raised on social media, and interactions through personal messaging apps.

5. Data collection

Customer journey mapping requires extensive data collection. You can collect data from the sources mentioned above.

Steps involved in creating a customer journey map

After doing the preparation work, you can start mapping the customer journey of your e-commerce business using the following steps.

1. Trace the customer journey through the stages

Depending on your objectives and the scope of your mapping exercise, you can plot the key stages that a particular customer group goes through during their interactions with your business. For instance, if you’re planning to identify the pain points in post-purchase customer support, then it will involve touchpoints during the stages such as post-purchase engagement, customer retention, and advocacy.

2. Capture the customer’s behavior, actions, and emotions through the stages

Based on the data, write down every action, response, behavior, and emotion felt by the customer during the interaction with your business at every stage of the customer journey that you are covering in the customer journey map.

For instance, if your customers have given feedback mentioning they have not got the solutions for the problems despite contacting customer support multiple times, they would feel frustrated, they may write about their experiences on social media, give negative feedback on, say your business listing in Google maps, unsubscribe from your mailing list and stop buying from you again. These are the behaviors, actions, and emotions that you need to capture.

3. Map customer journey paths

Every type of customer may take a different journey and progress in different directions. Map all these different parts of the journey and scenarios that your customer groups take for different product offerings. You can also map the paths for different demographic groups including customers of certain age groups and gender.

4. Make visual representations of your customer journey maps

You can use various means of visualization, such as diagrams and flow charts. Dedicated customer journey mapping software is also available in the market as well for visualizing the maps. Ensure that these visual representations accurately depict the journey and make it easy for the stakeholders to understand when you share them.

5. Share with your stakeholders and concerned teams

You can share your customer journey and maps with your management and explain the obstacles in enhancing customer experience and increasing sales. You can also share with the concerned teams regarding the inconveniences that the customers face and ask them to find ways to make the customer experience better.

For instance, if the customers feel unhappy that they cannot reach out to the customer service team quickly, your customer support team can identify the reasons for it, such as outdated CRM software, or a lack of chatbots. By bringing out the ways to address these problems, you can list the strategic changes the management can implement, highlight the areas where they need to spend the resources better and the operational changes the teams can come up with to smoothen the e-commerce customer journey.

6. Monitor the customer journey constantly and update the maps

The market conditions and customer preferences constantly change. As a result, the customer journey may also change accordingly. So, it is crucial to constantly iterate and update the customer journey map to identify these changes in customer behavior and how they impact the business. It helps to keep your business agile and adaptable.

Click here to download the free Customer Journey Mapping Template[1] 

FAQs

1. What is a customer journey map for e-commerce?

A customer journey map traces the points of interaction between the customer and e-commerce business at various stages of the customer journey, from initial discovery to post-purchase engagement. These maps enable businesses to understand exactly where and how customers engage with them and optimize these touch points throughout the buying process. It ensures a pleasant and seamless e-commerce customer journey.

2. What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

The seven steps involved in customer journey mapping are:

1. Defining objectives of the mapping

2. Identifying customer personas

3. Mapping touchpoints

4. Gathering data

5. Analyzing insights

6. Implementing improvements at the touchpoints, and

7. Continuous optimization

3. What are the stages of the e-commerce customer journey?

The five stages of an e-commerce customer journey reflect the progression of a shopper from discovering a product or service to completing a transaction and beyond. These five stages include:

Awareness

Consideration

Decision Making and Purchase

Retention, and

Advocacy

4. What are the 4 stages of customer journey mapping?

The four stages of customer journey mapping involve gathering customer data, creating visual representations of the journey, executing strategies based on those insights, and assessing the effectiveness of implemented changes.

The four stages of e-commerce customer journey mapping typically comprise:

1. Research

2. Design

3. Implementation, and

4. Evaluation.

What is the seamless customer journey in e-commerce?

9. Provide shopping assistance

Another advantage of having a brick-and-mortar store is the opportunities it creates to listen to the customers directly, understand their needs, clarify doubts, and suggest the right products.

You can emulate this advantage on your e-commerce site by going the extra mile to provide live assistance on chat for customers to answer all their queries regarding your products and help them select the right products. By helping customers make informed purchase decisions, you can earn their trust and make the e-commerce customer journey smoother and seamless during the purchasing phase.

However, you have to have a strong customer support team trained to assist the customers and a reliable and efficient live chat software to enable the experience.

10. Provide omnichannel sales, marketing, and customer support

Customers these days reach out to businesses through various channels. So, you have to extend your key operations to whichever platforms your customers frequently use, i.e. open multiple storefronts and customer support on various platforms, and promote your business on all those platforms through concerted marketing efforts.

This calls for an omnichannel sales, marketing, and customer support strategy. You can achieve this through software integrations that bring all these channels into a singular control interface, enabling you to promote and sell your products and offer customer support through all these channels easily. This is indispensable because if you respond to customers’ grievances instantly on one platform but take a few hours to respond to customers on another, it could hinder a seamless customer journey and lead to the loss of customers. In contrast, by implementing an omnichannel strategy, you can serve your customers on every platform without any inconsistencies or disjointed experience.

For instance, a customer can effectively find your products through a digital ad on a third-party website, do the product research on your website, purchase through a social media storefront such as your Facebook page, and get post-purchase product support through a messaging service such as WhatsApp. In this case, a customer can move from one platform to another at any point of the customer journey seamlessly and still get a consistent and coherent customer experience. So, an omnichannel strategy is imperative for a seamless e-commerce customer journey.

FAQs

1. How can I improve my customer journey online?

Some of the ways to improve customer journey online include:

1. Enhancing the performance and the load speed of the e-commerce site
2. Tweaking the User Experience and the usability of the website
3. Making the navigation simple and more logical
4. Personalizing communication, product recommendations, and content
5. Offering multiple payment options for user convenience
6. Making the e-commerce website responsive and compatible with multiple platforms, including mobile devices

2. How can an e-commerce business improve customer experience?

An e-commerce business can improve the customer experience by mapping the customer journey. By identifying the inconveniences and hurdles faced by the customer at every stage of the customer journey, you can address them, iron out the issues, and improve the customer experience.

3. What is an e-commerce customer journey?

An e-commerce customer journey is the journey a customer undergoes while making an online purchase. It encompasses all the interactions between the customer and an online store, right from product discovery to conversion, post-purchase customer support and communication, and beyond.

4. What are the 5 stages of the customer journey?

 The 5 stages of the customer journey are:

1. Awareness – the initial stage where the customer comes to know about your business, brand, and products
2. Consideration – where the customer evaluates your offerings and compares your offerings with those of your competitors before making a purchase decision
3. Purchase – the stage where the customer makes a purchase decision, goes through the checkout process, and completes a purchase
4. Retention – where you as a business engage with the customer post-purchase, constantly communicating with them based on your understanding of their preferences, and convince them to make repeated purchases, ultimately ‘retaining’ them as customers in the long term
5. Advocacy – in this stage, the customers are satisfied with your brand and product offerings and recommend them through reviews and word of mouth to their friends, family, and relatives