A customer arrives at a click-and-collect desk to pick up an order their partner placed. The confirmation email said the order was ready. It didn’t say what the person collecting needed to bring. The colleague cannot release the parcel, so the customer either goes home or waits while the colleague rings another team to check. In this example, the collection process was set up for the person who placed the order, but someone else turned up.

Most gaps in the customer journey start like this. A process asks the customer for a receipt, or the correct product code, and that day, for one reason or another, the customer doesn’t have it. These situations rarely appear on a journey map. The colleagues who handle them usually see them first.

How to find gaps in the customer journey

The quickest way to find gaps in the customer journey is to take one journey, change one thing about the customer’s situation, and follow the process as it works today. Five steps cover it:

1. Choose one customer situation to test.

Pick a situation your customers are actually in. Someone collecting an order their partner placed. A return without a receipt. A phone that’s run out of battery life, but the order number and loyalty card are on it. A customer who knows what a product needs to do but not what it is called. A parent at the till with an upset toddler. Keep the journey small enough to follow every step: one collection process, one returns process or one delivery booking.

2. Follow the process as it works today.

Read the confirmation email, the website instructions, and the guidance colleagues use. Then walk through what happens at the desk or on the phone. Note every point where the customer cannot continue, needs a colleague’s help or has to make another trip.

3. Ask colleagues what they do when it happens.

Ask the colleagues who run that journey three things: whether the situation happens, what they do to help, and what happens when they cannot resolve it. If they use a workaround, ask them to show you. It might be a phone call to another team, a manual check, or a sale recorded under a different till option.

4. Look beyond complaints.

Customers who cannot complete a journey often leave without saying why. Check where people stop as well as what they say: baskets abandoned at a particular page, orders that are never collected, the same question asked at the desk every week.

5. Make one change and check it.

Choose one improvement, such as clearer collection instructions, a way for customers to authorise someone else, or guidance that tells colleagues what they are allowed to change. Agree who will make it and when you’ll check it. Decide the measure in advance, for example the share of orders collected on the first visit, or the number of calls about missing information.

If the change is large, trial it first. Before rolling its Quieter Hour out to all stores, Morrisons trialled it in Lincoln, Woking and Gainsborough. The trial helped them identify improvements and the best time to run the hour.

Why customers don’t report gaps in the customer journey

Many customers who hit a gap in the journey do not tell the retailer. They leave.

The Click-Away Pound Report 2019 surveyed disabled people about shopping online. It found that 69% of disabled internet users with access needs leave a website they find difficult to use, and only 8% of disabled customers who have difficulty contact the business about it.

For a retailer, the pattern means complaints data will understate how often a journey fails. If fewer than one in ten struggling customers report it, the complaints log records only a small share of the journeys that went wrong. Web analytics can show the page where a customer stopped. They cannot show what stopped them.

John Seddon, the occupational psychologist behind the Vanguard Method, calls this failure demand: demand caused by failing to do something, or doing it poorly, for the customer. In retail, it shows up as a customer phone call asking what to bring to collect an order, a second trip to the returns desk, and 20 minutes a colleague spends on something the system can’t log. Seddon traces much of it to standard processes that cannot handle the variety in what customers need.

What colleague workarounds show about the journey

When colleagues regularly work around a process to help customers, the workaround shows where the journey does not fit. Central teams often have no way of seeing it.

At Retail Week Live in 2019, James Timpson said that watch repairs, then the fastest-growing part of the business, began with one colleague who had previously been a watch repairer. The colleague started repairing watches in store without telling management, and rang the sales through the till as key cutting.

Anyone reading the sales figures would have seen key cutting. Only the colleague in the shop knew that customers were coming in with watches. Timpson’s colleagues have unusual freedom to act on what they see. In many retailers, they would turn away the same request.

A colleague might call another team for approval, enter a sale under the wrong till option, or find another way to help the customer. These workarounds show where the process leaves customers stuck, and the details often never reach an official record.

In 2016, the Sainsbury’s store in Gosforth, Newcastle, trialled Slow Shopping. The idea came from Katherine Vero, whose mother had dementia and shopping together had become difficult and stressful. One afternoon a week, colleagues greeted customers at the door and helped them shop, with chairs at the ends of aisles and staffed help desks.

At the time, reporting cited Alzheimer’s Society research showing that one in four people surveyed had given up shopping since their diagnosis. A customer who knew exactly where the supermarket did not work for her family explained it to her local store, and the store had room to try something different.

Why every planned journey differs from the real one

Every journey map simplifies; it has to. A team can’t design anything if it tries to map every customer in every situation. Mapping workshops choose a customer and the steps that customer is expected to take. The risk comes when people read the map as a full description of how customers behave.

Researchers at SINTEF tested this with Norway’s telecoms company, Telenor. They compared the journey Telenor had planned with what individual customers actually did, using interviews, diary studies and process tracking. Every real journey they studied separated from the plan, and most separated more than once. Customers had to call customer service when they shouldn’t have needed to, or received important letters too late to use. None of the companies in the research had a full picture of the end-to-end journey.

The journey separations often followed a pattern: steps happened in the wrong order, or one stage repeatedly confused people. A pattern points to the step that needs changing.

Booths, the northern England grocer, gives a UK retail example. In November 2023, it removed self-checkouts from all but two of its 28 stores. Managing director Nigel Murray said customers found the machines slow, unreliable and impersonal. Loose fruit, vegetables and bakery items needed visual verification at the self-scan; some customers could not tell one apple from another, and any alcohol meant waiting for a colleague to check age. The self-checkout asked customers to identify every loose item by name, and the work it was meant to remove passed to the colleague standing by the machines and to the customer.

Deciding which situations the process should handle

No retailer can design a journey for every circumstance, so the decision is which situations the standard process handles and which ones colleagues are trusted to resolve.

Regular situations belong in the standard process. If people often collect orders placed by someone else, the collection process needs a clear way to authorise them and tell them what to bring. Less common situations can be left to colleagues’ judgement, provided colleagues know what they can change, which checks still apply and where to get help. Without that, each colleague has to work out an answer from scratch.

Frequency alone does not show which gaps matter most. A rare situation can still stop a customer from getting what they came for. Booths shows that the answer can differ by store: it kept self-checkouts in two Lake District stores, where they help during busy periods.

Key takeaways

• Choose one customer situation to test. A partner’s order, a lost receipt, or a dead phone situation will show more about the journey than a general review of every step.
• Follow the process as it works today. Read the email, the website instructions and the colleague guidance, and note every point where the customer needs help or has to come back.
• Ask colleagues what they do when it happens. Workarounds, such as calling another team or ringing up a sale under a different option, show where the journey doesn’t fit.
• Look beyond complaints. Many customers leave without saying why, so check abandoned baskets, uncollected orders and repeated questions at the desk.
• Make one change and check it. Agree on who will make the change, when you’ll check it, which measure should move, and trial larger changes in a few stores first.

Let’s connect – Find me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-williams-ccxp/)

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