Understanding the customer journey as a strategic tool

Many organisations describe their customers through segments, personas or funnel stages. These perspectives can be useful, yet they often stay abstract and disconnected from everyday decisions. What tends to improve decision quality is a clearer understanding of how customers actually move through interactions over time and how the organisation is experienced across those moments.

A customer journey captures this movement. It shows how people encounter an organisation, how they engage, where friction appears and what shapes their experience from first contact to ongoing use. Without this view, decisions are often made in isolation, guided more by internal logic than real behaviour.

Why the customer journey matters

From a strategic perspective, customer journeys provide context. They reveal how touchpoints connect, where handovers break down and where expectations are created or lost. This helps explain why initiatives sometimes fail to deliver impact, even when they look sound within individual functions.

Journey thinking also highlights gaps that are difficult to see internally. Marketing, sales, product and service may perform well on their own, yet the experience can still feel fragmented when viewed from the customer’s side.

A short example. Sephora

As Sephora expanded across digital and physical channels, customers increasingly moved between online research, mobile interaction, loyalty programmes and in-store purchases. While each channel worked well individually, the experience was not always perceived as connected.

By working systematically with the customer journey, Sephora gained clarity on how customers moved across touchpoints and where friction influenced behaviour. This helped the organisation prioritise improvements that strengthened coherence across channels and supported higher engagement over time.

Why this thinking applies beyond retail

Although this example comes from a consumer brand, the same customer journey logic applies to industries such as med-tech and pharma. In these settings, journeys are often more complex, involve multiple stakeholders and unfold over longer timeframes, yet the underlying dynamics are similar.

Healthcare professionals, patients and decision makers move through sequences of interactions that shape understanding, confidence and adoption. Handovers between roles, functions and systems matter. Unclear ownership or fragmented experiences create friction that affects outcomes. A shared view of the journey helps organisations identify where decisions stall, where effort is duplicated and where focus has the greatest impact.

A foundation for better decisions

When organisations share a common view of the customer journey, conversations change. Decisions become easier to align across teams, trade-offs clearer and priorities more focused. Strategy becomes grounded in how the organisation is actually experienced.

Used well, customer journey mapping supports stronger choices in marketing, innovation and service development, while reducing the risk of solving the wrong problem.

If you want to discuss these topics further, feel free to reach out.

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