visual representation of a journey

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

Why make a customer journey map from scratch when you can use a template? Save yourself some time by downloading HubSpot's free customer journey map templates .

This has templates that map out a buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating one in the first place.

What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it for? What experience is it based upon?

If you don't have one, I would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. This persona reminds you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward the right audience.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research. This is where it helps to have customer journey analytics at the ready.

Don't have them? No worries. You can check out HubSpot's Customer Journey Analytics tool to get started. 

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services and who have either interacted with your company or plan to do so.

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

• How did you hear about our company?
• What first attracted you to our website?
• What are the goals you want to achieve with our company? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve?
• How long have you/do you typically spend on our website?
• Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, what was your deciding factor?
• Have you ever interacted with our website to make a purchase but decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how easily can you navigate our website?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it, on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Can we further support you to make your process easier?

You can use this buyer persona tool to fill in the details you procure from customer feedback.

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

Once you've learned about the customer personas that interact with your business, I would recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a UX journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company — so if you group too many personas into one journey, your map won't accurately reflect that experience.

When creating your first map, it's best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the first time.

You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each and determine the best fit for your journey map. Don't worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map specific to those customer types.

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

Based on your research, you should have a list of all the touchpoints your customers are currently using and the ones you believe they should be using if there's no overlap.

This is essential in creating a UX journey map because it provides insight into your customers' actions.

For instance, if they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they're quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they are using more than expected, does this mean your website is complicated and requires several steps to reach an end goal?

Whatever the case, understanding touchpoints help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customers might find you online. These channels might include:

• Social channels
• Email marketing
• Third-party review sites or mentions

Run a quick Google search of your brand to see all the pages that mention you. Verify these by checking your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Whittle your list down to those touchpoints that are the most common and will be most likely to see an action associated with it.

At HubSpot, we hosted workshops where employees from all over the company highlighted instances where our product, service, or brand, impacted a customer. Those moments were recorded and logged as touchpoints. This showed us multiple areas of our customer journey where our communication was inconsistent.

The proof is in the pudding -- you can see us literally mapping these touch points out with sticky notes in the image below.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

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1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map can help you gain a deeper understanding of the steps, interactions, and emotions that a customer experiences as they move through their journey.

In this blog post, we’ll cover what we mean by a journey map, the benefits and challenges, and provide a step-by-step guide to building your own, including free (and editable) templates you can share with your team.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps and experiences a customer has as they interact with a business, product, or service. It can be used to identify areas of friction, understand customer preferences, and create a personalized experience for each customer.

By creating a customer journey map, businesses can gain insight into how customers move from awareness to purchase, and build meaningful relationships with them.

Why is it important to map the customer journey?

• Customer journey maps provide businesses with an in-depth understanding of the steps and experiences of their customers.
• They can help identify pain points in the customer experience and identify areas for improvement.
• Customer journey maps can be used to personalize the customer experience, creating a more meaningful relationship with customers.
• They can help businesses identify new opportunities and growth areas.
• Customer journey maps can help teams create and manage customer-centric strategies.

Benefits and challenges of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map can provide businesses with invaluable insights into their customers' experiences, while also presenting some challenges in terms of gathering customer data and creating a strategy to address customer pain points.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map can provide businesses with invaluable insights into their customers' experiences. It can help identify pain points in the customer experience, understand customer preferences, create a personalized experience for each customer across different touch points, and identify new opportunities and growth areas. It also helps teams create and manage customer-centric strategies, which can help businesses stay ahead of the competition.

Challenges of customer journey mapping

Creating an accurate customer journey map can be challenging, as it requires gathering customer data from multiple sources and understanding customer needs and preferences. It can also be difficult to create an actionable strategy to address customer pain points, as different customers may have different needs and preferences. Additionally, customer journey maps can quickly become outdated, making it important for businesses to stay up-to-date on customer trends and preferences.

How to create a customer journey map

To build your customer journey map, you’ll need to follow the seven steps below. Each of these steps has multiple components that require cross-functional teamwork, making having a shared, digital space key to your success.

Duration: 2 hours

Participants: 2-10 people

1. Gather customer data from multiple sources, such as surveys, interviews, online reviews, and analytics.

The first step in creating an actionable customer journey map is to ensure that you have a very solid understanding of your customers. Without a deep appreciation for their experience and a holistic view of your interactions, it’s impossible to capture accurate insights or make informed decisions.

2. Analyze the data to understand customer needs and preferences.

It is essential to thoroughly analyze customer needs and preferences in order to create an effective customer journey map that accurately reflects the customer experience. This is where you’ll be challenging any assumptions you may have had and beginning to look for patterns or insights that can be drawn from the data impact the overall experience.

3. Identify key customer touchpoints and create a timeline of the customer journey.

Once you’ve done your analysis, it’s time to start mapping your customer journey. To map the experience, you should:

• Narrow your focus to a facet of your customer experience (for example, when building solutions for Agile teams, you may want to focus on a particular ritual, like a retrospective )
• Decide on a single user, customer, or persona whose experience your diagram will represent
• Using sticky notes, have your team collect all the places, people, and items your persona will interact with (be as comprehensive as possible)
• Make sure you include instances where you have less control (e.g., the timing of a meeting vs. the structure)
• Consider the aspects of the experience that may be connected, even — especially — where those connections may not be immediately obvious

For this, a visual, collaborative platform like Mural can be a huge help, allowing you to connect what may seem like disparate elements of an overall experience, painting an accurate picture of your customers’ experience as a whole.

4. Identify areas of friction and opportunities for improvement.

After documenting the existing state of a person’s experience, it’s time to focus on key moments to deepen your understanding. Visualize the journey as pain points, bright spots, and opportunities to create a clear picture of how to improve the product or service experience, overall.

Things to do:

• Bring together the team that created the Experience Diagram(s) or people who are familiar with the experience
• Review your notes and any other artifacts collected during diagramming or early research (notes, photos, audio or video files, etc.)
• Select three colors of sticky notes (physical or digital) to capture Roses, Thorns, and Buds — we recommend Pink (Roses), Blue (Thorns), and Green (Buds) — to capture what is going well, what needs improvement, and any opportunities to expand upon in the future

5. Create an actionable strategy to address customer pain points.

Now that you’ve conducted your analysis and brainstormed ways to improve, it’s time to turn all that good information into actionable next steps.

Once you’ve organized all the information into categories, you can assign teammates to specific tasks all within the same visual platform, so everyone knows who is working on what, and expectations are transparent for every team member.

6. Test and refine the customer journey map.

Once you have a prototype of your customer journey map, you can begin to test it. You might start by applying your changes to a segment of your audience’s experience, and seeing what the preliminary results tell you. If it works, do more of it. If it’s not working so well, gather your team again to analyze performance and see what might be negatively affecting the experience.

7. Monitor customer trends and preferences to ensure the customer journey map stays up-to-date.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. Just because you’ve successfully created a customer journey map doesn’t mean the work is finished. As you begin to implement your changes, you’ll also be collecting new feedback — use that data loop to continuously improve your customer experience by returning to check in and reflect on progress with your team at regular intervals.

Customer journey mapping templates

Mural offers free, customizable customer journey mapping templates that you can share with unlimited members, so your whole team can get engaged.

Customer journey map template

The Mural customer journey map template, built by the Product School, has five components: entice , enter , engage , exit , and extend. Each of these steps includes a breakdown of interactions, goals and motivations, positive and negative moments, and opportunities for improvement.

Experience diagramming template

With the Mural experience diagramming template, you can pull back and come to grips with an individual experience for a customer, allowing you to consider each interaction in a more open, but also more granular way.

Rose, thorn, bud and affinity clusters template

The Mural rose, thorn, bud & affinity clusters template, built by the experts at the LUMA Institute (part of Mural’s Collaboration Design Institute), is a great brainstorming tool that allows your team to identify as many positive and negative aspects of a customer journey, while also providing space to investigate opportunities and organize feedback.

Use this template after the experience diagramming template to effectively map the interactions and emotions in a customer’s journey.

Customer journey maps are a stepping-stone to a better experience

Creating an actionable customer journey map is essential for businesses to stay ahead of the competition and provide a meaningful customer experience. By turning the customer journey map into actionable next steps, businesses can identify areas of friction in the customer experience, understand customer needs and preferences, create a personalized experience for each customer, and identify new opportunities for growth.

Mural makes extraordinary teamwork simple . Get started building your customer journey map today with a Mural Free Forever plan , and invite unlimited team members, so that you can ensure broad engagement and valuable insights that can be easily lost in traditional meetings, or with traditional brainstorming methods.

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About the authors

Bryan Kitch

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Unlocking the power of customer journey visualization – Step by step

Marie Jehanne

October 9, 2023 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Oct 9, 2023

Table of Contents

What is Customer Journey Visualization?

The evolution of customer journey visualization.

• Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey: What's the Difference?

Customer Journey Visualization is a strategic component of digital marketing strategy, focusing on customer experience mapping. This approach provides a comprehensive view of customer interaction with a brand, from the first contact through engagement to a long-term relationship.

It’s a critical aspect of customer relationship management (CRM), identifying potential areas for improvement and enhancing the overall customer experience. The primary objective of Customer Journey Visualization is to offer businesses a deep understanding of customer behavior. It helps identify customer touchpoints and the conversion path customers take to reach a purchase decision.

This information is invaluable in designing effective marketing strategies, improving customer service, and enhancing product or service quality. Customer Journey Visualization goes beyond mapping customer interaction with a brand. It involves a thorough purchase behavior analysis, exploring the emotions and motivations that drive customer behavior.

By understanding these factors, businesses can customize their offerings to meet customer needs and expectations, thereby increasing satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer Journey Visualization is a graphical representation or a user journey map of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a brand. It offers a visual narrative of the customer’s experience, from the first point of contact, through the process of engagement, to the final purchase and beyond. It aids businesses in understanding the customer’s perspective and identifying areas where they can enhance the customer experience. The visualization process involves mapping out each customer touchpoint where the customer interacts with the brand.

These touchpoints could include various channels such as websites, social media platforms, email, or physical stores. The journey also includes different stages the customer goes through, such as awareness, consideration, purchase, and retention, essentially forming a sales funnel diagram.

Customer Journey Visualization isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.

It varies from business to business and even from customer to customer, based on their unique needs and preferences. Therefore, it’s essential for businesses to continually update and refine their user journey maps to reflect changing customer behavior and market trends.

Know what drives engagement and abandonment on your sites and mobile apps .

The concept of Customer Journey Visualization has evolved significantly over the years. Initially, businesses focused primarily on the transactional aspects of the customer journey. They mapped out the steps a customer took to make a purchase, with little consideration for the emotional and psychological factors that influenced customer behavior. However, with the advent of digital technology and the rise of social media, the customer journey has become increasingly complex. Customers now interact with brands across multiple channels and touchpoints, and their decision-making process is influenced by a wide range of factors, including online reviews, social media posts, and personalized marketing messages.

In response to these changes, businesses have started to adopt a more holistic approach to Customer Journey Visualization. They now consider not only the transactional aspects of the customer journey but also the emotional and psychological factors that influence customer behavior. This shift in focus has led to the development of more sophisticated and comprehensive customer journey maps that provide a deeper understanding of the customer experience. Furthermore, the evolution of Customer Journey Visualization has been driven by advancements in website analytics, data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

These technologies have enabled businesses to collect, analyze, and visualize large amounts of customer data, providing insights into customer behavior that were previously unattainable.

As a result, businesses can now create more accurate and detailed customer journey maps, leading to more effective marketing strategies and improved customer experiences. This evolution has also led to a more focused approach on UI/UX design, ensuring a smooth customer interaction with the brand’s digital platforms.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey: What’s the Difference?

The customer journey and the buyer journey, while interconnected, are distinct concepts in the realm of digital marketing strategy. The customer journey, often visualized through a user journey map, encapsulates the entire spectrum of interactions a customer has with a brand. It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, from the initial discovery to post-purchase interactions.

This journey is not linear; it encompasses multiple customer touchpoints across various channels, each contributing to the overall customer interaction. A critical aspect of understanding the customer journey is customer experience mapping. This process allows businesses to identify potential opportunities and pain points in their customer interaction, thereby enabling them to tailor their marketing and customer service strategies. With the evolution of customer preferences and the emergence of new technologies, the customer journey is constantly changing.

Therefore, businesses need to continually monitor and update their understanding of the journey, leveraging website analytics for data-driven insights. On the other hand, the buyer journey is a subset of the customer journey, focusing on the transactional aspect of the customer experience. It is a process that a customer undergoes when making a purchase decision, often visualized through a sales funnel diagram. The buyer journey includes stages such as awareness, consideration, and decision. A deep understanding of the buyer journey aids in purchase behavior analysis , enabling businesses to influence potential customers’ purchasing decisions effectively.

The buyer journey, like the customer journey, is not a linear process. It involves multiple touchpoints across different channels and is subject to change over time due to evolving customer behaviors and preferences. Businesses, therefore, need to continually monitor and update their understanding of the buyer journey.

This process, coupled with an effective UI/UX design, can create a personalized and engaging shopping experience, thereby optimizing the conversion path for potential customers.

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Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map template, the customer journey mapping process, data inputs for your customer journey map, why should you use customer journey maps, the uses of customer journey mapping, how to improve a customer journey, tools to help you with your journey mapping, see how xm for customer frontlines works, customer journey mapping 101: definition, template & tips.

22 min read Find out about how to start customer journey mapping, and how to improve it for the benefit of your customers and the business.

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be able to understand and adapt the customer journey you offer when someone interacts with your organization. Whether their journey is entirely online , offline, or a blend of both, there are multiple journeys a customer might undergo.

Understanding the customer journey in depth helps you identify and take action on customer pain points and repeat what’s working. By doing this, you will improve the overall experience that your customers have, which will have better outcomes for your business.

Outlining the potential customer journeys your audience might go through requires a process called customer journey mapping.

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs , and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.

It enables you to assess:

• Insights – from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
• Impact – how to optimize budgets and effort for changes we want to make to the customer experiences
• Issues/opportunities – Diagnose the existing customer journey
• Innovation – where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

A customer journey map gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience.

When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.

If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours , after picking the color, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.

Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand and service teams are key to helping you reach your business goals. But you can only do that by understanding the journey your customers go on in order to get there, what they’re thinking and needing from you at that time. Developing a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so you can understand them better than ever before.

Getting started when creating a customer journey map template doesn’t have to be difficult. However, your customer journey map template will need to cover several elements in order to be effective.

There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meets customer needs at that moment in time – and where the experience does not, and needs some improvement.

Understanding their behaviors and attitudes also means you can fix bad experiences more effectively too because you know why you haven’t met your customers’ expectations and what you need to do to make amends. There may be times when things go wrong, but it’s how you adapt and what you do to fix these experiences that separates the best. Knowing how the customer will be feeling makes taking that decisive action much easier.

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

• Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
• Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
• The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
• The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

So what could the customer journey map examples look like when starting the process of buying a car?

Customer journey vs process flow

Understanding customer perspective, behavior, attitudes, and the on-stage and off-stage is essential to successfully create a customer journey map – otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where the customer is interacting with your brand, you’re typically missing up to 40% of the entire customer journey.

There is no single customer journey. In fact, there are multiple. The best experiences combine multiple journeys in a seamless way to create a continuous customer lifecycle as outlined below.

Getting started with customer journey map templates

To begin, start by choosing a journey that you would like to create a customer journey map for and outline the first step that customers will take.

You can use this customer journey map template below to work out the customer behaviors, attitudes, the on-stage and off-stage processes – and the KPIs attached to measuring the success of this experience.

Download our free journey mapping template here

The step-by-step process of mapping the customer journey begins with the buyer persona .

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

In order to effectively understand the customer journey, you need to understand the customer – and this is where creating a persona really helps. You may base this around the most common or regular customers, big spend, or new customers you haven’t worked with before. This persona is beyond a marketing segment , but that can be a great place to begin if you’re just starting out on the mapping process for your organization.

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

These personas help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers and can be derived from insights and demographic data , or even customer interviews . This works for both B2B and B2C business models, but in B2B especially you’ll have multiple customers for each opportunity so it’s recommended you build out multiple personas.

To begin, start with no more than three personas to keep things simple.

Create a diverse team

When creating a customer journey map, you also need to build out a diverse mapping team to represent the whole business. Include frontline staff , day-to-day management, corporate teams, HR, and business support functions. They will give you vital feedback, advice, and perspectives you hadn’t thought of.

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

Select a customer journey map to construct, then build a behavior line. This might be a new customer journey, renewal, or fixing a product issue. You might also choose this based on the most frequent customer journeys taken, or the most profitable.

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

• Who are the people involved in this journey? E.g. if you’re in a car dealership, that might be the customer, the sales rep, and front-of-house staff.
• What are the processes or the things that happen during this journey?
• What are the customer attitudes ? What are they feeling at this time? Go beyond excitement or frustration. Bring these feelings to life. This car is my dream come true!
• What is the moment that matters? Identify the greatest moment of emotional load. The make or break where everything could be good up until that point, but if you get that moment of maximum impact wrong, then all that’s good is forgotten. The best experience brands get this moment right and identifying it is an important first step to achieving that. In that moment, ask yourself what are the things/people/processes involved? Think about this for the whole business – across your product , brand , and service teams.
• But beyond identifying this moment, you need to establish what your customers’ needs are. What are they getting out of this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly? Knowing the answer to these questions can help you deliver experiences that will resonate , and respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances or issues.
• And finally, how do you measure how effectively you are meeting customer needs throughout the journey? Set KPIs to put benchmarks in place for your customer journey map and customer experience and track your progress.

Step 4 – Innovate

When you are mapping out your customer journey, brainstorm ideas for how to improve that moment that really matters . These ideas don’t need to be practical, but by putting together a diverse mapping team from around the business you can begin to filter through these ideas.

Then, test it.

Ask yourself: Is it feasible? Is it viable? Is it desirable? Don’t ask can we do it, ask should we do it? Then you can start to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Step 5 – Measure

Use the customer journey map to decide on your measurement framework.

Who are you measuring? What are you measuring? When on the journey are you measuring it? And why? And finally, what metrics and KPI’s are in place to measure this?

Your customer journey map process will require you to use several different data inputs to get an accurate picture of how your customers behave and where you can improve their experience.

A customer journey map is often developed using data gleaned from customer feedback you’ve requested . While this type of market research is useful, your research process needs to be deeper to gain a richer, more accurate understanding of your customer’s behavior.

To create a customer journey map that accurately reflects the truth of customer actions and intentions, you need to take into account both solicited and unsolicited data.

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

Solicited data includes the customer feedback you gain when you conduct research through surveys such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or ask customers for feedback on social media. This approach can be very useful for understanding your customer’s point of view , rather than just making assumptions about how they think and behave.

However, your target audiences won’t tell you everything about what they plan to do when undergoing their customer journey. Though they might tell you that they’ve had a great experience in a particular part of their customer journey, this type of feedback presents a few issues:

• You have to know when to ask for feedback : You might already have a customer journey in mind when asking for feedback – but do you know all the routes a customer might take in your customer journey map?
• It’s a snapshot: When you survey customers, you’ll likely only get insights into their experience at that particular moment about a specific touchpoint
• It’s what customers say they think/will do, not what they actually think/will do: You’re relying on your customers to accurately reflect their sentiment and intentions in their responses, which isn’t always the case. For your customer journey map to be effective, you need to find the truth
• Your sample size might be too small : If you’re trying to understand how a relatively niche customer journey is doing, you might find that the number of customers who have not only taken the customer journey but are willing to respond with feedback is very limited. You can’t risk survey fatigue by polling the same audience several times, so your insights are limited
• You’re only getting part of the picture : You will likely have several types of useful customer data on file, but these are often not considered as part of the process when creating a customer journey design because solicited data takes precedence

You’ll need to infer how customers feel to be able to accurately predict the actions a customer takes. To do so, you’ll need to look at unsolicited data.

Unsolicited data

Unsolicited data covers everything your customers aren’t telling you directly when you ask them and contextual data that you likely already collect on them, such as purchase history. It can be taken from various sources, such as your website and social channels, third-party sites, customer calls, chat transcripts, frontline employee feedback , operational sources, and more.

This type of data is nuanced, but it allows you to establish the truth of your customers’ experience. The ability to gather unsolicited customer feedback from every channel enables you to see more than just what a customer tells you directly. Using real-time feedback gathering and natural language understanding (NLU) models that can detect emotion, intent, and effort, you’ll be able to understand your customers’ actions in a more profound way. Unsolicited data offers you a 100% response rate that better indicates what your customers actually think of each step in their customer journey.

Rather than be limited to a small sample size of customers who respond to surveys, you’ll be able to build an accurate picture of the average customer on each step of the customer journey map by using this richer insight data with your own operational data.

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

With solicited data, you don’t always see why a customer behaves or thinks as they do. For example, a customer might tell you that they would recommend you to a friend or family – but they don’t renew their subscription with you. A customer might be an ideal candidate for a particular journey, but they abandon their basket when prompted to give their personal details. Understanding the why behind customer actions is key for designing a great customer journey, and that’s why both solicited and unsolicited data collection and evaluation are necessary for creating great customer journey maps.

Of course, knowing how customers will actually respond to your customer touchpoints is only part of the process. You may need to develop more than one customer journey map and create sub-audiences for your customer personas to accurately see where you can rectify pain points and improve outcomes. You will need to collect and analyze contextual data across all customer journey touchpoints and develop a highly detailed journey map that can unveil routes your customers might be taking without your knowledge.

Qualtrics’ Experience ID platform can overlay solicited and unsolicited data to provide an all-encompassing picture of your customer journey map, no matter how complex. Creating an effective customer journey map is easier with all your data collated and analyzed together, with actionable insights created automatically.

A customer journey map creates a common understanding for the organization of how a customer interacts during different stages of the customer lifecycle, and the roles and responsibilities of the different teams in charge of fulfilling that experience.

It will also bring an organization together, and foster empathy and collaboration between teams because people will know what is required from everyone in the business to deliver the experiences that customers expect. This will help you to develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship, which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture . With everyone working towards a common goal, communication of what you learn about the customer and the journey they go through is vital in order to drive best practices throughout the organization.

Creating an accurate customer journey map will help your customer service team to focus on more specific issues, rather than handling problems generated by a less-tailored customer journey. Your customer experience will be improved with a customer journey that’s personalized to the specific personas you have generated. You’ll have put yourself in your customer’s shoes and adapted your strategy to reflect your customer’s perspective – which in turn will create more memorable experiences.

Creating a customer journey map will influence your journey analytics across the business. So for example, it will determine what you ask, who you ask, when you ask, why you ask it and how you ask questions in your Voice of the Customer Program .

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

• Assess the current state of your customer journey Understand and diagnose the specific issues in current experiences
• Understand what the future state of your customer journey should look like Design, redesign and create new experiences
• Blueprints For implementing change
• Communication Bringing teams together to train and scale up best practices.

Take stock and take action

To improve the customer journey you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and you need to make a distinction between the present and the future.

• What is your customer journey right now?
• What does the future state of your customer journey look like?

This is why organizations blueprint their customer journey because they can see what works and act accordingly. By understanding your customers’ attitudes and needs at critical times in the journey, you can make amends to better meet them – and develop contingencies to cope when these needs aren’t or can’t be met. For example, during a sudden, unexpected surge in demand.

Orchestrate your customer journey

To offer your customers truly optimized experiences, you’ll need to go further than just creating a customer journey map. You’ll also need to orchestrate journeys using real-time customer behavior to adapt your strategy as your customers make choices. Orchestrating a journey means taking dynamic action towards optimizing your customer’s experience, using real-time customer behavior as informative data.

Improve your employee experience

Use your diverse mapping team to come up with ideas that incorporate experience from all aspects of the business to improve the customer journey – and remember that this has a significant payoff for your employees too. Improving the employee journey – by giving teams the tools to make a difference – can have a positive knock-on effect for the customer and improve their experience in those key moments. This is because employees have the autonomy and motivation in their roles to help their customers, and realize their own potential.

Your customer journey map isn’t just designed to improve the customer experience. Creating an accurate customer journey map can help you to improve your business outcomes.

Being able to link operational data to key touchpoints in a customer journey is transformative for organizations. This is because improving segments of the customer journey will see a direct impact on your business. The Qualtrics Journey Optimizer helps you do just that. By analyzing areas for improvement as outlined by your customer journey map, organizations can take actions that will have maximum benefit for their customers, and the business too.

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

• Create a common understanding throughout your workforce of how a customer interacts with your organization, and you’ll know the roles and responsibilities of your different teams
• Develop empathy and collaboration between teams, working together to achieve the same outcome
• Develop a shared sense of ownership of the customer relationship which ultimately drives a customer-centric culture

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

Customer journey maps are visual representations of customer experiences with an organization. They provide a 360-degree view of how customers engage with a brand over time and across all channels. Product teams use these maps to uncover customer needs and their routes to reach a product or service. Using this information, you can identify pain points and opportunities to enhance customer experience and boost customer retention.

“ Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.” — Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert

In this video, Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how you can include journey maps in your design process.

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

Customer journey maps are research-based tools. They show common customer experiences over time To help brands learn more about their target audience. 

Maps are incredibly effective communication tools. See how maps simplify complex spaces and create shared understanding.

Unlike navigation maps, customer journey maps have an extra dimension—time. Design teams examine tasks and questions (e.g., what-ifs) regarding how a design meets or fails to meet customers’ needs over time when encountering a product or service. 

Customer journey maps should have comprehensive timelines that show the most essential sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights into customers' thoughts and feelings when proceeding along the timeline. The map should include: 

A timescale - A defined journey period (e.g., one week). This timeframe should include the entire journey, from awareness to conversion to retention.

Scenarios - The context and sequence of events where a user/customer must achieve a goal. An example could be a user who wants to buy a ticket on the phone. Scenarios are events from the first actions (recognizing a problem) to the last activities (e.g., subscription renewal).

Channels – Where do they perform actions (e.g., Facebook)?

Touchpoints – How does the customer interact with the product or service? What actions do they perform?

Thoughts and feelings – The customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you understand how customer experience evolves over time. It allows you to identify possible problems and improve the design. This enables you to design products that are more likely to exceed customers’ expectations in the future state. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

Before creating a customer journey map, you must ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. Clarify who will use it and what user experience it will address.

Conduct Research

Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence. Leverage customer interviews, surveys, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

Watch user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen talk about how user research fits your design process and when you should do different studies. 

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

List customer touchpoints (e.g., paying a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for more touchpoints or channels to include.

Make an Empathy Map

Pinpoint what the customer does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a given situation. Then, determine their needs and how they feel throughout the experience. Focus on barriers and sources of annoyance.

Sketch the Journey

Piece everything—touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.). Show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including their feelings at every touchpoint.

Iterate and Refine

Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders

Ensure all stakeholders understand your map and appreciate how its use will benefit customers and the organization.

Buyer Journey vs User Journey vs Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

You must know the differences between buyer, user, and customer journeys to optimize customer experiences. A customer journey map is often synonymous with a user flow diagram or buyer journey map. However, each journey gives unique insights and needs different plans.

Customer Journey

The customer journey, or lifecycle, outlines the stages a customer goes through with a business. This journey can vary across organizations but includes five key steps:

1. Awareness : This is the first stage of the customer journey, where the customers realize they have a problem. The customer becomes aware of your brand or product at this stage, usually due to marketing efforts.

2. Consideration : Once customers know about your product or service, they start their research and compare brands.

3. Purchase : This is the stage where the customer has chosen a solution and is ready to buy your product or service.

4. Retention : After the purchase, it's about retaining that customer and nurturing a relationship. This is where good customer service comes in.

5. Advocacy : Also called the loyalty stage, this is when the customer not only continues to buy your product but also recommends it to others.

The journey doesn't end when the customer buys and recommends your solution to others. Customer journey strategies are cyclical and repetitive. After the advocacy stage, ideally, you continue to attract and retain the customers, keeping them in the cycle. 

There is no standard format for a customer journey map. The key is to create one that works best for your team and product or service. Get started with customer journey mapping with our template:

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

The buyer's journey involves the buyer's path towards purchasing. This includes some of the steps we saw in the customer journey but is specific to purchasing :

1. Awareness Stage : This is when a prospective buyer realizes they have a problem. However, they aren't yet fully aware of the solutions available to them.

2. Consideration Stage : After identifying their problem, the buyer researches and investigates different solutions with more intent. They compare different products, services, brands, or strategies here.

3. Decision Stage : The buyer then decides which solution will solve their problem at the right price. This is where the actual purchasing action takes place.  

4. Post-Purchase Evaluation : Although not always included, this stage is critical. It's where the buyer assesses their satisfaction with the purchase. It includes customer service interactions, quality assessment, and attitudinal loyalty to the brand.

All these stages can involve many touchpoints, including online research, social media interactions, and even direct, in-person interactions. Different buyers may move through these stages at different speeds and through various channels, depending on a wide range of factors.

User Journey

The user journey focuses on people's experience with digital platforms like websites or software. Key stages include:

1. Discovery : In this stage, users become aware of your product, site, or service, often due to marketing efforts, word-of-mouth, or organic search. It also includes their initial reactions or first impressions.

2. Research/Consideration : Here, users dig deeper, exploring features, comparing with alternatives, and evaluating if your offering suits their needs and preferences.

3. Interaction/Use : Users actively engage with your product or service. They first-hand experience your solution's functionality, usability, and usefulness to achieve their goal.

4. Problem-solving : If they encounter any issues, how they seek help and resolve their issues fall into this stage. It covers user support, troubleshooting, and other assistance.

5. Retention/Loyalty : This stage involves how users stay engaged over time. Do they continue using your product, reduce usage, or stop altogether? It includes their repeated interactions, purchases, and long-term engagement over time.

6. Advocacy/Referral : This is when users are so satisfied they begin to advocate for your product, leaving positive reviews and referring others to your service.

Download this user journey map template featuring an example of a user’s routine. 

Understanding these stages can help optimize the user experience, providing value at each stage and making the journey seamless and enjoyable. 

Always remember the journey is as important as the destination. Customer relationships start from the first website visit or interaction with marketing materials. These initial touchpoints can influence the ongoing relationship with your customers.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is valuable yet has limitations and potential drawbacks. Recognize these challenges and create more practical and realistic journey maps.

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

Customer journey maps often risk simplifying complex customer experiences . They may depict varied and unpredictable customer behaviors as straightforward and linear. This simplification can lead to misunderstandings about your customers' needs and wants. As a result, you might overlook customers' diverse and unique paths. 

Always remember that real customer experiences are more complex than any map. When you recognize this, you steer clear of decisions based on simple models.

Resource Intensity

Creating detailed customer journey maps requires a lot of resources and time. You must gather extensive data and update the maps to keep them relevant. This process can strain small businesses or those with limited resources. 

You need to balance the need for comprehensive mapping with available resources. Efficient resource management and prioritization are crucial to maintaining effective journey maps.

Risk of Bias

Creating customer journey maps carries the inherent risk of biases . These biases can arise from various sources. They can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of the maps. 

Alan Dix, an expert in HCI, discusses bias in more detail in this video.  

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

Assumption Bias: When teams make decisions based on preconceived notions rather than customer data.

Selection Bias: When the data doesn’t represent the entire customer base..

Confirmation Bias : When you focus on information that supports existing beliefs and preferences. Simultaneously, you tend to ignore or dismiss data that contradicts those beliefs.

Anchoring Bias : Relying on the first information encountered (anchor) when making decisions.

Overconfidence Bias : Placing too much trust in the accuracy of the journey map. You may overlook its potential flaws.

These biases may misguide the team, and design decisions based on these maps might not be effective.

To address these biases, review and update journey maps with real user research data. Engage with different customer segments and gather a wide range of feedback to help create a more accurate and representative map. This approach ensures the journey map aligns with actual customer experiences and behaviors.

Evolving Customer Behaviors

Customer behaviors and preferences change with time. A journey map relevant today can become outdated. You need to update and adapt your maps to reflect these changes. This requires you to perform market research and stay updated with trends and customer feedback. 

Getting fresh data ensures your journey map stays relevant and effective. You must adapt to evolving customer behaviors to maintain accurate and valuable customer journey maps.

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

Capturing emotions accurately in customer journey maps poses a significant challenge. Emotions influence customer decisions, yet you may find it difficult to quantify and represent them in maps. Most journey maps emphasize actions and touchpoints, often neglecting the emotional journey. 

You must integrate emotional insights into these maps to understand customer experiences. This integration enhances the effectiveness of customer engagement strategies. You can include user quotes, symbols such as emojis, or even graphs to capture the ups and downs of the users’ emotions..

Misalignment with Customer Needs

Misalignments in customer journey maps can manifest in various ways. It can impact the effectiveness of your strategies. Common misalignments include:

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

Not seeing or serving the varied needs of different customer types.

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

Engage with your customers to understand their needs and preferences if you want to address these misalignments. Incorporate their direct feedback into the journey map. This approach leads to more effective customer engagement and satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on the Map

Relying too much on customer journey maps can lead to problems. These maps should serve as tools rather than definitive guides. Viewing them as perfect can restrict your responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Treat journey maps as evolving documents that complement direct customer interactions and feedback. 

Make sure you get regular updates and maintain flexibility in your approach. Balance the insights from the map with ongoing customer engagement. This approach keeps your business agile and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Data Privacy Concerns

Collecting customer data for journey mapping poses significant privacy concerns. Thus, you need to create a balance. You must adhere to data protection laws and gather enough information for mapping. 

You need a careful strategy to ensure customer data security. Stay vigilant to adapt to evolving privacy regulations and customer expectations. This vigilance helps maintain trust and compliance.

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

Take our Journey Mapping course to gain insights into the how and why of journey mapping. Learn practical methods to create experience maps , customer journey maps, and service blueprints for immediate application.

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map requires visually representing the customer's experience with your product or company. Harness the strength of visual reasoning to understand and present this journey succinctly. Instead of detailing a lengthy narrative, like a book, a well-crafted map allows stakeholders, whether designers or not, to grasp the journey quickly. It's a democratized tool that disseminates information, unifies teams, and aids decision-making by illuminating previously unnoticed or misunderstood aspects of the customer's journey.

The customer journey encompasses five distinct stages that guide a customer's interaction with a brand or product:

Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a need or problem.

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

Purchase: The customer decides on a solution and makes a purchase.

Retention: Post-purchase, the customer uses the product and forms an opinion.

Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences.

For a comprehensive understanding of these stages and how they intertwine with customer touchpoints, refer to Interaction-Design.org's in-depth article .

A perspective grid workshop is a activity that brings together stakeholders from various departments, such as product design, marketing, growth, and customer support, to align on a shared understanding of the customer's journey. These stakeholders contribute unique insights about customer needs and how they interact with a product or service. The workshop entails:

Creating a matrix to identify customers' jobs and requirements, not initially linked to specific features.

Identifying the gaps, barriers, pains, and risks associated with unmet needs, and constructing a narrative for the journey.

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

Discuss the implied technical and non-technical capabilities required to deliver this value.

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

The ultimate aim is to foster alignment within the organization and produce a user journey map based on shared knowledge. 

Learn more from this insightful video:

Customer journey mapping is vital as it harnesses our visual reasoning capabilities to articulate a customer's broad, intricate journey with a brand. Such a depiction would otherwise require extensive documentation, like a book. This tool offers a cost-effective method to convey information succinctly, ensuring understanding of whether one is a designer or lacks the time for extensive reading. It also helps the team to develop a shared vision and to encourage collaboration.  Businesses can better comprehend and address interaction points by using a journey map, facilitating informed decision-making and revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured. Learn more about the power of visualizing the customer journey in this video.

Pain points in a customer journey map represent customers' challenges or frustrations while interacting with a product or service. They can arise from unmet needs, gaps in service, or barriers faced during the user experience. Identifying these pain points is crucial as they highlight areas for improvement, allowing businesses to enhance the customer experience and meet their needs more effectively. Pain points can relate to various aspects, including product usability, communication gaps, or post-purchase concerns. Explore the detailed article on customer journey maps at Interaction Design Foundation for a deeper understanding and real-world examples.

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement. This ensures that products or services meet users' needs effectively.

The process fosters team alignment, ensuring everyone understands and prioritizes the customer's perspective.

It helps identify pain points, revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

This visualization allows businesses to make informed decisions, ensuring resources target the most impactful areas.

To delve deeper into the advantages and insights on journey mapping, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on key takeaways from the IXDF journey mapping course .

In design thinking, a customer journey map visually represents a user's interactions with a product or service over time. It provides a detailed look at a user's experience, from initial contact to long-term engagement. Focusing on the user's perspective highlights their needs, emotions, pain points, and moments of delight. This tool aids in understanding and empathizing with users, a core principle of design thinking. When used effectively, it bridges gaps between design thinking and marketing, ensuring user-centric solutions align with business goals. For a comprehensive understanding of how it fits within design thinking and its relation to marketing, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on resolving conflicts between design thinking and marketing .

A customer journey map and a user journey map are tools to understand the experience of users or customers with a product or service.

A customer journey map is a broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It considers physical and digital channels, multiple user personas, and emotional and qualitative aspects.

A user journey map is a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service. It only considers digital channels, one user persona, and functional and quantitative aspects.

Both are useful to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. However, they have different scopes, perspectives, and purposes. A customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience across multiple channels and stages. A user journey map provides a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service.

While user journeys might emphasize specific tasks or pain points, customer journeys encapsulate the entire experience, from research and comparison to purchasing and retention. 

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are tools to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map shows the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It focuses on the front stage of the service, which is what the customers see and experience. It considers different user personas and emotional aspects.

A service blueprint shows how a service is delivered and operated by an organization. It focuses on the back stage of the service, which is what the customers do not see or experience. It considers one user persona and functional aspects. What are the steps that the customer takes to complete a specific task or goal within the service? What are the channels and devices that the customer interacts with at each step?

For an immersive dive into customer journey mapping, consider enrolling in the Interaction Design Foundation's specialized course . This course offers hands-on lessons, expert guidance, and actionable tools. Furthermore, to grasp the course's essence, the article “4 Takeaways from the IXDF Journey Mapping Course” sheds light on the core learnings, offering a snapshot of what to expect. These resources are tailored by industry leaders, ensuring you're equipped with the best knowledge to craft impactful customer journey maps.

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Journey Maps by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

Take a deep dive into Customer Journey Maps with our course Journey Mapping .

This course will show you how to use journey mapping to turn your own complex design challenges into simple, delightful user experiences . If you want to design a great shopping experience, an efficient signup flow or an app that brings users delight over time, journey mapping is a critical addition to your toolbox. 

We will begin with a short introduction to mapping — why it is so powerful, and why it is so useful in UX. Then we will get familiar with the three most common types of journey map — experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints — and how to recognize, read and use each one. Then you will learn how to collect and analyze data as a part of a journey mapping process. Next you will learn how to create each type of journey map , and in the final lesson you will learn how to run a journey mapping workshop that will help to turn your journey mapping insights into actual products and services. 

This course will provide you with practical methods that you can start using immediately in your own design projects, as well as downloadable templates that can give you a head start in your own journey mapping projects. 

The “Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project” includes three practical exercises where you can practice the methods you learn, solidify your knowledge and if you choose, create a journey mapping case study that you can add to your portfolio to demonstrate your journey mapping skills to future employers, freelance customers and your peers. 

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

Indi Young will provide wisdom on how to gather the right data as part of your journey mapping process. She has written two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models . Currently she conducts live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang will walk us through his very practical process for creating a service blueprint, and share how he makes journey mapping a critical part of an organization’s success. Kai is a talented UX pro who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne. 

Matt Snyder will help us think about journey mapping as a powerful and cost-effective tool for building successful products. He will also teach you how to use a tool called a perspective grid that can help a data-rich journey mapping process go more smoothly. In 2020 Matt left his role as the Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software to become Head of Product & Design at Hivewire. 

Christian Briggs will be your tour guide for this course. He is a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation. He has been designing digital products for many years, and has been using methods like journey mapping for most of those years.  

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

14 ux deliverables: what will i be making as a ux designer.

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What are Customer Touchpoints & Why Do They Matter?

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How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

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How to Resolve Conflicts Between Design Thinking and Marketing

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4 Takeaways from the IxDF Journey Mapping Course

The Power of Mapping

User Story Mapping in Design

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Customer Journey Maps: What They Are and How to Build One

Customer journey maps are a visual storytelling tool used to help designers empathize with users and identify actionable opportunities for providing a better user experience.

By Bree Chapin

Bree’s a passionate designer and problem-solver with 10+ years experience in product and UXUI design for web and native mobile applications.

PREVIOUSLY AT

When a customer uses a company’s products and services to achieve a goal or need, they are going on a journey from point A to point Z. A customer journey map charts the path a user takes from the beginning of this journey to the satisfaction of that need.

Mapping out the customer journey is an effective way to understand what turns a viewer into a long-term, loyal customer. – Kofi Senaya, Director of Product at Clearbridge Mobile

Understanding a user’s needs is the bedrock of great design. User experience and product designers draw upon a range of tools and methods for uncovering the needs of their users and designing a product that meets those needs.

The customer journey map is one such tool to deploy in the early stages of the design process to help empathize with users and identify opportunities for providing a better experience.

What Is a Journey Map?

“Journey mapping combines two powerful instruments: storytelling and visualization,” according to Kat Kaplan in When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps . A customer journey map can take a variety of forms, but essentially, it is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a product or company at various touchpoints over time.

A Customer Journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels. […] The story is told from the customer’s perspective, but also emphasizes the important intersections between user expectations and business requirements – Megan Grocki at UX Mastery

A customer journey maps help designers and other stakeholders empathize with the needs of their customers, triangulate pain points that their users experience, and identify opportunities for improvement and innovation. Most customer journey maps attempt to track the customer’s potential emotions during the experience: curiosity, confusion, anxiety, frustration, relief, etc.

The quest to understand the target user or customer is not new or specific to the digital landscape. Disney, arguably the masters of great customer experience, began mapping out their customers’ multi-channel engagement—from movies to toys to theme parks—decades ago.

The terms “journey map” and “experience map” are often used interchangeably in the design community, although some designers draw a line between the two terms. As the debate rolls on, it is perhaps less important to debate the distinctions than to focus on the essential goal of mapping out and better understanding the customer journey.

A customer journey map can focus on a single task or experience, such as mapping out a payment flow, or can cover the full life cycle of a customer’s initial engagement and continued retention. A product journey map lays out a customer’s interactions with a particular product.

The journey map design may center on a specific feature or app, or it may follow the customer’s experience at each touchpoint across a company’s service ecosystem. If a company relies on multiple channels and various touchpoints for customer service, for example, a map can help identify when best to escalate a customer email to phone support.

User journey maps help designers and stakeholders empathize with a user’s motivations and experiences from point A to Z and beyond. Like any other maps, a customer journey map helps one understand where the customer is and how to help get them where they want to go.

A customer journey map helps designers and stakeholders figure out what questions to ask but does not immediately answer them. One should approach the customer journey mapping process as an act of discovery, where the exercise itself illuminates the path to take.

Since the map is meant to be a catalyst, not a conclusion, the takeaways drive the next phase of the design or strategy by illuminating the journey, and helping to identify the opportunities, pain points, and calls to action. This will depend on what your next steps are, driving strategy or tactical design. – Adam Ramshaw at Genroe

Mapping is an exercise of connecting concepts and data to each other. In the case of customer journey maps, designers should be looking at how the customer’s intent maps to the flow of interaction provided at various touchpoints and seeing more clearly how they are connected or disjointed.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Start with user research.

All great design begins with research, whether analytical or anecdotal. The more one knows about a customer and their needs, the more accurate a map will be.

Conducting proper research will help designers avoid basing assumptions about their users on false consensus. “The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context,” according to Raluca Bidiu in You Are Not the User: The False Consensus Effect .

Feedback surveys are direct ways of asking users about their needs and what they’re already doing to meet those needs. User interviews open up the opportunity, not just in order to ask a lot of questions but to also observe what the users are not saying about their needs.

Customers will respond to a product within the framework of completing a particular task. This means the customer journey starts before users even engage with a single product and continues after they leave. Capturing a customer’s perception of their experience relative to their goals and needs informs how a designer can improve upon it.

Customer journey maps then use storytelling and visualization to map out the customer’s experience over time with the product, which aids the design team in identifying actionable opportunities for improving the experience.

Looking at more quantitative analytical data can provide valuable insights into the product’s users as well. For example, is there a significant drop off in user engagement at a particular screen in the subscriber sign-up experience? A clear user journey map might help designers understand what’s happening and if there are any gaps in the overall experience.

There is also great value in conducting competitive and comparative research. Observe how users engage with existing products and solutions. Mapping out a competitor’s customer experience as a story can be far more revealing than looking at a flat feature table.

One should also leverage others in their organization. Anyone who interacts with customers or their feedback should be interviewed: point-of-service providers, customer support specialists, error message report handlers, etc. Getting the other side of the story is a surprisingly effective way of understanding where customers are experiencing confusion or frustration.

Identify the Lens of the Experience

Before one begins mapping out a customer experience , one must define what the question to be examined is. After synthesizing the research, one should be able to understand the scope or timeline of the experience.

Remember that customers are not considering the experience of a company from just one microinteraction; every touchpoint at which they come into contact with someone’s products and services is part of a larger, comprehensive experience.

Does research reveal that customers show high initial satisfaction with a company’s eCommerce site that tapers off after the first transaction? Are customers enjoying a responsive website, but deleting the native app after first launch? How does a company foster loyalty in its publication readers and keep them coming back?

Mapping out the customer journey across each channel helps designers survey and optimize the overall experience. This may even mean looking at how the overall experience involves other platforms and services. For example, an eCommerce experience may begin with a search engine such as Google before the customer even gets to a company’s own website.

To solve for a specific problem or pain point for the customer, it may make sense to focus an experience mapping exercise on that flow. This does not mean, however, that the map can’t be complex—a payment experience for a company that offers both online and in-store shopping can cross multiple channels of service.

Building a map out for each touchpoint segment allows the team to research the component parts that make up the whole story more deeply. Focus the lens on specific segments or points in time of the customer journey while keeping the holistic experience in mind. By mapping out the experience across these channels, one can begin to suss out if the snag is isolated to an online payment processor or is something more systemic.

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Now that the prep work surveying the landscape has been completed, it is time to draw out the customer journey map. It is advisable to begin by scribbling the basics out on paper before moving into user journey mapping tools like Sketch or Omnigraffle.

Specify the timeline lens and plot out the user’s main goal at the beginning of the customer journey map, and whatever constitutes a success at the end. This does not have to be linear; for example, points in a repeatable experience can be plotted along a circle. Begin to fill in what the high-level steps are that the user is meant to take to get from point A to point Z.

Once the outline is laid out, try to group steps into stages. For example, if a user is trying to book a hotel room, one might group searching activities with browsing activities as the “research” stages of the journey. This will help you further contextualize and link the user’s motivations and actions.

If you’re looking at a multi-channel journey, for instance, you may also want to plot what happens at each of these stages within each channel. How does customer service escalate a service request? How does an online purchase system connect with an in-store return? What are the best ways to guide the user who must initiate a rideshare service with an app, and then later perform further actions to complete their task?

Most journey maps will also try to track a customer’s emotions during each stage of the journey. Refer to research, especially insights from user interviews and customer support calls, to empathize with points of frustration as well as moments of delight in the experience.

Make sure the information included is clear and concise—easily digestible for the team and stakeholders. Refine the map down to the essential so that the insights it highlights are actionable.

Think of the customer journey map as a poster pinned to the office wall. At a glance, people should be able to see the key touchpoints that a user passes through. It should remind them that the customer’s needs must always be at the forefront of their thinking – Paul Boag of Smashing Magazine

The Importance of Customer Journey Maps

The success of a customer journey map can be measured by how well it helps the team identify pain points, as well as opportunities for improvement as it traces the customer’s path from start to finish. A successful map provides an honest assessment of a company’s existing products and services, then helps spark ideas on how the customer’s needs can be better met.

Present the map to the design and development team as well as stakeholders. Look at the map with an honest, analytical eye. Connect customers’ emotions, such as frustration, with the motivations and expectations guiding the user’s actions. Look for gaps between various channels of your business where the experience falls through. Refer back to the customer journey map repeatedly throughout the design process to validate potential solutions.

A journey map is meant to empathize with customers and identify problems and opportunities; not solve them. The customer journey map is a living, ever-evolving map of a customer’s interactions with the products and services a company has to offer. New touchpoints may be created and customer journey designs re-routed as the team iterates, tests, and validates new solutions.

Use a customer journey map to develop better empathy with customers, leverage user research to identify potential pitfalls in the product journey, and guide the team to craft a more cohesive, seamless user experience, whether this experience is focused on one interaction or occurs across multiple channels.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

• E-commerce UX: An Overview of Best Practices (with Infographic)
• The Best UX Designer Portfolios: Inspiring Case Studies and Examples
• Heuristic Principles for Mobile Interfaces
• The Importance of Human-centered Design in Product Design
• Anticipatory Design: How to Create Magical User Experiences
• Voice of the Customer: How to Leverage User Insights for Better UX
• Product Design

Bree Chapin

New York, NY, United States

Member since May 15, 2016

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Business Education

Customer journey map: what it is + free template.

As a sales leader or account executive, you understand that the key to building successful customer relationships lies in gaining a deep understanding of their journey. One powerful tool that can help you in this endeavor is a customer journey map. 

Through the effective utilization of a customer journey map, you can get valuable insights into the experiences, challenges, and expectations of your customers at every stage of their buying process — specifically focused on their interactions with your business. This could include their initial encounters with a virtual receptionist to post-purchase activities like reaching out to customer support.

In this post, we’ll walk you through what a customer journey map is, how to create one, and examples so you can apply similar principles to your own customers and business. 

We’ve even included a free template that’ll help save you time and empower you to take your sales team to new heights of success through the art of customer journey mapping.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation or diagram that illustrates the complete experience of a customer with a particular product, service, or brand. It provides insights into the customer's interactions, emotions, and touchpoints at various stages of their journey, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase, usage, and post-purchase support.

A customer journey map typically includes multiple stages that a customer goes through in the digital marketing funnel , such as:

• Awareness: The stage where a customer becomes aware of a product or service.
• Consideration: The customer explores different options, compares features, and evaluates alternatives.
• Purchase: The actual transaction or conversion point where the customer decides to make a purchase.
• Onboarding: The process of familiarizing the customer with the product or service after the purchase is made.
• Usage: The customer begins using the product or service and interacts with it regularly.
• Support: The availability of customer support or assistance throughout the customer's usage phase.
• Retention: The customer's ongoing relationship with the brand and their potential to become repeat customers or advocates.

Customer journey maps are created by collecting data and insights from various sources, including customer surveys, interviews, feedback, analytics, and market research. They help businesses understand the customer's needs, pain points, and expectations at each stage of the journey, enabling them to identify opportunities for improvement and deliver a better customer experience.

How to create a customer journey map

Customer journey maps are meant to be dynamic and adaptable. They should serve as a valuable tool to guide your business to deliver exceptional customer experiences and foster long-term customer relationships. 

That being said, while customer journey maps can vary in their specifics, they typically adhere to a similar framework. To help you create your own customer journey map, follow the steps outlined below.

Define your customer personas

Start by identifying and defining your target customer segments or personas. These personas represent your ideal customers and help you understand their characteristics, goals, motivations, and behaviors. 

To avoid complexity, it’s recommended to concentrate on a single persona and one customer scenario at a time.

Map the customer journey stages

Create a visual representation of the customer journey stages. Typically, these stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, onboarding, usage, support, and customer retention . You can customize these stages based on your specific business and customer lifecycle.

Identify customer touchpoints

List down all the touchpoints or interactions a customer has with your brand throughout their journey. These touchpoints can include website visits, social media interactions, live chat messages, phone calls, email communications, and more.

Plot customer actions and emotions

Within each stage, identify the specific actions customers take, pain points they may experience, and the emotions they feel. An empathy map is a great way to help you do this because it uses data from different sources and stakeholders. This helps you understand the customer's mindset and expectations throughout each stage. 

Connect touchpoints and actions to stages

Connect the touchpoints and actions to the corresponding stages of the customer journey. Show how the customer moves from one touchpoint to another as they progress through the stages. This helps you understand the sequence of interactions and potential gaps or friction points. More importantly, it helps you understand the type of sales conversations that should take place before the purchase — and the level of customer support that should take place after.

Analyze and identify opportunities

Analyze the customer journey map to identify pain points, areas of improvement, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Look for moments where you can deliver a wow factor, reduce friction, or address customer needs more effectively. 

Take action

Based on your analysis, prioritize the opportunities and develop an action plan to improve the customer journey. This may involve making changes to specific touchpoints, optimizing processes, improving lead nurturing, enhancing customer engagement , or implementing better customer support.

Iterate and update

Customer journey mapping is an iterative process. Continuously collect feedback, measure the impact of your improvements, and update the journey map accordingly. Customer needs and preferences may evolve, so it's important to keep your map up to date.

Customer journey map examples

Customer journey maps differ among businesses based on their unique offerings, customer lifecycles, industries, and overall business models.

To inspire you, we’ve compiled several real-life examples of customer journey maps. These examples will give you an understanding of the diverse visual representations that a customer journey map can take.

Example #1: B2B SaaS 

This example by Freshworks is an overview of a customer’s journey with a B2B SaaS product. In this customer journey map, you can clearly see the different stages a customer goes through along with elements such as their cognitive state, emotions, opportunities, barriers, and touchpoints. 

This map also incorporates the internal teams and key performance indicators (KPIs) being monitored, providing a valuable perspective on which teams are currently involved in customer interactions during their journey and which KPIs hold the greatest significance in each stage.

Example #2: Travel agency

While the 2020 pandemic disrupted many industries, the travel industry took a major hit. To help understand the traveler’s journey, Travelport put together this map with the persona of a leisure traveler planning a post-pandemic trip.

By comparing this map with their pre-pandemic customer journey map, Travelport was able to identify new opportunities to better their traveler’s experiences. Recognizing the increasing demand from travelers for destination-specific information like local regulations and restrictions, they identified an opportunity to empower customers with self-service options for obtaining those details.

Example #3: Entertainment

Spotify, renowned as one of the leading audio streaming services around the world, recognized the need to enhance its customers' music-sharing experiences. To better understand users, Spotify engaged the expertise of Meghana Bowen to develop a customer journey map. 

The primary aim of this map was to identify the optimal placement of music-sharing features within the overall customer experience offered by Spotify. Thanks to this map, Spotify was able to identify pain points for users and address them so that the music-sharing experience is easier — encouraging users to share music more often.

Customer journey map template

To jumpstart your customer journey mapping process, check out our free downloadable template that you can customize and adapt to your specific industry, target audience, and sales objectives. This ready-to-use resource will save you time and ensure you're on the right track.

Enhance the customer journey with Smith.ai

A customer journey map helps ensure that each touchpoint leaves a lasting impression, motivating customers to progress on their buying journey with your business.

At Smith.ai, we can help you enhance the customer journey by providing unified solutions that address every lead, while also engaging your existing customers, giving you peace of mind in knowing they’re in excellent care. 

Whether you need a virtual receptionist , live chat support , or an outreach campaign service , our professional team of agents are available 24/7 to assist you in effectively engaging with your leads and customers. 

To discover more about how Smith.ai can contribute to your business success, book a free consultation .

Maddy Martin is Smith.ai's SVP of Growth. Over the last 15 years, Maddy has built her expertise and reputation in small-business communications, lead conversion, email marketing, partnerships, and SEO.

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Inside Design

A beginner’s guide to customer journey maps

Emerson schroeter,   •   oct 25, 2019.

When it comes to designing products that are both useful and memorable, there is little else in the design process that’s more important than cultivating a user-centric approach to our work.

We can design and iterate and do design sprints for weeks on end, but the results of our work will be hit-or-miss unless we’ve taken the time to understand the real needs and actual experience of the person we’re all here for: the end user.

In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of one important tool for developing a stronger focus on our end users: the customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map, also known as a user journey map, is a visual representation of the path a user takes from beginning to end in accomplishing a specific goal with your product.

The backbone of a customer journey map (CJM) is a timeline of sorts, following the succession of touchpoints (thinking here of Moments of Truth and micro-moments ) that occur between the user and your product or organization. Touchpoints come in different shapes and sizes, including:

• How the user discovers your product in the first place
• Their first experience on your website/app
• The first bit of navigation they interact with to find what they’re looking for
• A click on the menu that takes them (or doesn’t) where they want to go
• An order confirmation email

Customer journey maps are a visualization of these touchpoints, along with their context and likely (or evident) outcomes, and often provide context as well—drawing the company’s goals and user’s emotions into the picture.

What does a customer journey map do?

So why not just have a meeting to present the company’s goals and the ways the product is or is not meeting user needs?

CJMs are particularly effective in making the user’s actual experience clear to everyone involved in creating the CJM—and to everyone who receives the final deliverable.

They place a real user (or a close approximation, through personas ) in front of team members, decision-makers, and key stakeholders. And this generates one key element essential to good UX: empathy.

Empathy matters in UX design . It keeps the user right where they belong—at the forefront of design decisions.

When is a CJM a useful tool in the design process?

Customer journey maps are useful at any point in the design process where there is a high potential for the focus to drift away from the user and their real needs. Let’s look at the five stages of the design process , and where or how a CJM might come in to play.

The five stages of the design process (image credit: CareerFoundry )

Stages one and two: empathize and define.

A CJM is an effective way to transition from the first to the second stage of the design process. In Stage one (Empathize), you’re doing all the user research that gives you the data you need. In Stage 2 (Define), you’re narrowing your focus down to the key problem(s) you need to solve. A CJM is one way to take your data points and the expertise of your team and stakeholders and put it all in one place—with the user as the focal point. The fact that this will be delivered in a visual format helps you to:

• Minimize discrepancies between individual conceptions/ mental models . By getting thoughts and ideas out in the open and in a visual format, everyone can see what the combined thinking of the group is.
• Find common ground. Everyone can feel heard and have a chance to discuss what they see as the key touchpoints, problems, etc. This kind of communication often generates consensus.
• Establish a shared vision. There’s less room for speculation about user needs when the needs of many users have been combined into what is essentially the journey of one composite user.

Stages three and four: Ideate and prototype

A CJM gives your team a tangible starting point for the third stage of the design process (Ideate) and a strong foundation for moving into the fourth (Prototype). In stage three, the goal is to generate as many ideas as possible to improve, change, expand, and otherwise iterate on your product. Here, a CJM can help:

• Generate new ideas
• Narrow down the existing pool of ideas to the ones that are the most user-centric

Regardless of whether you’re planning to generate low-, mid-, or high-fidelity prototypes, going into Stage 4 with a CJM in hand will help ensure that the work remains true to the person we’re all here for—the end user. Print that CJM out, tack it to the wall, and keep your user at the center every step of the way.

Stage five: Test

As you conduct the testing required in the fifth stage, keeping your CJM as a reference point can help you see how the new, hopefully improved, journey compares to what it looked like before the work of stages 3 and 4. Here, the CJM can act as a signpost for where you’ve been—highlighting how design decisions have impacted the customer’s journey with your product.

Anatomy of a customer journey map

Do an image search for customer journey map and you’ll see a wide variation in the kind of deliverables people come up with. This speaks to how widely useful CJMs are as a tool for understanding the end user and how they will experience your product. They are versatile and adaptable to a wide variety of products, teams, and organizations. But this versatility can also make it difficult to pin down the exact form a CJM “should” take, there are a few key components that are common to most CJMs.

Now, enough talk—let’s have a look at an actual customer journey map and deconstruct it. Below, we have a CJM constructed for a hypothetical mobile app designed to help surfers find the safest times and places to go out on the water.

Sample customer journey map for Vela— a mobile app for surfers (image credit: CareerFoundry )  

In this instance, we’ve created the CJM in the early stages of the design process. At this stage, we don’t have a developed app with the concrete steps that Alex will have to take to “check general conditions,” for example. And we certainly haven’t had the chance (yet) to have any features or development oversights trigger overtly negative emotions in the user’s experience.

Zone A: User, scenario, goals

Zone a of the vela customer journey map— a mobile app for surfers (image credit: careerfoundry ).

The very top of the CJM gives context. It tells us who our user is and what their motivations and goals are as they interact with our product. Here, we learn some basic information about Alex (age, location, job, relationship status), what is motivating her use of the app in the first place, and what she wants to accomplish with the app.

Note: CJMs are often based on the experience of a real or composite user. There is some debate about personas versus Jobs-To-Be-Done , but having some research-substantiated representation of the user at the very top of the CJM is the standard and highly effective practice.

Zone B: Phases

Zone b of the vela customer journey map— a mobile app for surfers (image credit: careerfoundry ).

Underneath the user-centric umbrella of Zona A, we have the chronological journey Alex will take through our app. First, she’ll check the general weather conditions, then select a few potential sites, etc. This will end with Alex accomplishing her goal, and heading out to a safe location to catch a wave. Don’t get too hung up the particular labels here. The important thing is to capture the broad steps.

Zone C: Tasks, thoughts, emotions

Zone c of the vela customer journey map— a mobile app for surfers (image credit: careerfoundry ).

This part of the CJM gets into the details of what the user will do, think, and feel in each phase of the journey. We watch as Alex checks the general surfing conditions; we understand the motivating thought; we know that she feels hopeful that weather conditions will allow her to get out on the water after work. Then we move to the next phase and the tasks and thoughts change as Alex becomes indifferent, and so on.

Note that there is some variation in what CJMs accomplish in this zone, largely dependent upon what is important for the company as a whole, and for the project in particular, as well as the people involved in it. Remember that your goals in this zone are to 1) understand what’s happening on the user’s side of things that the product team wouldn’t otherwise be privy to, and 2) discover opportunities to eliminate problems and create a fantastic experience for the user. This leads us to Zone D.

Zone D: Opportunities

Zone d of the vela customer journey map— a mobile app for surfers (image credit: careerfoundry ).

At the bottom of the CJM, we have the opportunities we’ve discovered—the capabilities, features, and fixes that will optimize Alex’s experience of our app. In the final phase, for example, we know that Alex will want to look at multiple locations and will likely develop some favorites. So why not allow her to save those locations so that she can check them even more easily next time she uses the app?

Many CJMs also include a focus on internal ownership in this zone. This helps the individuals or teams involved to hone in on the opportunities they will take an active role in developing.

Overview of the process

But what goes into the creation of a deliverable like the one we’ve just dissected? Here’s your list of essential ingredients (typically introduced in this order):

• Research. Gather all the data you’ve distilled from user interviews, usability tests , surveys, and any other insights into how people actually engage with your product.
• People. Bring your researchers, developers, designers, content writers, and key stakeholders in and let them contribute to the process. The combined insight of a group this diverse will help ensure that you are getting the full picture of the product and the user’s current experience with it.
• Collaboration —whether in person or remote. Often, this takes the form of an in-person workshop, in which participants share knowledge and observations (usually with Post-it notes aplenty). If a workshop in real-time isn’t feasible for the teams involved, or you want to save on Post-its, there are countless tools available to aid remote collaboration in this process.
• The goal is to gather information and observations from people across every aspect of the product’s development and organize them in a way that allows everyone involved to see the narrative arc of the user’s experience with the product.
• A sketching tool. This is where you get into the piece-by-piece construction work of putting the final map together. While there are plenty of templates out there, few of them are fully customizable to fit your product and your organization. We recommend building your own CJM with a sketching tool like InVision Freehand .
• The result: A nicely organized and polished deliverable for the stakeholderswho weren’t able to participate (and to keep as a reference throughout the design process!).

A final word

This guide is only an introduction to customer journey maps. There are many ways to approach, adapt, and implement this extremely versatile UX design tool. The way you utilize it will depend largely upon your team, your product, and the particular design challenges you’re taking on.

If you’d like to learn more about customer journey maps, and other mapping tools useful in UX design, we recommend Jim Kalbach’s book Mapping Experiences .

For in-depth and mentored training in this and other powerful UX design processes and tools, check out CareerFoundry’s online UX Design Course.

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by Emerson Schroeter

Emerson is an Editor at CareerFoundry and a New Mexican transplant to Berlin. They’re a nonbinary human with an MFA in creative writing and a passion for UX design.

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UX Customer Journey — How to Map Out User Experience

Customer journey maps are effective visualizations that help organizations understand their customers and create better experiences. Product teams use these journey maps during the design process to solve usability issues, streamline user experiences, and identify opportunities that help the organization achieve its business goals.

Creating customer journey maps requires research, collaboration, the right tools, and an appropriate visualization format. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to streamline journey mapping, which we cover later in this article.

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What is a UX Customer Journey?

A customer journey represents the steps customers go through when interacting with a product, service, or business process. Companies use journey maps to visualize this end-to-end process and identify customer needs across multiple touchpoints.

User journey map vs. customer journey map

While the theory and application are similar, there is a slight difference between a user journey map and a customer journey map:

• User journey map : A visual representation of the steps to complete a specific task or goal.
• Customer journey map : A broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints, including all the interactions with an organization.

Benefits of mapping the customer journey

Mapping customer journeys offer many benefits for organizations and teams, notably improving user experience and customer satisfaction by identifying pain points and opportunities.

Some key benefits of customer journey maps include:

• Enhanced customer understanding: helps organizations gain insights about their target audience’s needs, preferences, motivations, and pain points by visualizing the experience from the customer’s point of view.
• Pinpoint issues and opportunities: allows teams to identify which steps cause difficulty or frustration for customers. Conversely, the organization can find areas for improvement and innovation.
• Streamlined and consistent experiences: organizations can identify and fix inconsistencies and gaps across multiple touchpoints, creating a more cohesive and consistent user experience.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: by streamlining and optimizing product processes, organizations improve customer satisfaction leading to increased loyalty, recommendations, and growth.
• Informed decision-making: journey maps help teams across the organization make decisions about design, development, marketing, etc. Many organizations use these visualizations to prioritize features, updates, and investments.
• Cross-functional collaboration: customer journey maps allow organizations to visualize how customers pass through each department, creating opportunities for teams to collaborate and find ways to improve the customer experience at each touchpoint–UX design, marketing, customer support, social media, etc.
• Creating benchmarks and continuous evaluation: organizations can use customer journey maps to evaluate projects and how products evolve and improve with releases.

Customer Personas – The Foundation for Customer Journey Maps

A user persona (customer persona) is UX research artifact design teams use as a fictional representation of a user group, including their demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points.

These user personas are the foundation for customer journey maps because they provide the framework for understanding how different types of users engage with the organization and its products.

For example, if a company is designing a fitness app, the research team might create personas for three primary user groups:

• Yoga practitioners

These three user personas will have different needs, priorities, goals, challenges, and ambitions. Their interactions with your brand and how they enter customer journeys will also differ.

Incorporating personas into the customer journey

User personas give designers a start and end goal for customer journey maps. They can use the persona’s behavioral patterns to highlight how these users interact with a product or service and tailor content that meets their needs.

Returning to our fitness app example above: Researchers learn that yoga users prefer to use the desktop application at home, while gym-goers use the mobile app in their local gym. The runners view their daily running program on a mobile device before their run and don’t view the app again until they return.

The customer journey maps for these three users will look completely different, each with varying steps, challenges, and goals.

This example demonstrates how customer journeys for each persona vary and the importance of separately acknowledging each group’s needs, behaviors, challenges, and goals.

Stages of a Customer Journey

There are several key stages of a customer journey:

• Awareness: the moment someone becomes aware of your brand through social media, paid ads, word-of-mouth, etc.
• Consideration: customers research your product and compare it to others by reading reviews, comparing prices, and evaluating features.
• Onboarding: once customers decide to use your product, they set up an account and learn to use its features . If your product uses a freemium model, these people may be users before converting to paying customers.
• Engagement: customers regularly use and engage with your product, its features, and its content. During engagement , they often upgrade to paid services and make purchases.
• Support: customers may require support during their journey. Organizations must answer questions (customer service, docs, etc.), identify ways to streamline experiences, and reduce support queries.
• Retention & loyalty: when customers have positive engagement and support experiences, they will continue using the product and recommend it to others.

Touchpoints and Channels

Touchpoints and channels are points of interaction between a brand and its customers.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the interaction points between a customer and a brand, including physical, digital, and emotional. Some touchpoint examples include paid ads, social media posts, customer service interactions, and product experiences.

Channels are the mediums or platforms delivering these touchpoints–for example, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), email marketing, ad channels (Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads), digital products, and physical locations (stores, service centers, events, etc.).

Organizations map these touchpoints and channels to identify areas for improvement and optimize the customer experience.

Emotions, Motivations, and Pain Points

Understanding a user’s emotions, motivations, and pain points throughout the customer journey is crucial, as these elements drive user actions and decision-making.

Here is a rough outline of how these core user elements relate to each other:

• Emotions: The feelings people experience at each stage of the customer journey, including excitement, happiness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. Designers use empathy maps to visualize these emotions across the customer journey. 
• Motivations: The reasons why people take action at different stages of the customer journey.
• Pain points: The challenges or obstacles customers experience during a customer journey.

By identifying these factors at each stage of the customer journey map, product teams can create solutions to reduce and mitigate problems while streamlining customer experiences.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

Select the appropriate format and tools for your journey map

The format and tools required for your journey map will depend on its complexity, level of detail, and available resources. Here are some tips:

• Consider your audience: who is the journey map for, and what are their needs? Do you need a high-level overview or a detailed step-by-step analysis?
• Choose a format: the level of detail will dictate the structure and medium of your journey map, including flowcharts, diagrams, infographics, and spreadsheets.
• Use tools: there are many tools for creating and sharing high-quality journey maps, including Lucidchart, UXPressia , Canva, Miro, Mural, and design tools.
• Find collaborators: identify teams, stakeholders , and departments that can offer insights and different perspectives about your customers to make journey maps as accurate and relevant as possible.

Collect and incorporate data from various sources

• List the touchpoints and channels customers will have with your brand for the specific journey, including website, social media channels, customer service, etc.
• Gather research data from customer surveys, user research, user interviews, analytics (product, social media, etc.), and other relevant sources.
• Analyze the data to identify patterns, trends, and behavior . The key is to find common customer pain points and friction across the journey.
• Create a visual representation of your customer journey, illustrating touchpoints and interactions and noting customer emotions, motivations, and pain points at each stage.

Visualize the customer journey in a clear and engaging way

Use your research to create a visualization of your customer journey. Start by sketching the journey and touchpoints or create a simple flow diagram mapping each step.

We recommend using customer journey map templates from Mural , UXPressia , or Miro to streamline the process and produce beautiful visualizations to share with your organization. You can even use a free whiteboard tool like Google Jamboard or create your journey map in a spreadsheet.

Recommended reading from UXPressia: Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes and How to Avoid Them .

Customer Journey Map Examples of Templates

Here are some customer journey map examples of templates that you may use at work or as an inspiration for your own visualizations.

Design, Prototype, and Test Customer Experiences with UXPin

Prototyping and testing are crucial for iterating and evolving customer experiences. Designers must assess various user experiences within a customer journey to ensure they’re free of roadblocks, usability issues, and friction.

Product design teams can use UXPin’s advanced features to build prototypes that accurately replicate the final product experience. These interactive prototypes give designers meaningful, actionable feedback from usability participants and stakeholders to iterate and improve. Create beautiful, intuitive product experiences your customers will love with UXPin. Sign up for a free trial .

Build prototypes that are as interactive as the end product. Try UXPin

by UXPin on 17th April, 2023

UXPin is a web-based design collaboration tool. We’re pleased to share our knowledge here.

UXPin is a product design platform used by the best designers on the planet. Let your team easily design, collaborate, and present from low-fidelity wireframes to fully-interactive prototypes.

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

How to create a customer journey map that improves customer success.

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There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes—and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do: they help you put yourself in different customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view.

Why should you do it? How should you do it? Find the answers in this guide, which we wrote after interviewing 10+ customer journey experts who shared methodologies, dos and don’ts, and pro tips with us. 

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

How to create a customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

In later chapters, we dive deeper into customer journey analytics, workshops, and real-life examples.

Start mapping your customer journey

Hotjar lets you experience the customer journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter. This is essential if you want to implement informed, customer-focused optimizations on your site.

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

A customer journey map can have a very narrow focus and only look at a few, specific steps of the customer experience or buyer’s journey (for example, a product-to-purchase flow on a website), or it can take into account all the touchpoints, online and offline, someone goes through before and after doing business with you. 

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

A CJM with a narrow focus allows you to zero in on an issue and effectively problem-solve 

A CJM with a wide focus gives you a broader, holistic understanding of how customers experience your business

Regardless of their focus, the best customer journey maps have one thing in common: they are created with real customer data that you collect and analyze . The insights are usually organized into a map (hence the name), diagram, or flowchart during a group workshop, which is later shared across the entire business so everyone gets a clear and comprehensive overview of a customer’s journey.

How to create your first customer journey map in 2 and ½ working days

The process of creating a customer journey map can be as long or short as you need. Depending on how many people and stakeholders you involve, how much data you collect and analyze, and how many touchpoints there are across the business, you could be looking at days or even weeks and months of work.

If you’re new to customer journey mapping, start from a narrower scope before moving on to mapping every single customer touchpoint . 

Here’s our beginner customer journey mapping framework to help you create your first complete map in 2 and ½ working days:

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

Day 2: prep and run your customer journey mapping workshop.

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

Download your free customer journey map checklist  (as seen below), to mark off your tasks as you complete them.

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

Clarifying what part(s) of the journey you're looking at, and why, helps you stay focused throughout the mapping process.

If this is your first map,  start from a known issue or problematic area of your website. Keep the scope small, and focus on anything you can break down into four or five steps. For example:

If you have a high drop-off on a pricing page with five calls-to-action, each of which takes users to a different page, that’s enough for a mappable journey

If your purchase flow is made of five self-contained pages, each of which loses you potential customers, that’s a good candidate for mapping

✅ The output: a one- or two-sentence description of what your map will cover, and why, you can use whenever you need to explain what the process is about. For example: this map looks at the purchase flow on our website, and helps us understand how customers go through each step and the issues or obstacles they encounter. The map starts after users click ‘proceed to checkout’ and ends when they reach the 'Thank You' page .

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

Once you identify your goal and scope, the bulk of your first day should be spent collecting data and insights you’ll analyze as part of your mapping process. Because your map is narrow in focus, don’t get distracted by wide-scale demographics or data points that are interesting and nice to know, but ultimately irrelevant. 

Get your hands on as much of the following information as you can:

Metrics from traditional analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that give you insight into what’s happening, across the pages and stages your customer journey map covers

Data from analyzing your conversion ‘funnels’ , which record how many visitors end up at each stage of the user journey, so you can optimize those steps for potential customers and increase conversions

Behavior analytics data (from platforms like Hotjar) that show you how people interact with your site. For example, heatmaps give you an aggregate view of how users click, move and scroll on specific pages, and session recordings capture a user’s entire journey as they navigate your site

Quantitative and qualitative answers to on-site surveys relevant to the pages you’re going to investigate, as customer feedback will ultimately guide your roadmap of changes to make to improve the journey

Any demographic information about existing user and customer personas that helps you map the journey from the perspective of a real type of customer, rather than that of any hypothetical visitor, ensuring the journey makes sense for your target audience

Any relevant data from customer service chat logs, emails, or even anecdotal information from support, success, and sales teams about the issues customers usually experience

✅ The output: quantitative and qualitative data about your customers' interactions and their experiences across various touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many people drop off at each individual stage, which page elements they interact with or ignore, and what stops them from converting.

💡Pro tip: as you read this guide, you may not yet have most of this data, particularly when it comes to heatmaps, recordings, and survey results. That’s ok. 

Unless you’re running your CJM workshop in the next 12 hours, you have enough time to set up Hotjar on your website and start collecting insights right now. The platform helps you:

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

When the time comes for you to start your customer journey mapping process, this data will be invaluable.

Step 3: invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

In our experience, the most effective way to get buy-in is not to try and convince people after things are done—include them in the process from the start. So while you can easily create a customer journey map on your own, it won’t be nearly as powerful as one you create with team members from different areas of expertise .

For example, if you’re looking at the purchase flow, you need to work with:

Someone from the UX team, who knows about the usability of the flow and can advocate for design changes

Someone from dev or engineering, who knows how things work in the back end, and will be able to push forward any changes that result from the map

Someone from success or support, who has first-hand experience talking to customers and resolving any issues they experience

✅ The output: you’ve set a date, booked a meeting space, and invited a group of four to six participants to your customer journey mapping workshop.

💡Pro tip: for your first map, stay small. Keep it limited to four to six people, and no main stakeholders . This may be unpopular advice, especially since many guides out there mention the importance of having stakeholders present from the start.

However, when you’re not yet very familiar with the process, including too many people early on can discourage them from re-investing their time into future CJM tasks. At this stage, it’s more helpful to brainstorm with a small team, get feedback on how to improve, and iterate a few times. Once you have a firm handle on the process, then start looping in your stakeholders.

On workshop day, you’ll spend half your time prepping and the other half running the actual session.

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

To run a smooth workshop, ensure you do the following:

Bring stationery: for an interactive workshop, you’ll need basic materials such as pens, different colored Post-its, masking tape, and large sheets of paper to hang on the wall

Collect and print out the data: use the data you collected on Day 1. It’s good to have digital copies on a laptop or tablet for everybody to access, but print-outs could be the better alternative as people can take notes and scribble on them.

Print out an empathy map canvas for each participant: start the workshop with an empathy mapping exercise (more on this in Step 2). For this, hand each participant an empty empathy map canvas you can recreate from the template below.

Set up a customer journey map template on the wall: use a large sheet of paper to create a grid you'll stick to the wall and fill in as part of the workshop. On the horizontal axis, write the customer journey steps you identified during your Day 1 prep work; on the vertical axis, list the themes you want to analyze for each step. For example:

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

This is the most interactive (and fun) part of the process. Follow the framework below to go from zero to a completed draft of a map in just under 2 hours .

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

Using the one-two sentence description you defined on Day 1, explain the goal and scope of the workshop and the activities it will involve

Offer a quick summary of the customer persona you’ll be referring to throughout the session

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

Using the personas and data available, have each team member map their observations onto sticky notes and paste them on the relevant section of the empathy mapping canvas

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

Using Post-its, ask each participant to fill in parts of the map grid with available information. Start by filling in the first row together, so everybody understands the process, then do each row individually (15–20 min). At the end of the process, you should have something like this:

Looking at the completed map, encourage your team to discuss and align on core observations (and take notes: they’ll come in handy on your final half day). At this point, customer pain points and opportunities should become evident for everybody involved. Having a cross-functional team means people will naturally start discussing what can, or cannot, immediately be done to address them (35–40 min).

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

Congratulations! Your first customer journey map is complete. Finish the session by thanking your participants and letting them know the next steps.

Final half-day: wrap up and share

Once you’ve gone through the entire customer journey mapping workshop, the number one thing you want to avoid is for all this effort to go to waste. Instead of leaving the map hanging on the wall (or worse: taking it down, folding it, and forgetting about it), the final step is to wrap the process up and communicate the results to the larger team.

Digitize the map so you can easily update and share it with team members: it may be tempting to use dedicated software or invest time into a beautiful design, but for the first few iterations, it’s enough to add the map to your team’s existing workflows (for example, our team digitized our map and added it straight into Jira, where it’s easily accessible)

Offer a quick write-up or a 5-minute video introduction of the activity: re-use the description you came up with on Day 1, including who was involved and the top three outcomes

Clearly state the follow-up actions: if you’ve found obvious issues that need fixing, that’s a likely next step. If you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and usability testing.

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

In 2023, it’s almost a given that great customer experience (CX) provides any business or ecommerce site with a competitive advantage. But just how you’re supposed to deliver on the concept and create wow-worthy experiences is often left unsaid, implied, or glossed over.

Customer journey maps help you find answers to this ‘How?’ question, enabling you to:

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

We’ve done a lot of customer journey work here at Hotjar, so we know that the above is true—but don’t just take our word for it: all the people we interviewed for this guide confirmed the benefits of journey mapping. Let’s take a look at what they shared.

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

It’s one thing to present your entire team with charts, graphs, and trends about your customers, and quite another to put the same team in front of ONE map that highlights what customers think, want, and do at each step of their journey.

I did my first customer journey map at MADE.COM within the first three months of joining the company. I was trying to map the journey to understand where the pain points were.

For example, people who want to buy a sofa from us will be coming back to the site 8+ times over several weeks before making a purchase. In that time, they may also visit a showroom. So now I look at that journey, at a customer’s motivation for going to the website versus a physical store, and I need to make sure that the experience in the showroom complements what they're doing on-site, and vice-versa, and that it all kind of comes together.

The map helps in seeing that journey progress right up to the time someone becomes a customer. And it also continues after: we see the next touchpoints and how we're looking to retain them as a customer, so that they come back and purchase again.

A customer journey map is particularly powerful when you incorporate empathy into it, bringing to light specific emotions that customers experience throughout the journey.

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

The best, most effective customer journey maps are not the solo project of the user experience (UX) or marketing team (though they may originate there).

Customer journey maps are a quick, easy, and powerful way to help everybody in your business get a clearer understanding of how things work from a customers’ perspective and what the customers’ needs are—which is the first step in your quest towards creating a better experience for them.

Our first goal for preparing a customer journey map was to improve understanding customers across the company, so that every employee could understand the entire process our clients go through.

For example, people from the shipping department didn't know how the process works online; people from marketing didn't know how customers behave after filing a complaint. Everything seems obvious, but when we shared these details, we saw that a lot of people didn't know how the company itself works—this map made us realize that there were still gaps we needed to fill.

If we discover that customers have a pain point in a specific section of the map, different teams can look at the same section from several angles; customer support can communicate why something is not possible, and engineering can explain why it’s going to take X amount of effort to get it done. Especially in cross-functional teams where we all come from really different disciplines, I find these maps to be an incredible way for us all to speak the same language.

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

As a company grows in size and complexity, the lines of ownership occasionally become blurry. Without clarity, a customer might get bounced like a ping pong ball across Sales, Success, and Support departments—not great for the seamless and frictionless customer experience we all want to offer.

A central source of ‘truth’ in the form of a customer journey map that everybody can refer to helps clarify areas of ownership and handover points.

We were growing as a team, and we realized we needed to operationalize a lot of the processes that, before then, had just been manually communicated. We did it through a customer journey map. Our goal was to better understand where these hand-off points were and how to create a more seamless experience for our customers, because they were kind of being punted from team to team, from person to person—and often, it was really hard to keep tabs on exactly where the customer was in that entire journey.

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

A customer journey map will take your team from 'It appears that 30% of people leave the website at this stage' to 'Wow, people are leaving because the info is incomplete and the links are broken.' Once everyone is aligned on the roadblocks that need to be addressed, changes that have a positive impact on the customer experience and customer satisfaction will happen faster.

The customer journey map brings it all together: it doesn't matter who you've got in the room. If you’re doing a proper journey map, they always get enlightened in terms of ‘Oh, my word. I did not know the customer's actually experiencing this.’ And when I walk out of the session, we have often solved issues in the business. Accountability and responsibilities have been assigned, and I find that it just works well.

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

The secret of getting value from customer journey mapping is not just building the map itself: it's taking action on your findings. Having a list of changes to prioritize means you can also measure their effect once implemented, and keep improving your customers' experience. 

This all starts with collecting customer-centric data—the sooner you begin, the more information you’ll have when the time comes to make a decision.

Start mapping your customer journey today

Hotjar lets you experience your customer’s journey through their eyes, so you can visualize what’s working and what needs improvement.

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

To create a useful customer journey map, you first need to define your objectives, buyer personas, and the goals of your customers (direct customer feedback and  market research will help you here). Then, identify all the distinct touchpoints the customer has with your product or service in chronological order, and visualize the completion of these steps in a map format.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping provides different teams in your company with a simple, easily understandable visualization that captures your customers’ perspective and needs, and the steps they’ll  take to successfully use your  product or service. 

Consider customer journey mapping if you want to accomplish a specific objective (like testing a new product’s purchase flow) or work towards a much broader goal (like increasing overall customer retention or customer loyalty).

What is the difference between a customer journey map and an experience map?

The main difference between an experience map and a customer journey map is that customer journey maps are geared specifically toward business goals and the successful use of a product or service, while experience maps visualize an individual’s journey and experience through the completion of any task or goal that may not be related to business.

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The Ultimate Guide to Customer Journey Mapping [Updated 2022]

In a world full of choice, how are brands standing out?

By creating exceptional customer experiences.

Emotions play a large role in purchasing decisions. Brands that can create positive experiences are more likely to attract and retain customers, drive revenue, and experience growth.

For many businesses, customer journey mapping (CJM) is the first step towards creating these exceptional customer experiences.

We’ll talk about what customer journey mapping is, why customer journey mapping is especially important for offline-first businesses, and how to create your own customer journey map..

Customer journey mapping process, source: Unsplash

Customer journey definition

Your customer journey is the series of touchpoints your customer experiences as they interact with your brand on their way to making a purchase or after purchasing.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. It highlights the various touchpoints, actions, and goals a user has in the process of becoming your customer.

Since 56% of customer interactions happen across channels , there are many opportunities for cost savings, growth, and customer retention for your brand when you deepen your understanding of your customer’s journey. It’s best practice to map out your customer journey so you can identify pain points and opportunities for growth.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customer journey from the moment they first interact with your brand all the way through to when they become loyal advocates.

Customer journey mapping will help you step into your customers’ shoes and gain valuable insights into their real-world interactions with your brand – from clicking on your Google ad to stepping into your museum or store.

A strong customer journey map will provide insights into the aspects of the customer journey that are working well, not-so-well, and any aspects that may be missing altogether. These insights are an incredible resource as they help you to better understand your customers and pinpoint where you should be focusing your time and efforts.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

An exceptional customer experience is essential if you want to build brand equity, attract customers, and grow your business. Your customers interact with your organisation in a variety of ways. With the increasing complexity of interactions online and offline you’d think customer journey mapping features in most organisations’ customer experience (CX) plans.

How would you best describe your understanding of the customer journey? Source: econsultancy.com

Yet, even though 81% of companies believe customer experience is a competitive advantage , only 8% report having a joined up omnichannel strategy. A full 33% admit they’re unable to track customer journeys at all.

It makes sense to spend some time creating your customer journey map – 71% of brands say that customer journey mapping has reduced their customer service costs by up to 20%. A further 77% of consumers say they view brands more favourably when they ask for feedback.

With 84% of consumers saying being treated like an individual is very important to winning their business, it’s critical that you understand your buyers’ desires and pain points at every interaction with your brand.

Source: salesforce.com

To create an exceptional customer experience , you need to have the proper data. Customer journey mapping is a strategic tool that helps you create personalised experiences along every step of the customer journey. It helps you meet short-term customer needs and expectations but also gives you a long-term view of their expectations so you can anticipate future needs. A customer journey map provides you with the insights you need to better understand your customers. This allows you to then create a customer experience that satisfies all their expectations.

The last mile of the customer journey is an important topic and customer journey mapping can help you identify opportunities for advanced forecasting, optimised delivery, intelligent insights, and real-time tracking.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

With information comes empowerment. By gaining a deeper understanding of your customer experiences through customer journey mapping, you will be empowered to make decisions that elevate your business.

By thoroughly mapping customer journeys, you can develop a customer-focused mentality, improve your customer retention rate, and gain a deeper understanding of your customers.

Customer journey mapping has several benefits , including:

• Uncovering the differences in behaviour between buyer personas
• Creating a logical buying process
• Optimising the onboarding process
• Benchmarking your customers’ experience against predictions

You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company

Although every department in your company is working towards the same goal, the objectives of each department may be slightly different. Everyone in the business wants to achieve growth. But while the marketing department focuses on building brand awareness, the accounting department focuses on profits and losses. Whatever the department’s objectives may be, the customer must always be at the heart of every action and goal.

By creating a customer journey map that illustrates the entire customer journey and the role each department plays in shaping the experience, you can unite departments over a shared customer-focused mentality. This shared mentality can help departments unite their objectives, improve the customer experience, and reach the same goals.

You can improve your customer retention rate

Customers are largely driven by emotion. If your business delivers a consistently positive experience, your customers are unlikely to take their business elsewhere.

By improving customer engagement and your customer retention rate through exceptional customer experiences, your business will likely also benefit from:

• Increased revenue. You are more likely to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers. These revenue sources are often more profitable for your business.
• Improved external touchpoints. Your loyal customers will share positive referrals and reviews of your business to new potential customers.
• Cost efficiencies. It is generally more affordable to retain current customers than to attract new ones.

You can gain a deeper understanding of your customer

The best way to help your customer and create an exceptional customer experience is by understanding who they are and what they want. Diving into the actions and touchpoints your customers have along their journey will reveal the different goals they have and the outcomes they expect. This understanding will allow you to implement solutions and strategies that appeal directly to your customer’s wants and needs so you can continue creating those positive experiences and build brand loyalty.

A case against customer journey mapping

While there are many benefits to creating a customer journey map, it is not without its limitations. Some of these limitations include:

Little opportunity for flexibility. If you are a newer business without a pre-established customer journey in place, creating a customer journey map can limit your ability to test and experiment with different customer experience models or initiatives.

Excludes external factors. Inputs such as cost, implementation difficulty, and competition are not included in a customer journey map. However, these inputs have the potential to hold a notable influence on your overall customer experience and customer satisfaction.

Does not consider related journeys. Purchases don’t often happen in isolation, and your customer is likely engaging in a variety of related journeys with multiple businesses at the same time. CJM’s are not able to evaluate how these related journeys impact one another and influence the overall customer experience.

Despite its limitations, a customer journey map is still a great tool. Supplement CJM’s shortcomings by implementing additional tools that can work alongside your map.

The basic concepts of a customer journey map

A customer journey map combines a series of touchpoints, actions, emotions, and barriers that your customer experiences throughout their journey. Together, these inputs create one cohesive experience.

Example Customer Journey Map, source: Columbia Road

A strong journey map will include all these different inputs in detail so that you can make customer experience decisions based on complete and accurate information.

Touchpoints

A touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with your brand. This can include everything from in-store experiences and web searches to paid advertising and word-of-mouth referral. Essentially, a touchpoint is any interaction that allows your customer to form an opinion on your business.

Touchpoints are critical because their combined influence determines whether a user will become a customer. The challenge with touchpoints, however, is that many of them are outside of your control. Peer recommendations and user-generated content cannot be managed by your marketing department and depend upon the experiences of other customers with your brand.

Actions are any behaviour your customer engages in. This includes following your social media page, visiting your website, or coming to your store. While not all actions are equally important, they all play a role in determining whether a customer makes a purchase at the end of their journey.

Emotions & Motivations

Every customer has a different reason for purchasing from you. It may be because your product or service fulfils a functional need or because the customer aligns with your brand promise. Either way, the aspect uniting all purchasing motivations is emotion.

Customers’ decisions are largely based on how your business makes them feel. Ensuring you can fulfil customer’s functional needs while delivering a positive emotional experience is essential in creating a great customer journey.

Barriers & Pain Points

No customer journey is perfect, and at some point, your customer is likely to come across a barrier or pain point. Maybe your website load time is slow, or your return policy does not meet expectations. Whatever it is, most customer encounters a touchpoint or action that takes away from their overall experience.

Customers experience roadblocks, dead ends and frustration in their journey. The more friction we put in front of potential customers, the less likely they are to complete the journey Forbes

To create an outstanding customer experience, the first step is knowing where your barriers are. You need to identify these pain points and understand why they deter customers. With this information you can respond quickly and build effective solutions.

Current State

The most common type of customer journey map, is one that represents your customer journey as it currently exists. These customer journey maps outline the touchpoints, actions, emotions, and barriers that your users currently go through before and after becoming a customer. These types of CJM’s are great to help you acknowledge aspects of the customer journey that are working and identify growth opportunities.

Future State

A future state customer journey map, visualises your customer journey as you would like it to be. Future state CJM’s are aspirational by nature. They are great for creating a visual representation of your customer experience goals.

How do I create a customer journey map?

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/w00FkE6e8zE

Your customer journey mapping should seek to address questions such as:

• Which customer segments am I targeting?
• What kinds of behaviours am I looking at – linear or cyclical?
• How can I start from the customer’s perspective?
• How can I recreate experiences across multiple channels and touch points?
• How can I represent important metrics and indicators such as NPS or CSAT scores?

There are many ways you can go about creating and designing your CJM, but for best results, we recommend following the following customer journey mapping methodology:

Conduct persona research

Many businesses believe they have an in-depth understanding of your customers and the customer experience. Yet, nothing beats speaking to your customers directly. For a strong customer journey map, conduct thorough research. Interview your customers via feedback surveys and questionnaires to get more complete and honest feedback on your current customer experience. Avoid making mistakes when surveying customers .

It is important to note when building your customer journey map, it is often best practice to focus on one customer persona at a time. Your customer base is diverse and so are their experiences with your brand. One CJM will not be enough to cover the variability in different customer journeys. Begin by focusing on one persona and slowly build out more maps from there to cover multiple personas.

Understand your customer’s goals

At every step along the customer journey, there is a goal your customer is trying to achieve. Whether that be trying to find your store hours when visiting your website, or wanting to learn more about your brand personality through social media. Every action is motivated by an end goal. By figuring out what these goals are at each stage of the customer journey, you will be able to determine if these goals are being satisfied effectively. You will also understand how these goals are evolving throughout the customer journey.

List all the touchpoints

The strongest CJM’s have lots of detail and are specific. Spend time identifying all the different touchpoints in your customer journey, to get a complete view of the experience.

Map the current state

To understand how you can improve your customer experience, you must first understand how the current journey is doing. Start by mapping the current state to create a baseline and identify opportunities for growth and improvement.

Take the customer journey yourself

Your real customers will be able to tell you a lot about your current customer experience. But most customers are not taking note of each and every touchpoint. They are likely to forget minor pain points or small moments of delight when questioned later on.

Going through your customer journey yourself is a great exercise. Approach with an unbiased perspective so you can experience first-hand the strengths and limitations of the journey. You’ll find deeper insight when you put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Chart a sentiment line

Representing the emotional state of your customer throughout each stage of the journey is one of the most important aspects of your customer journey map. Each action taken by your customer is driven by emotion, so understanding how these emotions evolve throughout the journey and how they influence different actions is imperative. Include a sentiment line in your CJM that represents how emotions are evolving throughout the journey, and use this as a baseline when creating changes and improvements to your map.

Step-by-step: Customer journey mapping process

While it can be helpful to find other customer journey mapping examples, your customer journey map will be unique to your organisation’s goals and customers.

Source: davechaffey.com

We suggest the following 5 step process to build your customer journey map:

1. Gather the support of stakeholders

In the modern connected enterprise every department has a stake in the customer experience, not just customer support. Getting everyone involved early in the customer mapping process will help you define requirements and gather feedback further down the line.

2. Conduct customer research

Find out everything you can about your customers and their pain points through surveys , customer effort scores , and interviews. You can also use the data you have concerning your interactions with your customers, including your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool , social media conversations, customer support calls, and complaint logs.

Build a complete picture of your customers using words and phrases you’ve heard them use, adding motivations, expectations, pain points and other emotional elements you’ve been able to gather.

When you’re building a customer journey map, don’t forget to include customers that didn’t purchase to uncover differences in their experiences. This can provide useful insights on their decision-making process, helping you to plug gaps in your product and service offerings you may be unaware of.

3. Create your customer personas

Armed with the results of your customer research, build a comprehensive profile of your customers. You may have one or several buyer personas. A buyer persona is an idealised profile of a customer but it will help you formulate an understanding of each customer type.

Your customer persona will also help you understand your customers’ motivations.

These can be:

• Price – At the research stage
• Information and guidance – At the purchasing stage
• Recognition from peers – Post purchase, such as when recommending your product or service to their friends and family

4. Draw your customer journey map

There are many ways (customer touchpoints) your customer comes into contact with your brand before, during and after purchasing.

Your map should capture these touch points adequately, highlighting those that have the highest impact. The point of sale is especially important for many businesses because this is the last interaction your would-be customer has with the brand before committing to a purchase.

For long customer journeys, break up your map into phases , taking care to document your customers’ mindset throughout each phase as they try to accomplish different goals.

Start with a customer journey map template if you’re unsure where to start. You may want to ask a graphic designer to give your map a professional finish to maximise its impact on stakeholders.

5. Refine your journey maps

Use qualitative and quantitative data to identify roadblocks and pain points in your customer journey. Also, mark areas where you’re excelling so you can build on them. Where there are roadblocks in your customer journey, drill further into the data and try to figure out where adjustments might have the biggest impact.

How can I improve my customer journey?

Once you understand your current customer journey, you will face the challenge of figuring out ways to make improvements. While each business will have different areas of focus, here are some guiding steps to follow when creating and implementing changes.

Your journey maps will be extensive, and there are likely many different areas you could focus your time on. To avoid getting overwhelmed or, feeling unsure of where to start, begin by setting specific goals of what you want to achieve. Maybe you want to focus on your social media presence or improve your customer service wait times, whatever it is, start small and set specific and tangible goals to guide your efforts.

Decide what to measure

When making improvements to your customer journey, it’s important to measure their impact. By defining metrics and measuring the success of different initiatives, you can track your progress and create a benchmark for future changes and opportunities.

Include KPIs

Changes to your customer journey won’t happen overnight. Set key performance indicators to help keep your team focused and on track as they work towards implementing outlined improvements. Align your KPI’s with your goals to help keep the improvement process organised and succinct.

Prioritise and fix issues

Once you’ve built your current state customer journey map, there will likely be quite a few customer pain points and improvement opportunities. To decide where to start, prioritise improvements based upon their significance in the customer journey, how frequently a customer interacts with that touchpoint, and the return on investment (ROI) they can deliver. Begin by fixing the highest priority items and work your way down the list.

Review and update each journey map after every major change

As your business evolves, so will your customer journey. Every time you launch a new product, service, or location be sure to update your CJM to reflect the changes. Customers expect a lot and being able to constantly improve your offerings while delivering consistently exceptional experiences will go a long way in building customer loyalty .

Set monthly, quarterly, or annual meetings to review the CJM as a team to help get you in the practice of making updates frequently.

Example customer journey maps

No two customer journey maps are alike. Depending on your industry and who your customers are, your customer journey map will hold different details and nuances to create a comprehensive and specific visual of your customer journey.

Although each CJM is unique, here are a few examples to help get you started.

Retail customer journey map example

Source: IKEA

Customer journey mapping for big corporations can be tough. Ikea did a great job of developing a CJM that outlines the thoughts, behaviours, and emotions of a customer throughout their journey at the store. Visually appealing and easily digested, this map clearly describes the entire journey with all its complexities and nuances.

Bonus example: Omnichannel consumer journey map example

Source: Medium

It’s not a simple customer journey map, but this amazing graphic beautifully demonstrates how offline and online consumer journeys are connected as a buyer interacts with different touchpoints at IKEA.

B2B customer journey map example

Source: FedEx Business Insights

This customer journey map by FedEx is customer-focused and addresses the goal of the customer – global expansion. Through b2b international customer journey mapping, and by highlighting the customer journey from start to finish - and how FedEx plays a role in goal attainment - FedEx can position itself as an essential aspect of the B2B customer journey.

Circular customer journey map example

Customer Journey Map created by LEGO

A fun example of a circular customer journey map is the one from Lego, showing the customer experience of a Lego customer flying from Heathrow to New York City. In this example, Lego pays close attention to each step of the journey to create a detailed, unique, and exceptional LEGO customer journey.

Automotive customer journey map example

Car Rental Customer Journey Map created by Delightability

The image shows an automotive customer journey map using car rental. It’s taken from Gregory Olson’s book, The Experience Design Blueprint.

As you might notice, the relevance of each touchpoint on the journey depends largely on the audience. The company may have an interest in improving the overall experience when you’re trying to find a car to rent and using their app, but for someone renting a car for business travel, that might be less important than how easy it is to return the car at their destination.

So context matters. How you use the service as a business traveler will likely be very different from how you use it as a tourist.

The one thing we can all relate to is that most people have rented a car, so we can look at this map and think about all of our experiences in this context—and then consider how they could improve those parts that are more relevant to us based on what we do with them.

Use of customer journeys to improve customer satisfaction

Depending on what type of business you are in, the ideal customer experience will be different. By understanding who your customers are, what they need, and the experience they want to have, you can prioritise and implement the improvements that best align with your customer’s ideal experience.

In our world of change, competing on exceptional experiences is key to success. Make sure to use your journey map frequently and across departments to maintain your competitive advantage.

Tools to help you with your journey mapping

There are a variety of tools you can use to support the development of a strong customer journey map. Some of the tools that we recommend include:

Get everything done at once with Smaply.

A great tool to help you along the journey, Smaply helps you create customer personas, stakeholder maps, and customer journey maps. Includes various visualisation features and icons to help you add detail.

Create custom templates with Lucidchart

A great option for those looking to create a customised map. Lucidchart is a free online tool that allows you to develop a customer journey map using its suite of features.

Keep yourself on track with Asana.

After building your map, you will need a strong organisational system to keep you on track to implement journey improvements. Using a CRM journey map or work management platform like Asana helps you build out implementation projects, assign roles, and collaborate with your team to make customer journey changes quickly and efficiently.

15 free customer journey map templates

A customer journey map that looks great and is easily interpreted is more likely to be used by your team. Here are some great (free!) customer journey templates and customer journey canvas you can use to help develop your journey map:

• Practical Service Template
• Customer Journey Canvas
• Visual Paradigm Customer Journey Maps
• Invision App CJM Template
• Shopping & Purchases CJM Template
• Bundled Journey Map
• Graphic Customer Journey Maps
• Retail Customer Journey Template
• Miro Customer Journey Map
• Customize CJM
• Comprehensive CJM Template
• Simple Customer Journey Template
• Leisure & Entertainment CJM Template
• Restaurant Customer Journey Map
• Service Blueprint Template

Download your free customer journey map template using any of the links above.

Final Thoughts

To compete in our world of choice, you need to stand out from the crowd.

By delivering exceptional customer experiences you can stay competitive, build strong customer relationships, and drive profits.

Use the above steps, recommendations, and tools to build a strong customer journey map that will help you better understand your customers and grow your business.

Co-founder, TRACX

Tom is the co-founder of TRACX, a no-code marketing platform that allows local business owners to collect customer feedback and create engaging marketing campaigns. With over 17 years of experience in entrepreneurship, product development, and marketing for businesses large and small, Tom is currently responsible for developing product and marketing strategies for TRACX.

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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

Everything you need to know before customer journey mapping

Both customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) professionals should require the use of user or customer journey mapping in determining the ideal customer and user experience, says Forrester Analyst Leah Buley in this EffectiveUI blog post .

The rising importance of CX and UX has inspired us to share our collection of the most comprehensive instructions from our corporate Miro library, which we hope will be helpful in your customer journey mapping too.

Look through this brief presentation about customer journey mapping or read the full article below.

Why did we collect this information? Because current trends prove that ideal customer experience is going to be a cornerstone of a company’s success soon.

According to Econsultancy Digital Trends 2015 report , which was based on a global survey, customer experience is considered to be the main opportunity in 2015-2020 to differentiate from competitors, beating out current markers of success (like product quality and competitive pricing).

Read our recent post on the four remote collaboration trends that drive the adoption of virtual whiteboards for customer journey mapping.

It means that customer experience soon will be, if it is not already, the key factor determining referral, retention, revenue and overall growth in the majority of businesses.

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Another study conducted by Esteban Kolsky (a customer strategist, researcher, and consultant) shows, among other things, that customers are looking for a guaranteed quality experience.

Kolsky’s results show that only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers regularly complains and that the rest simply churn; he also finds that 67% of consumers cite bad experiences as the reason for churn. Ultimately, at least 91% of unhappy customers will simply leave without a complaint.

Currently, most companies are struggling to get customers’ attention and acquire new-comers, but this is not a financially sound strategy: “it is 6-7X more expensive to attract new customers than to keep existing customers,” according to the research.

That means that the real competition starts in the middle of the marketing funnel and that the focus really needs to be on improving the experience for existing customers. The question then becomes: How best to implement strategies that will be successful in this area?

What is customer journey mapping?

The customer journey map (CJM) is one of the main tools that allows us to understand and improve customer experience. This video from Peer Insight shows a sample Customer Journey Map in action; but in essence, it is a graph which illustrates the steps customers go through: from initial contact, through the process of engagement, and hopefully into long-term loyalty. It may focus on a particular part of the story or give an overview of the entire customer experience as they interact with a company — whether it is a product, a website, a retail store, a service, or any combination of these. It usually treats individuals as real or potential customers, so it shows a path how people either become customers or leave.

The more interaction steps are described, the more complicated — but also the more informative and useful — such a map becomes.

There is an endless number of customer journey map templates, but a basic template includes a specific persona, the steps beginning-to-end of the customer experience (including touchpoints), and the potential emotional highs and lows. Other parts of the journey are optional and depend on your objective.

As Paul Boag, a user experience consultant, speaker & author of Digital Adaptation, says, participation in creating customer journey map is useful for all involved in product development :

However, the finished map could be simplified and expanded to the entire company under the condition of non-disclosure.

The process of customer journey mapping

The process of customer journey mapping varies from one company to another. Usually, it depends on the resources you have (people, time, equipment, etc.), the template, and the facilitator’s experience. Below you can find one of thousands of possible scenarios for customer journey mapping.

Step 1: Gathering information

During this phase, you have to define a customer persona that is relevant to your goal and the scope of activities you would like to assess, and then gather the maximum data about this persona. How does one gather this data? You will want both quantitative and qualitative information to gain the deepest insight into your customer.The more data you can get — the more chance you have to understand customer values and experience correctly.

The more data you can get — the more chance you have to understand customer values and experience correctly.

Quantitative customer research like surveys, testing, and web analytics will show you conversion rate and customers’ pain points. While this is important, it is almost useless without qualitative research that complements your data and gives deep understanding of customers’ emotions, goals, attitudes or motivations. Qualitative research includes interviews, focus groups, and field studies. Kerry Bodine , customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, even suggests inviting customers to a journey mapping workshop where you can ask them directly about their thoughts and feelings at each step of the journey.

Step 2: Introducing the team

To kick things off, start with an introduction phase to ensure that everyone is on the same page before you begin. Set up a date for the workshop, create a shared space, and get together a cross-functional team that represents different departments and seniority levels.

Uncontrollable meetings neither help your team be productive, nor boost creativity. Usually, they lead to chaos, where everybody is speaking at the same time, or someone is starting to dominate in the conversation. Nancy Halpern , Principal at KNH Associates suggests to develop “the rules of the road” that limit each person’s speaking time to prevent anyone from dominating.

Create a shared space to get together a cross-functional team:

Once everyone has gathered, explain the stakes and the goal of the workshop and agree upon the schedule. Since customer journey mapping is a kind of brainstorming activity, consider additional exercises that will help you to warm up the participants or refresh them if they reach a deadlock.

Step 3: Brainstorming

Plan for the lion’s share of the time to be the brainstorming activity. Select a brainstorming technique  that you feel will best help your cross-functional team generate new ideas for future customer experience.

The discussion will start with a briefing about the customer persona and then an analysis of the research.

Then, the team should generate as many touchpoints as possible and consider relevant channels between them. A touchpoint is a point of contact between the customer and your product.

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to strengthen the relationships with the customer and move towards the greatest customer experience. Usually, they are mapped either as a timeline , a tree , a spider or a wheel .

It is important to let your team “tell the story.” Do not interpret user feedback; rather, let your team see the whole picture by first capturing the stories via whatever creatively makes the most sense: stickers, mapping using flowcharts, writing stories with text, illustrating with pictures, acting if necessary — whatever works!

Visualization tips from @UXlady

“Use arrows to illustrate connection type between touchpoints”.

Direct connection. One task leads on to the next.

Bidirectional connection. One task leads to the next, but user can go back.

Controlled evaluation. User moves between different variables in a controlled environment.

Open exploration. User moves between different variables, related or not.

Facilitate the process so that maximum attention can be devoted to gathering touchpoints because they determine CX and what customers think of your service. Touchpoints and the path between them are vital because they are the exact places where we see users leaving.

While brainstorming, try to map as many existing and potential touchpoints as possible and encourage your team to put themselves in the shoes of the persona when analyzing.

Step 4: Illustrating

After you have allowed sufficient time for brainstorming, the team is ready for the illustration phase, where we combine the results into one map. Each touchpoint is accompanied by specific information such as:

Make sure that even if you used a physical whiteboard for the customer journey mapping, someone is responsible for digitizing the final layout, because it should be an editable and shareable piece of work.

While digitizing your customer journey map, you are free to invent your template or use one of the thousands from the web. We use Miro template, which allows us to collaborate in real-time from any place and share the results with the entire company, including remote employees.

Step 5: Creating an action plan & implementation

After the map is ready, analyze whether each touchpoint is convenient and gives value to the customer. The gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received should be your action plan . An effective action plan should cover deadlines, responsibilities, budget, KPIs and success criteria.

In Miro brainstorm touchpoints and barriers using Sticker tool , because it is easy to copy them and transfer to sticky notes backlog, prioritize using tags or Emojis, discuss and track progress via mentions in comments .

Step 6: Revising your CJM

New popular tools, behavioral patterns and communication channels arise almost every month, and the customer journey map needs to be adapted accordingly. Consider establishing a standard schedule for revising your customer journey map. For example, it may be once per quarter. During the revision process, point out what may have changed and what KPIs have been achieved. If there are gaps or red KPIs, another brainstorming session starts. Online tools like Miro  (from $10 per month), Touchpoint Dashboard (from $65 monthly) and UX360 (from $500 monthly) will save you time on the illustration phase if you plan to repeatedly revise your CJM.

10 reasons why CJM improves CX process and generates ROI

Now that you have an idea of what CJM is, and how to go about creating one, it is important to understand why implementing this process is so necessary for a company that wants to become or remain competitive in today’s changing market.

CJM shows who, where, when and how the customer interacts with the product or service, making the experience as transparent as possible.

CJM highlights the customer and what they value because it focuses on customer needs and feelings at every stage of interaction.

CJM helps you design the most economical system for lasting value.

CJM leads not only to improvements in current features but also showcases opportunities for innovation, allowing for “a-ha!” moments.

CJM allow the team to optimize costs because it highlights priorities and areas not valued by the customers so that you can relocate resources to the most critical gaps or to the touchpoints most likely to “convert” a customer.

CJM examines the brand promise that you sell to customers through many channels (for example, a complicated sign up form doesn’t correlate with an “effortless” characteristic).

CJM shows opportunities for improvement because the map reveals barriers. It examines whether the customer life cycle is in a logical order, or if there are gaps between the desired customer experience and the one that is actually received.

CJM helps to develop cross business alignment across the organization and improve external communication.

CJM, shared with the entire company, makes people who communicate with customers in the touchpoints feel more responsible for the experience they make.

CJM helps you to find ways to differentiate from your competitors.

4 tools similar to the customer journey map

It should now be clear that having some kind of tool for your company to track customer interaction and visualize feedback is vitally important. However, you may be wondering why a customer journey map should be used. Why not a different kind of map, instead?

Several tools look quite similar to the customer journey map, although they serve different purposes and cases:

While the boundaries between the tools are becoming blurred because they all cover related topics, it is not the terminology that should be discussed, but the purposes and goals of each so that you can benefit from the tools to the fullest.

Basically, sales journeys, service blueprints , and process maps describe an Inside-out or a “backstage” company strategy. In other words — “how the service works,” “what we do,” and “how we create a set of experiences for a customer.”

On the other hand, the perfect customer journey or user experience map is a part of an Outside-in  world, where we describe “how the service is experienced” or “what happens to the individual” so it helps to adapt the product to the audience behavior.

However, there are no rules prohibiting you from merging parts from those Inside-out and Outside-in worlds, and it positively influences UX and CX when they are used in conjunction, so it could be even more useful to look at the intersection of all diagrams.

To understand how best to use each one, let’s briefly scan the tools in more detail.

Try customer journey mapping template for free

1. user experience focused maps (ux journey maps).

A UX map could be applied to:

The map shows how the experience fits into a person’s life. If a service is being considered, the UX journey map examines user engagement to improve the service and make the user’s life simpler and easier.

Both a UX journey map and a customer journey map look quite similar because they cover the same ideas. However, according to Adam Ramshaw, Australian expert in customer experience management and customer loyalty management, they are different and treating them as if they are the same is confusing for all concerned .

The difference is that the experience map looks at individuals in the context of human behavior, while the customer journey map considers individuals specifically as current or potential customers.

Also according to Adam Ramshaw, the UX journey map doesn’t necessarily describe the interaction stage (like subscribing, purchasing or getting in contact), while the customer journey map covers the whole user path starting from awareness, going through sales and finishing with continuous service usage.

This means that while both styles of map perform essentially the same function, a customer journey map is more specifically tailored to the needs of a company looking to improve customer experience and especially how to improve or increase touchpoints.

The goals of the user differ from the goals of the customer.

2. Marketing automation or sales journeys (sales automation journey maps)

A sales automation journey map helps the marketing team increase sales by mapping the user’s path to becoming a paying customer through the use of triggers, or messages that reach a customer at the right time in order to increase brand awareness and hopefully create a loyalty loop that brings the customer back time and again, as seen in the diagram below.

A sales automation journey map can often become quite complicated because it is not linear, and it needs to predict the path for many different personas to move from consideration to paying customer.

Fortunately, the steps are easily tracked and measured, which is why a sales journey map can help to customize marketing and sales strategy. It can be used to determine which scenario converts customers more frequently and which drives the biggest income from a single customer. The biggest difference from the customer journey map is that the sales journey map does not consider the product at all, merely the marketing needed to connect with the customer.

3. Service blueprint

A service blueprint is a visual tool designed to establish effective business processes. Just like product companies use blueprints to help them construct products and buildings, service businesses use blueprints to ensure all the factors are in place and the processes optimized to provide great customer experience. The service blueprint provides a visual for the person providing a service to see the steps in the process that they need to accomplish behind the scenes.

Since it focuses on the process as opposed to the experience, a service blueprint shows the backstage of the Inside-out world, but will have a lack of information on user experience. Fortunately, a customer journey map covers this problem (mapping the user experience), and these two diagrams are often aligned. In this case, the customer journey map describes a user and acts as a step in the decision cycle, while a service blueprint captures the flow of all business processes impacted by the journey.

4. Process map

The process map is very similar to the service blueprint — it maps the process activities flow, plotting out responsibilities, business standards, and KPIs or success indicators . It’s necessary to map processes if you want to train the staff to a single standard, identify opportunities for improvements or assess the influence of any upcoming changes.

A process map is often developed by specialists or by specific departments because it is important to have expertise in the internal process. This is different from how a CJM should be developed; since a customer journey map is not focused on the internal world, the team can (and should!) be cross-functional, representing all departments involved in the customer experience.

As you can see, any of the diagrams mentioned above could positively influence UX and CX, and the most powerful journey map combines all of these types of maps so that the internal perspective will be developed in conjunction with an understanding of the customer journey.

The most powerful journey map combines all of Inside-Out and Outside-In maps so that the internal perspective will be developed in conjunction with an understanding of the customer journey.

The most common mistakes while customer journey mapping

When developing a customer journey map, many companies that are eager to make use of a powerful tool fall prey to some common and easily correctable mistakes:

Customer journey map is an old document with restricted access

Customer journey map is a single linear path..

Flexibility is the key to great customer experience. Recreating a linear path of the customer experience is a waste of time because customers take many routes to complete a sale .

Customer journey map skips some touchpoints

considering them as occasional or unimportant. To make your map as useful as possible, you need to include every point where your customer comes into contact with your business. According to research from McKinsey & Company, the number of touchpoints is increasing in number by around 20% a year . Do not forget about social media channels, collision touchpoints , and the post-purchasing period!

Customer journey map is created from the company point of view

If you interpret your customer’s experience, you will wind up in a situation where you shoot in the dark because the chances that you guessed right are next to zero. Let the information speak for itself.

One customer journey map for all customers

Each customer persona is unique. You may wish to group them according to research results, but each group requires a dedicated customer journey map.

Customer journey analysis concentrates on the bad experience

It’s true that pain points are vital opportunities to dramatically increase customer satisfaction, but don’t forget to figure out your success points. These play an important role in emotional decision making, and extending the positive experience is an opportunity, too.

Customer journey map doesn’t include an action plan.

The gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received should be your action plan. Set it as a clear expectation of the result — each participant of the workshop should understand it. Then, carry the vision through planning and execution. Don’t neglect this! There are two ways to work with the gaps and barriers: improve the touchpoint or remove it from the process. If you let the situation flow as it is, it will turn out in the frozen or decreasing AARRR metrics because many disappointed users will continue silently leaving. And don’t forget that any successful changes conсern three angles of the process (not one) — customers, business processes, and corporate culture/structure.

A customer journey map is a powerful tool which, if used properly, positively influences customer experience, which in return improves retention and revenue metrics. Although it is not a magic bullet that can solve all your experience problems at once, it helps to add value for your customers.

The tool itself is rather complicated because it deals with behavioral patterns of different audiences and requires discipline. Trying to make the path simpler is tricky because it usually leads to the above-mentioned set of most common mistakes, like creating a CJM from the company perspective.

In Miro we decided that three simple rules make the customer journey map more effective:

Feel free to customize the process of the customer journey mapping and improve it from one revision to another.

Since this article is a collection of best practices across the web and Miro experience, we welcome you to share your thoughts, cases, and references in the comments below! Or check out the links to related templates (like Persona) and other useful links below.

Related templates and links

While creating the customer journey map, the following templates can help you make the process smoother. Use all of the templates together with the customer journey map on one endless online board to get a helicopter view of the problem.

Useful links:

1.  Outstanding customer journey mapping toolkit with several templates ;

2.  UX Project Canvas Template ;

3.  Practical Service Blueprinting Guide .

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