Key Takeaways
- The customer journey is the full path a customer takes with your company: before buying, while buying and after. It includes the touchpoints you control and the ones you don't, like a review, a WhatsApp group or a colleague's recommendation.
- The full journey predicts satisfaction better than any single touchpoint. Performance on journeys is 30% to 40% more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction (Rawson, Duncan and Jones, Harvard Business Review, 2013).
- Customers remember the most intense moment and the end, not the average. In a trial with 682 patients, making the end of a procedure gentler increased the likelihood that they came back (Redelmeier, Katz and Kahneman, Pain, 2003).
- In B2B, buyers decide almost everything before talking to a salesperson. 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience (Gartner, 2025).
- A customer journey map drawn in the office shows the journey the company imagines. The one that works comes from talking to real customers, including those who didn't buy.
Almost every company knows how many visits its website got, how many quotes it sent and how many deals it closed. Few know what happened to a customer between the day they looked for a solution and the day they decided to buy again, or not. Each department looks at its piece and nobody looks at the whole path.
This guide explains what the customer journey is, how it differs from a sales funnel, why it pays to measure journeys rather than isolated touchpoints and how to build a customer journey map step by step, with real customers. It is part of our guide to business growth.
What is the customer journey?
The customer journey is the sequence of experiences a person has with a company from the moment they recognize a need until after the purchase, including the decision to come back. Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef organized it into three stages in Understanding Customer Experience Throughout the Customer Journey (Journal of Marketing, 2016): prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase.
Their most useful contribution is classifying touchpoints by who controls them. Most companies only map the first kind.
| Type of touchpoint | Who controls it | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Brand-owned | The company | Website, salespeople, packaging, invoice, after-sales service |
| Partner-owned | The company and a third party | Distributor, carrier, payment platform, marketplace |
| Customer-owned | Only the customer | How they use the product, what they compare it to, when they decide |
| Social or external | Other people | Reviews, recommendations, WhatsApp groups, industry peers |
A carrier that shows up late or a negative comment in a business owners' group weighs on the decision as much as the company's best web page, and neither appears in the marketing report.
How is the customer journey different from a sales funnel?
A sales funnel measures how many prospects move from one sales stage to the next, seen from the company's side. The customer journey describes what the customer experiences along the whole path, seen from their side, and it continues after the sale.
| Tool | What question it answers | Point of view | Where it ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales funnel | How many prospects move forward and where are they lost? | The company | At the sale |
| Customer journey map | What does the customer experience at each moment, and where do they get frustrated? | The customer | At the repeat purchase or the exit |
| Jobs to Be Done | What progress is the customer seeking when they hire a product? | The customer's need | Before choosing a solution |
The three complement each other. Jobs to Be Done explains why the customer starts moving, the map shows what the path looks like and the funnel counts how many reach each point.
Why does the full journey matter more than each touchpoint?
Customers judge a company by the whole experience, and a chain of good interactions can add up to a bad one. Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan and Conor Jones of McKinsey measured this in The Truth About Customer Experience (Harvard Business Review, 2013): performance on end-to-end journeys is 30% to 40% more strongly correlated with satisfaction than performance on touchpoints, and 20% to 30% more strongly correlated with business outcomes such as revenue, repeat purchase, churn and word of mouth.
Their clearest example is a pay-TV provider. Onboarding a new customer took about three months and involved a technician visit and around six calls. In key segments, average satisfaction fell almost 40% between the start and the end of that journey.
The arithmetic explains it. Another McKinsey analysis, The three Cs of customer satisfaction (2014), works through six interactions at 95% satisfaction each: up to one in four customers can still end up with a poor journey. No department sees the problem because each one is doing well on its own metric.
In the same Harvard Business Review article, a car rental company found that its airport bottleneck was having clean cars ready on time, something that didn't depend on the counter. It solved it with something as simple as a buzzer to alert the lot from the counter. In the pilot, on-site service scores doubled, upselling revenue rose 5% and the cost of serving each customer fell 10%.
How do customers decide today?
Customers today decide with much more information that doesn't come from the company: reviews, comparisons, recommendations and whatever they find on their own. McKinsey documented this with almost 20,000 consumers in The consumer decision journey (2009): two-thirds of the touchpoints during the evaluation stage are driven by the consumer, not the brand.
That study left two ideas that still hold. Brands in the customer's initial consideration set can be up to three times more likely to be purchased, and the set can expand during evaluation, so a company that wasn't there at the start can still get in. And after the purchase there is a loyalty loop: a satisfied customer can come back without going through the whole evaluation again.
In B2B the shift is stronger. According to Gartner, 61% of B2B buyers surveyed in 2024 prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. By the time the salesperson arrives, the buyer already has a short list.
In Colombia there is a channel almost no imported map includes. According to DataReportal's Digital 2026: Colombia report, with GWI data, 92.1% of internet users aged 16 and over used WhatsApp in the past month. Much of the buying journey, from the quote to the complaint, runs through it and leaves no trace in any system.
How to build a customer journey map, step by step
These seven steps work for a B2B or a B2C company. Ideally do it with people from sales, operations, service and finance at the same table, because the journey cuts across all of them.
1. Choose one type of customer and one specific job
A map for "all customers" helps nobody. Choose a segment and a buying situation: "purchasing manager at a construction company who needs to restock materials urgently" can be mapped; "B2B customers" cannot. If you already know the job the customer wants done through Jobs to Be Done, start there.
2. Define where the journey starts and ends
The journey starts when the customer notices the need, long before they look for you, and ends when they decide to buy again or leave. If the map ends at the invoice, it leaves out delivery, use, support, collections and the repeat purchase, which is where the next deal is won or lost.
3. Talk to real customers, including those who didn't buy
Interview recent customers and ask them to reconstruct what they did, not what they think: where they looked, who they asked, what made them hesitate, what almost made them give up. Also interview people who got a quote and didn't buy, and people who stopped buying. Those conversations show what the team can't see from inside.
4. Draw the stages and touchpoints, including the ones you don't control
Lay out the stages on a line (need, search, evaluation, purchase, delivery, use, support, repeat purchase) and under each one the real touchpoints. Include partner touchpoints, like the carrier, and external ones, like recommendations or the industry WhatsApp group. For each stage, note what the customer does, thinks and feels, and who in your company is responsible for that moment.
5. Mark the moment of greatest strain and the end
People don't remember an experience as the average of what they went through. Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues showed that memory is built mostly on the most intense moment and the end, in studies such as Redelmeier and Kahneman (Pain, 1996). Find on your map the moment where the customer suffers most (waiting for a delivery, a charge they don't understand, an unanswered complaint) and how the journey ends. That is your priority.
6. Measure the journey as well as each touchpoint
Besides satisfaction with the call or the delivery, ask about the whole experience and cross data between departments: how long the journey takes end to end, how many contacts the customer needs to resolve something, how many buy again. These are the metrics that reveal what McKinsey found in the pay-TV case.
7. Fix one journey at a time, with a cross-functional team
Choose the journey that weighs most on revenue or churn and put together a team with the departments that touch it. Measure before, change, measure after. Fixing them all at once dilutes the effort, and the map goes back in the drawer.
Common mistakes when mapping the customer journey
| Mistake | What happens | How to avoid it |
|---|---|---|
| Doing it in an internal workshop without customers | The map reflects what the company believes | Interviews before the workshop, with buyers and non-buyers |
| Mapping "the average customer" | Nobody recognizes themselves in the map | One map per segment and buying situation |
| Ending at the sale | Delivery, use and repeat purchase get lost | Take the map to the second purchase or the exit |
| Ignoring informal channels | WhatsApp, calls and referrals don't show up | Ask in interviews where each step happened |
| Stopping at the drawing | The map changes nothing | Pick one journey to improve and measure it |
| Leaving it to marketing alone | The departments causing the friction don't take part | A team with sales, operations, service and collections |
Real case: changing the end of the journey changed who came back
The clearest experiment on how much the end of an experience weighs doesn't come from commerce but from medicine, and that's what makes it useful: it measures what people remember and whether they return.
Donald Redelmeier, Joel Katz and Daniel Kahneman ran a randomized trial with 682 patients undergoing a colonoscopy, an uncomfortable procedure that should be repeated periodically. For half of them, a short, less uncomfortable interval was added at the end, which made the procedure longer but made it end more gently. The results are in Memories of colonoscopy: a randomized trial (Pain, 2003).
Patients in the gentler-ending group rated the final moments as less painful (1.7 vs 2.5) and remembered the whole procedure as less unpleasant (4.4 vs 4.9), even though it was longer. Over a follow-up of about five years, they were more likely to come back for the next exam, with an odds ratio of 1.41.
For a company, the lesson is about where to spend effort. A journey doesn't have to be perfect at every step for the customer to come back, but the worst moment and the ending weigh disproportionately on what they remember: how the complaint was resolved, how the last order arrived, what the last invoice looked like.
Repeat purchase: where the journey starts again
The repeat purchase is the stage that moves the most money and the one that shows up least on maps. Frederick Reichheld and Earl Sasser showed this in Zero Defections (Harvard Business Review, 1990), and Bain later summarized it in a figure for financial services: a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.
An example from Latin America shows how far that effect can go when the journey generates referrals. Nubank, the Brazilian digital bank, reported in its SEC filing in 2021 that 80% to 90% of its customers had been acquired organically, through word of mouth or unpaid referrals, and that its customer acquisition cost for the first nine months of that year was 5 dollars per customer. These are company-reported figures, but they show that a satisfied customer is also an acquisition channel.
That is why the map doesn't end at delivery. If your journey has no designed moment for the second purchase and for referrals, growth depends on constantly finding new customers, which is the sign of dangerous growth we describe in the business growth pillar guide.
Frequently asked questions about the customer journey
What is a customer journey map?
It is a visual representation of one type of customer's path with the company, stage by stage, with the touchpoints, what the customer does, thinks and feels at each one, and where friction appears. It helps decide what to improve first and which department owns each moment.
What are the stages of the customer journey?
The basic stages are prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase. In practice they are often broken down into need, search, evaluation, purchase, delivery, use, support and repeat purchase. What matters is that the map continues after the sale.
What is the difference between customer journey and customer experience?
Customer experience is the customer's overall perception of the company; the customer journey is the concrete, step-by-step path that produces that perception. The journey map is the tool for managing the experience.
How many customers do you need to interview to build the map?
There is no fixed number. In practice, interview until the stories start repeating, including recent customers, customers who stopped buying and prospects who didn't buy. With a few customers per segment, the main patterns usually show up.
Does the customer journey work for B2B companies?
Yes, and it is often more useful than in B2C, because in B2B the journey is longer, several people take part on the customer's side (the user, the approver, the payer) and much of the decision is made before talking to a salesperson. In B2B it helps to map the journey of each role involved.
A map nobody uses is a poster
The value of a customer journey map lies in what the company changes after drawing it. If at the end you know the moment where most customers get frustrated, who owns it and how you will measure whether it improved, the map has done its job.
At Suricata Labs we do this work with companies that already sell and want to grow with the customers they have: we talk to their customers, build the map with their team and choose the journey most worth fixing.
Read also: What is Jobs to Be Done? The framework that explains why your customers really buy
Last updated: October 17, 2026
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