A customer journey is the end-to-end relationship a customer has with a company across discovery, evaluation, purchase, product use, support, renewal, and other touchpoints.
For a B2B software buyer, the journey might be:
Hear about product → Evaluate → Trial → Security review → Purchase → Onboarding → Daily use → Support → Expansion or renewal
Each stage can be owned by a different team, but the customer experiences one continuous relationship.
A user journey often focuses on how a person experiences a particular goal or product interaction. Customer journey is usually broader and includes commercial and service touchpoints.
In B2B software, the customer and user may even be different people.
They are useful when a problem does not belong to one screen or department. For example, poor activation may begin with sales setting the wrong expectation, continue through onboarding, and end with support answering questions the product never explained.
Use actual evidence from customers and systems.
Cross-functional friction often hides at handoffs.
Choose a segment and business problem rather than mapping every customer at once.
A customer journey asks: what is it like to become, use, and remain a customer across every team and touchpoint involved?
User journey · User experience · Product funnel · User retention
Read Digital Customer Journeys for a deeper product-team perspective.