Customer journey steps are the individual actions a buyer takes inside a stage: opening the form, finishing it, choosing a time slot, confirming, turning up. Stages tell you where buyers are. Steps tell you exactly where inside that stage they stop. This article answers how to list the steps inside your most important stage, record each one in the levelpartner.ai platform, and find the single step where most buyers give up.
Why steps matter more than stages for fixes
A stage report might say that 200 people enquired and 80 booked a call. That tells you the booking stage leaks. It does not tell you why. Listing the steps between enquiry and booked call often reveals five or six actions: receive reply, click link, open calendar, pick a slot, enter details, confirm.
Each step loses some people. Usually one loses far more than the others, and that step is cheap to fix: a confusing link, a calendar with no slots this week, a form asking for too much.
Before you start
- Agreed stages. The customer journey stages guide covers this.
- One stage you want to examine, usually the one with the biggest drop.
- Access to Sites for forms and funnels, Calendars, Automation and Contacts.
- Three colleagues willing to walk through the stage as if they were buyers.
How to set it up
- Choose the stage with the largest drop on your Funnel widget.
- Ask three colleagues to go through that stage from the buyer's side and write down every action.
- Merge their lists into one ordered set of steps.
- For each step, decide which record proves it happened, such as a page view, form submission or booking.
- Where no record exists, add one: a workflow tag or a Source element.
- In Contacts > Smart Lists, create one smart list per step.
- Compare the counts and find the step with the biggest fall.
- Change only that step, then measure again after four weeks.
Finding the step that matters
Do not fix every step. Fix the one with the biggest fall first, then measure again. Changing several steps at once hides which change worked and makes the next decision harder.
Common culprits are surprisingly ordinary. A form with twelve fields where four would do. A calendar that offers no slot for ten days. A confirmation email that lands in spam. A booking page that does not work on a phone.
Suppose the brokerage lists six fact-find steps: receive link, open form, complete personal details, upload documents, submit, book review call. Of 300 clients sent the link in a quarter, say 270 open it and 240 complete personal details, but only 110 upload documents, because the upload step asks for seven documents at once. If splitting it into a short form plus a later request lifted submissions to 190, that would be 80 more completed fact-finds a quarter. These figures are illustrative.
Walking the steps yourself
Once a quarter, go through your own key stage on a phone, as a buyer would, using a personal email address. Time each step. Leaders who do this usually find at least one step they did not know existed, such as a second confirmation email or a login screen.
What it replaces
Step tracking replaces guesses about why a stage underperforms, and the habit of redesigning a whole website or funnel when one page is the problem. It also replaces surveys asking buyers why they stopped, which few of them answer.
Time it takes each week
Listing and instrumenting the steps for one stage takes a day. Checking the step counts takes ten minutes a week. Work through one stage per quarter rather than all of them at once.
The mistake most people make
Listing steps from your side rather than the buyer's. "Sales sends proposal" is your step. "Buyer opens proposal, reads price, asks a question" are theirs. The buyer's steps are where the drop-offs happen, so list those.
When not to track steps
If a stage has tiny volume, say a handful of buyers a month, step counts are too small to read. Talk to the buyers instead. Step tracking also adds little in stages run entirely by a person in a meeting; there the steps are conversational, not clickable. For the internal work that sits behind each step, see customer journey process.
Troubleshooting
Step counts go up instead of down
A step is counted twice, for example a form submitted twice. Count unique contacts, not events.
One step shows zero
The tag or field that records it is not being set. Run a test contact through and watch which workflow step fails.
Step counts do not match the stage report
The stage report counts opportunities and the step counts count contacts. Pick one unit and use it for both.
You cannot see page views
Funnel and website pages hosted in Sites report views; external pages may not. Move the critical page into Sites, or tag the contact when they click through. For linking sources to steps, see customer journey tracking.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between steps and touchpoints?
A touchpoint is where the buyer meets you, such as an email or a call. A step is something the buyer does. One touchpoint can hold several steps. The touchpoints customer journey guide covers touchpoints.
How many steps should a stage have?
Whatever the buyer actually does, usually three to eight. Fewer steps usually means a better experience.
Can AI agents remove steps?
Often. An AI agent in chat or SMS can book a call inside the conversation, which removes the click to a calendar page and the form that follows it.