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Customer Journey

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5 Customer Journey
From Practice to Theory
Patricia Harris, Harald Pol and
Gerrita van der Veen

Introduction
Technological developments have ensured strong worldwide growth in the use of
the internet and wireless devices, such as smartphones and tablets. As a result,
customers have many more opportunities to connect with companies. Processes
of purchasing and consuming have become real “journeys” because more
channels are involved and those channels are used more intensively. As a con-
sequence, channel preferences and use are constantly changing and customers
have more control over these journeys. With one click, they switch to a com-
petitor or share their experiences with the world. They are actively engaged
in purchase processes by communicating about a brand through, for example,
social media posts, online reviews, tweets, blogs and vlogs. They help, and get
help from, other customers using online forums and communities. Firms are no
longer in full control of the communication and interaction with their customers
and prospects and, in turn, no longer in full control of customer engagement
behavior. It is therefore not surprising that customer journeys are receiving con-
siderable attention in current business practice. An online search for “customer
journey” yields many thousands of results and demonstrates that interest in
the concept lies largely in the practitioner, rather than the academic, domain.
Moreover, the web is rich in software vendors, consultancies and industry
commentators offering their services to assist organizations with designing, ana-
lyzing and visualizing their customers’ journeys.
Customer journeys are defined as the processes of purchasing and experi-
encing products and services as seen from a customer’s perspective, and can be
thought of as a walk “in the customer’s shoes” (Holmlid and Evenson, 2008,
p.343). The focus on the customer perspective is the result of a shift in attention
in recent years from “marketing a product” to “creating an experience”.
Traditionally, organizations had a core competency, for example a proprietary
production technique, such as that for Coca Cola, which delivered sustainable
competitive advantage. The marketing department ensured optimal sales by
using the marketing mix to influence demand. Increasingly, however, sustained
protection of such proprietary knowledge and skills is virtually impossible.
Instead, competitive advantage arises when products and services are combined
in such a way as to create a unique customer experience. It is not the product or

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68 Harris et al.
service that determines success or failure, but the customer experience: this is the
essence of the paradigm change in the digital age. To realize this, the challenge
for organizations is to stay close to the customer and not to lose sight of them
because of the complexity of the digital environment. A successful organiza-
tion knows what its customers and prospects want and how they want to be
served. This requires insight into how the customer journey takes place and how
customers experience the journey –​a difficult task, given the increasing com-
plexity of the journeys. Mapping the customer journey can assist by creating
an instrument for organizations to use in predicting the steps customers and
prospects will take and in “helping” them with their choices. In this chapter,
we will discuss the theoretical foundations of the concept of customer journey
regarding:

• The configuration of the customer journey across channels as a result of

channel choice and channel mix decisions
• Customers’ experience across the journey, i.e. the interactions between
customers and providers, third parties and other customers
• Visualization of the customer journey through customer journey mapping
in order to optimize the customer experience

Despite its centrality in current business practice, a recent literature review

(Følstad and Kvale, 2018) confirms that the domain of the customer journey
is an immature field of study for academics. Although the customer journey
seems to be primarily an invention of practice, within the academic literature
we do find research streams, particularly in the literature on multichannel man-
agement and service management, that can help to build a better understanding
of the dynamics of the customer along their journey. In the multichannel man-
agement literature, the focus has been on the channel management strategies
required to underpin consumers’ purchase processes, from need recognition
to the point of making a purchase (i.e. the shopper journey). There are many
reasons for organizations to establish a multichannel strategy, such as achieving
cost efficiency or optimizing the distribution network to reach as many potential
customers as possible. A customer journey approach to multichannel manage-
ment, however, aims to arrange the channels in such a way that they accommo-
date the needs of the customer as much as possible (Neslin and Shankar, 2009).
In other words, the various channels should enhance the customer experience
and help customers in their search across all available channels for information,
services or specific products; increasingly, this is referred to as omnichannel man-
agement. Omnichannel has evolved from multichannel as the focus has shifted
from selling through different channels to facilitating an integrated, coordinated
experience for the customer. Key to omnichannel management is to acknowledge
the interdependence of channels and the need for coherence between channels to
satisfy the customer and achieve sales targets. Where multichannel management
literature is mainly concerned with the question of how the customer journey
takes place through different channels, service management focuses on the
question of how customers experience the service within the customer journey.

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 69

In the service management literature, the focus has been on the design of experi-
ential services as instruments to strengthen the entire customer experience across
the service process (Voss and Zomerdijk, 2007; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010,
2011). Service design aims to improve the customer experience across the mul-
tiple touchpoints at which service providers and customers meet and interact,
be they under the direct control of the service provider, indirect through third
parties or facilitated by the engagement behaviors of other customers. To this
end, service blueprinting was developed (Shostack, 1984) as a method to provide
input to service design by mapping out the interactions between the customer
and the service provider and facilitating infrastructure within the servicescape.
Customer journey mapping, as a method to visualize the journey and measure
the experience, has evolved from blueprinting.
The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. The next section (The
Shopper Journey) presents the shopper journey with a focus on channel mix
and choice. Following that, The Service Journey describes the service journey
with a focus on the interactions between a provider and its customer. Mapping
the Journey, Measuring the Experience deals with the methodology of mapping
the journeys and measuring the customer experience. Reflections and Future
Directions concludes the chapter with our thoughts on future directions and
challenges for research and business practice.

The Shopper Journey

The shopper journey is a specific form of customer journey in which the cus-
tomer activities are oriented around shopping activities –​browsing and
searching, evaluating, purchasing and post-​purchase activities such as arran-
ging delivery, exchanging or returning purchases, and contacting customer ser-
vice. Historically, the shopper journey has been a physical, spatial and temporal
journey –​a shopping trip made on foot or by private or public transport to
a brick and mortar store. Catalogue shopping has a long history (Sears’ first
catalogue was launched in 1888) but together with telephone shopping, played
a relatively minor role in overall shopping behavior. The decision of where
and when to shop was, primarily, governed by spatio-​temporal accessibility to
physical shops. The shopper expedited their journey in a single channel, usu-
ally the brick and mortar store channel, and patronized stores and shopping
centers that they could physically and temporally reach. Shopping journeys
were governed by travel times to stores, and store choice was made by weighing
up the attractiveness of a store or shopping center in terms of size, variety of
merchandise and facilities, and therefore likelihood of finding what you want,
against the time, effort and cost of getting there. Shopping convenience was, as a
result, conceptualized as minimization of time and physical effort. The internet
changed all that and, in the process, effected radical change in the fundamental
nature of shopping and the shopper journey.
Multichannel shopping is defined as “the pattern of shopping related activities
which consumers perform across different channels such as stores, the internet,
mobile devices, catalogues and the telephone” (Harris, 2017, p.355). Such

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70 Harris et al.
patronage of more than one shopping channel over a defined period is increas-
ingly the norm as shoppers spread their shopping across stores, online and the
mobile channel (Hand et al., 2009; Dawes and Nenycz-​Thiel, 2014; Melis et al.,
2015). However, a multichannel shopper’s journey will often involve the use of
only a single channel for search, evaluation and purchasing activities. Shoppers
use channels on a complementary basis, for example combining a monthly
online grocery shop with weekly infill or top-​up shopping in a local store.
The changes to retailing wrought by the internet and more recently, the
mobile channel have created new forms of shopping activity and driven resultant
changes to shopper journeys. Technology has facilitated new activities, which now
form part of the shopper journey, such as one-​click purchasing, reading online
product reviews, sharing ideas and information with peers via social media, real-​
time price comparison and stock checking, and use of online personal shoppers,
avatars and smart shopping agents. New forms of shopper journey, defined as
omnichannel shopper journeys, have emerged in which shopping activities are
spread over the store, online and mobile channels:

• Click and Collect/​ Order Online, Purchase in Store –​here the shopper
journey begins in the online or mobile channel, where the shopper either
purchases or places an order and subsequently visits a store or a pick-​up
point to collect their merchandise. Such shopper journeys offer benefits to
both retailers and shoppers. Where a store is selected as the collection point,
the retailer has the potential to gain additional sales, as the shopper may look
around in addition to collecting their purchase. The shopper has full control
over the time at which they obtain their purchase, thus avoiding the incon-
venience of waiting for a delivery. The merchandise can be inspected and
if unsuitable, can be returned immediately without the need to repackage
and organize return. The use of third party collection points, such as the
U.K.’s Collect Plus network, allows retailers to serve populations outside
the catchment areas of their stores and provides convenient, local collection
points for shoppers.
• Research Shopping (Verhoef, Neslin and Vroomen, 2007) –​here the shopper
either begins their journey with online search and ends with in-​store pur-
chase, known as webrooming, or the reverse, known as showrooming.
Both forms of omnichannel shopper journey offer benefits to the shopper.
Webrooming enables the shopper to take advantage of the vast product
ranges and information resources offered by the online and mobile channels
and then avail themselves of the ability to see/​try the product before pur-
chase and obtain expert advice from a salesperson. Webrooming is the
dominant form of omnichannel research shopping, accounting for the
majority of omnichannel shopper journeys (Karr, 2016; Voorveld et al.,
2016). Showrooming enables the shopper to benefit from the sensory
experience of the store and the opportunities for idea stimulation that the
retail servicescape can provide, to inspect/​try the product and obtain the
salesperson’s advice, but then search for the best price online. Omnichannel
shopper journeys create challenges for both multichannel and pure play

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 71

retailers, as the shopper journey may leak away from them to a competitor
if they fail to create lock-​in. Showrooming is considered to have particu-
larly negative consequences for multichannel retailers –​Daunt and Harris
(2017, p.167) go so far as to call it “a form of service abuse”, as the retailer’s
in-​store resources are being used without commensurate sales reward, and
in-​store salespeople can feel undermined, leading to a decline in their per-
formance (Rapp et al., 2015).

Omnichannel shopper journeys are therefore defined as sequences of channel/​

shopping activity combinations. Understanding the omnichannel shopper
journey is predicated on identifying these various types of sequence and ana-
lyzing their characteristics and the benefits they provide to the shopper.
The shopper’s level of personal innovativeness was found to be the strongest
predictor of omnichannel shopping behavior (Juaneda-​Ayensa, Mosquera and
Murillo, 2016). Omnichannel shopper journeys are increasingly common and
are considered to be characterized by the omnichannel shopper’s requirement
that channels are integrated in a consistent, seamless manner.
Shoppers are generally assumed to select a channel for a specific part of their
shopper journey based on their perception of:

• The characteristics of the channel and the fit between the channel and the
shopping activity (channel-​task fit)
• The risks inherent in using the channel for that specific shopping activity

A channel’s characteristics are a function of its media richness (Maity and Dass,
2014) –​its ability to facilitate communication, feedback and personalization.
The store channel is considered to be high in media richness, the online channel
offers medium media richness and the mobile channel currently offers the lowest
level of media richness, though this is likely to increase with developments in
mobile technology. Bezes (2016) examined the financial, performance, psycho-
logical, time, transaction and logistics risks associated with each channel and
found that logistics, psychological and performance risk were more associated
with the online channel, while financial, time and transaction risks were more
associated with store shopping. Overall risk was perceived to be higher, and was
more dissuasive, for the online channel.
Shoppers’ perceptions of channel characteristics, channel-​task fit and risk
are moderated by a number of factors, such as the nature of the product and
the shopper’s level of product involvement, knowledge and expertise. Voorveld
et al. (2016) found that shopper journeys involved more use of online channels
when the purchase was for a high involvement product, and more use of off-
line channels when the product was being purchased for the first time. Thus, a
shopper’s perception of the benefits of using a particular channel for each stage
of their shopper journey may vary according to the nature of the shopping task.
In addition to channel selection being governed by perceived benefits and risks,
shoppers will configure their overall journey to maximize their convenience. As
noted earlier, in the traditional brick and mortar channel, shopping convenience

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72 Harris et al.
was defined as the minimization of time and physical effort. The online and
mobile channels free shoppers from the spatial and temporal constraints of store
location and opening hours, and therefore in the multichannel shopping envir-
onment, convenience needs to be conceptualized differently and a broader view
of the types of effort involved in shopping taken into account. In the multi-
channel/​omnichannel shopping environment, convenience can be defined as the
minimization of:

• Physical effort
• Cognitive effort
• Emotional effort
• Time

In configuring their shopper journey, choosing the channel in which to expedite

each shopping activity, the shopper will trade off the components of conveni-
ence one against the other to derive maximum convenience. A shopper may be
happy to wait for a product to be delivered, having purchased it online, rather
than expend the emotional effort required to deal with crowds and queues in
stores. Another shopper, or the same shopper on a different occasion, may see
the cognitive and time effort required to expedite effective online search as too
great and prefer to expend physical effort on a trip to a store.
Shoppers do not always configure their journeys in the same way, even within
a product category. The apparent heterogeneity of shopper journey configur-
ation is caused by shopping being woven into the fabric of daily lives and being
subjected to the shopper’s overall goals (Harris, Dall’Olmo Riley, and Hand,
2018). Individuals are driven at any point in time by their goals, which operate
hierarchically from high-​level, almost abstract goals (I want to be a responsible
citizen) down to low-​level, specific goals (I need to buy a birthday card by 5pm
today). At any point in time, one goal from an individual’s hierarchy is focal,
while others operate in a background capacity. When the individual is in shopper
mode, their goal hierarchy includes shopping-​specific goals, which may or may
not be focal. The interplay between the goals active at any point in time shapes
the shopper’s perceptions of channels and alters their perception of what is
likely to be the most convenient. An individual shopper’s journeys, therefore, are
not always configured in the same way. Lee et al. (2018) capture this inherent het-
erogeneity in shopping journey configuration through a taxonomy that adopts a
needs-​adaptive perspective to identify 12 distinct journey types, including Retail
Therapy, Routinized Habit and Opportunistic. The Retail Therapy journey, for
example, is undertaken when the shopper needs to ameliorate negative emotions
and wants to make themselves feel better. The Routinized Habit journey involves
little in the way of engagement behaviors, such as exploration and browsing, but
is a type of journey that the shopper undertakes regularly. The Opportunistic
journey, on the other hand, is undertaken only when the shopper takes advan-
tage of opportunities presented by the external retail environment, such as a
limited-​time price offer. An individual shopper will likely engage in several of
these types of journey over time, depending, inter alia, on the goals pursued.

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 73

Technological changes, such as Web 2.0 and near field communications,
and behavioral changes, such as social media use and smart device adoption,
combined with the proliferation of shopping channels, have the effect of freeing
the shopper journey from a deterministic funnel/​path and allowing it to be less
linear. Iterations around channels and shopping activities are increasingly com-
monplace. Shopping activities can be carried out simultaneously on different
channels. Technological developments, especially those involving the mobile
channel and apps, mean that some journeys are now micro in scale, expedited
in seconds with one or two clicks on a smart device. We can conclude that the
shopper journey has evolved considerably in recent years from the single channel
(generally linear) journey conducted primarily in brick and mortar stores,
through multichannel shopping (with some journeys expedited offline in stores
and others online), to the omnichannel journey where shoppers move seamlessly
from one channel to another during a single shopper journey, making use of
physical and digital touchpoints as they go. As a result, we now find a plethora
of shopper journey types and shoppers who are no longer fixed and stable in
their journey configuration, even for the same shopping task. The shopping
journey, shaped (and to an extent constrained) by the retailer’s channel strategy,
has now evolved into the shopper journey, where the shopper has much greater
control over the choice and sequencing of their shopping activities. The onus is
more than ever on the retailer to examine their shoppers’ journeys from the cus-
tomer perspective.

The Service Journey

The previous section described that part of the customer journey in which the
customer ultimately decides whether or not to buy a product or service. Both
before and after the purchase, the customer can be confronted with another
aspect of the customer journey: the pre or post sales service. Before the concept
of customer experience gained attention, researchers had already referred to this
as the service journey (Whittle and Foster, 1991; Johns and Clark, 1993; Johns,
1999). The term “service journey” is still used in research into expectations man-
agement and perceptions of service quality, but is increasingly being replaced
by customer experience. Building on research into the nature of service quality,
customer experience is therefore also seen as a (dis)confirmation of expect-
ation (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985). Berry et al. (2002, 2006) draw
attention to an orchestration of clues that play a role in customer experience
within the service process in a way that is equal to customer journey approaches.
Edvardsson’s (1998) description of the customer process indicates a comparable
sensitivity for the service process as seen from the perspective of the customer
as is contained in the term “customer journey”. Service-​oriented organizations
nowadays give the experience of the customer a dominant place in the service
offering processes (Voss, Roth and Chase 2008). Experience-​based services facili-
tate the development of an emotional connection between the customer and the
service provider, which in turn leads to a higher customer satisfaction and a
higher recommendation intention (Pullman and Gross, 2003; Pol, 2017). In the

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74 Harris et al.
more recent academic and practitioner literature, the service journey is usually
conceptualized as a sequence of touchpoints. Zomerdijk and Voss (2011) define
touchpoints as moments of contact between the customer and the organization.
These contact moments and the interactions that take place thereby form the
elements that create the customer experience. How to improve and manage cus-
tomer experience across the customer journey, through different channels and
customer interactions, is an important service research priority (Ostrom et al.,
2015). The service journey addresses the interactions and experiences of ser-
vice processes as an “engaging story” about the user’s interaction with a service
(Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010, p.151).
Service management literature has adopted and further developed this
approach to the service journey in research specifically addressing service design
(Følstad and Kvale, 2018). Early contributions to service design made by Shostack
(1982) considered the activity of designing service to be part of the marketing
discipline. This design process could be visualized using a blueprint to map the
sequence of events in a service and to specify all the interactions a customer has
with an organization throughout their customer lifecycle. Later, in the 1990s,
service design was presented as a new multi-​disciplinary and integrative design
discipline (Moritz, 2005). Service design refers to a holistic, customer-​oriented
approach that uses design principles and processes to develop appreciably better
services than those of competitors and create the ultimate customer experience,
encompassing from the moment a customer first engages with a service provider
up to and including the moment that he leaves. Apple can be considered an exem-
plar in service design. Of course, they design beautiful products, but they also
pay attention to the intangibles that support the product, from the packaging
to the servicescape in the Apple store, and from classes and creative sessions to
easy payment systems. Such services contribute to making their products desir-
able and their customers satisfied owners. Apple’s products are the means to
provide service, and these services are the basis of the exchange relationship
with the customer. In marketing, this view of the centrality of service is exem-
plified in the theory of service dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008).
Service dominant logic shifts attention away from transactional relationships
with customers (the exchange of goods, both physical and non-​physical) towards
building long-​term relationships with customers, in which value creation for and
by the customer is realized. The concept of value therefore has moved beyond
the instrumental and functional worth of goods and services and refers to cre-
ating better value for customers purchasing and consuming goods and services.
Several authors have emphasized the importance of forms of value other than
functional/​instrumental value, such as emotional, contextual, symbolic, social
and experiential values (Sheth, Newman and Gross, 1991; Pine and Gilmore,
1999; Reynolds and Olson, 2001; Thompson, Rindfleisch and Arsel, 2006;
Holbrook, 2006; Smith and Colgate, 2007). In addition to recognizing mul-
tiple forms of value, researchers’ attention has been directed towards the pro-
cess of value creation. To this end, Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2008) recognized
the customer as a co-​creator of this value, shifting attention from the concept
of value-​in-​exchange to the concept of value-​in-​use. Value-​creation therefore

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 75

is the outcome of ongoing interactions between customer and provider. Value
creation assumes active customer engagement via their interaction with the
service employees of an organization (Brodie et al., 2011), with third parties
and with other customers. While customer engagement can be examined from
a psychological or a motivational perspective, our perspective here is behav-
ioral. Examined through a behavioral lens, customer engagement takes many
forms, e.g. giving and receiving word of mouth (WOM), writing and reading
recommendations and reviews, providing advice and help, blogging and pos-
sibly even taking legal action in the event of service failure (van Doorn et al.,
2010). It is therefore critical for organizations to understand exactly how value
is created in each of these interactions in order to provide the customer with
superior experiences. As a consequence, this is leading our attention to relational
determinants that feed the customer experience, such as relationship norms or
expectations of behavior and reward/​return, for example “for the money I pay
the organization, I expect a good service in return” (Haslam and Fiske, 1999),
and type or degree of personal contact.
The academic literature presents a number of models that describe the
determinants and moderators of customer experience (Brunner-​Sperdin and
Peters, 2009; Verhoef et al., 2009). Determinants of customer experience can
be found, for example, in the social environment, the service interface, the retail
atmosphere, the retail brand, and the assortment or price. Verhoef et al. (2009)
also distinguish a number of situation moderators (such as type of store, location
and culture) and personal moderators (such as socio-​demographics, task orien-
tation and consumer attitudes). However, none of these models includes rela-
tionship norms as a possible determinant of customer experience. Nevertheless,
previous research gives clear indications that the relationship norms used by a
customer are an important factor in driving their behavior and shaping their
experience (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003; Aggarwal, 2004; McGraw and Tetlock,
2005; Kaltcheva and Parasuraman, 2009; Kaltcheva, Winsor and Patino, 2011;
McGraw, Schwartz and Tetlock, 2012; Kaltcheva, Winsor and Parasuraman,
2013). The type of relationship between organization and customer has a signifi-
cant effect on customer experience in terms of consumption emotions, customer
satisfaction, recommendation intention and loyalty (Pol, 2017). Clarke and Mills
(1979) proposed a distinction between exchange relationships and communal
relationships; exchange relationships are more common in a customer–​supplier
context, while communal relationships are more common in a person-​to-​person
context. Kaltcheva, Winsor and Parasuraman (2013) demonstrated that the rela-
tional model used by a customer might mitigate or amplify customer responses
to service failure. If customers use a more personal model, they will evaluate
bad service in a different way than if they use a model that is business oriented.
A personal approach seems to be a key success factor in the service journey,
creating an optimal customer experience (Bitner, 1990; Bitner, Booms and
Tetreault, 1990). Research by Brunner-​Sperdin and Peters (2009) showed that
human ware –​the people who provide a service –​has more influence on the
emotional experience of customers than hardware, such as the environment in
which the service is provided. Good service is often interpreted by organizations

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76 Harris et al.
as a more personalized service, which results in competition as to who is most
responsive and empathetic to the customer. In the academic literature, per-
sonalization used to refer to the behavior of employees when in contact with
customers, especially in the form of spoken address. Personalization means
that the contact changes from formal and business-​like to more personal and
intimate (Surprenant and Solomon, 1987; Adelman and Ahuvia, 1995). With
personalization, the quality of customer contact is improved, because the cus-
tomer is recognized as a unique person and not an anonymity (Surprenant and
Solomon, 1987). There seems to be a broad consensus among service providers
that personalized service is something that customers want. Surprenant and
Solomon (1987) measured the effects of programmed personalization in the
financial services sector. Their research showed that programmed personaliza-
tion (non-​functional small talk) had a negative impact on customer expectations
of, for example, competence, confidence and effectiveness. Customized person-
alization was found to have a positive impact on the customer experience, par-
ticularly concerning the dimension of friendliness. Recent research (Pol, 2017)
confirmed the finding that customized personalization leads to an enhanced
emotional experience and to higher customer satisfaction than non-​personalized
communication.
To summarize, the service journey addresses the interactions within and
experiences of service processes. The development of the service concept in
recent years from a non-​physical good to the basis of every exchange relation-
ship has two key implications. Firstly, it broadened the scope of the service
journey to purchasing and consuming products and services. This means that
the service journey can no longer be perceived as complementary to the shopper
journey, i.e. the journey in the pre and post sales phases, but has evolved into
a more holistic concept in which the shopper journey is one component part.
Secondly, the recognition of the customer as the co-​creator of value means
that more attention needs to be given to their relational needs, as these are key
moderators of the customer’s experience.

Mapping the Journey, Measuring the Experience

Mapping the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is, at first sight, an apparently simple concept. The
goal is to create a visual depiction of a customer’s interactions with an organiza-
tion. Given that customer experience is created through the customer journey,
the customer journey map then charts this experience over time and space and
across myriad touchpoints. The term “customer journey mapping” emerged in
the first decade of the 2000s in response to growing recognition of the stra-
tegic importance of customer experience and the concomitant recognition of the
increasing complexity of customer experience management driven by channel
and touchpoint proliferation. Thus, the overarching aim of customer journey
mapping is to improve customer experience. As the purpose of mapping is to
uncover the customer journey, the steps taken along the journey should not be

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 77

defined a priori, but should emerge from the mapping process. However, the
map may be organized around a series of high level steps that the customer
is known to, or expected to, go through, such as responding to an email, pur-
chasing, seeking customer support and so on.
The origins of customer journey mapping lie primarily in service blueprinting
(Shostack, 1982), which in turn is based on business process modelling and
information systems design. All of these tools allow the content and flow of a
process to be captured in visual form. Service blueprinting emerged in the 1980s
when the service sector began to exert economic dominance over manufacturing
in many developed countries around the world and the enormous wealth gener-
ating capacity of services was recognized. Managers’ and marketers’ interest in,
and concern for, service quality grew (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985),
together with increasing attention being given to ensuring customer satisfaction
through service (Churchill and Surprenant, 1982).
A service blueprint displays the steps involved in the process of service
delivery using the codified conventions of business process modeling languages
such as BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and UML (Unified
Modeling Language). Symbols represent the actors and activities in a service
system, while arrows represent relationships and dependencies. Blueprints use
lines of interaction, visibility and internal interaction to divide a service process
into zones –​onstage and back stage –​in order to differentiate between the vis-
ible, invisible and support processes (Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan, 2008). The
physical evidence used to facilitate and augment a service is also displayed on a
blueprint. The underlying assumption of service blueprinting is that there is one
optimal, ideal flow through the system that meets service users’ and providers’
requirements.
As pioneered by Shostack (1982, 1984, 1987), service blueprinting enabled
organizations to spot and address inefficiencies, weaknesses and possible fail
points in the service process. Service blueprinting is still used in the design and
evaluation of service processes (Bitner, Ostrom and Morgan, 2008; Patrício,
Fisk and Falcão e Cunha, 2008), and although it includes the customer in the
representation of service flow, it is primarily a process-​centric tool. Customer
journey mapping, in contrast, starts with the customer and puts their actions
center stage. The scope of a customer journey map is considerably larger than
that of a service blueprint, incorporating touchpoints outside the organization’s
direct control. Another key difference between a blueprint and a customer
journey map is that while both represent what the customer is doing, the latter
seeks additionally to represent what the customer is thinking and feeling. A ser-
vice blueprint can be created by observing a service in action, but a customer
journey map requires input from a range of information sources, including pri-
mary research conducted with customers, such as interviews, focus groups and
ethnographic studies. Customer journey mapping is defined variously as the
steps a customer goes through in engaging with a company (Richardson, 2010);
a structured visualization of a customer’s experience (van Dijk, Raijmakers
and Kelly, 2011); and “documents that visually illustrate customers’ processes,
needs and perceptions throughout their relationships with a company” (Temkin,

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78 Harris et al.
2010, p.2). To add to the confusion, customer journey mapping is also variously
referred to as moment-​of-​truth mapping and as touchpoint mapping.
On closer examination, the various extant conceptualizations of customer
journey mapping commonly incorporate the following components:

• Customer activities such as searching for products and services, comparing

prices, reading product/​service reviews, purchasing, and seeking support
or customer service. Some of these activities, such as making a purchase
or speaking to a customer service agent, involve direct interaction with the
organization, while others, such as creating a shopping list or traveling to a
store, are outside the organization’s control but play a role in shaping the
overall customer experience and offer opportunities for the organization to
influence the journey through, for example, targeted advertising.
• Organizational activities such as serving the customer in a store, sending
emails, providing customer support via telephone/​email/​online chat, and
arranging fulfillment of online orders. These organizational activities are
grounded in a range of internal processes, the responsibility for which is
often spread across the organization and the design of which may have been
carried out without reference to the customer.
• Physical and digital touchpoints. Some touchpoints will be owned by the
organization; others, while not owned, may be under organizational control.
Touchpoints will also be owned and controlled by organizational affiliates,
such as authorized retail stockists, by non-​affiliated third parties (such as
price comparison websites) or by the customer (such as WOM).
• Time. Depending on its scale and focus, the elapsed time covered by a cus-
tomer journey map can range from minutes (the map of a customer support
call journey) to years (the journey of a family’s lifetime experiences with a
bank). The time dimension of the map needs to match that of the customer’s
activities; this is not necessarily going to match the organization’s timescales
for reporting, analysis and planning.

A customer journey map contains information on all of this and portrays in

visual, diagrammatic form the interactions of the customer, the organization
and the touchpoints over time.

Measuring the Customer Experience throughout the Customer Journey

Pine and Gilmore introduced the concept of customer experience at the end
of the 1990s in their book The Experience Economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).
Their starting point was the premise that customers are looking for valuable,
joyful and memorable experiences, and this in turn could create significant eco-
nomic value for the organization. Since the publication of Pine and Gilmore’s
book, a considerable amount of research has been conducted on customer
experience (Gentile, Spiller and Noci, 2007; Meyer and Schwager, 2007; Verhoef
et al., 2009), and many attempts have been made to define the concept. For
example, Meyer and Schwager (2007, p.118) define customer experience as “the

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 79

internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact
with a company”. Verhoef et al. (2009) were among the first to examine this
concept in relation to multichannel management. They stated that the concept
of customer experience is holistic in nature and encompasses the entire experi-
ence, including the search, purchase, consumption and after-​sales activities. The
concept itself relates to the cognitive, affective, emotional, social and physical
reactions of the customer to the provider. Furthermore, customer experience is
a multi-​dimensional concept. It is not only driven by factors that the provider
can control (such as the service interface, the atmosphere in the store, the range
of products and the price), but also aspects that are beyond the control of the
provider (such as the influence of other customers, the purpose of shopping or
even the weather). For a more in-​depth discussion of the concept of customer
experience, see Chapter 7 by Verhoef in this book. The fact that customer experi-
ence is a holistic and multi-​dimensional construct makes it difficult to choose
metrics that accurately represent the total experience. Many organizations have
used, and continue to use, customer satisfaction as the main indicator for cus-
tomer experience. Customer satisfaction has been the dominant customer feed-
back metric for years (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). Customer satisfaction is
often seen as the result of conscious information processing. When a customer
is questioned about their satisfaction regarding aspects of the service process,
they will respond by recollecting their own experience(s) with the organization.
Customer satisfaction, therefore, only refers to the cognitive dimension of cus-
tomer experience and essentially only asks whether the provider has performed
properly according to the customer’s expectations. Another measure that is fre-
quently used by organizations to measure customer experience is Reichheld’s
(2003, 2006) Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures recommendation inten-
tion and is sometimes assumed to be a better predictor of a customer’s future
behavior (loyalty or churn). Where customer satisfaction measures the satisfac-
tion with the performance of the provider, NPS purports to measure the satis-
faction of the customer with their relationship with the provider. NPS, therefore,
fits better with the customer experience concept, in which the co-​creation of
value within the customer–​ provider relationship is central. Both NPS and
customer satisfaction are used at different levels: after a transaction or inter-
action, or as an overall evaluation. However, customer-​experience measurement
is meant to measure the experience at journey level rather than only at trans-
actional touchpoints or in terms of overall satisfaction with the provider. For
this reason, the Customer Effort Score or CES (Dixon, Freeman and Toman,
2010) is a third possible customer experience metric. This metric indicates the
extent to which customers experienced ease within their customer journey. CES
is therefore a metric that evaluates the entire journey, although it is still a one-​
dimensional metric like customer satisfaction and NPS and so does not reflect
customer experience’s multi-​dimensional nature.
For effective customer experience management, it is important to examine
relationships between each of the different touchpoints and the overall
experience, and this is something that single, one-​dimensional metrics simply
cannot do, even if they evaluate the entire journey. That is why in business

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80 Harris et al.
practice an alternative approach uses integrated measurement models in which
different metrics at various levels, i.e. touchpoint, journey and overall level,
are combined to obtain a holistic view of the customer experience (Bough
et al., 2017). The emphasis is not so much on choosing the right metric as on
building a set of metrics into a unified model that operationalizes a customer-​
centric strategy. Such a model enables organizations to systematically align
all of their customer-​experience metrics and analyze them in an integrated
manner, in real time and “on the go”, so that they can manage the experience
of the customer.

Reflections and Future Directions

We started this chapter with the observation that the customer journey is a con-
cept developed primarily in business practice, and it is within the practitioner
realm that the concept receives most attention. Most organizations recognize
the concept of the customer journey and dedicate time, effort and money to
customer journey management. A customer journey represents the processes
of purchasing and consuming products and services, as seen from the cus-
tomer viewpoint. The aim of customer journey management is to optimize the
customer’s experience throughout their journey. Customer journey mapping is
the most frequently used instrument to obtain insight into how the customer
journey takes place and how customers experience the journey.
Although the concept of the customer journey seems to be an invention of
business practice, we do have scholarly research streams that help to build a
better understanding, such as the literature on multichannel management and
service management. In multichannel management, the focus has been on
the customer’s purchase process, from need recognition through to making a
purchase. The extant literature on multichannel management primarily seeks
to inform channel investment decisions to ensure the right channel mix in the
different stages of the purchase process, using a mix of online/​offline channels.
The service management literature addresses the design of experiential ser-
vices as instruments to strengthen customer experience across the entire service
process and defines the journey as a sequence of touchpoints –​moments of
interaction between customer and provider. Both research streams examine the
journey from different perspectives depending on their primary objective, which
is to facilitate and guide customers in their purchase process and support the
design of new services.
We have provided an overview of both the shopper journey and the service
journey as well as the principles of customer journey mapping, in which the
following developments have been discussed:

• The evolution of the shopper journey from the single channel journey
through multichannel shopping to the omnichannel journey where shoppers
move seamlessly from one channel to another during a single shopper
journey. We have shown that journeys nowadays are no longer fixed and
stable, even for the same task. Shopper journeys are increasingly iterative

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 81

rather than linear, and shopping activities can be conducted simultaneously
via different channels rather than in a funnel-​like, sequential manner.
• The development of the service concept in recent years from non-​physical
goods to the basis for every exchange relationship, which has led to more
attention being paid to the relational needs of customers during their
journey.
• Although originally emanating from service blueprinting, customer journey
mapping, in contrast, starts with the customer and puts their actions center
stage, incorporating touchpoints outside the organization’s direct control as
well and representing not only a customer’s actions but also their attitudes,
perceptions and emotions

The process of digitization has already had an enormous impact on customers’

journeys and will continue to do so in the future. For example, the online channel
is evolving rapidly and now has so many diverse manifestations that labeling
“online” as a single channel is insufficiently precise. We have a range of online
and mobile media such as email, messaging, social media chat, and platforms
such as webshops, comparison sites, and rating and review sites. These are all
different “channels” and “touchpoints” within the online medium, mediating
the interaction or communication between a customer and a provider. This is
further complicated by the fact that in the changing landscape, channels are con-
verging more and more. Originally, established store-​based retailers migrated to
the internet, but the reverse now also is the case, for example the pop-​up stores
that web-​retailer Zalando has opened in several major cities. Other examples of
channel convergence are digital fitting rooms that aid clothing purchasing and
the provision of digital devices in store to enable out-​of-​stock products to be
ordered with ease. In this way, the specific advantages and features of the offline
and online channels become blended. In addition, more and more online envir-
onments are becoming intertwined. Today, companies have Facebook pages and
Twitter accounts to exert some degree of control over online chat and increas-
ingly provide product review and comparative price information on their own
website to reduce the need for customers to search elsewhere. With all the avail-
able options, every customer journey is likely to be unique, as a result of two key
factors:

• The growth in numbers and types of touchpoints and integration of channels

leads to more complex customer journeys but also more customized,
personal journeys. The shopper is able to configure each journey to fit their
unique needs at that time, to attain their goals and fulfill their desires.
• In these personal journeys, customers choose their own approach to solving
problems, taking action or fulfilling their desires. Along the way, they make
use of touchpoints in the wider retail and brand landscape, some of which
lie completely outside the control of a specific provider, and their customer
journey blends seamlessly into their wider personal journey; i.e. an ever-​
growing part of the customer journey will be outside the direct provider –​
customer interaction.

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82 Harris et al.

Future Directions for Research

We see several consequences for future research regarding the three key elem-
ents of the customer journey: customers’ processes and channels used in the
context of shopping for, consuming and experiencing products and services; the
interactions taking place between provider and customer within and outside
the service process itself; and the need to capture the journey and its experience
to be able to optimize the customer experience to the full.

Channels: Customer Search Strategies

To understand the increasingly complex customer journeys, we need to move
our attention from channels to touchpoints, defining the customer journey
as a series of customer interactions across touchpoints and through different
channels. The concept of touchpoints is widely used in the service management
literature but underutilized in the multichannel management literature thus far.
Although recent contributions suggest shifting attention from channel choice in
singular interactions to sequences of interactions within the customer journey
(Rego, Morgan and Fornell, 2013; Baxendale, Macdonald and Wilson, 2015;
Dholakia et al., 2010), revealing customers’ search strategies through the increas-
ingly complex omnichannel landscape (van der Veen and van Ossenbruggen,
2015; Lee et al., 2018). This can also help companies obtain insight into the
parts of the journey that take place outside their own immediate channels and
communications with customers.

Interactions: Value-​in-​Experience
If organizations want to get to grips with the complexity of a customer’s
journey, they need to understand how customers themselves get to grips with
the increasingly diverse and complex landscape. They need to acquire a detailed
understanding of the motives underlying customer journeys –​how, why and
when customers choose a specific set of interactions –​rather than just tracking
the locations of these interactions. The concept of value-​in-​use seems helpful
here, but to date little has been researched in this context (Barwitz and Maas,
2018). However, adopting the concept of value-​in-​use may not be enough if
new research insights show that value can also be created outside the provider–​
customer relationship, created by and embedded in the daily lives of customers,
and value-​in-​experience should be recognized as the key driver and shaper of
the customer journey (Helkkula, Kelleher and Pihistrom, 2012; Gronroos and
Voima, 2013). Current developments in business practice support this view;
we see that organizations are answering the challenge by investing in strategies
to position their brands in the lives of their customers. Organizations that are
successful in the digital age seem to have two things in common. First, they create
demand for the ongoing use of their products and services rather than purely
stimulating demand to buy. Secondly, they exchange promotion for advocacy.

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 83

They no longer focus on promotion per se but care about and engage with what
customers communicate about their brand (Bonchek and Bapat, 2018).

Mapping and Measuring: Multi-​dimensional

At present, most companies use single, one-​dimensional metrics for capturing
the customer experience, such as customer satisfaction and NPS, in integrated
measurement models. As customer experience is a holistic and multidimensional
concept, none of the available options gives a complete picture of its dimensions
and fully represents the concept in all its richness and complexity. We are there-
fore waiting for future research on measurement systems and metrics that will
incorporate the customer-​centric and affective dimensions of customer experi-
ence. Furthermore, digitization of the journey and the availability of big data
make it possible to follow the behavior of customers on different platforms and
observe some customer engagement behaviors that take place along the journey
but outside a provider’s immediate sphere of influence.

Future Challenges for Business Practice

Each of the three key elements discussed presents its own challenges for business
practice when it comes to shaping the customer journey. Currently, there are
three major developments that influence the customer journey itself and the
experience of the customer: the urge to digitize the customer journey, the need
to develop and maintain personalized communication and customer service, and
the increasing availability of data. We consider each in turn.

Channels: Digitization of the Customer Journey

For organizations, the online channel can seem the most appealing channel, as
the costs of an online interaction are usually much lower than the costs of an
equivalent interaction facilitated in an offline environment. This is why more
and more organizations are encouraging their customers to make use of the
digital channel in all its manifestations (Pieterson and Ebbers, 2008; Pieterson,
2009). For example, organizations may make it difficult for customers to find a
contact telephone number in their written communications or on their internet
site, or even simply prohibit customers from contacting them by telephone.
Negative emotions can arise when customers feel that their freedom of choice or
autonomy is affected. As such, overt channel direction usually means a restric-
tion of freedom of choice and an undermining of the autonomy of customers;
this can result in a reaction of “reactance” (Pol, 2017). Reactance is the reaction
in which people emotionally resist a restriction of freedom of choice (Brehm,
1989). The use of digital channels and self-​service tools can, of course, also have
a positive effect on customer experience. People are always looking for ways
to minimize the amount of energy they have to invest in daily activities and
therefore for ways to operate and communicate with the least effort involved

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84 Harris et al.
(Kahneman, 2011). Therefore, from the organizational as well as the customer
perspective, it is clear that the process of digitization of the customer journey
will continue. One of the major challenges for the future is: how can we use digit-
ization to make it easier for the customer, while reducing costs at the same time?

Interactions: Personalization
Digital technology makes personalization possible, but the downside is that
customers now expect personal messages, products and services. Given the fact
that digitization cannot be stopped, the challenge for companies is therefore to
personalize their customer approach. Although digital service environments,
with the help of data, can offer a more personal approach, digitization makes
authentic personal contact difficult. Complex questions that require a dialogue
can be hard to answer using automated or scripted interfaces. In those cases, a
customer wants to have personal contact with the organization and also expects
organizational involvement in solving their problem. On the other hand, we
communicate more and more with and through technology. We are getting used
to building intimate relationships within a virtual environment with each other
and with organizations. The advent of deep learning technologies such as text-​
to-​speech, automatic speech recognition and natural language processing can
allow us to build intimate relationships with technology. New technologies, for
example chatbots, are able to simulate human conversation and dialogue and
increasingly function as our personal assistants in a wide variety of customer
service processes. In short, personalization and digitization do not have to be in
opposition. The gap can be closed through the integration and smart use of data
and technology to create an optimal customer journey and customer experience.

Mapping and Measuring: Big Data Challenge

Digital media have increased the possibility to generate, store and analyze
customer data in vast quantities, in a variety of forms and through different
channels. These data can be used to capture a comprehensive understanding
of the customer’s journey and can be leveraged to increase customer engage-
ment throughout the journey. Such data are usually stored in an organization’s
own CRM system. Nevertheless, as we have seen, parts of the customer journey
often take place outside the control of the organization, and therefore some, if
not much, of the data will come from external sources and platforms. One of
the major challenges is to integrate these different platforms and build a holistic
customer perspective. Another challenge is to use the collected data in a way
that addresses ethical and privacy restrictions. Customers nowadays are increas-
ingly paying attention to what businesses are doing with their data. The global
ubiquity of cloud computing may expose customers’ personal and potentially
sensitive data to significant privacy and security threats (King and Raja, 2012).
Companies must make sure they are compliant with the new regulations that are
being developed around the world. They also have to meet customers’ concerns
that their data are not being misused. Transparency, effective communication

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Customer Journey: From Practice to Theory 85

and user-​control will help build trust and enable deeper customer engagement
(Kunz et al., 2016).

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