Customer Journey Mapping and Engagement: understanding and optimising the customer journey

Now that you’ve established the foundations of Customer Success, the next step is to understand and optimise the entire journey your customers take—from their first interaction with your product to becoming loyal advocates. Mapping the customer journey helps you identify key milestones, critical touchpoints, and areas for proactive engagement. By creating a clear, actionable journey map, you ensure that every interaction delivers value, driving retention, satisfaction, and long-term growth.

1. Why Customer Journey Mapping Matters: 

The customer journey is the series of experiences your customers have with your company, starting from their very first interaction. Understanding this journey is essential because it enables you to:

• Identify Friction Points: Pinpoint areas where customers struggle or drop off.

• Define Success Milestones: Highlight critical moments where customers achieve value.

• Engage Proactively: Build touchpoints to guide customers toward their goals.

For early-stage companies, a clear journey map helps you are optimising the journey for customer value, prior to scaling the Customer Success function in a consistent and predictable way.

“Ultimately, the goal of a customer journey map is to ensure that every interaction your customer has with your company and product is driving them to increased value - conversely, it should identify anything that’s contradictory to that goal.”

Andrea Spillman-Gajek - Founder at

Customer Success Accelerators and Brighteye Mentor

2. Mapping the Customer Journey: 

A customer journey map visually outlines the stages customers go through as they interact with your product. At its simplest, the map includes three key phases:

• Onboarding: Customers start using the product and experience their first success milestone.

• Adoption: Customers incorporate your product into their regular workflows and achieve ongoing value.

• Expansion/Advocacy: Customers become power users, expand usage, and refer others to your product. 

• Renewal / upsell: Mapping out this phase is key to aligning the sales / CS / renewals team activities and touchpoint

Steps to Create Your Journey Map:

1. List Key Customer Stages: Define the key phases of your customer’s journey (e.g., onboarding, adoption, renewal).

2. Identify Success Milestones: Determine what success looks like at each stage.

3. Outline Customer Touchpoints: Document interactions (e.g., onboarding calls, emails, QBRs) that help customers achieve success.

4. Spot Gaps and Friction: Analyse where customers drop off or struggle and brainstorm ways to improve.

“Think about the earliest point at which your customer is getting value from your solution and think about how this value increases over time.”

Andrea Spillman-Gajek - Founder at

Customer Success Accelerators and Brighteye Mentor

3. Proactive Customer Engagement: 

With your journey map in hand, you can design proactive engagement strategies to guide customers through each stage. At this stage, focus on a few key touchpoints:

• Onboarding Check-Ins: Ensure customers achieve their first value milestone.

• Adoption Nudges: Share tips, training, or content to encourage deeper product usage.

• Onboarding accelerators: Construct a coherent and thoughtful set of onboarding material and touchpoints that accelerate users towards value.

The goal is to anticipate customer needs and provide the right support at the right time.

“On your side, you should conduct customer ‘health checks’, assessing metrics on usage so you can address risks as early as possible.

With users, you might undertake value-centred business reviews, such as EBRs and QBRs to check they are experiencing the value you have designed for them.”

Andrea Spillman-Gajek - Founder at

Customer Success Accelerators and Brighteye Mentor

4. Leveraging Automation for Scale: 

As you grow, automation can help you scale your engagement without sacrificing quality. Early automation strategies include:

• Onboarding Email Sequences: Step-by-step guides to help customers get started.

• Product Usage Alerts : Automated notifications when customers hit key milestones, either for success or when they represent a risk of leaving/ not renewing their subscription

• Surveys and Feedback Requests: Tools like NPS surveys to collect customer insights.

“You could also trial integrating support automations for guiding customers to the most helpful material for their needs, routing inbound support requests, and others.

Particularly for B2C or for smaller B2B clients, you should optimise many touchpoints and engagement moments, as well as using data to create customised, automated journeys and outreach – these touchpoints feel personalised even if they are actually automated!”

Andrea Spillman-Gajek - Founder at

Customer Success Accelerators and Brighteye Mentor

Start small, automate repetitive tasks, and focus your time on high-impact, personalised interactions.

Takeaways for Founders:

• A clear customer journey map helps you understand and optimize every stage of the customer experience.

• Proactive engagement ensures customers achieve success and reduces churn.

• Automation allows you to scale engagement while maintaining quality.

• Focus on onboarding, adoption, and expansion touchpoints to drive long-term growth.