Founders love sales funnels. A funnel is clean. It is linear. It suggests that if you pour a thousand people into the top, a predictable number of customers will drop out the bottom. It is a comforting spreadsheet model. Unfortunately, it is a lie.
Real human beings do not live in funnels. They live in a chaotic mess of distractions and impulses. This reality is best captured by the Customer Journey.
The Customer Journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. It starts the moment they realize they have a problem and continues long after they have purchased your solution.
For a startup, understanding this journey is the difference between building a transaction and building a relationship. If you only focus on the sale, you miss the context that drives the decision.
The Touchpoint Ecosystem
#A journey is made up of touchpoints. A touchpoint is any interaction a person has with your business.
Some touchpoints are obvious:
- Seeing an Instagram ad
- Visiting the landing page
- Entering credit card details
Other touchpoints are invisible to the founder but critical to the customer:
- Reading a review on a third party site
- Waiting on hold for customer support
- Receiving a confusing invoice
- Trying to reset a forgotten password
One bad touchpoint can ruin the entire journey. You might have the best product in the world, but if your billing email looks like spam, you damage the trust required to keep that customer.
The Linear Fallacy
#The biggest mistake startups make is assuming the journey is a straight line. They think a customer sees an ad, clicks, and buys.
In reality, the journey is a loop. A customer might visit your site, leave, read a review three weeks later, ask a friend for advice, and then finally come back to buy. This non-linear behavior makes attribution difficult.
If you treat the journey as a funnel, you will optimize for the click. If you treat it as a journey, you optimize for the experience. You realize that the person visiting your site for the third time needs different information than the person visiting for the first time.
Mapping the Gap
#To improve the customer experience, you must map it. This involves creating a visual representation of every step a user takes.
When you do this, you will discover the “Gap.” This is the difference between how you think your product works and how it actually works.
You might think your onboarding takes five minutes. Mapping the journey reveals that because of a confirmation email delay, it actually takes twenty minutes. That fifteen minute gap is where your churn happens. You cannot fix friction that you do not see.
Beyond the Buy Button
#Marketing teams often stop caring about the journey once the credit card is charged. This is fatal for a subscription business.
The most important part of the journey happens post-purchase. This is the retention phase. How does the customer feel when they unbox the product? How easy is it to get help? How do you celebrate their one year anniversary?
If the journey ends at the sale, you are treating the customer like a wallet. If the journey continues, you are treating them like a partner. Partners stick around. Wallets eventually close.