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Customer journey

October 24, 2026

A customer journey is the full sequence of steps a person goes through with a brand, from first noticing a need to researching, comparing, buying, using the product, and then buying again or recommending it. Each contact along the way, such as watching a video, reading a review or messaging to ask about price, is a touchpoint.

What is a customer journey?

Customers rarely move in a straight line. Google’s “messy middle” research describes the space between the trigger (the moment a need appears) and the purchase as a loop of two mental modes: exploration, where people widen their options, and evaluation, where they narrow them down. People repeat that loop as many times as they need, across search engines, social media, aggregators and review sites (Think with Google, The messy middle, July 2020).

The same research notes that the web of touchpoints differs from person to person.

Customer journey stages

No single set of stages fits every industry. Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) gives three examples (NN/g, Journey Mapping 101, last reviewed July 2026):

Scenario Stages
Ecommerce (buying Bluetooth speakers) Discover, try, buy, use, seek support
Big purchase (buying a car) Engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification
B2B (rolling out an internal tool) Purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy

Set your stages from your own data. A cosmetics shop and a real estate project will have different numbers of steps.

What goes into a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visualization of the process a person goes through to reach a goal. According to NN/g, most maps share five elements:

  1. Actor: a specific type of customer, usually based on a persona. One point of view per map.
  2. Scenario and expectations: what the customer is trying to do, for example switching mobile plans to save money.
  3. Journey phases.
  4. Actions, thoughts and emotions in each phase. Emotions are often drawn as a single line that rises and falls.
  5. Opportunities to improve, with an owner and a metric attached.

A customer journey example in Vietnam (hypothetical)

The journey of one shopper buying a serum on Shopee:

  1. Sees a TikTok review video (trigger).
  2. Searches Google for “is serum X any good” and reads the 1-star reviews on Shopee.
  3. Messages the shop’s Zalo Official Account to ask whether it suits oily skin.
  4. Buys on Shopee and gets an order confirmation message.
  5. Runs out after about 45 days and needs a reminder to reorder.

Hypothetical October numbers: 10,000 product page views, 400 add-to-carts (4%), 120 orders (30% of carts). After 60 days, 18 customers have bought again, a 15% repeat purchase rate (one way to measure retention rate). The biggest drop is from viewing to adding to cart, so fixing steps 2 and 3 (reviews, skin-type advice) may pay off more than raising the video budget at step 1.

To see the whole chain, ad, marketplace, Zalo and order data must be joined into one customer profile, which is the job of a CDP or CRM.

Customer journey vs related terms

Term Point of view Used for
Customer journey The customer Understanding which steps and touchpoints a customer goes through
Marketing funnel The business Counting how many people remain after each step
Customer journey map One actor, one scenario A visual the whole team can align on
Service blueprint The business, behind each touchpoint Mapping the internal work that makes the journey happen

The journey map and service blueprint rows follow NN/g’s distinctions.

FAQ

Is a customer journey map different from a user journey map?

NN/g treats the two names as interchangeable. Agreeing on what goes into the map matters far more than agreeing on what to call it.

How do you measure a customer journey?

Use conversion rates between steps, time from first view to purchase, and repeat purchase rate. After delivery, you can also ask for an NPS rating to learn whether customers would recommend you.

If you want to map your customer journey from the ad and CRM data you already have, contact Adtek.

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