Experience: customer and user journeys and touchpoints

Two services can facilitate exactly the same outcome at the same cost and risk, yet one is loved and the other resented. The difference is experience. ITIL 4 introduced customer experience, user experience and customer journeys as important ideas, and ITIL (Version 5) raises experience to a key term alongside utility, warranty and value. This lesson explains what experience means, how journeys and touchpoints help providers understand it, how to measure it with common scores such as CSAT, CES and NPS, and how accessibility and inclusion shape good experience.

What experience means

Experience is the sum of what people encounter, do, think and feel when they interact with a product, a service or an organization. It includes functional aspects (could I do what I needed?), practical aspects (was it easy and quick?) and emotional aspects (did I feel respected, confident, frustrated?). Experience is perceived, like value, and it shapes perceived value directly. A clumsy, confusing service lowers perceived value even when it eventually works.

ITIL distinguishes customer experience (CX), which covers all interactions between a customer and a provider across the whole relationship, from user experience (UX), which focuses on the interactions of users with a particular product or interface. In practice the two overlap, and many organizations talk simply about service experience. What matters is to see experience as something designed and managed, not left to chance.

Journeys and touchpoints

A customer journey is the complete end-to-end experience a customer has with one or more providers and their products, through the touchpoints and service interactions supported by those products. A touchpoint is any event where a consumer or potential consumer has an encounter with the provider or its products and resources. Touchpoints include a website visit, an email, a phone call, an app notification, an invoice, a technician's visit and even an advertisement.

Not every touchpoint involves direct interaction. Seeing a news story about the provider's outage is a touchpoint that shapes perception. Some touchpoints are moments of truth: points where the consumer forms a strong impression that colors the whole relationship. The first day using a new service, the handling of a serious incident and the experience of canceling are typical moments of truth.

Mapping a journey

Journey mapping is a practical technique for understanding experience. A team chooses a persona (a realistic description of a type of consumer) and a scenario, then lays out the stages the persona goes through, the touchpoints at each stage, what the persona is doing, thinking and feeling, and where problems occur. Good journey maps are built from evidence: interviews, observation, support tickets, survey comments and analytics, not just the team's assumptions.

• Choose a persona and scenario, such as "new employee getting set up in the first week".
• List the stages from the persona's point of view, not the provider's internal processes.
• Add touchpoints, actions, thoughts and emotions at each stage.
• Mark pain points and moments of truth.
• Identify which teams, systems and suppliers sit behind each touchpoint.
• Choose improvements and measure their effect.

Measuring experience

Experience can be measured in several ways. Three common survey-based scores are customer satisfaction (CSAT), customer effort score (CES) and net promoter score (NPS). Each answers a different question, and none is enough alone.

Survey scores have limits. Response rates are often low, and those who respond may not represent everyone. Scores tell you that something is wrong but not why. Combine them with operational data (wait times, repeat contacts, abandonment rates), comments, observation and journey mapping to build a full picture.

Accessibility and inclusion

A service that some people cannot use at all fails on experience for them, however good it is for others. Accessible design ensures that people with disabilities, older adults, people with limited literacy, people using assistive technologies and people with slow connections can use the service. Inclusive design goes further, considering language, culture, age, income and context from the start.

In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to many public and private services, and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to make their information and communication technology accessible. In 2024 the Department of Justice adopted a rule requiring state and local government websites and apps to meet the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level AA, with compliance dates phased by government size. Service providers should check which rules apply to them and design to WCAG as a practical baseline.

• Use plain language and clear structure.
• Ensure all functions can be used with a keyboard and screen reader.
• Provide text alternatives for images and captions for video.
• Offer more than one channel, such as phone or in-person help, for people who cannot use digital channels.
• Test with real users who have diverse needs, not only with automated tools.

Designing for good experience

Several principles help providers design better experiences:

• Start from the consumer's goal, not the provider's structure. Users should not need to know which department handles what.
• Reduce effort: ask for information once, pre-fill what you already know, avoid unnecessary steps.
• Be consistent across channels, so starting online and finishing by phone does not mean starting again.
• Communicate proactively, especially when things go wrong. A text message saying the technician will be 30 minutes late turns a moment of frustration into one of trust.
• Close the loop: tell consumers what changed because of their feedback.

Experience inside the organization

Experience matters for internal services too. Employee experience, the way staff experience the tools, services and processes their employer provides, has a large effect on productivity and retention. A new employee who waits a week for a laptop, cannot find how to request software and gets five different answers from five teams forms an impression of the whole organization. Many internal providers now map employee journeys, such as joining, changing roles and leaving, in the same way that external providers map customer journeys.

Internal experience is also linked to external experience. Front-line staff struggling with slow, confusing systems pass that frustration on to customers through longer waits and more errors. Improving the tools that service desk agents, nurses or bank tellers use often improves the experience of the people they serve. Some organizations measure this directly with surveys of staff about their tools, alongside customer measures.

Experience work is never finished. Consumer expectations keep rising as people use better services elsewhere, so a journey that felt smooth two years ago may now feel slow. Revisiting key journeys regularly, and listening to front-line staff who hear consumers' frustrations first, keeps a provider's understanding of experience current.

Small improvements at moments of truth, such as a clear confirmation message or a friendly call-back after a problem, often change perceptions more than large investments elsewhere.