From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do
By Nicolas Maechler, Kevin Neher, and Robert Park

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1603

To maximize customer satisfaction, companies have long emphasized touchpoints. But doing so can divert attention from the more important issue: the customer’s end-to-end journey.

Great article and strongly recommend you g to the original source

When most companies focus on customer experience they think about touchpoints—the individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings........customer journeys include many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. Journeys can be long, stretching across multiple channels and touchpoints, and often lasting days or weeks........ he explosion of potential customer interaction points—across new channels, devices, applications, and more—makes consistency of service and experience across channels nigh impossible—unless you are managing the journey, and not simply individual touchpoints........the customers’ cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints, multiple channels, and over time.......Six actions are critical to managing customer-experience journeys :

• Step back and identify the nature of the journeys customers take—from the customer’s point of view.

• Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the journey.

• Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey.

• Build an understanding of what is working and what is not.

• Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.

• Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.