Shopper Journeys

The vast majority of shopper journeys focus on company outcomes, like Net Promoter Score (NPS) — which measures a customer’s willingness to recommend a company’s products or services to others. However, in reality, only companies care about their NPS; customers typically do not. So, NPS is just another KPI.  It does not provide direct traceability to any single intended customer outcome or expectation, or show where the company may be falling short.

It is also very common to portray the shopper journey as a linear series of interactions — shopper sees offline ad, then goes to search engine, then is directed to landing page on website, then is retargeted on Facebook, then comes back to website and provides email address, after which an email to shopper is triggered, etc. — is only useful as an example of what could happen if all the stars aligned — or if shoppers were willing to follow the script. But shoppers don’t follow scripts. They follow impulses, urges, whims, and preferences, often in unplanned moments of opportunity.