Why Most Businesses Get Customer Journey Stages Wrong (+ How to Fix It)

Key Takeaways

Customer journey stages have become essential to business success. Most companies look at five stages their customers go through: awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. Mastering these stages takes more than just knowing about them, businesses need strategic management and optimization.

Numbers paint a clear picture of why this matters. 80% of companies now compete based on customer experience. 94% of customers say positive experiences drive them to make future purchases. The financial effects show that brands giving good customer experiences see revenue grow by 2-7%.

Many businesses still misunderstand everything in the customer journey:

• Non-linear pathways: Customer journeys rarely follow a straight path because of multiple digital channels. Mobile devices now generate more than half of all web traffic. This creates complex, interconnected trips.
• Limited vendor interaction: Gartner’s research shows that only 17% of a customer’s journey involves direct conversation with vendors. Customers spend the other 83% doing independent research and internal discussion.
• Siloed approaches: About 40% of businesses say poor inter-departmental collaboration stops them from optimizing customer journeys.

Businesses that nail customer journey management see amazing results:

• 60% of consumers buy again when they get tailored experiences
• 66% of customers have no problem sharing personal data to get these tailored experiences
• Omnichannel campaigns generate up to 494% more orders than single-channel efforts

On top of that, 86% of buyers will pay more to get a great customer experience. But poor experiences make 29.6% of clients abandon branded digital channels completely.

Journey management that works needs mapped touchpoints across all stages, ground data, broken down organizational silos, and dedicated teams focused on optimization. This changes traditional journey maps from simple sketches into dynamic tools showing not just what happened but why.

Successful organizations see customer journey management as an ongoing practice. They constantly research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate experiences to hit both customer satisfaction and business targets.

Introduction

Your bottom line depends more on customer journey stages than you might think. Research shows that maximizing satisfaction throughout these stages can increase customer satisfaction by 20%. This improvement boosts revenue by 15% and reduces service costs by up to 20%. Most businesses still struggle to perfect these stages.

Customer experience now drives competition for 80% of companies. Yet vendors only participate in 17% of a customer’s journey directly. The customer spends the remaining 83% doing independent research and internal discussion. Businesses often miss vital opportunities to connect during the five customer journey phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy. This gap becomes expensive since attracting new customers costs five times more than retaining existing ones.

My analysis of customer journey management in businesses of all sizes reveals common pitfalls. We’ll explore each stage, point out frequent mistakes, and teach you to create a customer journey map that delivers results.

If you are a business owner struggling with customer success management in your organization, or want to get a customized customer success strategy for your business, feel free to reach out to my website, iAdeelSohail or message me directly on my LinkedIn profile.

What is the customer journey and why it matters?

A customer’s trip with your business includes all interactions from brand discovery to becoming a loyal supporter. This path guides them toward purchase and lasting loyalty. Companies track this trip to understand their customers better and improve each point of contact.

Customer journey vs. buyer journey

These terms might sound alike, but they mean different things in the customer relationship. The buyer journey focuses on what happens before purchase. It has sections about awareness, consideration, and the final decision.

The customer journey goes beyond the purchase to show how people use and talk about your product. A market expert puts it well: “your relationship with your customers doesn’t end the moment they’ve made a purchase. The real success of a business depends on return customers”.

This difference matters because the customer journey needs regular customer involvement to build trust and keep them coming back. The buyer journey stops at purchase, but the customer journey continues with relationship building and after-sale engagement.

Why customer experience is more than just a sale

Businesses used to focus on touchpoints – those key moments when customers connect with them before buying. This narrow view can give the wrong idea about how satisfied customers really are.

Customer experience sits at the core of business-customer relationships. It goes beyond product use to include brand interactions before purchase, buying experience, and after-sale support.

This detailed approach matters and with good reason too:

• 80% of companies now compete primarily on customer experience
• 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases
• 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, with price premiums up to 13% (and as high as 18%) for luxury services
• All but one of these customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience
• A mere 5% increase in customer retention can boost profitability by 25% to 95%

Understanding the customer journey helps you spot ways to enhance customer experience at every step. You’ll see what your audience expects and needs, creating a continuous connection between your brand and customers.

A well-laid-out customer journey makes buying easier and more enjoyable. This helps decision-makers stay focused on what truly counts – the customer.

Breaking down the 5 key customer journey stages

Smart businesses know that turning prospects into loyal customers happens through specific customer journey stages. Companies create better touchpoints to guide potential buyers when they understand these phases well.

1. Awareness

Prospects first realize they need something but haven’t started looking for solutions. They gather information to understand their situation better. Buyers rely on educational content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media to define their challenges. Their searches focus on problem-related questions rather than specific solutions. Brands build credibility for later phases by providing helpful, non-promotional content.

2. Consideration

Prospects move to the consideration stage after defining their problem clearly. Buyers read 47% more content during this stage than at any other part of their trip. They complete 57% of their decision-making process before talking to a sales representative. Prospects test different options through product demos, case studies, comparison guides, and webinars. They create criteria for their final decision and weigh factors like price, features, and ease of use while looking for social proof to verify their choices.

3. Decision

Prospects narrow their options and prepare to buy during the decision stage. The buying process needs to be simple since 86% of buyers will pay more for a great customer experience. Good decision-stage content shows pricing information, competitor comparisons, free trials, demos, and special offers. Clear calls-to-action and smooth processes remove final purchase barriers. Personal testing becomes vital: you wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive.

4. Retention

Building long-term relationships after the first purchase defines the retention stage. This phase matters because getting a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one. Good retention strategies use individual-specific communications, loyalty programs, excellent customer service, and regular email campaigns with special offers. Companies succeed by adapting to customer needs, building trust, and rewarding loyalty through perks and discounts.

5. Advocacy

Happy customers become brand ambassadors who promote your business actively in this final stage. Advocacy creates huge value through referrals, positive reviews, and word-of-mouth marketing. Companies encourage advocacy through referral programs, customer spotlights, user-generated content campaigns, and community building. Brand advocates provide the most powerful marketing, genuine recommendations from trusted sources.

Companies can create targeted content and experiences that guide customers from first awareness to loyal advocacy by understanding these five stages.

Where most businesses go wrong in each stage

Companies don’t get it right when they implement customer journey stages. They focus on their processes instead of what customers need. Let’s get into where businesses usually miss the mark during each phase of the customer’s experience.

Lack of clarity in the awareness phase

Businesses start their journey mapping without clear goals in mind. Research shows 70% of organizations fail to define specific goals for their customer journey maps. Many create overly promotional content rather than addressing real customer pain points. This pushes away potential customers who still need help understanding their problems and aren’t ready for solutions. The numbers tell us 75% of companies focus on their operations rather than what customers actually experience.

Overlooking emotional drivers in consideration

Buyers read 47% more content during consideration than any other time in their journey. Companies often miss how emotions drive decisions. Brand perception and trust play vital roles, as 56% of customers feel most companies treat them as numbers. Social proof like reviews and testimonials, help customers feel confident, but many companies don’t provide enough credible evidence.

Friction in the decision-making process

Cart abandonment rates worldwide hit 71.7%. We found that this happens because checkout processes get complicated. E-commerce sites could increase conversion by 35% just by making checkout simpler. All the same, removing every bit of friction isn’t always right. Some friction, like two-step verification, helps protect customers from fraud and mistakes. This then creates more thoughtful buying that leads to fewer returns and less buyer’s remorse.

Neglecting post-purchase engagement

The ball drops right after purchase for many businesses. Here’s what happens: One in three shoppers will stop doing business with a brand they love after a single bad experience. Bad post-purchase experiences make 51% tell their friends, 40% unsubscribe from all communications, and 34% write negative reviews. This critical stage often gets overlooked, yet repeat customers spend 67% more than new ones.

Missing opportunities for advocacy

Events offer great chances to build advocates, but organizations don’t use these well. They miss three main advocacy opportunities: finding advocates, activating them, and integrating them into the business. Building communities beyond sales matters more than companies realize. Studies show 56% of B2B purchasers rely on offline word-of-mouth for information, which jumps to 88% when including online sources. This oversight gets pricey since customer advocates typically spend twice as much as non-advocates.

How to fix the broken customer journey Stages

Businesses must make strategic changes to map, understand, and respond to customer needs to fix a broken customer journey. Research shows only 47% of customer experience leaders believe their processes work. The time has come to take a practical approach to repair these critical pathways.

Map the customer journey steps with real data

Customer journey mapping converts abstract concepts into visual representations of actual customer experiences. Data should drive these maps rather than assumptions. Target audience personas’ travel through different stages of the customer journey needs visualization. Multiple touchpoints should appear in these maps, starting from original awareness through post-purchase involvement.

A customer’s trip from watching a TV ad to social media research and online purchase with support interactions can appear on a single journey map. Real customer behavior data should inform multiple journey scenarios instead of guesswork.

Use feedback loops to identify pain points

Customer feedback matters at every touchpoint. Dynamic tools for improvement emerge when you create feedback loops that give vital explanations. Surveys, conversation analysis, and review monitoring help gather both structured and unstructured data.

Feedback collection throughout all customer journey phases helps spot friction points that might stay hidden otherwise. Companies must act on this feedback and tell customers about these changes.

Personalize touchpoints across the digital customer journey

The digital customer journey becomes meaningful when you create individual-specific experiences. Studies reveal 66% of customers share personal data willingly to receive individual-specific experiences. Customer data platforms’ technology helps create unified customer profiles.

Successful personalization needs centralized data repositories and behavior-based segmentation. This setup delivers dynamic content that matches individual priorities at each stage.

Align teams around customer lifecycle management

Customer lifecycle management succeeds when departments cooperate toward shared goals. Disconnected experiences and missed opportunities arise from a siloed approach. Regular stakeholder meetings should promote shared responsibility.

A simplified customer service process needs teamwork across functions. Each team member should understand their role in delivering exceptional experiences. This arrangement improves communication and efficiency while creating a customer-centric culture. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams work together as a unified revenue team.

Creating a customer journey map that actually works

Customer experience maps need a systematic approach that reflects actual customer interactions. A good map evolves with your business and adapts to your customer’s needs.

Define customer personas and goals

Your experience mapping should start with detailed customer personas. These fictional yet believable archetypes represent your target customers through individual names and stories. Each map works best when it focuses on one persona in a specific scenario with a single goal. This prevents them from becoming too generic. You can build these personas through market research, customer interviews, and data about demographics, behaviors, and priorities. Going beyond simple information helps you understand their motivations, attitudes, and pain points to connect better with your customers.

List key touchpoints across experience stages

The next step identifies every point where customers interact with your brand throughout the customer journey stages. These touchpoints cover everything from advertising and social media to websites, physical stores, and customer service. You should group these interactions into before, during, and after purchase phases to spot areas that need improvement. It’s worth mentioning that customers take multiple different paths influenced in various ways, rarely following a single linear route.

Identify actions, motivations, and pain points

Each stage needs documentation of what customers do, think, and feel. You should map their actions (behaviors and steps), mindsets (thoughts, questions, and needs), and emotions (shown as a sentiment line with ups and downs). Place pain points, areas of frustration, errors, or bottlenecks under the corresponding touchpoints. This helps you see where your customer experience falls short.

Visualize the experience with tools and templates

The final step brings your map to life with the right tools. You can choose from whiteboard sessions with sticky notes to specialized software like UXPressia, Custellence, or free templates for Figma and Sketch. Good visualization includes phases, touchpoints, actions, emotional responses, and improvement opportunities. The most useful maps show both current experiences and potential improvements.

Conclusion

Customer experience optimization is one of the most powerful tools to stimulate business growth today. This piece shows how customer experiences directly affect revenue. Brands that deliver exceptional experiences increase their revenue by 2-7%. But most businesses still miss critical opportunities in all five stages of customer interaction.

A striking gap exists between what customers expect and what businesses deliver. While 80% of companies compete mainly on customer experience, many view journey mapping from their internal perspective instead of focusing on actual customer needs. This can get pricey when you see that a single bad experience drives away even the most loyal customers.

Customer journey management needs more than simple awareness. Successful businesses treat journey mapping as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time project. They collect real data about customer behaviors and establish feedback loops to identify pain points. These businesses create customized touchpoints across all channels and arrange teams around customer-centric goals.

Journey maps become most effective when they show specific personas moving through clear touchpoints with documented actions, motivations, and pain points. These visual tools turn abstract concepts into actionable insights that improve all stages of customer interaction.

Companies that excel at customer experience see amazing results. Their customized experiences turn 60% of consumers into repeat buyers. Satisfied customers become brand supporters who gladly pay more and actively promote the brand. Need help with your account management or customer success processes? Book a free 30-minute consultation with me to learn about improving your customer experience for better results.

The solution is straightforward. Companies must break down departmental barriers, act on customer feedback, customize every interaction, and keep refining their approach. Making your customer experience perfect takes dedication, but the investment brings substantial returns in customer loyalty, support, and long-term business growth.

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