How does engagement affect customer journeys?

In today’s multichannel markets understanding customer journeys is increasingly relevant. However, extant research predominantly focuses on dyadic purchase journeys, giving scant insight into touchpoints beyond firm influence. In particular, insight into ‘customer-owned’ and ‘social’ touchpoints is pivotal for improved understanding of customer journey behaviour. This paper offers a richer, more dynamic, understanding of journeys by drawing from engagement research, which provides insight into customer activities exogenous to the firm. Journey research has, to date, given limited consideration to engagement and virtually no earlier research has sought to establish the analytical connection between these two concepts. We develop five propositions which explain the relationship between engagement and customer journeys. We postulate that engagement affects the range, volume, and nature of touchpoints throughout the focal customer journey, as well as other customers' journeys. We show how engagement behaviors connect individual customer journeys to each other and may even change the fundamental course of journeys.