Abstract
The customer journey concept concerns the process of service provision from the customer perspective. Here, the service process is analyzed in terms of its concrete customer interactions, so called touchpoints, typically with reference to how these impact customer experience. There has been a steep increase in interest in the customer journey concept since its emergence in industry and government practices in the 1990s, and the use of customer journey approaches is considered a core competency in customer experience management across public- and private sector service provisioning. In recent research on customer journeys, emphasis has been put on how to explore and map existing customer journeys, how to understand service failure and recovery, and how customer experience develops across the customer journey. In this entry we provide an overview of the customer journey concept and related terms, current approaches to applying customer journeys, and relevant future research directions.
