Mapping the Customer Journey in Retail

Creating a customer journey map has quickly become an interesting and innovative way to understand consumers and their behavior. Over the years, the method gained popularity and established itself by offering a clear way to visualize the company's intangible services. As the importance of customer experiences increases, the mapping of their journeys also expands to encompass not only actions and thoughts, but also feelings that occur along the journey. The aim of this paper is to explore the mapping of the customer experience journey and the process behind its creation. In addition to a framework based on the existing literature on the topic, the research, conducted in the retail context, uses qualitative methods to unravel customer experiences. Observation is used as a method to better understand touchpoints. The qualitative methods chosen and the framework created are successful in establishing touchpoints and creating a customer journey map. When done right, a customer experience journey map can be a useful tool for improving the overall experience, enabling complex, non-linear and contextual customer journeys to be understood from the customer's perspective.