Going on a journey: A review of the customer journey literature

Customer journey has become an increasingly important concept to understand complex customer behaviours and get insights into their experiences. While the term has been used in diverse disciplines since the 1990s and its literature has grown more than sevenfold over the last eight years, understanding of the topic remains incoherent. This paper adopted a stream-based systematic review approach to identify the underlying themes of the customer journey presented in the business literature up to May 2020. 147 relevant papers were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCO for the analysis. The quantitative content analysis identified five underlying themes of the customer journey, namely, service satisfaction, failure and recovery, co-creation, customer response, channels and technological disruption. The results section reviewed and discussed each theme and its sub-themes in turn. The review identified important gaps in the literature related to the key stages of a customer journey.