Customer Journey Testing FAQs Answered

Seamless customer journeys are not luxuries; they are necessities that directly affect business goals and brand reputation. In fact, aside from price, the customer experience is a prime motivator for consumers in their buying decisions.

A study by PwC revealed that 73% of respondents point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, just behind price and product quality. Any failures along consumers’ digital or physical paths risks customer churn and negative reviews.

Customer journey testing helps organizations optimize these user interactions with digital products. This comprehensive strategy aims to smooth these blended journeys, but many organizations don’t know where to start — or run into logistical challenges when they do.

In this customer journey testing FAQ, we’ll answer some common questions around customer journey testing, including benefits, methods and challenges, to help inform your strategy.

What is customer journey testing and why is it important?

Customer journey testing is a software quality assurance technique that involves assessing and validating a user’s interactions with a digital product or service. Customer journey testing is not a type of testing, but rather a multi-faceted approach that aims to identify points of friction that hinder the customer’s ability to perform a task.

Customer journey testing often involves a blend of both digital and physical journeys, such as completing an order via mobile app and successfully picking up the item in store. In these blended scenarios, customer journey testing differs quite a bit from traditional forms of testing. When a human being is required to accomplish part of the task, such as driving to the store and locating the pick-up areas, these transactions introduce a number of unique variables.

The reason why customer journey testing is important is because revenue is important. When businesses can reduce churn, improve consistency and enhance customer satisfaction with their digital products, that customer is more likely to use the product again in the future — and the opposite is true as well, with poor experiences driving customers away from a digital product, and even the brand entirely. Ultimately, customer journey testing helps a business better understand and foster loyalty with its customers by understanding their behaviors, personas and challenges.

How do you map the customer journey for a specific product or service?

Before you can test the customer journey, you must map it. Mapping the customer journey is a nuanced task, but generally follows the following steps:

Define customer personas and touchpoints. Every business has its target customers —these are the personas you want to detail. Define their characteristics, challenges, behaviors, preferences, spending capabilities and more.

Once you understand who the customer is, you must identify how they will interact with your digital product or brand — before, during and after the purchase. Customer touchpoints ultimately shape the perception of your company, so it is important to define these elements in a customer journey map.

Outline the different tasks customers undertake when interacting with your brand. List all the steps it takes to complete an action, such as finding a specific item on the mobile app or adding a new payment method to an account. 

Visualize and expand on the journey. Use a flowchart, diagram or other tool to visualize the customers’ flows. Create a timeline for each customer journey and its respective touchpoints.

Once you have a visual model in place, expand on the customer’s actions, emotions and challenges. Detail each of these areas, including positives and negatives, to get a sense of what might need improvement. These details will provide opportunities for brands to overcome challenges and create positive experiences for customers.

Match to business goals. It’s crucial for the customer to have a friction-free experience with your digital product and brand, but the business must meet its goals as well. When mapping the customer journey, identify and prioritize areas that help the business meet its goals. For example, if a business plans to increase mobile app sales by 10% YOY, the organization might focus on optimizing customer journeys that travel through mobile channels to reduce cart abandonment.

Additionally, aligning customer journeys with business goals helps foster cross-team and cross-organization collaboration. Customer journey mapping requires more than an individual team or person, and the possibility of meeting a broader business goal often opens up more resources or opportunities for collaboration.

Test the customer journey and measure success. Conduct customer journey testing with real in-market individuals who represent your target personas following various customer journeys. Gather feedback and analyze behavior from customer journey testing to optimize omnichannel pathways.

Analytics tools can help provide concrete, quantitative insights that lead to data-driven decisions that help the business. Take advantage of all available customer journey testing resources — feedback from real users following the customer journey is more accurate and valuable than any informed guess.

Update and refine. Customer journeys are dynamic, not static, especially as technology continues to evolve. When refining the journey, incorporate customer feedback and data as well as changing market and economic conditions.

Revisit customer journeys on a periodic basis to account for new technologies as well. Account for new and refined customer journey pathways whenever a new product is launched or significantly updated.

What methods and techniques are used for customer journey testing?

The key to testing the customer journey is to put representative testers through the paces of the mapped journey. Conduct in-market, end-to-end testing with real people on real devices to understand how the product works in the real world. Anything short falls back on informed guessing.

Customer journey testing techniques involve a variety of different approaches. Techniques for testing the customer journey include:

• persona-based testing focused on the specific needs and behaviors of a segment of users, like catering different levels of a subscription service to the intended customer
• scenario-based testing, in which you validate both typical and edge cases of real-world scenarios, such as buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS)
• exploratory testing where testers can freely use the digital product to discover defects, such as randomly adjusting the number of items in a cart to see what happens
• customer feedback analysis to leverage surveys, reviews and customer support data to understand broad trends, such as low app store ratings
• A/B testing to determine which version of a page or feature a customer prefers, such as two different home page layouts
• functional testing to validate any customer-facing features of a product, like errors that prevent a successful checkout
• non-functional testing to gauge the performance or usability of the digital product, such as attempting to navigate and purchase an item on Black Friday.

How can you design and conduct customer journey testing studies?

Designing and conducting customer journey testing studies is no easy task. Take a nuanced and comprehensive approach to cover as many personas as possible and their myriad edge cases.

Designing customer journey studies essentially means detailing those customer pathways and validating them. Start by defining the personas, including mapping the journey, and the objectives of the testing. Establish success criteria, such as KPIs and metrics like conversion rates, to track performance over time. From there, you can determine the testing methods, tools, scripts and scenarios to cover a range of potential points of friction or defects. With the test plan in place, the organization must recruit a diverse group of testers that represent the customer personas you wish to validate. Then, set up the testing environment to mimic real-world scenarios, and you can begin to test.

Conducting customer journey testing studies starts with an orientation session for testers, collecting their consent, and making certain they understand the purpose and scope of the task. Working cross-functionally where possible, the organization then guides testers through the scenarios, stepping in where needed to clarify or foster helpful feedback. The organization should gather as much qualitative and quantitative data as possible to support any findings. Document, analyze and visualize these findings in a comprehensive report where possible to inform stakeholders and generate actionable recommendations. Once you implement these changes, begin the cycle again — continuously iterate and refine over time to ensure smooth customer journeys.

A crowdtesting provider, such as Applause, is uniquely valuable in designing and conducting customer journey testing studies, as it has access to both the pool of global participants and the digital quality expertise to guide testers and elicit actionable recommendations. When working with a crowdtesting provider, you define the criteria to validate and the partner executes upon that strategy.

How do you analyze and interpret customer journey testing data?

There is no singular way to analyze and interpret data collected during customer journey testing. However, as with similar data analysis efforts, such as UX studies, organizations generally follow procedures such as the following:

Clean the data. Gather relevant customer journey testing data from user sessions, surveys and more. Standardize that data.

Conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis. With the former, focus on trends in KPIs and other hard numerical data. With the latter, identify trends, themes and other potential issues presented by users.

Segment the data. Not all data affects all customers the same. By classifying the data, you can identify trends as they apply to particular personas, stages in the journey, devices, and more.

Visualize the findings. Use techniques like charts and hot/cold spots to enable stakeholders to understand how testers engaged with the digital product. Working cross-functionally when evaluating the data can introduce helpful perspectives and conclusions.

Map and understand the journey. Refine customer journey maps using the testing data. Use techniques like conversion funnels and benchmarking to learn where to improve performance and identify ongoing trends.

Find and fix defects. Use root cause analysis to uncover defects and points of friction, and enter any defects into the organization’s bug tracking system. Prioritize these issues based on severity and impact, specifically targeting ones that directly affect business goals.

Take action. Outline actionable steps that make use of these findings to deliver better business results. Don’t forget to adapt testing to validate any theories derived from the data.

Foster a feedback loop. Work toward continuous improvement with a feedback loop that delivers new and valuable insights on every iteration of the digital product and customer journeys.

What are the key metrics for measuring customer journey success?

Organizations can track a variety of different types of qualitative and quantitative data to make sense of the customer journey. Determining the most important metrics for your team depends on business, industry and organizational goals. Some examples of metrics to measure customer journey success include:

• Conversion rate. Tracks the percentage of users who follow a desired action, such as completing a purchase.
• Customer satisfaction scores. Provides feedback from customers on the app performance and experience.
• Net promoter scores. Measures the overall customer satisfaction and the likelihood they would recommend the product, service or brand.
• App store ratings. Generalizes customers’ reactions to a mobile app or product.
• Average order value. Calculates how much money the average customer spends in a single transaction to measure the effectiveness of the overall journey.
• Session duration. Tracks the amount of time users spend on an individual page or within the app.
• Bounce rate. Calculates the percentage of users who navigate away from a site or app after viewing only a single page.
• Customer retention rate. Measures the frequency of repeat customers as a way to gauge satisfaction.
• Click-through rate. Tracks how many users click on a specific link compared to total number of page views.
• Social shares/engagement. Assesses a variety of social media metrics that can measure customer journeys, including followers, mentions and engagements, both for sponsored and organic shares.

Remember that customer journey testing often involves a physical action as well, such as picking up an order at a drive-thru window. The metrics above might not account for any customer frustrations or internal issues that arise in this element of the customer journey.

How do you prioritize and address customer pain points identified through journey testing?

Customer friction or pain points directly affect the bottom line. Take a strategic, data-driven approach to prioritize customer journey pain points. Categorize customer pain points based on their frequency and effect on customer satisfaction. Address high-impact, high-frequency issues first, as these problems affect a large portion of the customer base. Make use of quantitative and qualitative data to make informed decisions in prioritization.

Developing solutions. Once you’ve prioritized the pain points, take a cross-functional approach to solution development, engaging teams from product development, marketing, sales and customer service. Conduct brainstorming sessions to focus on creating customer-centric solutions that directly address these issues. Design thinking methodologies help you empathize with the customer, define the problem, ideate, prototype and test these solutions. An iterative solution development process helps ensure that continuous feedback catches future issues as customer journeys and technologies evolve.

Implementing changes. Take a systematic and monitored approach to implementing solutions to these customer pain points. Establish clear objectives and measurable KPIs to chart the effectiveness of the changes. Communication is key during this phase, both internally to align teams and externally to inform customers about the improvements. Manage customer expectations and demonstrate that their feedback is valuable.

Monitoring and iterating. Addressing customer pain points is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor the customer journey post-implementation to assess the effect of these changes. Customer satisfaction surveys, NPS scores and user analytics can help gauge the effectiveness of and response to these solutions. Be prepared to iterate and make further improvements; customer journey testing is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing commitment to enhancing customer experience across all channels.

How do you incorporate customer feedback from journey testing into product development?

Incorporating feedback from customer journey testing into product development helps create user-centric products. Begin by gathering and analyzing the feedback comprehensively. Some of the tools discussed above, like customer journey maps, help pinpoint where in the product lifecycle the feedback is most relevant, such as stages like initial engagement, purchasing or post-purchase support. Group feedback into themes to identify common issues or suggestions.

Foster cross-functional collaboration

It is crucial to involve various departments in the product development cycle. Involve designers, developers, marketers, customer service teams and more — anyone that can help provide context for the customer journey feedback. Cross-functional workshops and regular meetings help ensure everyone understands the customer insights — and how they translate into product improvements. Don’t view feedback in isolation; understand it within the context of overall product strategy and goals.

Prioritize features and changes

Assess potential changes based on how they would affect the customer experience and align with business objectives. Frameworks like the MoSCoW method (must-have, should-have, could-have, won’t-have) can help categorize feedback for prioritization. Ultimately, the goal is to balance customer needs with business concerns like time constraints, resource limitations and technical feasibility.

Iterate with development and testing

Incorporate an Agile or incremental development approach, where product changes are implemented in iterative cycles. Iterative development and testing allow for continuous refinement based on ongoing customer feedback. Follow each iteration with testing and validation to ensure that the changes meet customer expectations and solve the identified issues. Engage with a subset of your customer base, such as real-world crowdtesters that meet a variety of demographic and geographic needs, to test these changes. Gather customer journey feedback to inform the next cycle of development.

Close the feedback loop

Finally, inform customers about how their feedback led to actionable improvements. When you act upon this feedback, it enhances customer satisfaction and encourages further engagement in the future, creating a cycle of continuous improvement. Remember, customer feedback is not just a checkbox phase in product development; it’s an integral and ongoing part of a customer-centric business culture.

How do you measure the impact of customer journey testing on customer satisfaction and loyalty?

You cannot achieve smooth customer journeys through luck or divinity. Nor can you achieve them once, at a single point in time definitively and indefinitely into the future. Measure customer satisfaction and loyalty over time to understand where — not if — problems occur. Here are a few ways to measure customer journey testing efforts.

KPIs and metrics. As mentioned above, some common customer experience indicators include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). An NPS score provides an assessment of how likely a customer might be to recommend your service or product, reflecting loyalty and satisfaction. CSAT measures customer satisfaction with a specific interaction or the overall experience. CES gauges how easy it is for a customer to do business with your company, a key factor in fostering loyalty.

Longitudinal analysis. Conduct longitudinal analysis to understand trends over time. Compare KPIs before and after implementing changes to reveal whether modifications positively affected customer satisfaction and loyalty. Monitor these metrics over time to detect long-term trends and fluctuations, as customer satisfaction can change with market conditions and evolving expectations.

Segmented feedback analysis. Different customer segments have varying responses to the same changes. Segment your customer base, and analyze the satisfaction and loyalty metrics of each one after implementation of the changes. For example, how do the demographics or purchasing behavior change? Understanding these nuances enables more targeted and effective improvements in the customer journey.

Customer behaviors. Beyond direct satisfaction metrics, observe changes in customer behaviors. Indicators such as repeat purchase rates, increased engagement and lower churn rates are strong signals of improvement in customer loyalty and satisfaction. Correlate these behavioral changes with your customer journey testing interventions to gather a more comprehensive view of their impact.

Qualitative feedback and case studies. In addition to quantitative metrics, gather data from surveys, interviews and focus groups for a qualitative assessment of the product or service. Seek deeper insights into the motivation behind the numbers, providing context and guidance for further improvements. Document case studies where specific changes led to noticeable improvements in satisfaction to measure and communicate the impact of customer journey testing.

Overall business impact. Remember, the goal is not just to improve metrics but also to foster a loyal and satisfied customer base that drives business success. Look at criteria like sales growth, market share and customer retention rates to grasp how these efforts affect the bottom line. Improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty often translate into tangible business benefits, and these should be part of the overall evaluation of customer journey testing efforts.

How can customer journey testing inform the design and development of software products?

By mapping out the customer journey, software developers can gain insights into how users interact with the product, including determining what features they find most useful and where they experience friction. These findings encourage user-centric software design that addresses real customer needs. Some conclusions might include identifying which features to prioritize, how to structure the user interface and which kind of user experience (UX) will be most effective.

Consider these benefits of customer journey testing informing product design and development:

• resolution of pain points, such as navigation and usability issues, early in the software development life cycle (SDLC), enhancing digital quality and saving future resources;
• improved insight and feedback on user-valued features, guiding both initial feature development and future iteration to evolve software in line with user needs and expectations;
• better UI and UX that capitalizes on customer insights about the intuitiveness and user-friendliness of the product, guiding designers in creating functional, easy-to-navigate and aesthetically pleasing interfaces
• enhanced satisfaction and loyalty, leading to increased engagement, reduced churn and organic growth
• better cross-functional collaboration, as various teams within an organization come together to ensure a comprehensive and well-rounded approach to software development — a potential gateway to future projects.

What are the best practices for conducting customer journey testing?

Effective customer journey testing involves strategic planning and an understanding of the target customers. A variety of methods, including the use of crowdtesters to walk through customer journeys in the real world, help organizations remove friction from the customer experience. Let’s walk through some quick customer journey best practices.

1. Clear planning and objective setting

Begin with a well-defined plan and specific goals. Understand which aspects of the customer journey you will examine and what goals you intend to meet. Clarity helps focus the testing process and ensure actionable results.

2. Audience segmentation and analysis

Segment and understand your target customers to gain nuanced insights. Tailor your testing efforts to different customer groups based on factors like demographics and behavior patterns.

3. Strategic crowdtesting engagement

Make use of a crowdtesting partner like Applause, who can source a diverse group of users who are representative of your customer journeys, offering a wide range of perspectives. This crowdtesting approach helps uncover issues not apparent in controlled environments and provides real-world insights from various customer segments.

4. Comprehensive journey mapping

Develop detailed maps of your customer journeys, encompassing all touchpoints. These complete views help the organization understand the customer experience from their perspectives, covering both digital and physical interactions.

5. Mixed methods approach

Deploy both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Qualitative methods like interviews provide deep insights into customer emotions, while quantitative methods offer measurable, statistically analyzable data.

6. Iterative testing and feedback

Conduct multiple rounds of customer journey testing to refine the customer experience continually. Implement changes based on customer feedback, and retest to assess the success of those changes.

7. Cross-functional team involvement

Involve teams across the organization, such as designers and developers, in customer journey testing and analysis. Collaboration helps lead to more effective improvements and adoption across additional teams.

8. Data analysis and actionable steps

Analyze the customer journey data carefully to identify patterns and issues. Prioritize changes based on how they might affect customers, and ensure insights lead to actionable improvements.

9. Transparent communication

Keep stakeholders informed about the findings of customer journey testing and subsequent actions for issue remediation. Transparency builds trust and demonstrates a commitment to enhancing the customer experience.

10. Ongoing monitoring and improvement

Treat customer journey testing as a continuous process, not a one-time event. Regularly update your journey maps and engage with your customers for continuous feedback. Remember to adapt to changing expectations and market conditions as you go.

How can customer journey testing be integrated with the software development process?

When properly integrated throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC), customer journey testing offers a host of benefits, including early and continuous feedback, cross-functional collaboration, realistic user story development and ongoing post-launch testing. Let’s explain how customer journey testing fits throughout the SDLC.

Early in the SDLC

Customer journey testing typically requires a usable product, as the approach is all about understanding and optimizing the journey — early development stages introduce technical blockers that outright inhibit or prevent those journeys.

Still, organizations can conduct foundational research to map out journeys and plan for customer journey testing. Testing on customer journeys in previous iterations can also influence the planning and design phases to better account for the customer’s needs and expectations. Customer journey insights can also inform user stories and development scenarios. The goal should be to create realistic and relevant use cases that guide the development process.

In this way, an Agile or iterative framework encourages a more receptive approach to ongoing testing. Plan for an incremental development approach early on to achieve flexibility, which comes in handy when integrating customer feedback at various stages.

Middle of the SDLC

Rolling customer journey testing into development fosters collaboration between dev teams and customer experience specialists. Developers gain insights into user behavior and preferences, while customer experience teams understand the technical feasibility and constraints of the product. This collaborative approach yields more innovative and user-friendly solutions.

Late in the SDLC

Continue customer journey testing even after the software launch. Post-launch feedback is critical for ongoing improvements and updates. It helps in identifying new user requirements, changing market trends, and areas for enhancement in subsequent versions.

Throughout the SDLC

Establish continuous feedback loops throughout the SDLC. As the organization builds prototypes and develops features, use customer journey testing to gather feedback. Continue this approach when a viable product is available for testing. An iterative approach enables real-time adjustments and refinements, ensuring the final product aligns closely with user preferences and requirements.

Use data from customer journey testing to drive business decisions. Analyze customer feedback to prioritize feature development, UI/UX improvements and bug fixes. A data-driven approach helps ensure efficient and effective allocation of resources.

What are some common challenges faced when conducting customer journey testing and how can they be overcome?

Customer journey testing brings issues to light that otherwise would negatively affect the customer’s experience with the product and the brand’s reputation. While the approach yields positive returns, it does introduce some hurdles to clear. Let’s address some customer journey testing challenges and provide some solutions.

Limited perspective and bias

Traditional testing methods often rely on a limited set of users, such as friends and family of the company, leading to biased results that don’t represent the needs of a diverse customer base.

By leveraging a diverse, geographically spread and varied demographic group of testers, such as through the use of crowdtesting, customer journey testing provides both a broader and more targeted perspective. Capturing a wide range of experiences and feedback helps reduce bias and ensure more comprehensive testing results.

Difficulty simulating real-world conditions

A testing environment doesn’t always accurately simulate real-world conditions. Lab environments or controlled settings cannot replicate actual user interactions and behaviors, even when they are informed by real user feedback.

Use real-world testing scenarios to overcome this challenge. Encourage testers to use the product in their natural environment, with their devices and during their typical routines. Aim for authentic insights and real user experiences.

Balancing quantitative and qualitative data

It’s challenging to strike the right balance between quantitative metrics, like completion times, click-through rates, and qualitative feedback, like user satisfaction and usability feedback.

Adopt a mixed-methods approach. Combine analytics and metrics with in-depth interviews, surveys and open-ended user feedback. Seek a blend of measurable results and subjective insights to get a detailed picture of user attitudes and perceptions.

Integrating feedback, collaboration into development cycles

Timely and effective integration of feedback into the development process can be a logistical challenge, especially for teams that resist change or have to keep up in fast-paced development environments.

Implement an Agile approach. Iterative and incremental development approaches are conducive to incorporating feedback quickly and efficiently. Establish clear communication channels between dev and testing teams to sharpen the focus on digital quality.

Ensuring consistent user experience across channels

It’s hard to provide a consistent and seamless user experience across various platforms and channels. Customer journeys are often complex, and many touchpoints means many places where something can go wrong.

Conduct channel-specific testing while also keeping an eye on the overall journey. Test each channel and its unique considerations but also assess how it integrates and transitions into other channels.

Applause’s Customer Journey Testing solution offers a comprehensive approach to enhancing customer experiences, using real-world insights to identify friction points in both digital and physical customer interactions. Customer Journey Testing with Applause leverages a million-strong global community that provides valuable feedback on product functionality, user experience and operational readiness, ensuring seamless and intuitive journeys.

Contact Applause’s expert team today to curate actionable customer journey feedback, improve customer loyalty, increase conversions and launch products with confidence.