Optimizing the Customer Journey Using Consumer Psychology

Why Customer Sentiment, Customer Intent and Customer Values are at the Core of Customer Success

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Philip Mandelbaum
04/08/2023

A mass of pink and orange smiley face balloons floating in a partly cloudy sky

A customer journey can begin anywhere, at any time. How long it lasts is up to you.

What makes a customer relationship last is well known: all you have to do is continually provide an optimal customer experience. Knowing how to optimize the customer experience? That’s the hard part. And it’s mission critical.

We know that 96% of consumers will abandon a brand for a single bad experience, and 92% will also take revenge by blasting you on social media. This could be for slow eCommerce processing or a malfunctioning cart, failing to resolve a technical issue, or even asking the wrong question in a survey or sending a marketing message that misses the mark.

This is why today’s CX leaders — “increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys” — still “face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with their brand are most impactful to their overall experience?”

In other words, do we prioritize our branding and promotional activities on social media? Our ads on Google SERPs? Our website UX, or lead generation opportunities? Our email drip campaigns and sales funnel? Or our customer support channels and voice-of-the-customer program? The answer: all of them.

Two young scientists practice dissection in a laboratory

Dissecting the Customer Journey

Historically, this has meant cutting up the customer journey into concrete stages along a sequence, and then separating collections of these touchpoints into silos based on a generalized purpose. For instance, many organizations divide up their journey into:

Pre-purchase
Purchase
Post-purchase

Others take a more granular approach — (inadvertently) mimicking the path and breakdown of the sales funnel, which draws a customer from general interest (top of funnel) to more specialized research (middle of funnel) and, finally, to consideration of solutions and sales (bottom of funnel).

A customer journey framework is more inclusive of post-purchase opportunities, while distinguishing the stages based on customer intent and sentiment, as follows:

Motivation/Inspiration, or which pain points, needs, goals, values or influencers motivated or inspired a general interest
Search, or the collection and analysis of data on the industry and its key terms and trends
Evaluation, or the demoing and comparing and contrasting of varying solutions
Decision making, or the moment of purchase/sale
Satisfaction, or the level to which the solution addresses pain points, needs and goals
Sharing, or the evangelizing of the solution via customer reviews, social media engagement, user-generated content and influencer marketing

Customer journey mapping entails charting out a visual representation of the path your customer will take, from motivation to satisfaction, defining:

A clear objective
The targeted user personas and their pain points, needs, goals, points of friction, and buying triggers
All stages of the journey and the goal(s) for each
All touchpoints of the journey, and the best methods of outreach for each
KPIs, and how to measure performance
Key customer data, and when, where and how to obtain it
Processes, procedures, roles and responsibilities for monitoring, analyzing, reporting and optimization

By sectioning out the stages of the customer lifecycle, brands have been able to:

Locate the sources of the most valuable customer information
Identify gaps and opportunities across the customer lifecycle
Prioritize, and strategically devote marketing, sales and CX resources

However, according to Harvard Business School assistant professor Julian De Freitas, neither methodology is recommended. A member of the marketing department, De Freitas studies “how the moral psychology of consumers colors their attitudes toward firms, and how firms can market in ways that are sensitive to these moral buttons.”

It makes sense. We already know that consumers are more concerned than ever about the mission and values of the brands they shop and support:

82% of consumers prefer a brand whose values align with their own
75% of consumers have stopped shopping a brand “over a conflict in values”
39% of consumers say they’d even “boycott their favorite brand”

Learning to Listen, and Think Like Our Customers

So, how do we ensure alignment with our customers, leads and prospects? How do we maintain and grow high-value customer relationships? By thinking of customer journeys “as continuous patterns of mental experiences traced over time.”

Indeed, why wouldn’t we leverage generations of increasingly sophisticated psychological study to better understand how our customers, leads and prospects think and behave? Further, why would we mass-message an entire population when we can target the shoppers who not only want or need the products or services we provide but are also most likely to maintain or expand their relationships with us based on shared values?

In a series of studies detailed in Harvard Business Review March 31, 2023, De Freitas and his co-authors “explored what kinds of patterns lead to successful outcomes — both when consumers have experiences themselves, and when they hear about the customer experiences of others.”

But, first, let’s travel back nearly 30 years in time to the beginning of the modern use of behavioral science and psychology in marketing — with the development of the “user experience honeycomb.”

How to Apply Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb to Customer Experience

Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb

By following Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb, you can:

Demonstrate your value proposition, as well as your core values
Showcase how your products or services solve a problem or provide a solution
Bolster your customer success rate, customer lifetime value, and all the most important customer experience KPIs

Although Morville worked in information architecture and user experience, and the Honeycomb has served countless organizations in rethinking their websites to apply user-centered design and SEO best practices, all seven hexagons can and should be applied to customer experience — from initial awareness (as, for instance, a social media app user) to prospecting (as a user on your owned properties, like your website or microsite), and from conversion to use and cross-/upselling.

Here’s my version of the honeycomb, reconfigured for the full customer journey:

Useful. Are our products or services useful to our target audience(s)? Do the user, prospect, lead and customer experiences we provide all offer value? How can we innovate to improve the usefulness of our offerings and how we communicate about them throughout the customer journey?
Usable. Do we develop our products or services with our target audience(s) in mind? Do we design for ease of use? What improvements have been requested, and do we continually strive to streamline our offerings and how we communicate about them, based on user/customer feedback?
Desirable. Are the products or services we offer what target audience(s) want? Do they solve a problem and/or otherwise meet their needs and goals? And what about the messages, interactions and experiences we provide — are they designed to promote the brand, or elicit an emotional response from our target audience(s)?
Findable. Are our products/services and content discoverable through search, on social media, in the news, in stores, and/or via strategically placed native or banner ads? Can our customers continue to find us wherever they are (e.g., on their preferred social media platform or device), and for any reason (e.g., to make another purchase, or to fix a technical issue)?
Accessible. Do we simply follow the latest regulations on accessibility, or do we actively strive to deliver the best possible products/services and experiences for all people, irrespective of capability/disability, on all platforms and devices throughout the customer journey?
Credible. Are we merely providers of a specific solution to a unique problem (if so, we have to be the undisputed expert), or are we industry insiders with extensive knowledge and experience? Do our C-suiters headline/keynote conferences; write articles, op-eds or guest posts; and/or appear as thought leaders in high-profile media? Is our website an eCommerce platform, or is it a hub for everything our customers (and future customers) need or want to know? Do we respond to complaints, listen to our customers, and showcase product improvements based on feedback?
Valuable. Do we provide value to our customers, our employees, our partners, and our stakeholders? Do we continue to innovate to increase the breadth and depth of that value?

Fresh bay leaves organized in a pattern

The Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey

For the De Freitas et al. studies, the goal was to determine all the paths customers might journey — and which sequences create the best customer experiences. (If they’re scalable and repeatable, we’ve got a winner!)

“Some have argued that the best patterns are smooth and frictionless, while others have made the case for patterns that fluctuate, given that they are likely to be more eventful and stimulating,” De Freitas explains. “To help shed empirical light on these questions, my coauthors and I explored what kinds of patterns lead to successful outcomes — both when consumers have experiences themselves, and when they hear about the customer experiences of others.”

What did they find?

There are 27 common patterns — and across them all, consumers are least likely to make a first, repeat or new purchase when their experiences (in ranked order):

Are consistently negative
Deteriorate over time
Fluctuate significantly

Conversely, the customer experiences most likely to produce your desired outcome are:

Consistently positive
Improve over time

Likewise, the researchers discovered, for consumers who learn about other consumers’ experiences: After reading customer reviews or viewing a social media post from a user or influencer, consumers are least willing to take a customer journey that’s entirely negative, followed by one that’s up and down. Needless to say, the companies that receive the most referrals have a reputation for providing consistently positive or improving customer experiences.

How to Create the Optimal Customer Journey Pattern

For you, dear reader, the aforementioned might have all seemed intuitive, or even obvious. For the parts of your organization that do not directly engage with customers, however, it may have been a revelation. And when all parts of your organization integrate and think like customer experience professionals, you can start a revolution: your digital transformation.

To learn more about the De Freitas study findings, read “What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?”.

For the best advice I’ve heard on how to promote customer-centric thinking across your organization, watch my interview with the AVP of customer experience at Health Partners Plans, Katherine Ketter:

To create the optimal customer journey pattern at your organization:

Get rid of third-party cookies and implement UX and customer data best practices to obtain and leverage valuable zero- and first-party customer data
Prioritize customer sentiment and other qualitative customer data to finetune and enrich the journey
Provide consistency in brand design and voice across platforms and devices
Throw in a little variety or add an element of surprise, without overdoing it
Ramp up and end with a climax, ‘tickling their buying bone’ and closing with a bang
Implement the necessary tech to enable improved data collection and usage: a CDP and/or DXP, integrated with the most appropriate ustomer experience platform (e.g., Freshdesk, Help Scout, Intercom, LiveAgent, or Zoho Desk)
Measure your success rates using the 13 most important customer success KPIs: