customer journey map 5 a's

Optimizing The 5As Of Marketing For Customer Journey: A Guide To The Kotler 5a Model

Are you looking to enhance your marketing strategy and improve your customer journey? Look no further than the Kotler 5A Model. In this guide, we will explore how to optimize the 5 A’s of marketing for a successful customer journey.

Understanding the 5 A’s importance is essential in today’s competitive market. By creating awareness for your brand, appealing to customers’ curiosity, assisting them in their research process, encouraging action, and building advocacy and loyalty, you can effectively engage with your target audience at every stage.

Following this strategic model, you can tailor your marketing efforts to cater to different brand journeys. Whether in the B2B or B2C space, understanding how each A fits into your overall strategy will allow you to create a seamless and impactful customer experience.

In this article, we will delve into each step of the Kotler 5A Model and provide insights on optimizing it for maximum results. Get ready to take your marketing game to the next level!

In this Article

Key Takeaways

• The Kotler 5A Model enhances marketing strategy and improves customer journey.
• The 5 A’s framework helps guide customers through their journey and enhance their experience.
• Tailoring messaging to address customer concerns establishes credibility and trust.
• Building customer advocacy and loyalty is essential for long-term success.

Understanding the Importance of the 5 A’s of the Customer Journey

Now that you’re diving into the world of marketing let’s talk about why understanding the importance of the 5 A’s of the Customer Journey will be a game-changer for your business. In today’s digital age, where customers have access to abundant information and options at their fingertips, it has become crucial for companies to optimize their customer journey. Doing so can create a seamless and memorable experience for your customers at every stage of their interaction with your brand.

The customer journey refers to a potential customer’s process before making a purchase or becoming a loyal advocate for your brand. It consists of several stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. The 5 A’s framework developed by Kotler provides a strategic approach to optimizing each stage of this journey.

By focusing on the 5 A’s – awareness, attraction, action, affinity, and advocacy – you can effectively guide customers through their journey and enhance their overall experience with your brand. This framework helps you identify opportunities to create awareness for your brand among potential customers. It also enables you to attract them by offering valuable content or solutions that address their needs and desires.

Understanding the importance of the 5 A’s allows you to strategically plan and execute marketing initiatives that align with each stage of the customer journey. Doing so can strengthen your relationship with existing customers while attracting new ones. Now let’s discuss the first aspect: creating awareness for your brand without delay!

The First A: Creating Awareness for Your Brand

The first step in creating brand awareness in the 5 A’s is establishing a solid market presence. This involves ensuring your target audience knows who you are and what you offer. To do this effectively, you need to consider three key elements:

• Advertising : Utilize channels such as television, social media , and print ads to reach your potential customers. Develop compelling messages that highlight the unique value proposition of your brand.
• Advocacy : Encourage satisfied customers to become advocates for your brand by sharing their positive experiences with others. Word-of-mouth marketing can be compelling in building awareness and credibility.
• Awareness campaigns : Engage in activities that raise awareness about your products or services, the industry, and related issues. This positions you as an authority and thought leader within your field.

Incorporating these strategies into your marketing efforts can create a solid foundation for brand awareness. According to Philip Kotler’s framework, the first stage of mapping out the customer journey is about generating interest and familiarity with your brand.

Transitioning into the subsequent section about ‘the second A: appealing to your customers’ curiosity,’ it’s crucial to build upon this initial awareness by piquing their interest through engaging content and targeted messaging.

The Second A: Appealing to Your Customers’ Curiosity

Engage your audience by creating captivating content that sparks their curiosity and leaves them wanting to learn more about your brand. The second A of the Kotler 5A model, “Appealing to Your Customers’ Curiosity,” is crucial in optimizing the customer journey. By piquing their interest through elaborative and catchy ads, carousel ads, and more, you can guide potential customers through the marketing funnel and increase the likelihood of conversion. Adding social media posts to your marketing strategy can also be an effective way to attract and engage your target audience.

To effectively appeal to your customers’ curiosity, it is essential to understand their behavior and preferences. Implementing data-driven marketing strategies allows you to tailor your content to specific segments of your target audience, increasing relevance and engagement. Providing valuable information, teasing upcoming product launches or exclusive offers, or sharing compelling storytelling are all effective ways to captivate your audience and improve performance through automation.

One way to engage your audience is through interactive experiences encouraging active participation. Incorporating quizzes, surveys, or contests into your content can create a sense of excitement and make customers feel involved with your brand.

By appealing to customers’ curiosity throughout their journey, you enhance customer retention and foster customer advocacy as they become more invested in exploring what else you have to offer. As we discuss the third A—assisting customers in their research process—we will explore how you can provide valuable resources that facilitate informed decision-making.

The Third A: Assisting Customers in Their Research Process

To effectively assist customers in their research process, it’s essential to provide valuable resources that empower them to make informed decisions about your brand. As potential customers move through the customer path or funnel, they will engage in research activities to gather information and evaluate their options. You can guide them toward choosing your brand by offering informative content and tools.

Offline and online channels are crucial in assisting customers during their research phase. Offline methods like brochures, pamphlets, and physical stores provide tangible resources that showcase your products or services. Online platforms such as websites, blogs, social media, and email marketing campaigns offer information that educates potential customers about your brand.

A well-designed marketing campaign should strategically align with each customer journey stage. By understanding your target audience’s specific needs and preferences during the research phase, you can tailor your messaging to address their concerns and provide relevant solutions. This approach establishes credibility for your brand while fostering trust among potential customers.

As we transition into ‘the fourth A: encouraging customers to take action,’ it is essential to remember that practical assistance during the research process sets the foundation for converting potential customers into loyal advocates for your brand.

The Fourth A: Encouraging Customers to Take Action

Ready to take the next step? It’s time for you to seize the opportunity and move towards achieving your goals with our brand. We understand that encouraging customers to take action is crucial in optimizing the 5 A’s of marketing for customer journeys. By effectively guiding customers through the sales process, we can ensure they have a positive experience and are likelier to become loyal advocates.

To help you navigate this critical stage, here are five key strategies we recommend incorporating into your digital marketing strategy:

• Implement targeted email marketing campaigns to engage with customers at different stages of their customer path.
• Create personalized landing pages with relevant information and incentives to encourage action.
• Optimize your website’s user experience by making it easy for customers to find what they need and complete desired actions.
• Leverage social media platforms to create buzz and drive excitement around your offerings.
• Utilize retargeting ads to remind potential customers about your brand and entice them into the sales process.

By implementing these strategies, you can encourage customers to take action and move forward in their journey. Next, explore how building customer advocacy and loyalty is crucial in sustaining long-term success.

The Fifth A: Building Customer Advocacy and Loyalty

Developing a solid base of loyal customers who passionately advocate for your brand is essential for long-term success in the ever-evolving digital business world. Building customer advocacy and loyalty is the final step in optimizing the 5 A’s of marketing for the customer journey. It involves creating an emotional connection with your customers, ensuring they continue purchasing from you, and actively promoting your brand to others.

To build customer advocacy and loyalty, it is crucial to understand the entire customer journey. This includes identifying touchpoints where customers will likely engage with your brand, such as social media platforms or review websites. By delivering exceptional customer experiences at each touchpoint, including websites and apps, you can increase customer satisfaction and encourage them to advocate for your brand.

A successful marketing campaign is crucial in building customer advocacy and loyalty. By consistently delivering valuable content and personalized offers, you can keep your customers engaged and interested in what your brand offers. Additionally, monitoring key metrics like conversion rate and customer lifetime value can help identify areas where improvements can be made. To further enhance your marketing efforts, it is important to leverage platforms like YouTube to keep users engaged and consistently reminded of your product or offering. By incorporating YouTube into your ad campaigns, you can deliver rich, personalized ad experiences to consumers who are ready to discover and engage with your brand. This will not only increase brand visibility but also strengthen customer loyalty.

Focusing on building customer advocacy and loyalty is vital for long-term success. By understanding the customer journey, implementing effective marketing campaigns, and monitoring key metrics, you can create a loyal base of customers who will not only continue purchasing from you but also actively promote your brand. Transitioning into the next section about adapting the 5 A’s model to different brand journeys allows businesses to cater their strategies based on unique needs and goals while keeping sight of these core principles.

Adapting the 5 A’s Model to Different Brand Journeys

Adapting the 5 A’s model to different brand journeys is crucial for tailoring marketing strategies to meet the unique needs and goals of sales professionals, ensuring maximum effectiveness. By understanding the customer journey and applying the principles of the Kotler 5A model – awareness, appeal, ask, act, and advocacy – marketers can optimize each stage of the process.

To create a clear image in your mind, consider two sub-lists that showcase how adapting the 5 A’s model can benefit different brand journeys:

1. Customized Awareness:

• Utilize targeted advertising campaigns to raise brand awareness among specific demographics.
• Leverage social media platforms to reach younger audiences more likely to engage with online content.

2. Enhanced Appeal:

• Tailor messaging and visuals to resonate with different cultural backgrounds or regional preferences.
• Incorporate user-generated content and testimonials to build trust and credibility with potential customers.

By strategically adapting each stage of the 5 A’s model according to specific brand journeys, marketers can optimize their efforts in reaching target audiences more effectively. This analytical approach allows for better customization of marketing strategies based on individual customer journeys, including attribution. Ultimately, this increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy for brands across various industries.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can the 5 a’s model be applied to different industries.

To apply the 5 A’s model to different industries, first, identify your target audience’s specific needs and preferences. Then, tailor your marketing strategies to address these factors at each customer journey stage.

What are some common challenges in implementing the 5 A’s model?

Common challenges in implementing the 5 A’s model include:

• Aligning all departments with a customer-centric approach.
• Collecting and analyzing relevant data.
• Ensuring consistent messaging across channels.
• Adapting strategies to changing customer needs and measuring the effectiveness of each stage.

How can businesses measure the effectiveness of each A in the customer journey?

To measure the effectiveness of each A in the customer journey, businesses can track metrics such as awareness through brand recognition surveys, acquisition by analyzing conversion rates, activity with website analytics, advocacy through customer reviews and referrals, and analysis via ROI calculations.

Are there any specific strategies or tactics recommended for each A?

To optimize each A in the customer journey:

• Employ specific strategies.
• For awareness, focus on creating compelling content and leveraging social media.
• For Attention, personalize messaging and emphasize unique selling points.
• For action, simplify the process and offer incentives.
• For advocacy, encourage reviews and referrals.

Can the 5 A’s model be used with other marketing frameworks or models?

Yes, the 5 A’s model can be used alongside other marketing frameworks and models. By combining different approaches, you can better understand your customers and develop effective strategies that address all aspects of the marketing process.

When understanding the customer journey, a customer journey model is an influential tool marketers can utilize. Kotler, a renowned marketing expert, has introduced the 5A’s of marketing concept, emphasizing the importance of analyzing, attracting, engaging, activating, and nurturing customers throughout their journey.

By implementing the 5A customer journey model, businesses can gain insightful knowledge about their target audience’s behaviours, preferences, and motivations. This holistic marketing approach allows companies to create personalized experiences tailored to each customer journey stage.

Marketers can identify potential touchpoints for attracting new customers by analyzing customer data and feedback and crafting strategies to engage and activate them. Moreover, the 5A’s framework enables businesses to nurture relationships with existing customers, ensuring their continued satisfaction and loyalty.

Kotler’s 5A customer journey concept provides marketers with a comprehensive roadmap for effective marketing campaigns. By understanding the different stages of the customer journey, businesses can strategically allocate resources, implement relevant marketing techniques, and optimize customer experiences at each touchpoint.

In conclusion, embracing Kotler’s 5A customer journey model allows businesses to enhance their marketing efforts and ensure a seamless customer experience. By aligning marketing strategies with the various stages of the customer journey, companies can maximize their potential for success and long-term customer satisfaction.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

The 5 steps of successful customer journey mapping.

May 28, 2017 2017-05-28

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One common frustration about the process of customer journey mapping is the lack of organization-wide or even industry-wide standardization. What are the key steps of journey mapping , and in what order should they be completed?

Effective customer journey mapping follows five key high-level steps:

• Aspiration and allies: Building a core cross disciplinary team and defining the scope of the mapping initiative
• Internal investigation: Gathering existing customer data and research that exists throughout the organization
• Assumption formulation:  Formulating a hypothesis of the current state of the journey and planning additional customer research
• External research: Collecting new user data to validate (or invalidate) the hypothesis journey map
• Narrative visualization: Combining existing insights and new research to create a visual narrative that depicts the customer journey in a sound way

In This Article:

Phase 1: aspiration and allies, phase 2: internal investigation, phase 3: assumption formulation, phase 4: external research, phase 5: narrative visualization.

The first phase in a customer journey process starts well before any research or visualization has taken place. This step is easily the most critical, because, no matter how many insights a map reveals, a journey-mapping engagement without focus or buy-in will not be effective in optimizing experience.

A. Establish a cross disciplinary team of allies

Throughout a journey-mapping endeavor, you must bring stakeholders along. Without a doubt, journey mapping will reveal gaps and opportunities within the user experience that, organizationally, are beyond the authority of the UX professional driving the mapping project. You must have buy-in and engagement from a cross disciplinary team, so that, when those issues and opportunities surface, stakeholders with decision-making authority are already convinced of the soundness of your method and apt to understand the importance of resolving the problems it found.

Creating a team of allies is easier than you might think. Before you begin mapping, identify stakeholders from multiple departments whose knowledge will be helpful to you along the way, and whose help you may need once opportunities begin to surface. You’ll need to explain the value of journey mapping and what you hope to accomplish, and ask these stakeholders to be sponsors for the project in their respective departments (e.g., marketing, R&D, business analytics, or other relevant areas). Acquiring allies may be a quick process or take a long time, depending on your situation: If you are working on a small project, it could simply be a 30-minute conversation with your team; conversely, it may be a long process if you work with a B2B client or engage in an enterprise-wide journey-mapping initiative.

B. Determine the scope

A scope, or point of view, for the map must also be established before the mapping activities begin. To create focus and clarity for the map, make sure you can answer these questions: “Whose experience will I map? What experience, or journey, will I depict?” Furthermore, make sure that you and your core team (your allies) share a mutual understanding about the answers to those questions. Typically, the “who” is a critical persona or audience segment, and the “what” is a prioritized journey or scenario that has impact on ROI or long-term customer retention and relationships.

Once your core team is established and your scope is determined, begin researching within your own organization. What does your company already know about the customer or user? Most organizations have bits and pieces of data spread throughout teams; this data can be useful when pieced together to create a holistic understanding of the current state of the journey.

A. Send out a search party

You don’t have to conduct this entire search on your own. Put your core team of allies to work. Together, generate a list of questions that you would like to answer, then send your allies back to their respective teams or departments to search for any available documentation or data that can help begin to answer those questions. Good places to start include:

• Market-research surveys
• Brand audits
• Call-center or customer-support logs
• Site surveys or VOC (voice of customer) feedback
• Outputs from client advisory board (CAB) meetings

B. Perform stakeholder interviews

With these first clues in hand, interview your stakeholders to get additional insights. Use the internal data you have found to shape the interviews. For example: Did the market-research survey reveal that there is lack of trust? Maybe the front-end sales team has insight into why. Put together role-specific interview guides that can bring clarity to your findings. A typical list of roles to interview might be:

• Sales-team members
• Marketing-team members
• Support-team members (e.g., technical-support representatives)
• R&D team members or product owners

Spread your research across typical organization silos, such as products, channels, or geographic regions. If you are short on time, conduct focus groups composed of 3–4 internal employees in similar positions.

By the time you finish phase 2, you will most likely have gathered enough insight to formulate a tentative hypothesis about how certain pieces of the customer journey look, and what pain points exist. Start laying out that hypothesis in a draft framework, called an assumption map or a hypothesis map.

A. Synthesize the internal research

First, bring the internal research together into a coherent story. Share synthesized insights with your core team, as well as with any other stakeholders who need to be involved. Conduct small research share-outs or informal brown-bag sessions (where anyone can bring a lunch and catch up on the research going on in the project).

B. Create a hypothesis map as a team

Once your team has a shared understanding of the insights gathered thus far, bring them together for a collective mapping activity. It’s useful to hold a short workshop session to map out the draft framework (or hypothesis map). You can even invite customers to this meeting so that their input shapes the early draft. Just remember: This is a draft, and it needs to be validated against external research.

When the draft map is complete using data and insights from your internal investigation, the next step is to validate it with customer research to fill in gaps.

A. Use the hypothesis map to shape your user research

The hypothesis map will most likely reveal large gaps within the customer journey that you are unable to visualize because there is no existing data. These areas are critical to explore in customer research, so that, at the end of the process, there are no holes in understanding. Additionally, you’ll need to validate (or invalidate) the hypothesis map.

B. Use qualitative research methods to validate and fill in gaps

Choose research methods that put you in direct line of observation with your customers or users. Use a multipronged approach — select and combine multiple methods in order to reveal insights from different angles. Depending on the context of your project, some relevant methods for journey-mapping research include:

• Customer interviews
• Direct observation
• Contextual inquiry
• Diary studies

If your budget or timeline is limited, a small sample size (6–8 research participants) is enough to get started. Remember to continue to involve your core team of stakeholders along the way by sharing research findings, so that they are not shell-shocked if something changes within the draft journey map that they have helped build.

The map itself is simply a tool that will help you share your research findings in an engaging way with others. At this point, you need to create a visual narrative that will communicate the journey and all the critical moments, pain points, and high points within it. A good method is to have another workshop with your core team. Having built context and common ground throughout your research process, bring them back together and evolve the hypothesis map based on your primary research findings.

From here, you can determine what to do next. If you have a small, engaged team, this collectively produced (probably unpolished, sticky-note, or virtual-whiteboard) version might be enough to move forward. If you are working with a client, or need to share your insights out in a formal way, you might need to create a polished visual.

Following these five high-level steps will ensure that you produce an output based in user research, that you make use of available data, and that, most importantly, at the end of your mapping initiative, you have a team of allies that are engaged and ready to act on the insights revealed during the process.

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How to create a customer journey map — a step-by-step guide with examples

Learning more about client experience is the best way to understand and improve it. As you are reading this article, you already know that 😉 

Here, you will find a detailed step-by-step guide on making a customer journey map (CJM), examples, expert tips, templates, and a PDF guide to download and save for later.

• 1 What is a customer journey map?
• 2 Benefits of client journey mapping
• 3.1 Step 1: Define your persona
• 3.2 Step 2: Set customer journey stages
• 3.3 Step 3: Define journey map sections
• 3.4 Step 4: Set customer goals
• 3.5 Step 5: Define touchpoints
• 3.6 Step 6: Processes and channels
• 3.7 Step 7: Problems and ideas
• 3.8 Step 8: Emotional graph
• 3.9 Step ?: Be Creative!
• 4 Customer journey map examples
• 5 A customer journey mapping checklist
• 6 The free guide to download

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is the final output of the collaborative visualization process called customer journey mapping. This process lets you reveal typical experiences the customers have over time when interacting with your organization, service, or product. A finished map provides insights into their actions, processes, goals, needs, channels, emotions, and many other aspects shaping the customer experience. 

Journey maps can be of different scopes. For example, a broad-scope map would include multiple customer journey stages like ‘Awareness’, ‘Decision’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Support’, and ‘Renewal’. In contrast, a map with a narrower focus would look at a few specific stages like ‘Decision’ and ‘Purchase’.

CJMs focusing on the current experience are AS-IS maps, while journey maps visualizing the future, desired, state of the experience are called TO-BE maps.

There’s also a similar technique, customer experience mapping, which is often used interchangeably with journey mapping. Experience maps are variations of CJMs, but they typically cover a wider range of interactions and contexts beyond a specific consumer-business relationship. 

Benefits of client journey mapping

Why make journey mapping your tool of choice? There are plenty of reasons, the major of which include:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

For instance, a high-end fashion retailer may discover that its younger customers prefer online shopping, while older customers enjoy the in-store experience.

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

Journey mapping will help you turn a fragmented vision of the customer experience into a unified, organization-wide one. It will have a massive impact on the decision-making process, encouraging you to consider how your actions will affect your clients and become customer-focused.

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

To make the way toward delivering a great customer experience, you will need to collaborate with others. Understanding why this collaboration is essential, departments and employees will be more inclined to participate in conversations and collaborate.

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

While working on a map, you will discover customer pain points at different stages of their journey with you. Fixing the most crucial one as quickly as possible will do you a good turn by eliminating the reasons for leaving you. If fixes take much time, look for quick wins first. 

For instance, adding details about your shipping policy on the website will take a developer half an hour, while it will set the right expectations among customers. They won’t be expecting the delivery the next day anymore, bombarding your customer support team with frustrated messages. Another example is a subscription-based video streaming service that can personalize content recommendations to keep subscribers engaged and less likely to cancel their subscriptions.

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on a specific segment or, talking journey mapping terms, specific personas. Customer journey insights will help you with this endeavor by giving you a glimpse into these people’s minds and ensuring the higher effectiveness of your marketing.

How to build a customer journey map

Although there is no gold standard for creating a customer journey map, we’ll try to create a somewhat generalized map. So that you can use it as a reference when making maps of your own.

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a CJM fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment. Oh, and there's a Personas building tool that comes with it 😉

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example of business and learn how to make a customer journey map together.

Step 1: Define your persona

Creating personas is a crucial part of customer experience service and journey mapping in particular. We won’t go into details — you can find them in this post about defining personas .

Let’s just say that our persona’s name will be Eva Moline — 29, works as a journalist and loves pizza. Eva is not really tech-savvy, and she tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

Stages are the steps customers take when interacting with a business. The easiest way to identify them is to think of all the actions the person has to take throughout their journey, organize them into logical groups, and name these groups. These will be your map stages. 

The number of stages varies from business to business, but we’ll take 8 for this example:

💡 Expert tips: 

• If you’re unsure about the order or names of the stages, don’t worry about that. You can change both at any time when working on the map.
• If your stages are complex, you can break them into smaller ones. Read this blog post about defining customer journey stages to learn more.

Step 3: Define journey map sections

Sections are horizontal rows with data that, together with the stages you defined, make up a customer journey map.

When picking sections for a map, your choice will depend on your journey’s type and purpose. 

As for UXPressia’s Journey Map tool, it offers a set of more or less universal sections for all kinds of maps. 

We’ll use some of the sections in the current example.

Step 4: Set customer goals

Setting customer goals at each stage is great for multiple reasons:

• It helps you understand how your business goals align with the goals of your customers.
• You can meet your customers’ needs better, gaining their loyalty by helping them achieve their goals at each stage.

Above, you can see some of the goals we set for Eva. They are self-explanatory, so there’s no need for extra details.

Step 5: Define touchpoints

Touchpoints are encounters that happen between your business and customers. In the pizza restaurant example, touchpoints happen:

• At the Awareness phase, when Eva is actively looking for a pizza place nearby. She is asking around, searching locations on Google Maps, etc.
• At the Research phase, when she is trying to find out what people say about the place by asking her friends and reading online reviews.
• At the Arrival stage, when Eva searches for a parking spot and enters the restaurant to get seated after parking the car.
• At the Order stage, when she makes an order and waits for it.
• Time to eat! At this stage, touchpoints occur when Eva is being served and when she is eating her meal.
• At the Leave stage, Eva interacts with the waiter, pays for the meal, etc.
• At the Feedback stage, she goes to the pizzeria’s website and drops a few lines on Instagram.
• At the last stage, Eva gets a promo email from the restaurant with discounts or other special offers.

Defining all the touchpoints is critical because each touchpoint leaves some impression, and your main goal is to keep it up to the mark.

You can also have a separate section to describe the actions your persona takes:

Step 6: Processes and channels

Now, you may want to add some processes and channels to the map. Just to see what channels your persona uses and what types of processes are in their journey. Luckily, our tool lets you do it in the most awesome way. Processes can be linear, non-linear & time-based, cyclic, or bi-directional. In UXPressia, you can specify up to 10 channels per process.

Step 7: Problems and ideas

It’s time to explore problems Eva might have when using our service. It could be a lack of info about the pizza house. Few reviews and ads do not show how our pizza differs from others.

Upon arriving, Eva may struggle with locating the place due to unclear information on signboards or just because of a hard-to-find location.

When making her order, Eva may look for detailed info on dish ingredients to learn whether it contains peanuts she’s allergic to. Descriptions may not be as detailed as she’d want them to be.

While waiting for the pizza, Eva may want to check out the place. Finding a restroom can turn into a nightmare if you don’t have clear signs showing what’s where in the restaurant.

Once you’re done with problems, it’s time to find solutions to these problems. Brainstorm for some ideas on how this or that problem can be solved. Here’s what we brainstormed for Eva’s case:

Step 8: Emotional graph

Never underestimate the power of visualization. And our Customer Journey tool is all about it. We added an emotional graph to see where our service example shines and where it stinks. Plus, we filled text boxes with Eva’s thoughts:

There’s also a special section ( “Think & feel” ) to put personas’ thoughts.

Step ?: Be Creative!

This is a good start, but the map is far from being complete. So, keep exploring Eva’s journey to find more insights and then add all of them to the map.

If you use our tool (which we highly recommend you to do), check out other CJM sections:

• Image section for screenshots, photos, or any other relevant imagery. You can even turn it into a storyboard , describing the journey from beginning to end with your images or those from our library.

• Charts section for communicating data in a visual and meaningful way, just like we did it in the persona:

• Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
• Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.

💡 Expert tip: The section with the persona’s questions works like a charm for marketing and content purposes. So be sure to add one 😉

Customer journey map examples

There are also a whole lot of free CJM templates for all sorts of journeys in our library. Here are three examples we picked for you.

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

This user journey map template covers the digital experience of the persona who discovers a new mobile app, installs it, and uses the app for some time before deleting it.

• Example 2: a client journey map for a corporate bank

This free template is an example of a multi-persona, B2B customer journey. The key persona is a newly opened company looking for a bank to run their business. The CJM also visualizes interactions between the personas involved. 

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

This customer journey map example shows the digital journey of three customer personas who want to buy a new pair of sneakers online. They go through the same stages, but if you look at the map, you will be able to see the differences in customer behavior, goals, and actions. It’s also a multi-persona journey map .

A customer journey mapping checklist

As a quick recap, here is a checklist with key steps to follow when creating a customer journey map:

• Do research

To represent real people, your real customers, and visualize their journeys, you must base your personas and journey maps upon actual data.

• Define your customer persona(s)

Identify your target personas. Create detailed profiles focusing on information relevant to your journey mapping initiative. Include such details as background, customer needs, motivations, channels, etc. 

• Specify journey map stages

Determine the stages you want to have on your map and come up with their names.

• Decide on the map sections

Determine which sections to include in your map (e.g., actions, touchpoints, emotions, channels).

• Set customer goals for each stage

Make sure that it is your customers’ goals, not your business goals.

• Identify touchpoints between the persona(s) and your organization, product, or service

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

Visualize the journey-specific processes and the channels your customers use at each stage. Include both digital and physical channels.

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

Identify any pain points and issues customers might encounter. Brainstorm potential solutions and quick wins to improve the experience.

• Add details about the emotional experience

Visualize the persona’s emotional journey. Include thoughts and feelings where it’s relevant.

• Use more sections

Include illustrations, images, and charts to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand. Enrich your journey map with more data, like KPIs related to journey stages.

Feel free to tailor this checklist to the specific context of your business and your project's needs.

The free guide to download

As a bonus, download our free customer journey mapping guide. Fill in the form below to get a PDF file as an email.

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

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first of all, excellent example and I’m very happy to I could understand how to create user journey map, due to for a long time I can’t understand it and how, many thanks for your efforts 🙂 I have some question about ser journey map. I hope to open your chest for me,

1-no there are rules for user journey map? 2-I need another example ?(for example Uber)?further understand 3-have I create user journey map without customer?

Hello, Karim!

I am very glad that this article helped you understand customer journey mapping 🙂

In regards to your first question, I would say that journey maps differ from business to business. However, they tend to have the same structure give or take. So no matter what industry you make a CJM for, you will end up having several stages and a bunch of sections we mentioned in this post.

If you’re looking for CJM examples of Uber customers, here is one: https://www.mindomo.com/doc.htm?d=92be818b774d422bad7eab790957ebc0&m=7d286174ccf1450bbb77c921a609ff65 Plus we have a lot more on our template page: https://uxpressia.com/templates

As for your last question, yes. You may have a journey map without a customer (persona) and use target audience segments instead (or have a generic map without personas at all, though I don’t recommend the latter as in this case it will be hard to empathize with real people). So you will certainly have to introduce a customer down the road to gain a deeper understanding of the journey.

many thanks for your reply to me and again I have some questions

1-why you don’t use in your example? user experience, empathy maps such as use goal touch point, and how to create it 2-As for the previous example (Uber) very confuse for me not as your example

Could you please rephrase your first question? And as for the Uber map, well, that’s all I managed to find. 🙂 But again, here you can find a hundred of map examples of all stripes and colors: https://uxpressia.com/templates

welcome again, my question is? what’s different between Aware and Research

The differences come from the names.

At the aware stage your client realizes that there’s a need for a service/product. Or they find out that your company exists and offer a desired service.

While at the research stage they either do research on your business (e.g. visit your website or ask their friends if they used your service) or they research what is out there on the market that can help them.

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

I am wondering , Have you done examples on B2B services. I work in Accreditation & Certification, this seems to be the least visited topic in marketing platforms and blog sites.

We have some B2B templates in our Template Library . Type B2B tag in the search placeholder and you will see all categories with the fitting templates. You can also explore the B2B mapping guide here .

Good luck and happy customers!

Great article, well articulated and detailed. I am starting off with service design and was wondering if I could get some advice mapping out a customer journey for a specific project. I was mapping out how do one approach to repair services?

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

If you’re dealing with home repair, I might suggest our pre-filled template for an interior design agency customer journey: https://uxpressia.com/templates/real-estate . Templates can be a great starting point even if they’re not a 100% match to your use case.

Other than that, you will need to create a persona. If you don’t have any research data yet, do it based on your assumptions. Then, try to visualize what their experience across all stages and interactions with the repair service might be. Once you have the first draft, you can proceed with validating it and adding more data as it comes in.

If you have more context on the project, I can look into it and come up with specific tips 🙂

I very delighted to find this internet site on bing, just what I was searching for as well saved to fav

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

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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

Definition, mapping, examples and template.

The customer journey, also called the shopper journey, is the series of steps a customer takes when interacting with a brand, product, or business. It starts with the realization of a pain point and ends with a purchase decision. The customer journey refers to the entire experience a customer has from discovery to purchase.

Download a blank customer journey map

Business growth

Marketing tips

Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents: 

Customer journey map template

Parts of a journey map, stages of the customer journey, advanced customer journey mapping tips, types of journey maps, customer journey mapping example, what is a customer journey map.

A customer journey is the path a person takes to move from general awareness to prospective customer to (in the ideal scenario) brand loyalist . A customer journey map is a visual document that traces this path through all of the interactions, or touchpoints, a person will have with a brand.

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

Of course, every customer is different. But you can't create a customer journey map for every individual—and you don't need to. Instead, you can segment your audience into customer personas and create a map for each. 

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

In a world where there are multiple high-quality options for just about every product on the market, brands need to foster long-term relationships with their customers to prevent them from being poached by competitors who offer a better customer experience .

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

This customer journey map template is separated into five stages along the leftmost column, with guiding questions to help plan the customer's experience in each stage.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it. 

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan." 

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront. 

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

Not all existing touchpoints will be a part of the planned customer journey . For example, I seriously doubt that American Express's customer journey map includes a milestone labeled "Customer gets a free ride because her friend has an Amex card and gets $15 in Uber cash each month." However, each question must have at least one touchpoint that directly and specifically addresses the customer's needs and questions at that point.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

For a small- to medium-sized business, the work of this stage involves reaching out directly to consumers via channels like advertising , SEO , and social media . For a household name like American Express, this stage is dedicated to ensuring the impression their brand makes is a positive one. 

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them. 

During this phase, the brand's goal is to design touchpoints that demonstrate to the user why their product can solve a problem or improve an experience that's specific to that person. This can be done using guides and how-tos, partnerships with other brands , and ads that portray a customer problem being solved.

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

Types of conversions vary depending on the type of business and industry. Examples of conversion pushes include:

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business. 

You can encourage brand loyalty by offering exceptional customer service, referral programs, and loyalty discounts and exclusives.

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her. 

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

When designing touchpoints and determining where and how customers interact with your business, don't guess—your existing customer base is a valuable resource you can tap for a firsthand customer perspective. You can i ncentivize customers to participate in surveys and fill out feedback forms by offering discounts and perks in exchange.

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

High-quality, premium experiences are defined by their high level of personalization, and that personalization is only possible if you have information about your customer. It's not possible to sit there and take notes on every person who interacts with your brand, but it is possible to automatically collect lead data from customer interactions and have them collated in your CRM tool . 

Set up your contact management platform to automatically tag contacts with information like gender, age, products they've bought, events they've attended, what types of emails they open consistently and what emails they regularly ignore, whether their purchases indicate that they have pets or children, and so on. The more information you have, the better your customer experiences will be.

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience. 

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year. 

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip. 

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

The best way to map mini-journeys within the larger customer experience lifecycle is with a "Day in a Life" journey map . This map plots the same things as the general customer journey map—key milestones, questions, touchpoints, and gaps—but over a particular period of time instead of over the course of the entire relationship. 

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant. 

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

One of the most common, and most significant, customer/brand interactions is the customer support journey . A frustrating customer service experience can turn someone off of your brand and product entirely, while a particularly impressive experience can immediately convert a regular user into a brand advocate.

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

​​Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym. 

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym." 

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post 

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting 

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work." 

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services 

Your customers' spending habits, interests, challenges, and problems are always changing, and your customer journey maps should adapt along with them. But with so much data to track, it's a good idea to connect your insights to CRM software. Then you can automate your CRM to create specific, valuable experiences for your customers without breaking a sweat.

Related reading:

Beyond the sales pipeline: Using a CRM for customer success

A quick guide to contact management

B2B email marketing: Proven strategies + examples

4 tips for creating an inbound marketing strategy

This article was originally published in May 2021 by Nick Djurovic. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Sales & business development
• Small business

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The 7 steps of the customer journey

table of contents

Crafting a comprehensive customer journey map: your essential guide.

Creating a customer journey map is not just about listing the touchpoints between your customer and brand. It involves having a deep understanding of every interaction and finding ways to improve them. To create an insightful and actionable map, it is essential to take your journey mapping from basic to comprehensive. Here are some tips to help you achieve this:

1. Setting clear goals

What it is: This initial step involves defining what you aim to achieve by mapping out the customer journey. Whether it's to enhance customer service, streamline the buying process, or increase customer retention, setting clear goals helps focus your mapping efforts.

How to do it: Begin with broad objectives, such as improving customer satisfaction, then break these down into more specific goals, like reducing response times in customer service interactions.

Pro tip: Use SMART criteria (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to frame your objectives. This will help you keep your goals precise and trackable, making it easier to measure success.

2. Collecting the right data

What it is : Data collection is gathering all relevant customer interaction data to paint a complete picture of the customer experience. This includes quantitative data from analytics tools and qualitative data from customer feedback.

How to do it: Start by identifying all sources of customer data within your organization. This might include web analytics, CRM systems, customer feedback forms, social media interactions, and sales data. Ensure that data is captured across different stages of the customer journey for a holistic view.

Pro tip: Engage directly with customers through surveys or interviews to gain insights not captured by analytics. This can provide deep dives into why customers behave a certain way or feel a particular emotion at different journey stages.

3. Creating detailed customer personas

What it is: Customer personas are detailed representations of the different segments of your customer base. These personas help you understand various customer needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes.

It should include:

Demographics : Age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and education.

Psychographics : Interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle.

Behavioral traits : Buying patterns, brand interactions, and product usage.

Needs and pain points : What problems are your personas trying to solve? What obstacles do they face?

Motivations and goals : What drives your personas? What are their aspirations?

For example, a persona for a tech company might be 'Tech-Savvy Tim,' a 30-year-old software engineer who values cutting-edge technology and quick, reliable service.

Creating personas is essential to tailor the customer journey map to meet the unique requirements of different customer segments. Remember that personas represent your average or ideal customers and not actual people.

How to do it: Analyze your customer data to identify common characteristics and behaviors that segment your audience. Develop personas that reflect these segments, including demographic info, psychographics, goals, and pain points.

Pro tip: Make sure to consider the emotional journey of your personas. Understanding their feelings and motivations can provide crucial insights into how to improve their journey.

4. Identifying all touchpoints

What it is: Customer touchpoints are all the points of interaction between the customer and your brand, from initial awareness through post-purchase.

How to do it: List every possible interaction point, including digital interactions like website visits and social media engagement, as well as physical interactions like store visits or product usage.

Pro tip: Think outside the box by identifying passive touchpoints, such as seeing a friend use your product or recommendations from peers, which can also influence the customer journey.

5. Visualizing the journey

What it is: This step involves mapping out each touchpoint along the customer journey, creating a visual representation of the paths customers take.

How to do it: Organize the touchpoints chronologically for each persona, and plot them on a timeline. Include potential branches where customers might take different paths based on their decisions.

Pro tip: Use visual symbols or different colors to denote positive, neutral, or negative experiences at each touchpoint. This can help quickly identify areas that need attention.

6. Analyzing and identifying gaps

What it is: Here, you examine the journey map to spot where customers might experience problems or less-than-optimal interactions.

How to do it: Look for high drop-off rates, negative feedback points, or stages where the customer seems to stall or disengage. Identify both the obvious and subtle gaps in the journey.

Pro tip: Conduct root cause analysis to understand why gaps occur and consider both internal factors (like process inefficiencies) and external factors (like market changes).

7. Implementing improvements

What it is: This final step involves using the insights gained from your journey map to make targeted improvements to enhance the customer experience.

How to do it: Prioritize improvements based on their potential impact and feasibility. Implement changes incrementally to test their effectiveness and adjust as needed.

Pro tip: Use metrics to track the success of each change. Consider both direct metrics, like sales and conversion rates, and indirect metrics, like customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Map your customer journey with confidence

By following a systematic approach that includes defining your goals, analyzing customer insights, and implementing targeted improvements, you can create a customer journey map that is informed by solid data. This allows you to enhance the customer experience measurably and effectively.

Miro is an excellent tool that can support your team's efforts during this process, making it easier for your team to work together seamlessly from anywhere. With Miro, you can confidently create, share, and adjust your customer journey maps, enabling you to translate insights into actionable changes that positively impact your customer experience. Miro has a customer journey mapping template that can help you get started.

With the right approach and tools, you can navigate the complexities of customer interactions with confidence and craft experiences that exceed customer expectations. This strategic effort not only boosts customer satisfaction but also aligns your team around a shared vision of continuous improvement and customer-centric innovation. Happy mapping!

Discover more

How to create an ideal customer profile

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Buyer persona vs target audience

How to make a customer journey map?

What is consumer decision-making process?

What is a customer journey map?

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How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

• Conduct persona research
• Define customer touchpoints
• Map current states
• Map future states

Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s one-of-a-kind customer experience, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Nowadays, a clear vision and strategy for customer interactions is no longer an optional “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. As you refine your customer experience, a customer journey map is one of the most powerful ways to understand your current state and future state.

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the process your customers go through in interacting with your business, such as an experience on the website, a brick and mortar experience, a service, a product, or a mix of those things.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. These visuals tell a story about how a customer moves through each phase of interaction and experiences each phase. Your customer journey map should include touchpoints and moments of truth, but also potential customer feelings, such as frustration or confusion, and any actions you want the customer to take.

Customer journey maps are often based on a timeline of events, such as a customer’s first visit on your website and the way they progress towards their first in-product experience, then purchase, onboarding emails, cancellation, etc. 

Your customer journey maps may need to be tailored to your business or product, but the best way to identify and refine these phases is to actually talk to your customers. Research your target audiences to understand how they make decisions, decide to purchase, etc. Without an essential understanding of your customers and their needs, a customer map will not lead you to success. But, a well-constructed and researched customer journey map can give you the insights to drastically improve your business’s customer experience.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering insights into your customer experience, driving business goals, and building resilience in a changing market. In a 2022 report, Hanover Research found that 94% of businesses said their customer journey maps help them develop new products and services to match customer needs. Another 91% said their maps drove sales. 

But understanding a customer’s journey across your entire organization does so much more than increase your revenue. It enables you to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty. 

This was especially evident in recent years as top of improving marketing, customer journey maps emerged as a valuable way to understand evolving buyer behavior. In fact, 1 in 3 businesses used customer journey maps to help them navigate the changing landscape during the pandemic.

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

• Increase customer engagement through channel optimization.
• Identify and optimize moments of truth in the CX.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
• Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
• Break down silos between departments and close interdepartmental gaps.
• Target specific customer personas with marketing campaigns relevant to their identity.
• Understand the circumstances that may have produced irregularities in existing quantitative data.
• Assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
• Make it possible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

Following the process outlined above, customer mapping can put your organization on a new trajectory of success. Yet, according to Hanover Research, only 47% of companies currently have a process in place for mapping customer journeys. Making the investment to map your customer journey and solidify that process as part of your company’s DNA can result in significant advantages in your competitive landscape, making your solution the go-to option that customers love.

Customer journey maps can become complicated unless you keep them focused. Although you may target multiple personas, choose just one persona and one customer scenario to research and visualize at a time. If you aren’t sure what your personas or scenarios might be, gather some colleagues and try an  affinity diagram in Lucidchart to generate ideas.

1. Set goals

Without a goal, it will be difficult to determine whether your customer journey map will translate to a tangible impact on your customers and your business. You will likely need to identify existing—and future—buyers so you can set goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.

Consider gathering the key stakeholders within your company—many of whom likely touch different points of the customer experience. To set a logical and attainable goal, cross-functional teamwork is essential. Gather unique perspectives and insights about each part of the existing customer journey and where improvements are needed, and how those improvements will be measured.

Pro Tip : If you don’t already have them in place, create buyer personas to help you focus your customer journey map on the specific types of buyers you’re optimizing for.

2. Conduct persona research

Flesh out as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on. Depending on the maturity of your business, you may only have a handful of records, reports, or other pre-existing data about the target persona. You can compile your preliminary findings to draft what you think the customer journey may look like. However, the most insightful data you can collect is from real customers or prospective customers—those who have actually interacted with your brand. Gather meaningful customer data in any of the following ways:

• Conduct interviews.
• Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
• Email a survey to existing users.
• Scour customer support and complaint logs.
• Pull clips from recorded call center conversations.
• Monitor discussions about your company that occur on social media.
• Leverage web analytics.
• Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

Look for information that references:

• How customers initially found your brand
• When/if customers purchase or cancel
• How easy or difficult they found your website to use
• What problems your brand did or didn’t solve

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative information throughout your research process ensures your business makes data-driven decisions based on the voice of real customers. To assist when conducting persona research, use one of our user persona templates .

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints make up the majority of your customer journey map. They are how and where customers interact with and experience your brand. As you research and plot your touchpoints, be sure to include information addressing elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. 

The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. For example, a customer’s journey with a SaaS company will be inherently different than that of a coffee shop experience. Simply choose the touchpoints which accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand.

After you define your touchpoints, you can then start arranging them on your customer journey map.

4. Map the current state

Create what you believe is your as-is state of the customer journey, the current customer experience. Use a visual workspace like Lucidchart, and start organizing your data and touchpoints. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics. Invite input from the stakeholders and build your customer journey map collaboratively to ensure accuracy. 

Again, there is no “correct” way to format your customer journey map, but for each phase along the journey timeline, include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned ownership of a touchpoint (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.). Then, customize your diagram design with images, color, and shape variation to better visualize the different actions, emotions, transitions, etc. at a glance.

Mapping your current state will also help you start to identify gaps or red flags in the experience. Collaborators can comment directly on different parts of your diagram in Lucidchart, so it’s clear exactly where there’s room for improvement.

5. Map future states

Now that you’ve visualized the current state of the customer journey, your map will probably show some gaps in your CX, information overlap, poor transitions between stages, and significant pain points or obstacles for customers.

Use hotspots and layers in Lucidchart to easily map out potential solutions and quickly compare the current state of the customer journey with the ideal future state. Present your findings company-wide to bring everyone up to speed on the areas that need to be improved, with a clear roadmap for expected change and how their roles will play a part in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey map templates

You have all the right information for a customer journey map, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to start arranging the information in a digestible, visually appealing way. These customer journey mapping examples can help you get started and gain some inspiration about what—and how much—to include and where.

Don’t let the possibility of a bad customer journey keep you up at night. Know the current state of the customer journey with you business, and make the changes you need to attract and keep customers happy.

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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Customer Journey Map: Definition with Examples

Improved customer service, customer loyalty, and increased ROI; 3 things that every organization wishes they could achieve overnight. It’s possible, although not overnight, but with the right tools and the effort.

One such tool is the customer journey map and it’s there at the top with the other powerful tools that help drive customer-focused change effectively.  

In this guide, we’ll explain the steps you need to take to create a customer journey map that drives the expected results while avoiding the common mistakes others make. Scroll down to learn:

• What is a Customer Journey Map?
• What Are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

Factors to Consider Before Creating a Customer Journey Map

What are the components of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map in 6 steps, tips and best practices when creating a customer journey map, common mistakes to avoid when creating your customer journey map, customer journey map definition.

A customer journey map, also known as a customer experience map, is a visual representation that outlines the various steps and touchpoints a customer goes through when interacting with a company, product, or service. It chronologically represents each step of interaction the customer takes with your business. A customer journey map usually starts with the initial step of when the customer discovers your product/ service and depending on your goal it can extend as long as you want to.

Customer journey map is a tool used to understand and analyze the customer’s experience, from the initial awareness or consideration of a product or service through the purchase and post-purchase stages. It reveals customer actions, emotions, pain points and expectations along the customer journey. And it helps the business see things from the customer’s perspective which in turn helps the business gain a deep understanding of the needs of the customer.

What are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

There are many benefits to customer journey mapping. The customer journey map helps

• To enhance the customer experience. It helps businesses gain insights into customers' various touchpoints and interactions with the product or service.
• To reduce costs by identifying the areas the business should prioritize investing in and spending effort on. Customer journey mapping can help businesses identify and eliminate unnecessary touchpoints or processes that may not add value to the customer journey. Get valuable insight into what the customer is expecting from your brand, their internal motivations, and needs which will, in turn, help you improve your customer experience.
• To innovate and differentiate by discovering the gaps between customer expectations and current customer experience, unmet customer needs, pain points, and opportunities.
• To improve customer satisfaction by identifying severe customer experience issues and eliminating them effectively.
• To increase customer loyalty by helping to build strong customer relationships by understanding their needs, preferences, and emotions.
• To align teams by facilitating collaboration within organizations. This helps to provide a shared understanding of the customer’s journey, enabling different teams to align their efforts toward a common goal.
• Data-driven decision-making based on gathered insights from customer research, feedback, and analytics.

Before you delve into creating a customer journey map, it is important to consider several factors to ensure that the final outcome is accurate, effective and actionable.

• What is your team trying to achieve? Make sure to define your objective and purpose of creating the customer journey map, clearly.
• Identify the target customer segment as different customer segments may have different touchpoints, pain points and requirements leading to different journeys.
• Carry out a thorough research by gathering data and insights via customer research, feedback and analytics. Conduct customer interviews, surveys, feedback forms, social media and website analytics among others.
• Make the customer journey mapping a collaborative effort by involving cross-functional teams. Invite the marketing, sales, customer service, product, and design teams to work together to understand and align efforts.
• Consider including the emotional aspects of the customer journey such as feelings, motivations and perceptions at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map typically includes the following components:

• Touchpoints: All of the interactions and experiences a customer has with a company, including in-person, online, and mobile interactions.
• Customer personas: Representations of the target customer segments, including their demographics, behaviors, motivations, and pain points.
• Emotions: A visual representation of how the customer feels at different touchpoints during their journey.
• Channels: The ways in which a customer interacts with the company, such as website, phone, or in-person interactions.
• Data and insights: Customer behavior data and insights from surveys, analytics, or other sources.
• Pain points and opportunities: Identifications of areas where the customer experience can be improved, as well as opportunities for innovation and differentiation.
• Recommended actions: Specific recommendations for improving the customer experience, based on the journey map analysis.
• Alignment with company goals: A visual representation of how the customer journey aligns with the overall goals and strategy of the company.

At a glance, a customer journey map may look easy to make. But there are many details you need to pay attention to when creating one. In the following steps, we have simplified the process of creating a customer journey map.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that customer journey maps may differ from company to company based on the product/ service they offer and audience behavior.

It’s also important to have the right kind of people who know about your customer’s experience in the room when you are mapping the journey.

Here are 6 six easy steps that you can follow when creating a customer journey map.

• Build your buyer persona
• Map out the customer lifecycle stages and touchpoints
• Understand the goals of the customers
• Identify obstacles and customer pain points
• Identify the elements you want to focus on
• Fix the roadblocks

Let’s look at each step in more detail.

Step 1: Build Your Buyer Persona

Creating a customer journey map begins with defining your buyer persona, which profiles your target customer based on extensive research.

The buyer persona usually consists of demographic data such as age, gender, career, etc. in addition to other behavioral and psychographic details like customer goals, interests, lifestyle, challenges, etc.

Your business can have one or many buyer personas depending on how many audience segments you are targeting. And to avoid creating a customer journey map that is too generic, you need to create separate customer journey maps for each of the segments you identify.

You need to also be careful to rely on real data rather than assumptions to avoid creating an erroneous customer profile that won’t do much for you.

You can gather as much data as you want from online research, questionnaires, surveys, direct customer feedback, interviews and with tools like Google Analytics.

Here’s our guide on creating a buyer persona . Refer to it to create your own buyer persona in 4 simple steps. Start with a template to save time.

Creating the buyer persona will also shed light on the goals of the buyer, which is another thing you need to pay attention to when mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 2: Map Out the Customer LIfecycle Stages and Touchpoints

What are the stages your customer goes through to come into contact with your product/ service? Breaking down your customer journey map into various stages will make it easier to understand and refer to.

Now, these stages may vary depending on your business situation, sales funnel design, marketing strategies, etc. but usually, it would contain – Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention.

Map out the touchpoints to clarify the customer lifecycle stages even better. A touchpoint refers to any moment in their journey when a customer comes into contact with your brand (i.e. website, social media, testimonials, advertisements, point of sale, billing, etc.).

The data you collected during your buyer persona research will give you a pretty good idea about the customer touchpoints along the lifecycle stages; these include the steps they take when they first discover your brand to purchasing your product and subsequent interactions.

Identifying all potential touchpoints may sound overwhelming, but you can always rely on tools like Google Analytics which will generate behavioral reports (which show the user path throughout your website)  and goal flow reports (display the path a user takes to complete a goal conversion) for you to work with.

Or you can follow the traditional method and put yourself in the shoes of your customers and take yourself through the journey to identify the actions.

At the same time try to determine the emotional state (delighted/ frustrated) of the customer as they take each action. Knowing how they feel will help you understand whether they would go from one stage to the other in the journey.

Step 3: Understand the Goals of the Customers

This is where you need to focus your attention on understanding the goals your customers are trying to achieve at each stage. When it comes to optimizing your customer’s journey, it will help immensely if you know what your customers are trying to achieve.

Some methods you can use here include survey answers, interview transcripts, customer support emails, user testing, etc.

Once you know the goals your customers are trying to gain at each phase of the journey, you can align them with the touchpoints.

Step 4: Identify Obstacles and Customer Pain Points

By now you know what your customer is trying to achieve at each stage of the customer lifecycle, and each of the steps they take to get it done.

If your customer journey is perfect, then you won’t have your customers abandoning their purchases, leaving your landing pages without filling the forms, clicking the CTA only to close the tab, etc. If your journey didn’t have any roadblocks at all, then you wouldn’t be needing this user journey map in the first place.

But that’s not the case here, is it?

There might be many things that you are doing right to make your customer experience a smooth one, but there can still be many roadblocks that frustrate your users. In this step, you need to work on identifying what these roadblocks and pain points of customers are.

Maybe the product price is too high, or the shipping rates are unreasonable, or maybe the registration form is a few pages too long. Identifying such roadblocks will help you apply suitable solutions to improve your customer experience.

You can rely on the research data you gathered to create your buyer personas here as well.

Step 5: Identify the Elements You Want to Focus on

There are several types of customer journey maps and each focuses on a variety of elements. Based on your purpose, you can select one of them.

Current state: These maps show how your customers are interacting with your brand currently.

Future state: This type of map visualizes the actions that you assume or believe will be taken by your customers.

Day in the life: This type of map tries to capture what your current customers or prospects do in a day in their life. They will reveal more information about your customers, including pain points in real life.

Step 6: Fix the Roadblocks

Now that you know the issues/ roadblocks your customers come across as they interact with your brand, focus on prioritizing and fixing them to improve each touchpoint to retain customers at all stages of the journey.

Customers are constantly changing, and so should your customer journey maps. Test and update your customer journey maps as often as necessary to reflect the changes in your customers as well as in your products/ services.

Here are some templates you can start with right away.

Here are a few additional tips and best practices to ensure your customer journey map is accurate and effective.

• Use or create personas to better understand your customer and tailor your journey to specific customer segments. For example, if your business is fashion retail, you can develop personas such as ‘working professional,’ ‘fashionable mom,’ ‘teenage fashionista,’ etc.
• Use data and metrics to support your map and make it data-driven. Include data on customer satisfaction scores, conversion rates, or customer retention rates to identify areas for improvement. This can also help to prioritize actions and allocate resources effectively.
• Use multiple channels, both online and offline, to interact with customers. For example, a customer may discover your product or service on social media, then research more on your website, visit the store for a demo, and then make the final purchase.
• Go beyond existing touchpoints to include anticipated future customer needs as well. For example, if you are in the hospitality industry, you could include potential pain points and opportunities for pre-arrival, check-in, stay, check-out, and post-stay.
• Always keep the customer at the center of your customer journey map. Consider the customer’s emotions, preferences, and motivations at each touchpoint to create a more customer-centric experience. For example, a customer journey map for a subscription-based meal delivery service can include touchpoints for menu options, selecting meals, placing an order, receiving, and providing feedback.
• Customer journeys are dynamic and can evolve due to customer behavior, market trends, and business strategies. Therefore, continuously review and update by monitoring customer behavior, trends, and business strategies. Keep the customer journey map flexible and adaptable to changes.
• Create and present the journey map in a visually appealing and accessible format so stakeholders can easily understand it. Use visuals, diagrams, and infographics as required.
• A customer journey map is not a one-time exercise but a continuous process: test and iterate. Validate the map with real customers to ensure accuracy and relevance. Gather feedback, and conduct usability testing to gather additional insights to refine and make the map accurate.
• Keep it simple and accessible. Use clear and straightforward language and visual elements while avoiding jargon and cluttering. Make sure the customer journey map is easy to understand and accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

Creating a customer journey map can be a complex process. Here are a few mistakes you should be aware of and avoid at any cost.

Making assumptions without data

A common mistake is relying on assumptions without proper data or research. It would be best to put time into gathering data and insights from various sources. Make sure to carry out thorough research. Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Focusing on one touchpoint

Another mistake is focusing only on one touchpoint or a single interaction rather than considering the entire end-to-end journey. This can result in an incomplete or biased customer journey map. To avoid this, take a comprehensive approach and consider the whole customer journey from initial awareness to post-purchase stages. Include all relevant online and offline touchpoints, channels, and interactions.

Not involving cross-functional teams

Involve cross-functional teams in customer journey mapping to get diverse insights and a holistic view. Not involving different teams can result in biased views and missing valuable insights from different perspectives. Encourage team collaboration and communication to align the customer journey map and gather input from different stakeholders. This can help uncover blind spots and identify opportunities for improvements.

Failing to validate with real customers

Not validating the customer journey map with real customers can lead to inaccurate assumptions. Also, relying on internal assumptions or team perspectives will lead to skewed views and away from the reality of customer interactions. To avoid such a dilemma, validate the map through feedback loops, usability testing, and customer interviews. Gather input from actual customer experiences, preferences, and pain points.

Ready to Map Your Customer’s Journey?

Customer journey maps are a great way to gain deeper insight into your customers and their experience with your organization. Taking the time to understand how your customers interact with you, what they feel and what they want to achieve can go a long way toward retaining them.

Follow these 6 steps to get your customer journey map right. Use a template to save time.

And don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

FAQs About Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps can improve customer experiences by providing companies with a clear understanding of their customers' experiences with their products, and services. This information can be used to identify pain points and areas for improvement, allowing companies to better meet the needs and expectations of their customers. By using customer journey maps to optimize the customer experience, companies can:

• Align resources and efforts to meet customer needs better.
• Create a more personalized experience for customers.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Reduce customer churn.
• Increase customer lifetime value.
• Enhance the overall customer experience.
• Improve operational efficiency.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to improve the customer experience.
• Stay ahead of the competition by offering a differentiated and superior customer experience.

The tools needed to create a customer journey map vary depending on the complexity of the map and the size of the company, but some common tools include:

• Customer feedback: Surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups can be used to gather customer feedback and understand their experiences.
• Analytics tools: Data analytics tools, such as website analytics, customer behavior tracking, and customer relationship management systems, can provide insight into customer behavior and preferences.
• Customer journey map software: Tools like Creately that can be used to create visually appealing customer journey maps.
• Project management software: Tools like to manage the journey mapping process and keep track of progress.
• Collaboration tools: Tools like Creately, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace can be used to collaborate with team members and stakeholders.
• Identifying and resolving pain points in the customer journey
• Improving customer onboarding and retention
• Optimizing marketing and sales efforts
• Designing a customer-centric website or app
• Aligning cross-functional teams to deliver a cohesive customer experience
• You can use customer journey maps to drive customer-centric strategies in your organization by Identifying pain points or gaps in the customer experience and developing targeted solutions
• Aligning cross-functional teams and processes to meet customer needs
• Optimizing touchpoints to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience
• Utilizing insights from the customer journey map to inform marketing, sales, and customer service strategies

More Related Articles

Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

How to understand, use, and build customer journey maps

A customer journey map is key to building a solid marketing strategy. We cover everything you need to know about customer journey maps, their different types, examples, and the steps to making your own.

What is a customer journey map?

Why do you need a customer journey map, characteristics of customer journey maps.

• What are touchpoints?
• Different types of customer journey map

Journey map variations

• How to create a customer journey map

Customer journey map tools

• How to build an empathy-based, data-backed customer journey map
• How to use empathy to create stronger customer journey maps
• Customer journey tools: Top rated and best available

The customer journey is a long and often unpredictable road. Understanding it can be even more complicated. 

That’s why customer journey maps were invented: to understand the roadmap of a customer, from the very first touchpoint throughout the lasting life of their relationship with your business. 

Customer journey maps (or user journey maps) can be an invaluable resource for companies, from marketing to sales to UX, and are known to help businesses increase their ROI by 13–22% if done correctly. 

Below we cover journey maps from top to bottom, their importance, characteristics, and review examples, along with what you need to make your own. 

Key takeaways: 

Customer journey mapping is a strategic (and successful) approach to truly understanding your customers.

There are real and valuable business reasons to journey map.

There are six basic types of customer journey maps.

Customer touchpoints are every instance of interaction or engagement that happens along the journey. 

There are current- and future-state customer journey maps that can help predict future behavior.  

A customer journey map (sometimes called a user journey map, UX map, or CJM) is a visualization of the steps and experiences a customer has with a brand, from first contact to ongoing engagement, revealing both seen and unseen interactions.

User journey mapping lets you create personalized experiences across all touchpoints —for every individual—across all channels.

Companies can use this shared understanding to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement.

These maps can be simple or complex, depending on what you're looking to gain from them.

For any company, a customer journey map helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer loyalty. 

A customer journey map can prove invaluable for optimizing across multiple departments—marketing, sales, product, and customer service—in many, many ways. Mapping your customer journey can help you:

Promote a customer-centric culture internally and externally 

Identify your ideal buyer and connect with customer needs

Glean customer journey insights into your audience that can drive revenue

Improve sales funnels & conversion rates authentically 

Amplify customer experience by understanding the customer’s perspective 

Reduce customer support tickets by locating customer pain-points 

Aid in marketing campaigns

Generate repeat business

Decrease customer churn and increase customer lifetime value

Together, these advantages translate into higher sales for your business.

A typical customer journey map includes: 

Actors—or potential profiles of customers—usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data . These actors will be the foundation of your map, and they will dictate the actions needed to create the desired outcome. 

Customer personas and buyer personas: What’s the difference?

A buyer persona is a profile that showcases your ideal customer based on existing customer data and market research. Buyer personas help humanize the ideal customer you are trying to attract, which helps you understand them better and pick the right marketing strategy to convert them.

A buyer persona is your ideal customer—they’re in research mode. You can have more than one buyer persona for your company, and understanding this buyer is the key to creating a successful customer experience. This buyer will turn into your customer.

Here’s what makes up your buyer persona: 

Demographics —including personal, professional, and specific (age, gender, location, education, income, marital status, skills, routines, etc.) 

Goals —including personal and professional, priorities, and challenges

Values —including personal and professional, and what they find to be important in products and companies

Preferences —including the content they consume, their communication choices, communities, groups, or associations, and how they spend their day, on and offline

All of these characteristics make up customer journey maps on the buying path. 

Journey phases

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the customer roadmap. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions).

The stages will vary from scenario to scenario, and each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario. Often you will see awareness, research, evaluation, and decision making in the customer phases. 

Customer expectations

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events, describe a process, or might involve multiple channels.

Pain points are a specific problem that customers or prospective customers of your business are experiencing in the industry.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated—for products that are yet in the design stage. 

Actions, mindset, and sentiment

Every customer has a particular action that they take, because of a mindset that they have and will express it in their own sentiment. 

Actions: When a customer engages with your brand with a purpose. 

Mindset : Correspond to users' thoughts, questions, motivations , and information needs at different stages in the journey.

Emotions : How customers feel about your brand, whether positive, negative, or neutral. Plot these emotions in a single line across the journey phases, signaling the emotional highs and lows of the experience.

Opportunities

Opportunities of a customer journey map are desired outcomes. Maps should include key components, which can depend on the goal of the user journey mapping initiative.

Opportunities are also insights gained from mapping—they speak to how the user experience can be optimized.

To create a customer journey map, identify the personas, map the triggers that lead to desired outcomes, and discuss opportunities.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Customer journey touchpoints are individual transactions through which the customer interacts with a business. 

Customer journey touchpoints for omnichannel brands are everywhere, here are a few examples:

Social media posts

Product demos

Advertisements

Brick and mortar visits

Website visits

You’ll also have the added returning customer touchpoints to consider—like how engaged they are with your product, if they are returning to your website or if they are attending your events for the second or third time. 

Examples of customer touchpoints 

Identifying each touchpoint is crucial for creating a customer journey map that will drive a better customer experience. Once you’ve identified the touchpoints, list out possible customer actions for each. 

Some actions that derive from customer touchpoints might be: 

Downloading an eBook

Clicking on your FAQ

Requesting a demo or call

Subscribing to your blog

Clicking a paid ad

It’s important to know which touchpoints to invest time and resources into. Your map maps out the areas you can improve, retain and scale. 

Types of customer journey maps

Each customer journey map has a different objective and business focus. There are six types to familiarize yourself with:

Current state —These illustrate what customers do , think, and feel as they interact with your business currently. 

Future state —These illustrate what customers will do, think, and feel as they interact with your business in the future. 

Day in the life —These examine everything that customers or prospects do, think, and feel (within a specific area), whether that involves your product or not. 

Service blueprint —This is a diagram that usually starts with a basic version of an existing or future state journey map. 

Circular —These are used for subscription-based models to visualize the customer journey as a circle or loop. This helps reinforce the importance of customer retention and lifetime value.

Empathy —These are used to create a shared understanding around the wants, needs, thoughts, and actions of a customer.  

Journey maps are meant to be used as a strategic planning tool. Use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of other methods that your team has not previously considered.

Journey map vs. Experience map

A journey map is specific to a product or service, while an experience map is more general and can be used outside of a business's scope.

Since experience maps are more generic in nature, they can also be used to find pain points in a product or service for a future journey map.

Journey map vs. Service blueprint

If journey maps are a product of experience maps, they will need a blueprint to direct them there. 

Service blueprints are a continuation of journey maps in the service industry. They lead the roadmap for service-based customer journeys. 

Journey map vs. User story map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities, much like a future customer journey map.

In the user story map case, each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence:

“As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” 

How to create a customer journey map 

To create a customer journey map , it helps to have an idea of the steps involved. You can break the process of creating a customer journey map down into the following steps:

Define —Define your map goals with the customer’s journey in mind and your business goals at the finish line. 

Describe —Describe your customers and personas in detail from all aspects of their lives. 

Determine —Identify customer touchpoints from the beginning of the roadmap of engagement with your brand. 

Design —Lay out the customer journey every step of the way.

Designate —Mark customer milestones, motivations, frustrations, and turning points . 

Decide —Flag events that require action and make the necessary arrangements to fix any errors. 

Deploy —Adjust and optimize for a smoother customer experience.

Customer journey map templates 

Having a template is a great way to get started. There are a few different templates to choose from: 

Current state customer journey map 

The current state journey map visualizes the current experience with your product or service. It involves defining the scope of the customer experience with customer touchpoints.

This type of customer journey map is designed with the considerations, thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customers in mind. Current state mapping is a practical approach to identify existing pain points and create a shared awareness of the end-to-end customer experience. 

Day-in-the-life customer journey mapping 

A day-in-the-life journey map is another simple grid map based on time, created especially for the daily grind of the customer. Instead of different journey stages, it represents times in the day related to actions based on decisions in the path of purchasing. 

This template helps you visualize your customer’s daily routine even if these actions are outside your company. It typically is organized chronologically to systematically show the course of the habits of the day.

Day-in-the-life's are great for giving you insights into all the thoughts, needs, and pain points users experiences throughout their day. You can use this type of map to evaluate when your product or service will be most valuable in your customer’s day. 

Future-state customer journey map 

With a future-state journey map template, your goal is to learn how your customers feel about a new product launch or about how they will require your service in the future. 

Future-state journey mapping is a useful approach to explore possible customer expectations and to create new experiences. Mapping out a future customer journey helps to align your team around a common goal—the betterment of the customer experience.

Service blueprint customer journey map 

A service blueprint helps you design a roadmap of your service process—much like building a house. The goal is to be able to make projected changes to the service where needed and to be able to visualize each step in the eyes of the customer. 

Service blueprint maps reflect the perspective of the organization and its employees and visualize the things that need to happen behind the scenes in order for the customer journey to take place. 

Service blueprints are created when making procedural changes, or when trying to pinpoint solutions to roadblocks in the customer journey on a website.

Circular customer journey map 

A circular customer journey map is just that—circular instead of linear or graph-like to showcase a different type of business model. For instance, a SaaS company may find it more useful to visualize the customer journey as a loop or wheel. 

This subscription-based journey map does a nice job of portraying both the customer interactions and sentiments, as well as their journey from awareness to purchase. 

Empathy customer journey map 

The empathy journey map is a bit different because it aligns with the customer's feelings and emotions. Empathy is a big factor in the customer journey and this template is designed to help teams align their customer journey mapping exercise with these types of needs. 

With empathy, you can get into your customer’s shoes and truly feel what they feel as it pertains to your product or service. 

As with anything, you’ll need customer journey mapping tools to help you . The key is to find the right tool that works with your team and workflow. 

Here are a few tools to consider:

Custellence

PowerPoint or Google Slides

With the right map and the right tools, you can overcome roadblocks and open a path to scalability and success.

Enhance your journey mapping process with customer intelligence. Look at data points like heatmaps , scroll maps , and other insights you can glean from session replay . Combining these quantitative and qualitative insights will help you in your journey mapping process.

Using journey maps to drive organizational change

It may not be easy to get buy-in to support the changes in strategic planning that result from customer journey mapping. 

You can use what insights you’ve gleaned from the current state journey map in these beneficial ways:

Align your organization around the customer viewpoint. Engage with each department and set up a commitment to put the customer experience moments top of mind with an initiative for growth.

Enlist team members and partners to generate empathy for customers. Use your journey map to bring together relevant teams to train on customer experience best practices. 

Supplement a new strategy with internal communications that encourage better customer service. As new initiatives roll out, use internal channels to communicate how you’re improving the experience of the customer, and how team members can help.

Optimize your user journeys with Fullstory

Understanding your users' digital experience and optimizing your most important touchpoints can be make-or-break.

With Fullstory Journeys, you can easily see how users explore your site or app and see step-by-step page navigations and other key interactions along the way. This lets you identify if users are using your site how you intended; what the most common navigation paths are; and how users typically arrive at your most critical pages. 

It's no longer a guessing game—it's data-driven and actionable.

Fullstory's DXI platform combines the quantitative insights of customer journeys and product analytics with picture-perfect  session replay  for complete context that helps you uncover opportunities.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial  to see how Fullstory can help you combine your most invaluable quantitative and qualitative insights and eliminate blind spots.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey maps

Who uses customer journey maps.

For any brand or company that wants to learn their customer, from the point of motivation to the turning point of frustration, a customer journey map is the best tactic to do so. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events. You might want to map multiple scenarios for one persona, depending on your project goals.

How often should I update a customer journey map?

If business goals change, so could your customer’s goals. If you roll out a new product or service, you may want to edit or update your customer journey map. Keeping your maps updated can help you reach your goals as a team. 

How many customer journey maps do I need?

The number of different customer journey maps needed all depends on your target audience. If you have multiple customer personas, it would be best to create different journey maps to suit each one. 

At the very least, be sure to create a customer journey map for the current and future state so you can aid in predicting future trends of the customer journey in alignment with your product and service.

Who should be involved in the mapping process?

Anyone that is involved in making your product or service successful should have a hand in the mapping process. Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams all should be involved in customer journey mapping. Every team member will benefit from truly understanding their customers to make for a better customer experience. 

What is a user journey map in design thinking?

User journey maps for design thinking is an iterative process of studying the user so that they can engage with a system with more agility. It redefines customer problems in an attempt to identify alternative solutions that might not be obvious with the initial level of understanding.

Related resources and further reading

Map out how your customers navigate your website or app—and determine where you need to improve.

Jennifer Pyron from brand performance agency Mighty & True on building a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map, how does it relate to product and marketing teams, and where can empathy help? Let's find out.

Fullstory helps you visualize customer interactions so you can understand and improve customer experience, one glowing review at a time.

A comprehensive guide to product analysis and analytics platforms, how important they are, and why they’re a valuable asset for your bottom line.

Journey mapping tools help marketers identify pain points, tailor interfaces, and cultivate efficient, enjoyable experiences for customers.

InVisionApp, Inc.

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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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

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Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

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The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

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Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

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Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

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Kotler’s 5 A’s of Creating an Effective Customer Journey

Creating an effective customer journey map is essential to converting leads into paying clients..

Have you taken the time to consider the journey that your ideal client takes from that first interaction with your business to accessing and participating with your online course, programs or services?

How do they get from point A of becoming aware of your business to point B of purchasing and becoming a loyal client?

This customer journey that our ideal clients take is often not a linear journey going straight from A to B. Rather, it is more of a meandering of different interactions with you and your business over a period of time before they make that commitment to purchasing your product or service.

It is important to take some time to map out your customer journey and identify the different touch points or interactions that someone may have with your business, and to consider how each touch point makes them feel. And most of these touch points fall under the area of marketing and the content you publish.

Are they having a positive experience with your brand to continue on this journey?

Research shows that people’s attention spans have steadily decreased, shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years to 8 seconds . As more and more things are vying for the attention of our ideal clients, we need to make sure that our marketing content connects with our target audience in authentic, meaningful ways.

Marketing is the art of creating genuine customer value. It is the art of helping your customer become better off. The marketer’s watchwords are quality, service, and value.  ~ Dr. Philip Kotler

I love this definition of marketing as it makes it seem less daunting and focuses on connecting with your ideal client in a humane way that focuses on connection and value.

When we take the time to understand the different stages that our ideal client will go through as they interact with our business, we can develop a marketing strategy that focuses on creating authentic, meaningful connection at each touch point along this journey.

If you have done any research into customer journeys, you will know that there are a number of different ideas out there with varying definitions of the stages people go through. Today, I am focusing on the 5 A’s of Marketing as taught by Dr. Kotler, and how we can use these phases to map out the journey that our ideal client will take. Dr. Kotler is known around the world as “the father of modern marketing” and has taught marketing for over 50 years.

Dr. Kotler’s 5 A’s of Marketing

The digital world has influenced and changed how our ideal client interacts with our business and our brands. There are many alternatives vying for their attention and it is even more important to find ways that allow you to stand out from the crowd to get their attention and deliver a message that meets their emotional needs.

Following Dr. Kotler’s 5 A’s of Marketing you can identify the path that your ideal client will take from that point A to point B. This is a framework that outlines the five stages someone will take on their customer journey with your business.

The five A’s of marketing are:

Aware | appeal | ask | act | advocate.

• Awareness. This is the first stage in the journey your ideal client will take. It is the stage that they become aware of a need or problem that they have and are wanting to find a solution for. As well, as the stage that they become aware of your business and your brand. It is the first time that they notice your business and begin the journey to learning more about your business, your brand and your products and services.
• Appeal. In this stage of the journey, your ideal client is continuing to get to know you and your business. They consume information published on your website, on your social media channels, from testimonials, and other mediums that you are using to share valuable and educational content. They are continuing their research to learn more about your business and the services/products that you offer and how they may be able to help solve your ideal client’s problem.
• Ask. This is the stage of the customer journey where your ideal client is ready to learn more. They have gathered the information that they can and they are ready to reach out to you to get more information on the specific details of the services or products you offer. This is where they (and you) decide if they are the right fit for your services or products.
• Act. At this stage, your ideal client acts on their decision by moving from a lead to a client. They make that choice to purchase your course, to sign up for one of your service offerings, or to purchase your product. This is where your marketing efforts of nurturing that relationship come to fruition as your ideal client is ready to move forward. They have chosen your business to work with.
• Advocate. The goal of this final stage within the customer journey is to turn your clients into brand advocates for your business. You have worked hard to nurture the relationship with your ideal client, and you want to continue to work hard to retain your clients as loyal consumers of your business and brand. As a result, they will share their positive experiences and refer others to you and your business.

Now that we have a better understanding of each stage within the customer journey, how can we practically apply these five stages within our marketing strategy?

Let’s walk through an example that outlines the customer journey for one of my core services: Kajabi Course Set-Up Tech Support

• Awareness = My ideal client becomes aware of Tiel Virtual Solutions as a Kajabi Expert as I create content around the topic of Kajabi and course creation. Within my content marketing plan, I am creating content that shares educational tips, answers questions, and promotes my offers. This comes through in consistently publishing new content on my website in the form of blog posts, and then repurposing that content by sharing the article with my email list and pulling out shorter, tip-style posts that I can use on my social media channels. Just like a first impression holds so much importance, consistently marketing on topics that fit with the services and products you offer plays a huge role in creating awareness with your ideal client.
• Appeal = As I continue to consistently create new pieces of marketing content, I am engaging with followers, sharing tips and tricks, and staying top of mind to those who are looking for help with their course set-up in Kajabi. I am piquing their interest to discover more by having a free offer available for them to sign-up for – something that further educates and helps them with a quick win. And once they are on my email list, I continue to engage and nurture that relationship through a series of emails that provide more educational content and shares additional information about how I can help them further through my Kajabi course set-up packages.
• Ask = At this stage, my ideal client books a discovery call with me to further discuss the areas that they need support with and to learn the benefits of working with me. Following the call, I send out a follow-up proposal that outlines my offer for them to review, along with additional testimonials from previous clients.
• Act = My ideal client makes the decision to move forward with my offer. An agreement is signed and the payment or deposit is provided. The on-boarding process begins with a welcome email going out to my new client that explains all the information needed to begin the project, how to access our project management system, and tips on working together.
• Advocacy = Following a smooth and positive experience, they have turned into an advocate for my business by providing a strong testimonial, and referring others within their network to Tiel Virtual Solutions. To continue working with them, they are offered to sign up for a monthly maintenance package to continue receiving the support of Tiel Virtual Solutions with their monthly Kajabi needs.

When we take the time to work through these 5 stages of a customer’s journey, it really doesn’t have to be daunting. You are simply guiding your ideal client through each stage from that first interaction, and giving them numerous opportunities to learn from you, showcasing how you can help them even more.

You can’t expect to just have an amazing online course, membership program or service and expect people to come running to join with no marketing effort on your part. You need to be growing an audience of warm leads and this all starts with people becoming aware of you … through your marketing efforts!

If you are struggling to be consistent with your marketing, I encourage you to book a quick teatime chat with Natashia and let’s discuss how we can help you save time, remove the overwhelm of having to do it all, and gift you confidence that your message is getting out there.

Not ready to invest in a team to help with your marketing?

Grab this FREE guide and learn how you can start booking more clients every day with these 5 simple steps to growing your business online. With these 5 simple steps, you can grow your business online with a process that with save you time … all while filling your courses and programs!

About the author 

Natashia Tiel

Empowering Coaches & Course Creators with All-in-One Digital Marketing & Kajabi support to propel their business to new heights. Our mission is help you stand out online, build authentic connections and create a lasting impact in this world – without the marketing or tech overwhelm.

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Kotler’s 5 A’s of Sales Marketing: Definition and Tips

As customers have become more attuned to their buying choices and preferences, the need for businesses to understand the customer journey and connect with them on an individual level has grown significantly. This has led to the development of the Kotler 5As of Customer Path, which is an effective tool that allows businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and tailor their strategies to their needs. The 5As stands for Attention, Acquisition, Activation, Retention and Re-Engagement, each of which is necessary for businesses to maximize their customer engagement and provide the best possible service to their customers. In this blog post, we will discuss the different stages of the customer journey, what each of the 5As means and how businesses can use the Kotler 5As to better connect with their customers.

Stages of Kotler’s 5 A’s of the customer path

The steps in Kotler’s customer path cycle are explained in more detail below:

The first phase of the customer journey is Awareness, during which a prospective client learns about a business. Customers typically learn about a business through paid advertisements or social media posts, though they may also discover it through a personal recommendation from a current or former customer. The potential customer may not be prepared to make a purchase at this time, but they are still interested in the goods or services the business provides.

For instance, a parent of a middle school student might start researching local tutoring services in case their child needs assistance with math later on in the school year. They may look at websites or social media feeds, read articles that list nearby tutoring agencies, or request recommendations from friends and family. Parents may become aware of a local tutoring business if it sends direct mail or sponsors school events.

At this point, a potential customer is aware of a brand’s or business’s advantages and finds it intriguing. The business might land a spot on the buyer’s list of potential vendors if its marketing or website appeals to them. During this time, they could visit the business’ website to learn more about its various solutions, read reviews, and look for special offers or other deals. For instance, a prospective buyer of a new car might browse an auto dealer’s online inventory to learn what brands and models are offered by that retailer.

Depending on the sector, potential clients may also participate in free company activities like webinars or promotional events. The parent of the middle school student could participate in free webinars on study skills offered by the tutoring service, where they could pick up resources and advice from company experts. These actions could influence a prospective client’s perception of the business in a favorable way.

The potential client may then research the company’s goods and services in order to contrast them with the alternatives they are considering. They could use the company’s website’s chat feature, call or email a sales representative, or both. The prospective client is now interested in the specific attributes and advantages of the product they’ve gotten in touch with the business to talk about. For instance, a parent looking for math assistance might question the sales representative of the tutoring business about the credentials of their tutors, the format of the lessons, and any success guarantees the business might provide.

Additionally, prospective customers might assess the business and its offerings using outside sources. They might read testimonials on the websites of consumer advocacy groups or launch a poll in a relevant social media group. For instance, a pet owner seeking boarding in a new city might join a social media group for dog owners there and inquire about a number of nearby facilities. The objective is to learn more about their options and reduce their list until they arrive at the best option.

The potential client purchases something from the business during the Act stage. This purchase could be a one-time transaction for a product or a monthly fee for a service that they use repeatedly. The sale might be made over the phone with the sales representative if the potential customer has already spoken to one. Even after speaking with a salesperson, some potential customers prefer to make purchases online. Following their purchase, they become the business’s clients and use their product or service.

Due to their purchasing experience, the customer supports the business in this final stage. They might post testimonials or user reviews for the good or service, share company posts on social media, and recommend the business to their friends and family. The customer may upgrade their service with the business or make additional purchases depending on the product or service they purchased. A client who purchased a basic lawn care service from a landscaping business, for instance, might be satisfied with the service to the point where they upgrade to a premium package.

What are Kotler’s 5 A’s?

A customer’s journey through the sales process is mapped out using Kotler’s five stages of the customer path framework. Named by Dr. According to Philip Kotler, the five stages—Awareness, Appeal, Ask, Act, and Advocacy—let marketing and sales experts map out the needs and priorities of customers at various stages of the buying process. With the aid of this map, they can create procedures that facilitate and enhance the purchasing experience for customers.

Depending on the length and complexity of their sales purchase, some customers might skip some of the five stages while others might go through all five. To choose a grocery store, for instance, a retail customer might not go through all five stages because everyday purchases frequently happen quickly and may not require an emotional investment from the customer. When customers purchase a big-ticket item like a car or a refrigerator or a durable service like tutoring or lawn care, they are more likely to go through all five stages.

Tips for using Kotler’s 5 A’s in marketing and sales

You can use Kotler’s five As in your sales and marketing processes by following the following strategies:

Track metrics for each stage

One advantage of this framework is that it categorizes customers clearly, making it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of salespeople and processes at each stage. For instance, measuring the conversion rate between interested parties during the ask and act phases can provide insight into how successfully the sales team closes deals. In order to determine whether a potential customer will make a purchase, you could also monitor how much time they spend at each stage of the process.

You can create custom labels for sales leads on many customer relationship management (CRM) software platforms, which can help you track metrics automatically. You could use a CRM to make graphs and reports that examine the metrics at each stage of the funnel if you work in sales or marketing management. You can identify weak points in the sales process using these reports.

Focus on individual stages for improvement

Managers of marketing and sales who monitor the metrics for each phase of the customer journey may use that data to create improvement strategies. They may decide to focus on improving one stage of the customer journey each month or quarter. They can measure the impact of new processes accurately and identify the most effective methods by concentrating on a single stage. By giving workers a small number of new processes to concentrate on at once, it can also make the process of improvement easier for them.

For instance, you might oversee a project to persuade clients in the action segment to promote the business. The project may evaluate the efficacy of a fresh customer loyalty plan that offers incentives for referring new customers. You can gauge the effectiveness of the loyalty program by counting the number of new referrals that have increased in the following sales cycle. For businesses to best serve their customers, the sales cycle should go through gradual changes at each stage.

Customize messaging for different segments

In many industries, email marketing is a crucial component of the sales development process. Using Kotler’s five As framework, you can tailor your email communications to potential and existing clients based on where they are along the sales development path. You can categorize leads using a CRM and send emails with specific messages to each stage. By focusing on the requirements of particular populations, customized email messages can increase the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

As an illustration, the marketing department of a tutoring business could send potential clients in the Appeal stage an email highlighting the credentials and guarantees of their tutors. People in that stage may find this information particularly interesting as it could aid in their decision-making process by allowing them to compare various businesses. The business’s marketing department may send details about referral bonuses, family discounts, and continuing education programs to customers in the Advocate stage. The marketing team can increase the proportion of people who open and read their emails by highlighting the details that people in each stage might value most.

Work with other departments

While the Kotler framework may be used by the sales, marketing, and business development departments in their daily work, other departments may have different influences on the customer at different stages. Teams may collaborate to enhance the customer experience at each stage. For instance, the landing pages and online resources developed by the company’s software development team may have a big impact on prospective clients in the Aware stage. The marketing team may collaborate with the development team to create lead captures or other digital tools to improve how potential customers interact with the business in order to increase the conversion rate from Aware to Appeal.

Please note that Indeed is not affiliated with any of the businesses mentioned in this article.

Kotler’s 5 Product Level Model

What are the five stages of the customer journey?

Modern Customer journey is categorized in 5 A’s. Aware, Appeal, Ask, Act & Advocate.

What are the 5ps?

• Awareness phase. The majority of potential customers begin during the awareness stage, when a user has a problem or need and searches for a solution.
• Consideration phase. …
• Purchase/decision phase. …
• Retention phase. …
• Advocacy phase.

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