Understanding the Touchpoints of the Customer Journey

Consumers don’t decide to buy your product on a whim if they’ve never been exposed to it before. Often, there have been multiple touchpoints along the customer journey, leading them to ultimately make the purchase.

It’s important for brands to engage the consumer at these touchpoints. However, determining when, where, and how to engage at those touchpoints can be challenging without understanding real consumer behaviour.

Having conversations with consumers allows you to both broadly explore and delve deeper into the consumer journey. Sometimes you’ll want to have a completely free-flowing conversation with a consumer. Other times, you’ll want a little more background… In instances when you want to start your conversation from an informed perspective, asking research participants to do pre-work can be a good option.

You can’t be with the consumer at every step of the customer journey. That’s why it’s critical to capture their behaviours and perspectives as often throughout the journey as possible. When you ask consumers to do pre-work, you increase your visibility into parts of the journey that you may not have been able to capture otherwise.

Pre-work gives researchers and brands a valuable window into how consumers think, feel, and behave when they’re not in a formal research setting. It allows teams to gather authentic, real-world insights that reflect the natural decision-making process, rather than relying solely on recall during interviews. In essence, pre-work bridges the gap between what consumers say and what they actually do, creating a more complete picture of the customer journey.

Here are some of the most common types of pre-work that we see used to understand the consumer journey:

In-the-moment image & video capture

One of the most common requests that we receive is for stimuli to be shared on our virtual whiteboard during live video conversations.

In advance of the session, participants may gather images and/or video to discuss.

Photos or videos that are taken in-the-moment (or immediately after an event, like shopping) are especially helpful when exploring the customer journey. Touchpoints are often small interactions and can be challenging to remember correctly after-the-fact. Memories are jogged when these moments (captured by photo or video) are later brought up in conversation.

This type of pre-work also helps moderators and researchers better contextualize the consumer’s environment. Seeing a participant’s surroundings, the packaging they interact with, or the physical space where they make decisions can bring valuable context that’s often lost in traditional interviews. For example, watching a participant explain their grocery shopping process at home gives richer, more actionable insight than simply asking them to describe it.

Diaries

Similar to image and video capture, we can also ask participants to keep a diary. In asking the participants to keep a diary in the days or weeks leading up to their session, they can get a clearer idea of usage and/or feelings around a product.

The consumer journey is not a short process. It can be easy to forget details about touchpoints along the way. A diary can be a good way to aid recall of what actually happened.

Diaries also allow for reflection over time. When participants record their experiences as they occur, researchers can identify patterns, triggers, and emotional shifts that may not emerge from a single discussion. Over several days or weeks, the diary entries provide a running narrative of the consumer’s experience—one that can highlight the moments that delight or frustrate them the most. These longitudinal insights are particularly valuable when studying behavior change, brand loyalty, or product satisfaction.

Collages

Photos can also be centered around a topic area or trend. For example, a client recently requested that participants compile a collage of things that seemed “cool” to them. During the session, participants went into further depth of why they selected each image. This informed decisions about how to enhance touchpoints to be more in line with what participants found “cool.”

Discuss.io coordinates all of this work and makes sure that the images and video are available during the live session.

Collages not only reveal aesthetic preferences but also emotional associations. They help participants express abstract ideas that might be difficult to articulate verbally. When someone chooses a specific image or color, it often represents how they perceive a brand, product, or trend. Reviewing these visuals during a live discussion opens the door to deeper conversation about motivations, values, and aspirations—insights that go well beyond surface-level opinions.

At-home product testing

The customer journey doesn’t end once the purchase has been made. Consumers also have to enjoy products in order to buy them again or tell their friends and families about it.

We’ve had many customers ask us if we can ship physical products to participants’ homes. The short answer is yes, to consumers all around the world.

Participants test the product on camera during the live session, giving you an opportunity to witness real behaviours and probe in real time. To learn more about pre-work or to kick off a project of your own, start a conversation with us.

At-home product testing adds a layer of authenticity that’s difficult to achieve in a lab or office environment. It allows researchers to see how a product fits naturally into a participant’s life—how it’s used, stored, and talked about with others. Observing participants in their own spaces often surfaces spontaneous feedback and behaviors that structured testing environments may miss. For instance, watching how someone prepares, opens, or interacts with a product provides insights into usability and design that can directly inform future improvements.

Bringing it all together

When combined, these pre-work approaches give researchers and brands a comprehensive view of the consumer journey. They uncover not just what people do, but why they do it, creating more depth and meaning behind every insight. The ability to connect pre-session data with live qualitative discussions helps ensure that brands act on accurate, real-world information.

Pre-work is ultimately about building empathy—understanding consumers in their own context, on their own terms. When brands take the time to gather these authentic perspectives, they’re better equipped to design experiences, products, and messaging that truly resonate. And that understanding is what turns occasional buyers into loyal advocates.