How to research a customer journey before you draw the map

To research a customer journey, you follow real people through one real decision while it’s happening, and only then draw the map. It sounds obvious, but journey maps are often drawn the other way round: in a workshop, from analytics and the team’s best guesses, with every step in a neat line from “aware” to “loyal”. Real purchases loop back, stall and change channel, and those moments can be where the sale is won or lost.

Below: why asking people afterwards isn’t enough, which customer journey research methods see which steps, and how we followed twelve shoppers in Madrid for Amazon.

What is customer journey research?

Customer journey research follows real customers before, during and after a purchase, to see every touchpoint that shapes the decision, including the ones the company doesn’t own. In a 2016 review in the Journal of Marketing, Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef describe customer experience as “a customer’s ‘journey’ with a firm over time during the purchase cycle across multiple touch points”. They split that journey into three stages (before, during and after the purchase) and sort the touchpoints into four kinds.¹

• Brand-owned: the ones the company designs and manages, such as its advertising, website, packaging and sales staff.
• Partner-owned: the ones it designs, manages or controls jointly with partners, such as a distributor or retailer that sells its products.
• Customer-owned: what customers do themselves, which the company doesn’t control, such as how they choose to pay or use the product.
• Social and external: other people and other sources, such as friends, other customers and independent sources such as review sites.

Only the first kind is fully in the company’s hands, and it’s also the kind its own dashboards see best. So a large part of customer journey research is seeing the rest, and seeing the brand’s own touchpoints from the customer’s side: the search on the phone at midnight, the sister on WhatsApp, the shop assistant who answers one question and settles the matter.

Why this is a challenge

The obvious way to research a journey is to ask people how they bought something. The trouble is that what people remember about an experience isn’t a recording of it, and the way memory sums up an experience has been tested.

• In a 1993 experiment led by Daniel Kahneman, 32 male students held one hand in water at 14°C for 60 seconds. In the other trial they held the other hand in for 60 seconds at the same temperature, then 30 seconds more while the water warmed by about one degree. When asked which trial they’d rather repeat, 22 of the 32 chose the longer one,² which had all the discomfort of the short trial and more.
• Donald Redelmeier and Kahneman then asked patients to rate their pain in real time during a colonoscopy (154 patients) or a kidney stone treatment (133 patients). Afterwards, their rating of the total pain was strongly related to the worst moment and to the last three minutes, and longer procedures weren’t remembered as particularly worse.³ This is what psychologists call the peak-end rule and duration neglect.
• A randomised trial with 682 colonoscopy patients, published in 2003, added up to three minutes of milder discomfort to the end of the procedure for half of them. That group rated the whole experience as less unpleasant (4.4 against 4.9 on a 0 to 10 scale), and once the researchers allowed for each patient’s past colonoscopies, the reason for the test and what it found, they were slightly more likely to come back for another one in the following years (the raw difference, 53% against 48%, wasn’t significant).⁴

These studies measured pain, not shopping, so take them as a warning about how memory works more than as a measurement of buying: in them, people’s verdict leaned on the worst moment and the ending. In our experience the steps get edited too, which is why the Amazon study was built around diaries and visits. Asked weeks later, people tend to tidy a purchase up, and the doubts and detours drop out. The remembered journey still matters, because it’s the version customers tell their friends and may act on next time, as the colonoscopy study suggests. It just isn’t a record of the steps they took, so a good study captures both.

Much of a modern journey also happens on a phone, and people aren’t good at reporting how much they use it. A 2021 review in Nature Human Behaviour, by Douglas Parry and colleagues, found people’s estimates of their digital media use only moderately related to logged data, and in just 3 of 49 comparisons did the average estimate land within 5% of the logged one.⁵

Paths also cross channels in ways a single data source misses. Peter Verhoef, Scott Neslin and Björn Vroomen studied the research shopper, someone who uses one channel to search and another to buy. Among the Dutch consumers they surveyed in 2004, searching online and buying in a shop was the most common form of research shopping they said they’d use.⁶ Your website analytics may see the visit and miss the till, and your shop data may see the till and miss the search, unless the customer is logged in or uses a loyalty card.

Customer journey research methods, and what each one sees

No single method sees the whole path, so customer journey mapping research usually combines several.

• A diary study. People record the purchase on their phone as it happens, for days or weeks. In the words of Niall Bolger and colleagues, diary reports “capture the particulars of experience in a way that is not possible using traditional designs”.⁷ A diary catches the searches, the price checks at home and the doubts at night, before memory tidies them up. It’s still self-report: it depends on what people think is worth writing down, and writing it down can make them shop more deliberately than usual. Where the phone steps matter, ask diarists to share screenshots or their search history too.
• A shop-along. In shop-along research, also called accompanied shopping, the researcher goes with the person to the shop and watches: what they touch, what they ask the staff, the moment the phone comes out of their pocket. It sees one visit in detail and little of what comes before or after, and being watched can change what people do, which is one more reason to compare it with the diary.
• An interview after the decision. It gives you people’s reasons as they tell them: what convinced them, what nearly stopped them. On its own, weeks later, it gives you the remembered journey. With the diary and the visit in hand, it can go back over the real one step by step and check the reasons against what happened.
• Analytics. Analytics records many visits to your own website or app, so it’s strong on brand-owned digital touchpoints at scale. It can’t see the shop, the friend or the reason.
• A survey. It tells you how many customers follow each path, which interviews can’t. It’s self-report too, so write it after the qualitative work and ask about a recent purchase and steps people can recall.
• Social listening. Social listening reads the public part of the social and external touchpoints in people’s own words: the forum thread, the review, the question someone posts before they buy. It can’t see private chats, like the sister on WhatsApp.

An illustration with an invented purchase of a television in twelve steps: a friend’s new TV at a dinner; an ad for it during a match; a search on the phone at midnight; reading reviews and shortlisting three; a doubt about the price; asking a sister on WhatsApp; seeing the screens side by side in a shop; asking an assistant about the warranty; checking the price on the phone in the aisle; leaving without buying; a price alert two days later; and buying online at the best offer. Two steps, the doubt about the price and leaving the shop, are moments when the sale nearly went elsewhere. In this illustration, an interview a month later with no record captures 2 steps as they happened and 2 remembered differently: the dinner becomes “I’d wanted one for ages” and leaving the shop becomes “they didn’t have the one I wanted”. A diary captures 7 steps, including both near misses, mostly on the phone, and misses the detail of the shop visit. A shop-along captures the 4 steps in the shop and one near miss. A diary, a shop-along and an interview that goes back over both, compared, capture 11 of the 12 steps. The ad during the match is missed by every method shown.

Interview a month later, no record Diary Shop-along Diary, shop-along and interview

1. PeopleA friend’s new TV at a dinner
2. ScreenAn ad for it during a match
3. PhoneSearches “55-inch TV” at midnight
4. PhoneReads reviews and shortlists three
5. Phone“Too expensive. Maybe after Christmas.”Nearly lost the sale
6. PeopleAsks her sister on WhatsApp
7. ShopSees the screens side by side
8. ShopAsks an assistant about the warranty
9. ShopChecks the price on her phone in the aisle
10. ShopLeaves without buyingNearly lost the sale
11. PhoneA price alert, two days later
12. PhoneBuys online at the best offer

11 of 12 steps as they happened 2 of 2 near misses

What you’d see

An illustration: the purchase, its steps and the remembered versions are invented. How memory sums up the pain of an experience: Kahneman and colleagues, Psychological Science, 1993; Redelmeier and Kahneman, Pain, 1996.

How we researched a purchase journey for Amazon

For Amazon, the question was what moves a purchase in Spain between the first idea and the payment, and what part the physical shop still plays in it. Asking people afterwards would probably have produced a neater version, so the customer journey study we ran for Amazon followed twelve shoppers in Madrid from before they’d decided what to buy, or where, to the moment they paid.

We recruited people who were already planning a purchase and hadn’t yet decided. Each one kept a mobile diary for three weeks, with short tasks from us along the way. We went with all twelve to the shops they chose, including MediaMarkt, Fnac and El Corte Inglés, and interviewed each of them once they’d paid. Then we compared the twelve paths step by step, looking for the moments they shared and the points where they split.

The detailed findings belong to the client. What we can share is the pattern that kept coming back among the twelve. Many needed to see the product in person and asked the staff when they had a question. After the shop, many bought online wherever they found the best offer, and others paid in a shop they trusted. Seeing a product in a shop and buying it online is usually called showrooming, the reverse of the route Verhoef’s Dutch shoppers said they’d use most. How common each route is in Spain today is a question for a survey, and twelve people can’t answer it.

Twelve was enough for this question because it was focused, in one city, and each person was followed closely for weeks through one planned purchase, whatever the product. Our article on qualitative research sample size explains when twelve people can be enough, and when they aren’t.

How to research a customer journey, step by step

1. Name one decision. “Buying a television” or “opening a business account” gives you a path to follow, and “our customer experience” doesn’t. Start the brief from that same decision.
2. Recruit people before they decide. Once the purchase is made, you’re back to memory. Look for people who are planning it and haven’t chosen yet.
3. Record it while it happens. A diary on the phone, with a few short tasks, catches the steps and the doubts before people forget them.
4. Go where the decision happens. That might be a shop, a branch, a showroom or a kitchen table. Watching one visit can show you things you wouldn’t have thought to ask about in a survey.
5. Interview them afterwards, with the record in hand. Ask about the moments the diary and the visit showed, especially the ones where the sale nearly went elsewhere.
6. Compare the paths. Look for the steps most of your participants share, the points where paths split and the touchpoints you don’t own.
7. Size the paths and listen to them. A survey tells you how common each path is, and social listening shows the public conversations around it.
8. Draw the map last. By then it describes what people did, not what the team assumed.

This is what we do

Our customer journey and CX research starts with the decision you need to understand and follows the people making it, with the qualitative methods described above. When you need to know how common each path is, and what people say about it unprompted, we add a survey and social listening, the three lenses our H3™ method fuses into one reading. If you’re still choosing between them, our guide to qual, quant and social listening can help.

Follow the purchase while it’s happening, and the map you draw at the end will be much closer to the path your customers really took.