Many companies are creating customer journey maps to get a better understand the factors that influence their path from awareness-to-advocacy. But a surprising few design, capture and integrate end-to-end research insights. Most have a long history with shopper research in specific areas of the journey, in specific channels, or to answer specific questions they are wrestling with like packaging or product features. But few capture the journey across the online AND offline channels as well as from “Trigger-to-Repurchase”.

Without a committed approach to doing this, the connection to a shopper along their journey is lost and the ability to track, predict and link changes from one part of the journey to the next are next to impossible, resulting in a list of “focused improvement programs” that even if successful individually, are impossible to assess on the final shopper outcome.

Designing an end-to-end customer research approach isn’t difficult – but it does require that multiple approaches be included:

• In-store mobile surveys – that are easy for all shoppers to engage with – from Millennials to Baby boomers – can provide quantitative research data at one of the most important parts of the journey – at the store during the shopping experience.
• In-store qualitative research – including shop-alongs and intercepts. Qualitative research and interviews can delve into the deep reasons for shopping, the detailed decision process and shopper motivations that surveys struggle to capture as well as capturing pictures, videos and other imagery critical to the purchasing process.
• Post-purchase quantitative research – including online surveys that capture customer loyalty, brand switching and channel selection – with the data analysis necessary to refine the business case for changes.
• Online shopping website analysis – identifying the “leakage” of brand and product intent through the online shopping and purchase process. These insights go well beyond shopping cart abandonment and into the impact of user reviews on various online shopper personas.

A major CPG company found that when they captured this information, they learned that:

• 70% of shoppers were switching their brand pre-determination inside the store
• Their brand strength was high, allowing them to leverage it to impact 75% of pre-shopping influencers.
• Packaging was far more important to capturing the product selection decision than they thought

If you are creating a customer journey, it isn’t complete until you have a comprehensive end-to-end research plan. Gold Research is the leader in in-store, online and at-home research. We have extensive experience in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research, deploying customer intercepts, in-store interviews, and mobile surveys for concept testing, marketing testing, satisfaction research, shopper insights, and mystery shopping. We can also act as an extension of your research team in helping with data processing, analysis, report development, and survey programming. Contact us at 1-800-549-7170 or send us an email for a free 30-minute consultation on this topic.