customer journey map nike

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The Nike Customer Experience And The Role of Its Journey Map

Within the fashion and apparel industry is an extremely competitive division where major brands vie for supremacy. Among them, one brand stands out not only for its incredible products or eye-catching campaigns but also for its ability to delight customers in various ways through every touchpoint that consumers experience – we’re referring to the Nike customer experience.

In this article, we will delve into the world of Nike’s Customer Experience, taking a closer look at some of their most successful initiatives, their customer journey , and some recommendations for implementing similar actions in your projects or businesses.

The Heart of Nike’s Customer Experience

At the core of Nike’s customer experience strategy lies a commitment to providing stylish products that perform exceptionally well. This commitment is reflected in their range of athletic gear, meticulously designed to cater to the needs of athletes and sports enthusiasts alike.

However, to become one of the leading brands in your industry, that alone is not sufficient. This is where customer experience strategies come into play. These are initiatives that focus on the customer journey, from the moment someone sees an advertisement or enters a Nike store to the post-purchase interactions. All of this is done with the aim of delighting their customers.

These strategies serve as the backbone of brand loyalty, reputation management, data-driven decision-making, customer retention, and global relevance. Nike’s unwavering commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences ensures that it doesn’t just sell products; it sells a lifestyle, a mindset, and an enduring connection with its customers.

Nike has become a master of these types of initiatives and actions. In the following sections, we will explore some of the most successful ones and reflect on what we can learn from these strategies.

Examples of Nike’s Customer Experience Strategies

House of innovation.

The House of Innovation project by Nike significantly impacts the customer experience. These flagship stores, known as ‘temples to shopping in the digital age,’ blend physical and digital worlds seamlessly, immersing customers in the Nike brand’s ‘Just Do It’ ethos. The digital integration enhances convenience and engagement with features like QR codes for virtual dressing rooms and interactive wall displays.

An important element to highlight within this initiative is personalization. Exclusive services like Nike by You offer NikePlus members one-on-one customization sessions with designers, creating unique, branded products. This elevates the shopping experience and strengthens the emotional connection between customers and the Nike brand, fostering loyalty and advocacy.

The Nike App was a game-changer for both Nike and its customers. Their App enhances the shopper experience by giving access to the NikePlus rewards program. This loyalty program offers members exclusive products, member exclusives, access to Nike experts, personalized workouts, priority access to events, and, most importantly, gives Nike insights into customers’ shopping habits and product preferences. This personalization enhances customer satisfaction and strengthens the emotional connection between consumers and the Nike brand solidifying their loyalty and enriching their shopping journey.

Nike Live Stores

The introduction of Nike Live stores in various locations has brought a revolutionary shift to the customer experience. These dynamic spaces, beginning with the inaugural store in Los Angeles, offer customers a shopping environment that feels alive and ever-changing. Nike Live stores transcend the traditional retail model with rotating product arrays, local artwork, and interactive features like the sneaker bar and consultation services. Customers can now immerse themselves in a personalized shopping experience, trying out shoes on treadmills and enjoying the vibrant atmosphere.

Technology in Physical Stores

Nike has succeeded in providing unique experiences to people visiting their physical stores by incorporating advanced software and hardware that surprises anyone who interacts with such technology. These implementations are not merely experiential; they make the purchasing process simpler and more efficient for people. Some notable examples include:

Replica Kiosk: A digital retail kiosk with a 65″ touch display where Nike Football fans can find, customize, and order their favorite Nike team products. It provides real-time product availability for both in-store and online purchases, streamlining the shopping process and improving stock efficiency.

Nike Bootroom: An interactive surface with a 65″ multi-touch display that facilitates employee and customer interactions. It offers real-time availability information for Nike products based on size and color, thanks to RFID technology and 3D cameras.

Mobile Connect: This feature offers free WiFi in-store, promoting extensive use of digital terminals. It enables more than 1,000 interactions on busy days, often involving groups. Integrating seamlessly with the retailer’s mobile app supports customers’ journeys throughout the store and allows convenient content sharing via smartphones.

Media Wall: The multi-touch, multi-user wall serves as a dynamic information hub, displaying campaigns, products, and real-time social media updates. It aggregates content from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, including soccer team rankings and scores. Additionally, customers are encouraged to engage by taking selfies, which are instantly discoverable through custom hashtags.

The Role of the Customer Journey Map in a Company’s Strategy

The customer journey map is a graphic and visual representation of all the points of interaction between users and a brand. This includes any type of contact, ranging from seeing an advertisement to something as involved as making a purchase.

These touchpoints are usually organized into stages and include additional information to better understand the steps or actions a potential consumer takes.

Each of these customer touchpoints is an area of opportunity if leveraged effectively. Likewise, they can become pain points where the user experience and perception can be negatively affected. Therefore, constant monitoring of each of these points and a strategy for continuous improvement are of great importance in the growth of any business.

Example of Nike’s Customer Journey Map

Below is an example of a fictitious customer journey map for Nike, created with reference to some of the most common touchpoints in the industry and information gathered from media and specialized portals.

Nike’s customer journey map would look like this:

Stage 01: AWARENESS

Stage 02: consideration, stage 03: purchase, stage 04: usage, stage 05: loyalty, stage 06: advocacy, start delighting your customers by nurturing every stage of your customer journey.

In a market flooded with choices, consumers are not just looking for products; they seek an emotional connection with the brands they choose. This is where the customer experience comes into play and becomes a differentiator that positions brands like Nike above others, even if they offer equally good products.

These types of strategies are not exclusively reserved for large corporations; in fact, they are something that all companies should implement regardless of their size or revenue. The rewards of doing so are numerous and impossible to ignore, especially if you aim to build a base of loyal and happy customers.

QuestionPro has developed an entire suite of tools and solutions to help you implement a successful customer experience strategy.

Among the most notable are:

QuestionPro CX, our Customer Experience Management Software,

A platform with everything you need to delve into the minds of your customers and understand their satisfaction levels. Thanks to features like our ticketing system and survey platform, you can identify opportunities within your customer journey to delight your users at every stage.

QuestionPro SuiteCX

A platform with everything you need to create customer experience journey maps and perform journey analytics in a simple and effective way. You can integrate various data points, user persona profiles and easily edit them to create action plans and detailed contact strategies.

If you’re interested in learning more about our solutions and how QuestionPro can help you empower your business, please contact us. We’d love to chat with you and find the best way to execute your projects with our technology.

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Nike’s Customer Experience Puts Their Best Foot Forward

Creating a cohesive cross-channel experience for customers has become a high priority for brands during the pandemic. With shoppers relying more on ecommerce , brands had to undergo a digital transformation to ensure that they instill confidence in their customers via online channels. 

Over three weeks, we examined Nike’s email and mobile marketing experience. By completing various actions—sign up for emails, abandon a product browse, abandon a cart, etc.—with Nike, we were able to uncover customer experience successes as well as opportunities. 

Nike has an excellent experience when it comes to marketing their products. They sent multiple triggered abandoned cart and abandoned browse emails to encourage us to buy products we had looked at. However, there is the potential to further personalize some of these messages. With the data Nike collects, message individualization could reach a whole new level. 

The results of our research are at the end of this post in our Customer Experience Analysis, but first we’ve highlighted some stats below for context about our time with Nike.

The First-Hand Customer Experience

In the attached analysis we illustrate the research process in a timeline to demonstrate when and how Nike shares their marketing messages.

Over the three weeks we received:

• 32 messages total
• 17 emails (12 promotions, 2 welcome emails, 3 abandoned browse/cart)
• 15 mobile messages (8 mobile inbox, 7 push notifications)

Our goal with this research was to better understand how retail brands are using their marketing messages during a time where ecommerce has become more prevalent than ever before. Do they use multiple channels? How personalized are their messages? Are their cross-channel strategies cohesive and centralized? While our takeaways only capture a small sample of Nike’s full customer experience, the insights gained are applicable to other apparel brands and retail brands in general. 

As a new user, Nike did well to gather our information and welcome us as a Nike Member. They sent not one, but two welcome emails describing the benefits of becoming a member with links to download their app and talk to Nike experts. 

One takeaway, in particular, however, is Nike’s collection of zero-party data . Gathering data directly from the customer, rather than through third parties, ensures the data is highly accurate and aligned with the customer’s preferences. Nike collects information like customer name and birthday to be able to provide individualized messages to each user. But, there is room to improve their personalization efforts. 

See how Nike can go a step further with personalization and other takeaways in the analysis below and be sure to check out our other Customer Experience Analyses on HBO Max , ASOS , and e.l.f. Cosmetics . 

Iterable is the AI-powered cross-channel communication platform that helps organizations like Redfin, DoorDash, Calm, and Box to activate customers with joyful interactions at scale. With Iterable, organizations drive high growth with individualized, harmonized and dynamic communications that engage customers throughout the entire lifecycle at the right time.

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14 customer journey touchpoints to optimize

Do you know how your customers found out about your brand or product? Or what made your users convert—or abandon their carts? 

It’s important to understand the key touchpoints where customers interact with your business to help you determine how to improve them. If you don’t know exactly which elements drive your users—or which block them—you won’t be able to design a smooth customer journey.

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This chapter outlines the most important external and internal customer journey touchpoints and shows you how to optimize them to elevate the user experience and drive business growth.

Optimize your customer journey touchpoints with user insights

Use Hotjar to see how users interact with key touchpoints—and improve their product experience.

14 key touchpoints in the customer journey

According to Iga Gawronska, Product Designer at Hotjar :

 Touchpoints are the key moments your customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or your customer support.

It’s important for companies to do customer journey map research to understand which touchpoints are ineffective or even causing friction, so they can quickly remove blockers and streamline the user experience. 

Below, we dive into external and internal customer touchpoints you can optimize to raise brand awareness, better understand your customers, and increase conversions.  

3 external customer journey touch points to optimize 

Before they get to your product or website, customers pass through several external journey touchpoints you need to effectively understand and perfect to guide users to your site or product:

1. Social media

Social media is a vital touch point that lets you communicate directly with your users to help them find information about your business or solve their problems, and grow your audience through engagement with posts and ads . 

Social channels also help businesses boost awareness, increase user engagement, and connect with customers. 

So how can you optimize your social media touchpoints? 

Encourage engagement with contests and giveaways, live Q&As, and ‘behind-the-scenes’ videos that get users excited about your brand

Create interactive, high-quality content users will want to share—and keep track of shares and clickthroughs

Use social listening tools to interact with users and track questions, comments, and complaints that help you better understand how customers are experiencing or what they expect from your brand

Humanize your brand by conveying your company's core values and involvement with social causes

Pro tip : highlight your expertise on social media to drive engagement. For SaaS product teams, that might include explainer videos and educational posts; for ecommerce businesses, it might mean showcasing different product pages or visuals, with tips for consumers on how they can use the products you’re selling in their everyday life. 

2. Online ads 

Display ads, social media ads, and video ads are all important customer touchpoints that introduce potential customers to your business. 

Ads help companies generate leads and successfully reach their target audience.  

Here’s how to optimize your online ads:  

Deeply understand your target audience and plan campaigns around their demographics, location, interests, and needs

Make sure you have a clear call to action (CTA) that guides users to complete the desired action—like subscribing to your product or signing up for newsletters

Use a landing page that displays relevant, compelling content and mirrors the advertisements in your campaign 

Use your ads to inform users about product upgrades, features, or improvements

Pro tip : Look for keywords—the words and phrases users type into search engines—that aren’t performing well to optimize specific product or landing pages and increase conversions. Use Google Ads to help you determine what keywords to use and which aren’t performing.  

Virtual or in-person events are an important touchpoint to build brand awareness, display industry thought leadership and influence, and generate sales . 

Some key tips for designing impactful event touchpoints: 

Target the right audience to provide attendees with real value and ensure you’re attracting interested potential customers

Tailor and segment your event using CRM or registration data to curate the content to your audience’s interests for more meaningful engagement

Create an immersive experience that lets you connect deeply with your audience

11 internal customer journey touchpoints to optimize 

Once your potential customers reach your website and product pages, key internal touchpoints can make or break their experience. 

Let’s explore the internal touchpoints you can optimize to land more conversions and delight —and retain—your customers:

1. CTA buttons 

Call-to-action buttons—like ‘Try it free’, ‘Learn more’, and ‘Add to cart’—guide your visitors to complete conversion action goals. Clear, compelling CTA buttons entice users to click, so they can take actions, like finding more information, booking a demo, starting a free trial, or initiating or completing a purchase.

Here’s how to optimize your CTA buttons:

Keep your CTA ‘above the fold’ , at the point before users have to start scrolling down your web page to learn more about your product offering

Use bright colors and white space to make sure your button stands out

Make sure any copy that accompanies your CTA clearly conveys how this action will solve the unique challenges of your potential customers

2. Homepage 

Your homepage is a crucial customer touchpoint: it's your users' first impression of your website, playing a huge role in whether they decide to keep navigating, and it guides them to intuitively find their way around your site.

Use your homepage to help visitors understand your product's value and show them what to do next. 

This touchpoint determines whether users will continue exploring your site and your product solutions —so make sure your web design is customer-centric, with clear, intuitive navigation menus, working links, and compelling images and content. 

Use these tips to make your homepage touchpoints more effective:

Set clear goals: define exactly what you want your website to do and what its customer journey KPIs should be. Stick closely to your core objectives to communicate your mission effectively to users. 

Create an attractive header: using an attractive, consistent header throughout your website experience—with a recognizable logo—elevates your brand's awareness and creates user trust

Build an intuitive navigation bar: make sure users are able to easily navigate your website from the second they land on your homepage with smart web design choices to improve UX

Add compelling CTAs: include calls-to-action that appeal to each type of user, and A/B test them to see which are most effective

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe products to see where users click, scroll, and move on your home page—so you know what to adjust to increase engagement. Hotjar's Heatmaps and Session Recordings tools help you A/B test CTAs and other homepage elements to get a granular view on which options compel users to click and engage.

#Hotjar Heatmaps tools

Source: Hotjar 

3. Landing pages 

Landing pages lead users to a specific product or offer—like an ecommerce promotion, a free trial, ebook, white paper, or webinar—that entices them to take action.

Landing pages focus users on one specific conversion action, helping online businesses guide targeted leads through signups that are more likely to convert. Use your landing page to home in on one unique value proposition and encourage users to complete that desired action on your site.  

Our top four tips for optimizing landing pages for customers are: 

Simplify design: don’t use complex design elements or cram your landing page with too much media or content—you don’t want to distract users from your landing page’s main objective. Keep design and copy simple and focused to make sure users get to your call to action. 

Clearly state your offer: don’t make users dig around for what you’re offering them. Make your value known to visitors: clearly explain the pains they’ll solve by taking an action, and why they should choose your solution to meet their needs. 

Prioritize value-based information above the fold: make sure your users are given the most valuable information before this point to encourage them to keep reading

Watch user recordings: Hotjar Recordings let you watch full user sessions, so you can see every click, scroll, u-turn, and rage click in real-time as visitors navigate your landing page. This arms you with valuable insights on blockers to remove and possible optimizations.

4. Signup forms

Signup forms let users opt in to communications like email newsletters or receiving educational resources. Using signup form touchpoints effectively can help you grow your mailing list, learn more about your users, and increase leads and conversions. 

So, how can you make your signup touchpoints more effective? 

Make it clear to users what the value of signing up is, and how it will help them solve their problems

Make signup forms short and clean—the more form fields you include, the more friction users experience

Personalize sign-up with tools like Mailchimp

Make the signup process easy with autofill forms

5. Blog posts

Blog posts are a vital touchpoint to earn your customers’ trust by offering them content that establishes credibility and thought leadership and helps them better understand your product's or website's jobs to be done .

High-quality blog posts build trust by showing users you understand their pains, helping them evaluate their options and make a decision. SEO-optimized blog posts can also help potential customers find your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Here’s how to make sure your blog posts are effective customer touchpoints:

Optimize for SEO: Optimize website readability , headlines, content, images, and anchor text to make your blog posts and other content findable to users 

Optimize for targeted keywords: stuffing your blog posts with less relevant keywords can harm SEO. Use a few long-tail keywords to narrow your focus and directly answer user questions. Remember, you’re writing for people , not search engines—and this approach will actually benefit SEO.

Add image alt text: search engines like images with alt text—they add to the user experience by summarizing what’s in the image, in the event that it doesn’t load

Optimize URLs: make sure your URLs and topic-specific ‘slugs’ are relevant to your content and inform users about what they’re about to open

Optimize meta descriptions: give search engines and customers a brief overview of what your blog post is about to inspire users to click through

5. Video/visual media

Great media elements compel viewers to convert by engaging your audience, providing useful information, and showcasing the benefits of your brand and product solution. Visual media can elicit an emotional response from users that helps them connect your brand with their needs. 

Make sure to optimize your visual media to maximize its effect on the overall customer journey. Here’s how:

Create user-centric videos: your videos should provide added value and insights, or educate users on the ins and outs of your product and features. Create content that’s relevant to your users to capture their attention and keep them engaged. 

Have a clear goal: determine the responses you’re hoping to get from viewers beforehand to design visual media with maximum impact 

Add key SEO information: do keyword research and add targeted keywords to video and image meta descriptions. Try transcribing your video content so users have the option to read it—and search engines can understand what it’s about. 

Consider lead capture methods: ask users for their email to access special or useful content and help you get qualified leads deeply interested in learning about solutions

6. Product pages 

Product pages help ecommerce companies showcase different product offerings and encourage users to make a purchase or learn more. 

Use an effective page navigation layout and high-quality images and product descriptions to give your customers everything they need to make their decision at this touchpoint. 

Here’s how to optimize product pages for your customers: 

Organize your products: group your products in a way that makes sense to your users, with clearly labeled categories, intuitive filters, and search bars

Make user-centric design decisions: adjust the style of your page, including its language, layout type, and item placement, to help users easily access all the information they need and improve their product experience (PX). Test out different product page designs with Hotjar's Heatmaps to see which attract more engagement—and ask users why with Surveys .

Add CTAs: include clear, compelling CTAs throughout the page to inspire users to carry out the intended action

Image quality: use professional, high-quality images of your products or services that clearly display their main features to compel users to keep browsing

Include all relevant information: add reviews, product comparisons, product specs, shipping information, and final price so your users have all the information they need to successfully convert

7. Point of exit   

The point of exit is when a user stops engaging with your website or product, whether it’s by unsubscribing, abandoning their cart, or exiting a page after clicking around.  Tracking churn touchpoints helps companies uncover key information on what’s stopping users from converting into paying customers.

It’s important to ask yourself— and your users —questions at this stage:

If a user abandons their cart: what about your checkout experience caused friction? 

If a user exits a page: what could you do to make your pages more targeted and engaging? 

If a user unsubscribes: how can you improve your product experience? 

How to optimize point of exit touchpoints: 

Identify where users drop off: use Google Analytics to track which pages are failing to convert by identifying the percentage of exits per page

Optimize pages with high exit rates: make sure web page design, navigation, and responsiveness are optimized for minimal exit. Include animations, images, and visual media—and optimize your content with the tips above.

Use multiple-choice churn surveys: place Hotjar Surveys on ‘unsubscribe’ pages to ask users why they’re churning. Let them choose a reason from a multiple-choice list so it’s quick and easy for users to complete—but also create an open-ended question where they can add their free-form feedback. 

Exit-intent surveys: use Hotjar exit-intent surveys to ask your users why they’re leaving your site without taking a conversion action. Then, use these actionable insights to make impactful changes.

8. Starting a free trial

Free trials are a key customer journey touchpoint that lets users experience your product on their own terms and decide if it’s what they’re looking for. 

This ‘show, don’t tell’ approach means you can focus on improving your solution so a trial user understands its value, rather than aggressively selling your product. 

Try the following to improve your free trial customer touchpoints: 

Build a trustworthy, informative landing page: create a landing page that’s dedicated to free trial signups and clearly explains the trial benefits and conditions. Include testimonials, trust seals, and guarantees to persuade users to give your trial a go.

Make signup and download easy: use a simple signup form with minimal steps, and make it easy for users to download and get started on your product trial, so they’ll be more likely to follow through. 

Provide clear timeframes: tell users how long they can expect their free trial to last, so they’re aware of when to cancel or continue with paid plans to build their trust

Showcase your product's value: make the trial worth users’ time and communicate how it’ll help them achieve their goals

9. Onboarding

Your onboarding experience directly impacts product adoption and helps build lasting relationships with users, which can turn them into brand advocates. 

Optimize onboarding touchpoints to make sure users are getting the most value possible, as they learn how to use your product and features, to minimize churn and maximize user satisfaction.

Make sure your onboarding process clearly and intuitively shows users how to get set up and introduces them to key features and use cases to help them integrate your product into their everyday life.

Here’s how to optimize your customer onboarding: 

Educational content and problem-solving: create high-quality educational content that simply and quickly answers user questions. Investing in an interactive knowledge base is one great way to address user issues that might arise during onboarding. Also, ensure that you have fast, effective customer support available.

Introduce users to key features: use hotspots, banners, and tooltips to draw users’ attention to features that might help them and let them quickly locate the answers to any questions they might have

Optimize welcome emails: A/B test your welcome email to find out what users respond to most

Collect user feedback: use Hotjar's Feedback tools to ask users what you could improve during the onboarding process and what they need help with. Use the Feedback widget for streamlined in-browser feedback forms to make gathering user opinions simple.

10. Using a new feature

New features keep users engaged with your product and add value to their experience to help them in their journey of becoming loyal customers. 

Find compelling ways of introducing new features to your customers so they understand how to make full use of your product and reach higher levels of product adoption. 

Here’s how:

Keep users in the loop on new features: tell users about upcoming features on your blog, social media, and newsletters to attract customers and get them to try them out. 

Set up guides and prompts: make sure users know about your features and updates within the product itself. Help them set up new features, and explain how to use them effectively. Use tooltips and hotspots to remind users of new features as they’re interacting with your product.

Include relevant features: focus on the user and include the right features that add value. Don’t feature-bomb your users and dissuade them from adopting your product. 

11. Customer reviews 

Customer reviews highly influence user decisions and can make or break a visitor’s desire to adopt your product. 

Positive reviews help build trust with your users and strengthen brand credibility . They encourage users to interact with your brand—and act as a knowledge base for potential customers. 

Here’s how to optimize your customer reviews:

Increase customer confidence: customers who are happy with their product decisions are more likely to leave good reviews and inspire confidence in other users 

Leverage bad reviews: use your reviews as a feedback mechanism to drive change and make user-backed decisions. Where possible, follow up with customers who leave negative feedback to learn more.

Improve your customer experience (CX) through feedback: use a customer experience survey to get user feedback , helping you make changes to improve CX and get better reviews

Optimize your customer journey touchpoints for brilliant results

Optimizing these key touchpoints will improve your customer journey from start to finish, helping you delight your users and meet organizational goals. 

FAQs about customer journey touchpoints

What are customer journey touchpoints.

Touchpoints are the moments your customer interacts with your brand along their journey before, during, and after purchase. 

Important customer touchpoints for websites and products include: 

Social media channels

Landing page

Product pages

New product features

Customer support

Point of exit

The quality of customer journey touchpoints affects the customer’s overall experience and often determines whether they convert, stay loyal to your solution, or churn, so it’s important to be aware of them.

What’s the difference between a customer journey map and customer journey touchpoints?

A customer journey map lays out all the touchpoints a customer may interact with throughout the buyer’s journey. Customer journey touchpoints are the individual interactions a user has with your company, like landing on your website, downloading an ebook, viewing your product pages, signing up for a free trial, making a purchase, or watching a video. 

How do you optimize the customer journey?

To optimize the digital customer journey, first map out all the touchpoints a customer could arrive at. Then, optimize these by evaluating whether they’re meeting user needs, using product experience insights tools like Hotjar, and making targeted changes to improve each touchpoint. If you optimize specific touchpoints throughout the journey, the entire experience will be optimized for user satisfaction. 

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Home • Knowledge hub • How to Use Customer Journey Mapping to Improve the Customer Experience.

How to Use Customer Journey Mapping to Improve the Customer Experience.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the steps and touchpoints a customer goes through in their interaction with a company. It aims to understand the customer’s needs, emotions, and motivations at each stage of the journey. 

The importance of customer journey mapping lies in its ability to improve the customer experience by identifying pain points and opportunities for optimization. By mapping the journey, companies can comprehensively understand the customer’s perspective and use this information to enhance the overall experience, increase customer satisfaction, and drive loyalty. 

Customer journey mapping helps companies to align their operations and messaging with customer expectations, leading to more efficient and effective communication and improved customer experiences.

“The customer journey map is a tool to help you understand what your customers are thinking and feeling as they engage with your company.” – Jeannie Walters, customer experience consultant and author of “The Customer Journey: Mapping the Future of Your Brand.”

The concept of customer journey mapping has its roots in the fields of marketing and customer experience design. It is a relatively recent development, with the first recorded use of the term dating back to the early 2000s. However, the practice of mapping customer interactions with a company can be traced back to the early days of market research and customer satisfaction studies.

Other names, including customer experience mapping, customer journey design, and customer journey visualization, sometimes refer to customer journey mapping. 

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Regardless of the name, the underlying process and goals remain the same: to create a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s experiences and use this information to improve the customer experience.

It has become an increasingly important tool for companies looking to improve the customer experience and is widely recognized as a valuable method for understanding and optimizing customer interactions.

Signs a Brand Would Benefit from Customer Journey Mapping

• Decreased customer satisfaction: If a brand is experiencing a decrease in customer satisfaction or loyalty, it may be a sign that the customer journey needs to be reevaluated.
• Increased customer complaints: An increase in customer complaints can indicate pain points in the customer journey that need to be addressed.
• Decreased conversion rates: A decrease in conversion rates can indicate issues in the customer journey that prevent customers from making a purchase.
• Increased churn: An increase in customer churn can indicate that the customer experience is not meeting expectations and needs to be improved.

Touchpoints and Pain points

The customer journey refers to a customer’s experiences with a company, from initial brand awareness to post-purchase evaluation. Understanding the customer journey is critical for companies looking to improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction.

The key components of the customer journey include touchpoints and pain points. Touchpoints are the moments of interaction between a customer and a company, such as a visit to a website, a phone call, or an in-store purchase. 

Pain points are the parts of the customer journey that cause frustration or dissatisfaction. These can include long wait times, confusing navigation on a website, or poor product quality.

Understanding touchpoints and pain points are essential to map the customer journey effectively. Touchpoints provide insights into the customer’s motivations and needs at each stage of the journey, while pain points indicate areas for improvement. By identifying and addressing pain points, companies can create a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience.

Here’s a fictional example of a customer journey map for a company that sells luxury skincare products:

Industry: Luxury Skincare Marketing Personas:

• Persona 1: “The Health-Conscious Beauty Enthusiast” – A young professional who values natural and organic products and prioritizes self-care.
• Persona 2: “The Anti-Aging Advocate” – A mature individual who is looking for skincare products that address aging and wrinkling.

The Customer Journey:

• Awareness: The customer becomes aware of the company through social media, influencer partnerships, and recommendations from friends.
• Consideration: The customer starts researching the company’s products and reviews online. They may also attend a skincare event or visit a store to try the products.
• Purchase: The customer purchases online or in-store and receives personalized recommendations based on their skin type and concerns.
• Delivery: The customer receives the products and begins using them, receiving regular follow-up emails and phone calls from the company to ensure satisfaction.
• Loyalty: The customer continues using the products and becomes loyal, referring friends and family to the company.
• Advocacy: The customer may become a brand advocate, sharing positive reviews and experiences online and attending events on behalf of the company.

Pain Points:

• Difficulty finding the right products for their skin type and concerns
• Lack of personal attention and support during the purchasing process
• Lack of clear instructions and usage guidelines
• Inconsistent results with the products

Key Touchpoints:

• Social media and influencer partnerships
• In-store events and product demonstrations
• Personalized recommendations and follow-up calls
• Clear instructions and usage guidelines

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

One of the key benefits of customer journey mapping is increased customer satisfaction. By identifying and addressing pain points, companies can create a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience. This can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and improved brand loyalty. Customers with a positive experience with a company are more likely to return and recommend the brand to others.

Another benefit of customer journey mapping is improved brand loyalty. By understanding the customer’s experiences, companies can align their operations and messaging with customer expectations. This can lead to more efficient and effective communication and a stronger emotional connection between the customer and the brand. This, in turn, can drive customer loyalty and encourage repeat business.

The benefits of customer journey mapping are evident, from increased customer satisfaction and improved brand loyalty to more efficient operations and better communication. By mapping the customer journey, companies can gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s experiences and use this information to drive improvements and create a more positive customer experience.

Gathering Customer Feedback

Gathering customer feedback is an essential component of the customer journey mapping process. It provides valuable insights into the customer’s experiences and helps companies understand their needs, motivations, and pain points. Customer feedback is a powerful tool for informing the customer journey mapping process and driving improvements in the customer experience.

There are various methods for gathering customer feedback, including surveys, focus groups, and online reviews. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, and the best approach will depend on the specific goals and needs of the company. For example, online reviews can provide a wealth of information about customer experiences, while focus groups can offer more in-depth and personalized insights.

It is important to use customer feedback to inform the customer journey mapping process. Companies can use this information to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, as well as to gain a deeper understanding of the customer’s needs and motivations. By incorporating customer feedback into the customer journey mapping process, companies can create a more accurate and comprehensive representation of the customer’s experiences.

By using customer feedback to inform the customer journey mapping process, companies can create a more accurate and comprehensive representation of the customer’s experiences and drive improvements in the customer experience.

The Importance of Empathy in Customer Journey Mapping

Empathy is a critical component of customer journey mapping, as it allows companies to understand the customer’s experiences from their perspective. Empathy helps companies to understand the customer’s needs, motivations, and pain points and to create a more accurate representation of the customer journey.

By incorporating empathy into the customer journey mapping process, companies can understand the customer’s experiences more deeply. This can lead to more accurate and comprehensive mapping and improved customer experience design. Companies can use this information to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement and create a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience.

Empathy can also help companies to build stronger emotional connections with their customers. By understanding the customer’s experiences and needs, companies can align their operations and messaging with customer expectations. This can lead to more efficient and effective communication, improved brand loyalty, and increased customer satisfaction.

Brands that use Customer Journey Mapping  

These are just a few examples of well-known brands that have used customer journey mapping to improve their customer experience and drive business success. Using this approach, these brands have identified areas for improvement, created more meaningful and memorable experiences for their customers, and ultimately differentiated themselves from their competitors.

• Starbucks: Starbucks used customer journey mapping to understand its customers’ experiences with its mobile ordering app. By mapping the various touchpoints, the company could identify areas for improvement, such as reducing wait times and improving the ordering process. As a result, Starbucks improved the customer experience and increased customer satisfaction.
• Amazon: Amazon is known for its exceptional customer experience, and customer journey mapping has been a key component of this. The company maps the customer journey across multiple touchpoints, including its website, delivery process, and customer service. By using customer journey mapping, Amazon is able to identify areas for improvement, such as streamlining the checkout process and improving delivery times.
• Nike: Nike used customer journey mapping to understand its customers’ experiences in China. By mapping the customer journey, Nike identified areas for improvement, such as simplifying the online ordering process and improving product availability. These insights helped Nike to create a more seamless and personalized customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Apple: Apple has a reputation for delivering an exceptional customer experience, and customer journey mapping has been a key component of this. By mapping the customer journey across multiple touchpoints, such as its retail stores and online support, Apple is able to identify areas for improvement, such as streamlining the product return process and improving the in-store experience.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map is crucial in improving the customer experience. By visualizing the customer’s experiences, companies can gain a deep understanding of the customer’s needs, motivations, and pain points and use this information to drive improvements and create a more positive customer experience.

Here is a step-by-step guide for creating a customer journey map:

• Identify your customer segments: Start by identifying your key customer segments. This will help you to understand the different types of customers and their unique needs and experiences.
• Gather customer feedback: Use various methods to gather customer feedback, such as surveys, focus groups, and online reviews. This information will provide valuable insights into the customer’s experiences and help you to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• Map out the customer journey: Create a visual representation of the customer’s experiences, including all key touchpoints. This can be done using various tools, such as flowcharts, diagrams, or mind maps.
• Identify pain points: Use the information gathered from customer feedback to identify pain points in the customer journey. These are the points in the customer’s experience where they encounter frustration, confusion, or other negative emotions.
• Analyze the data: Analyze the information gathered from customer feedback and the customer journey map to identify patterns and trends. This will help you to understand the customer’s needs and motivations and to create a more accurate representation of the customer journey.
• Drive improvements: Use the information gathered from the customer journey mapping process to drive improvements in the customer experience. Identify opportunities to streamline processes, improve communication, and address pain points, and use this information to inform your customer experience design.

The Role of Data in Customer Journey Mapping

Data plays a critical role in customer journey mapping. There are a variety of data sources that companies can use to inform their customer journey mapping. 

Some common sources of customer data include:

• Surveys: Surveys can be used to gather customer feedback and insights into their experiences. This can include their motivations, pain points, and overall satisfaction with the customer experience.
• Behavioral data: Behavioral data can be collected from a variety of sources, including website analytics, customer service logs, and sales data. This data can provide valuable insights into the customer’s actions and behaviors and help identify trends and patterns in the customer journey.
• Customer feedback: Customer feedback can be collected through various channels, such as online reviews, focus groups, and customer service interactions. This information can provide valuable insights into the customer’s experiences and help to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

By collecting and analyzing customer data, companies can gain a deeper understanding of the customer’s experiences and use this information to improve customer experience. Data can inform your understanding of the customer journey and help create a more accurate representation of the customer’s experiences.

Implementing Changes Based on Customer Journey Mapping

Using the information gathered from the customer journey mapping process, companies can identify opportunities for process improvements and product modifications to help drive customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Here are some steps for implementing changes based on customer journey mapping:

• Prioritize changes: Based on the customer journey map and the feedback gathered, prioritize the changes that will significantly impact the customer experience. This can include process improvements, product modifications, or changes to the customer service experience.
• Design new processes and products: Use the insights gained from the customer journey mapping process to design new processes and products that address the customer’s pain points and meet their needs.
• Test and iterate: Implement the changes in a controlled environment and gather customer feedback to evaluate the impact. Use this feedback to refine the changes and make further improvements.
• Roll out changes: Once the changes have been tested and refined, roll out the changes to the entire customer base. Continuously monitor customer feedback to evaluate the impact of the changes and make further improvements as needed.
• Stay flexible: The customer journey constantly evolves, and customer needs and expectations change over time. Stay flexible, gather customer feedback, and improve the customer experience as needed.

Companies can drive customer satisfaction and improve brand loyalty by prioritizing changes, designing new processes and products, testing and iterating, and continuously monitoring customer feedback.

Best Practices for Customer Journey Mapping

While customer journey mapping can be an effective tool for improving the customer experience, it is important to follow best practices to ensure success. 

Here are some best practices for customer journey mapping:

• Involve key stakeholders: Involve key stakeholders in the customer journey mapping process, including representatives from sales, marketing, customer service, and product development. This will ensure that all perspectives are considered and that the customer journey map accurately reflects the customer experience.
• Use a data-driven approach: Use data to inform the customer journey mapping process. This includes customer feedback, website analytics, and sales data. This data can provide valuable insights into the customer’s experiences and help to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• Test changes before implementation: Before making any changes based on the customer journey map, it is crucial to test them in a controlled environment. This will help evaluate the changes’ impact and refine them before they are rolled out to the entire customer base.
• Continuously monitor customer feedback: The customer journey constantly evolves, and customer needs and expectations change over time. Continuously monitor customer feedback to ensure the customer journey map accurately reflects the current customer experience.
• Foster a customer-centric culture: Foster a customer-centric culture within the organization by prioritizing the customer journey. This includes regularly reviewing and updating the customer journey map and improving the customer experience as needed.

Negatives of Customer Journey Mapping

• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Customer journey mapping can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, especially for larger organizations with complex customer journeys.
• Limited to current understanding: Customer journey mapping is only as good as the data and information used to create it. A brand needs to fully understand its customers and their journeys so that the resulting map accurately reflects reality.
• Can be subjective: Customer journey mapping is often created by a team, which can lead to subjectivity and bias in the final map. To minimize this, it’s important to involve multiple stakeholders and gather data from various sources.

Frequency of Customer Journey Mapping

It’s recommended that a brand conduct customer journey mapping regularly, at least once a year or as needed, based on changes in the market, customer behavior, and the brand’s offering. The frequency of customer journey mapping will depend on the size of the brand, the complexity of its customer journeys, and the speed at which the market and customer behavior are changing.

What to Consider before Embarking on Customer Journey Mapping

• Data collection : Before conducting customer journey mapping, it’s important to have a solid understanding of your customers, including their behaviors, preferences, and pain points. This information can be collected through surveys, focus groups, and customer interviews.
• Stakeholder involvement: To ensure that customer journey mapping is comprehensive and accurate, it’s important to involve key stakeholders, including representatives from sales, marketing, customer service, and product development.
• Clear goals: Before conducting customer journey mapping, it’s important to have clear goals and objectives, such as identifying areas for improvement, increasing customer satisfaction, or improving the overall customer experience. This will help guide the process and ensure that the resulting map is actionable and relevant.

The Role of Market Research in Customer Journey Mapping

Market research plays an important role in customer journey mapping. By gathering customer feedback and data, brands can gain a deeper understanding of their customer’s needs, motivations, and behaviors. This information can then be used to inform the creation and refinement of the customer journey map, ensuring that it accurately reflects the customer experience.

Customer journey mapping is a critical component of a brand’s customer-centric strategy, and market research is essential in ensuring that it is based on accurate and up-to-date information. By combining these two approaches, brands can create a customer experience that exceeds customer expectations and drives business success.

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Nike's Top 3 Priorities for the Digital Customer Experience

Not every household-name brand has a cult following, but Nike, valued at over $32 billion , certainly does. Its die-hard fans, AKA “sneakerheads” are “passionate consumers who will wait outside at 5am for three hours to get a pair of $200 shoes,” according to Larry Rodgers, Nike’s senior director of retail concepts. 

The iconic Nike Swoosh and ‘Just Do It’ are associated in consumer’s minds not with shoes or athleisure wear, but pushing the boundaries and being bold -- which is what takes Nike from just a sports apparel label to an athletics and lifestyle brand. 

As Nike and other retailers explore ways to blend ecommerce and physical retail, Rodgers discussed the top three priorities for Nike’s digital customer experience at CCW Austin . 

1. Building relationships with customers through mobile apps 

At the core of Nike’s retail strategy is extending the customer life cycle through value-creating mobile apps that become a part of their everyday lives. For instance, the Jordan Breakfast Club serves users with daily reminders each morning for 30 days with personalized workout regimes designed by former pro-athlete and world-class trainer Alex Molden.

Meanwhile SNKR , favored by “sneakerheads,” gives exclusive access to limited releases and special products. The app’s Nike Fit feature uses augmented reality and AI to help consumers accurately measure their feet to find shoes at the right size. Nike claims that, according to industry research, over 60 percent of people wear the wrong-sized shoes. 

(Image credit: Nike)

However, when the Nike chatbot first rolled out, the technology was incapable of handling any customer request that was even slightly off-script, resulting in dead ends for users.

The team realized they also needed to make sure the technology could understand customer intent. This turned out to be more important than providing 24/7 service; peak engagement was concentrated in the mornings and afternoons. No matter how robust the technology or how large your budget, chatbots entail a process of trial-and-error because no two use cases are the same. 

2. Ensuring career progression for agents, AKA "athletes"

From the get-go, Nike’s retail store and customer support agents are affectionately called “athletes,” and they’re given numerous opportunities for career progression. For instance, customer support athletes can work towards certifications that enable them to level up through training. 

“Every single athlete started as an L1 and then had the opportunity to get certified in certain things,” said Rodgers. Those who wish to stay in the company’s customer support division can qualify for L2 and L3 certifications.

Read more: Corporate Greenwashing is an Even Worse Problem Given Climate Change  

L3s live on campus at the company’s headquarters rather than at the contact center, and they’re the last point of escalation in the customer support function. Alternatively, L1s can go down the Expert certification path to move to other parts of the organization in a non-CS role. 

Nike's WHQ campus in Oregon (Image credit: Nike)

“Experts have different hours and a very specific skillset. A lot of the reason why we have athletes come and join is because they love the brand and they want to continue to be a part of the brand in different ways.” 

Experts might go on to work with the social media team, which is still part of consumer services, or become a category expert, brand marketer or product lifestyle manager (PLM). PLMs are responsible for the manufacturing and marketing of a good as it moves through the typical stages of product life cycle, from development and introduction to maturity and decline. 

3. Implementing retail innovations guided by the Voice of the Customer

Hailed by commentators as exemplifying the future of retail, the Nike Live retail concept is a members-only store with a focus on mobile and a two-week merchandise rotation. The experiential store is exclusive to members of the Nike Plus loyalty program and features products catered the local tastes of its location. 

Similar to the concept of Amazon Go’s cashierless stores, the items Nike stocks are determined not by product lines but consumer data such as purchasing patterns and mobile app engagement to provide a hyper-localized feel.

Also, the retailer’s mobile app is at the center of the concept, facilitating everything from reserving products to loyalty points and product information. Twenty-five percent of the inventory rotates every two weeks. 

Nike opened its first Nike Live store on Melrose in Los Angeles, with a second iteration planned for Tokyo and more to come. 

Much of its retail concept is underpinned by consumer research, which stems partly from the company’s voice of customer program started two years ago, explained Rodgers. 

“If you have a digital ecosystem and you have physical stores, how do those two things go together? But the real question is: how do consumers want to use those two channels in different ways?” 

Read more: 4 Quirky Retail Concepts That Show a Glimpse of the Future

The company’s VoC operation is a collaboration between several teams, including customer support, digital operations, digital product and tech support. The teams use voice and text analytics tools to glean insights from emails, texts, chats and more to help set organizational priorities. 

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Customer Journey Maps — Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes

Perhaps the biggest buzzword in customer relationship management is “engagement.” Engagement is a funny thing, in that it is not measured in likes, clicks, or even purchases. It’s a measure of how much customers feel they are in a relationship with a product, business or brand. It focuses on harmony and how your business, product or brand becomes part of a customer’s life. As such, it is pivotal in UX design . One of the best tools for examining engagement is the customer journey map.  

As the old saying in the Cherokee tribe goes, “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes” (although the saying was actually promoted by Harper Lee of To Kill a Mockingbird fame). The customer journey map lets you walk that mile. 

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” — Damon Richards, Marketing & Strategy expert

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a research-based tool. It examines the story of how a customer relates to the business, brand or product over time. As you might expect — no two customer journeys are identical. However, they can be generalized to give an insight into the “typical journey” for a customer as well as providing insight into current interactions and the potential for future interactions with customers. 

Customer journey maps can be useful beyond the UX design and marketing teams. They can help facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated across all sales, logistics, distribution, care, etc. channels. This in turn can help break down “organizational silos” and start a process of wider customer-focused communication in a business. 

They may also be employed to educate stakeholders as to what customers perceive when they interact with the business. They help them explore what customers think, feel, see, hear and do and also raise some interesting “what ifs” and the possible answers to them. 

Adam Richardson of Frog Design, writing in Harvard Business Review says: “A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated — but necessary — such a map becomes. Sometimes customer journey maps are “cradle to grave,” looking at the entire arc of engagement.”

A fictitious customer journey for the persona Samantha Bonham through the Rhythm Road learning service.

What Do You Need to Do to Create a Customer Journey Map? 

Firstly, you will need to do some preparation prior to beginning your journey maps; ideally you should have: 

User personas . If you can’t tell a typical user’s story, how will you know if you’ve captured their journey?

A timescale. Customer journeys can take place in a week, a year, a lifetime, etc., and knowing what length of journey you will measure before you begin is very useful indeed.

A clear understanding of customer touchpoints . What are your customers doing and how are they doing it?

A clear understanding of the channels in which actions occur. Channels are the places where customers interact with the business — from Facebook pages to retail stores. This helps you understand what your customers are actually doing.

An understanding of any other actors who might alter the customer experience. For example, friends, family, colleagues, etc. may influence the way a customer feels about any given interaction.

A plan for “moments of truth” — these are the positive interactions that create good feelings in customers and which you can use at touchpoints where frustrations exist.

User personas are incredibly useful tools when it comes to putting together any kind of user research . If you haven’t developed them already, they should be a priority for you, given that they will play such a pivotal role in the work that you, and any UX teams you join in the future, will produce.

Once you’ve done your preparation, you can follow a simple 8-point process to develop your customer journey maps: 

Review Organization Objectives — what are your goals for this mapping exercise? What organizational needs do you intend to meet?

Review Current User Research — the more user research you have at your fingertips, the easier this exercise will be. Be creative, and if you don’t have the right research to define the journey, then consider how you can carry that research out.

Review Touchpoints and Channels — the next step is to ensure that you effectively map touchpoints and channels. A touchpoint is a step in the journey where the user interacts with a company or product, and a channel is the means by which the user does this. So, for example, a touchpoint could be “pay this invoice” and channels could be “online,” “retail,” “over the phone,” “mail,” etc. It can also help to brainstorm at this stage and see if there are any touchpoints or channels you’ve missed in your original data collection exercise.

Create an Empathy Map. An empathy map examines how the customer feels during each interaction — you want to concentrate on how the customer feels and thinks as well as what they will say, do, hear, etc. in any given situation.

Build an affinity diagram . The idea here is first to brainstorm around each concept you’ve touched on and then to create a diagram which relates all these concepts, feelings, etc. together . This is best achieved by grouping ideas in categories and labeling them. You can eliminate concepts and the like which don’t seem to have any impact on customer experience at this stage, too.

Sketch the customer journey. How you do this is up to you; you can build a nice timeline map that brings together the journey over the course of time. You could also turn the idea into a video or an audio clip or use a completely different style of diagram. The idea is simply to show the motion of a customer through touchpoints and channels across your time frame and how that customer feels about each interaction on that journey. The map should include the outputs of your empathy map and affinity diagram.

Iterate and produce. Then, take your sketches and make them into something useful; keep refining the content and then produce something that is visually appealing and useful to stakeholders, team members, etc. Don’t be afraid to rope in a graphic designer at this stage if you’re not good at making things look awesome.

Distribute and utilize. The journey map serves no purpose sitting on your hard drive or in your desk drawer — you need to get it out there to people and explain why it’s important. Then, it needs to be put to use; you should be able to define KPIs around the ideal journey, for example, and then measure future success as you improve the journey.

When creating the Journey Mapping course , the IxDF used a modified customer journey map to better understand the end-to-end experience for aspiring and junior UX designers .

Anatomy of a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map can take any form or shape you like, but let’s take a look at how you can use the Interaction Design Foundation’s template (link below).

A very basic customer journey map template.

The map here is split into several sections: In the top zone, we show which persona this journey refers to and the scenario which is described by the map. 

The middle zone has to capture the thoughts, actions and emotional experiences for the user, at each step during the journey. These are based on our qualitative user research data and can include quotes, images or videos of our users during that step. Some of these steps are “touchpoints” — i.e., situations where the customer interacts with our company or product. It’s important to describe the “channels” in each touchpoint — i.e., how that interaction takes place (e.g., in person, via email, by using our website, etc.). 

You can download our Customer Journey Map Template here:

The Take Away

Creating customer journeys (including those exploring current and future states) doesn’t have to be a massively time-consuming process — most journeys can be mapped in less than a day. The effort put in is worthwhile because it enables a shared understanding of the customer experience and offers each stakeholder and team member the chance to contribute to improving that experience. Taking this “day in the life of a customer” approach will yield powerful insights into and intimate knowledge of what “it’s like” from the user’s angle. Seeing the details in sharp relief will give you the chance to translate your empathy into a design that better accommodates your users’ needs and removes (or alleviates) as many pain points as possible. 

References and Where to Learn More

Learn how to create different types of journey maps, including service blueprints and experience maps in the course “Journey Mapping” .

User experience strategist, Paul Boag gives an overview of customer journey mapping in this article .

Here is a checklist of everything you need to get started with customer journey mapping.

Journey maps come in different formats. Here is one created by Kate Kaplan, Insights Architect at Nielsen Norman Group.

Adam Richardson, a Creative Director at global innovation firm frog design shares another format for journey mapping, in this article .

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

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5 essential tips for customer journey mapping.

With businesses becoming more and more customer-centric, customer journey mapping is something you can’t afford to leave out of your CX strategy. This is especially true if you want to keep your customers coming back to you instead of your competitors.

Customer journey mapping is invaluable. The reasons? Mapping helps you get inside the minds of your customers, learn what their preferences are, and find out what motivates them to engage (or disengage) with your brand. Ultimately, customer journey maps provide insight into the customer experience that will help you make better business decisions.

Additionally, a study by the Aberdeen Group found companies that participate in customer journey mapping enjoy the following benefits over companies that do not:

• Better return on marketing investments (ROMI). 54% greater return on marketing investment by being able to reach more of the right customers more quickly.
• Customer service savings. Over ten times improvement in customer service costs.
• Social media influence. 24% more positive social media mentions.
• Boost in referral revenue. 3.5 times greater revenue from customer referrals.
• Improved sales cycle. 18 times faster average sales cycle.
• More up-sell opportunities. 56% more cross and up-sell revenue.
• Employee engagement. 200% more employee engagement.

In short, customer journey mapping will help you refocus your company with a customer-centric approach and target your customer base more effectively.

If you are creating a customer journey map for the first time or fine-tuning your current process, this article is for you. This post will present five tips every market researcher should consider when making a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

Before getting into best practices for making a customer journey map, it’s essential to understand what a customer journey map is.

A customer journey map is a visualization that tells the story of a customer’s particular experience with your brand. The map includes perspective into the customer-organization relationship starting with the initial contact, moving through the process of engagement, and continuing through a long-term relationship with your organization. It’s not a snap-shot of a single interaction like a CSAT or NPS survey, but a more in-depth look into the customer’s feelings, motivations, goals, and expectations.

Since customer journey maps are so involved, most organizations will only create one customer journey map for each of their primary audiences. A customer journey map will also focus on the overview of the entire journey, as opposed to digging into the minute details.

Customer journey maps can take different forms, but the main point of every customer journey map is the same. The point is to teach companies more about their customer base from the perspective of the customer.

Now that you know what customer journey mapping is, let’s talk about five essentials of the customer journey mapping process.

1. Create an overall objective and scope for your customer journey map

It’s easy to get lost when it comes to customer journey mapping if you skip the goal-setting step. This is especially true, considering there are several personas and experiences where a customer journey map would be valuable.

To define a goal, ask yourself why you are making a customer journey map, and what you are trying to understand. Questions you can ask yourself during goal setting include:

• What am I trying to learn?
• What customer persona am I trying to understand better?
• What experience will this map outline?
• What business practices am I looking to improve?
• What do I want this map to tell me about my business?

Once you have answers to these questions, you can write down your objective.

Keep in mind that the purpose of customer journey mapping is to tell an overall story of the experience of a single persona, not to detail every nuance of the customer experience.

Without defining the scope of your customer journey map, it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole and get lost in the details.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to defining the scope of your customer journey map. The scope of the map will often depend on your overarching objective. Your objective will tell you how much detail you need to go into and if you need a “zoomed out” or “zoomed in” view of the customer experience.

2. Define the customer persona

Before diving into customer journey mapping, everyone on your team must understand the customer persona you want to focus on during the mapping process. This is especially important, considering you probably have different target audiences.

Creating customer personas involves pulling together data, including CRM data, market research data, and customer feedback. Then, you use the data to create a fictional character that represents your customers. Buyer personas should include any or all of the following information:

• Demographics
• Job title/role
• Income range
• Relationship status
• Goals/motivations
• Values/fears
• Social circles
• Behavioral patterns

The more detailed your customer personas are, the more accurate your map will be. When mapping the customer journey, clearly communicate to your team which persona you are modeling.

Once you have decided on a persona, you’re ready to build a map based on real behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and experiences of customers that fit this persona.

3. Identify the stages of customer interaction and customer perceptions and emotions

Creating a reliable customer journey map also involves identifying all the potential stages of interaction your customer may have during the designated experience.

For example, if you are creating a customer journey map based on a specific persona’s interaction with your website, touchpoints could include:

• How visitors got to your website
• Search terms used to get to your website
• The first fold of your website
• Newsletter subscription bar
• Contact form
• Product demo
• Testimonials
• Comments section
• Social media sharing buttons

These are just a few of the touchpoints that may be relevant to a specific customer experience related to your website.

Once you’ve defined the touchpoints, it’s time to get into the meat of the map—describing what the customer does, thinks, and feels during their journey. Things to include are:

• Customer actions. Write down everything your customer persona does while they are interacting with your touchpoints (e.g., Google search for product page, clicks on a particular product, adds a product to cart, abandons cart, closes out of website, etc.).
• Emotions and motivations. You also need to identify the feelings or motivations that cause your customer to complete a specific action (e.g., the customer got frustrated and abandoned their cart).
• Obstacles and pain points. This step of the mapping process includes finding the roadblocks your customer’s experience (e.g., your customer got frustrated and abandoned their cart because the discount code didn’t work).

Identifying the relevant touchpoints for your customer’s experience means your map will be comprehensive. Identifying customer actions, emotions, and obstacles across these touchpoints show you what the customer persona is doing, feeling, and encountering from their perspective when interacting with your brand.

4. Illustrate the customer journey across multiple touchpoints

Let’s say your favorite brand is Nike. When you think of Nike, you probably don’t think of each part of Nike’s company. You don’t think of Nike’s product team, Nike’s marketing department, and Nike’s salespeople independently of each other. Instead, you think of Nike as one complete brand.

While customers think of brands as one company, organizations still tend to operate in silos. In other words, different departments focus on optimizing aspects of the customer experience as related to their silo.

A good customer journey map won’t focus on just one touchpoint or silo. It will focus on the entire customer experience and all interconnected interactions the customer has with the company.

When you illustrate the customer journey across all relevant touchpoints, it helps you identify problems that exist between departments and optimize the customer experience as a whole. This drives an overall better and more holistic experience for your customers.

5. Visualize the customer journey to promote understanding for all stakeholders

There is no wrong or right way to present a customer journey map to stakeholders. However, some best practices will help your team understand and find the value in your map.

The best way to present a customer journey map is through an engaging and easy-to-grasp visualization. Popular visual representations of customer journey maps include graphs, storyboards, videos, and infographics.

What works best for your customer journey map depends on your stakeholders, your design team, and the results of your map. Regardless of which representation you choose, make sure to:

• Keep it simple enough to be viewed on one page
• Eliminate excess or irrelevant information
• Include visuals that add value to the infographic
• Design the customer story map, so it’s easy on the eyes and compelling
• Highlight relevant metrics

When your customer journey map is visually appealing, you can rest assured it will get the attention from leadership that it deserves.

Customer journey mapping is a surefire way to walk in the shoes of your customers, identify potential problems, and make improvements to your business that will resonate with your customers.

For more information about customer mapping or to look into tools that help you with market research, visit Fuel Cycle today.

Author: Victoria Shakespeare

No description available.

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Nine Customer Journey Map Examples – and What We Can Learn from Them

We look at some of the best customer journey mapping templates to highlight the most effective approaches, and surface tips to drive customer experience management improvements.

Published: January 3, 2024

In essence, a customer journey map is really quite a simple concept: an illustration that details all of the touchpoints at your organisation that a customer comes into contact with as he/she attempt to achieve a goal, and the emotions they experience during that journey.

But the process of building the map is not so simple.

The mapping process demands rigorous research and a meticulous understanding of the customer. If the map is to be truly reflective of what the customer experiences at a human level, corners cannot be cut.

To complicate matters, no two maps will be exactly the same, with the design varying according to the business, product, service and customer being mapped out.

Having said that, there are best practices that organisations should adhere to during the mapping process, and these represent useful pointers for those that are creating a map for the first time.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some sample customer journey maps and examine what we can learn from them and apply to our own mapping efforts.

1. Make sure you have done your research

The data that will be used to inform that map should not be based on guesswork.

Organisations should firstly identify their best customers (or the customers that they would like to attract), and make sure they thoroughly understand them, building a buyer persona for these customers, and any other customer group that is important to the business.

To aid this process, it is best practice to interview these customer groups about their journeys to ensure that you understand their motivations, goals, purchasing habits and pain points.

Businesses shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming they know what customers want.

This map from  Heart of the Customer  demonstrates how the buyer persona informs the entire map, ultimately concluding how successfully this particular demographic’s journey has been.

The research process should also cover your own organisation. It is important that you know how successfully each of your channels is proving, so you should also interview your frontline staff and teams that work on the touchpoints, to identify any issues or pain points that should be factored into the map.

UX/digital design agency Adaptive Path begins the mapping process by first building a touchpoint inventory, based on qualitative and quantitative research. This ensures that when it comes to detailing how the customer moves through interaction and what he/she experiences, it is an accurate representation.

With a comprehensive foundation of data, organisations are ensuring that they are best placed to deliver an accurate visual representation of each customer’s journey, and to identify the potential problems that can be experienced on the path to purchase.

2. Define behavioural stages from the customer’s perspective

Having done your research, you should have a pretty clear idea of the processes that each of your personas go through on their path to purchase and beyond. When it comes to building a map, it is important that it is organised by stages that reflect the major goals your customer is trying to achieve, rather than organising it by stages that reflect your own internal processes. Think about what your customer is trying to achieve at every step, and use the data you have from your customer interviews to inform this.

This journey map from  Rightpoint  clearly details the goals.

3. Capture your customer’s considerations

As well as capturing the major goals, which characterise the stages of the map, the journey map should also try to detail more specific goals and considerations that the customer might have along the way.

For instance, these might include: wanting to find out what the different options are; ensuring that he/she is paying a fair price; or seeking reassurance that he/she has all the information readily available about the flight. By capturing these goals/considerations in each stage of the journey, you are able to examine how well you are meeting those goals and answering any questions.

Here is another map from Rightpoint that outlines the kinds of thoughts and goals that could be captured.

4. Detail every touchpoint

At each of the stages that has been mapped out, consider where the touchpoints occur.

Steve Offsey CMO at  MarketBuildr , describes touchpoints as: “the points of interaction that your customer has with your brand, or outside of your brand, as they seek to meet their specific goals and needs.”

Map out all the interactions that the customer has during his/her journey and all the potential touchpoints with your organisation that could occur.

Here is a comprehensive example from Rightpoint.

5. Detail customer pain points

After you have registered all the touchpoints, you will now be able to mark out your known pain points on the journey map. Having conducted your interviews with customer-facing staff and teams that work on touchpoints, you will know where these pain points are. This will come in useful for later, when you are looking for actions to take following the mapping process.

Similarly, you could highlight where you are doing a great job. This example from  User Testing  depicts positive and negative experiences by colour code.

6. Chart changing customer emotions

Now you have detailed the pain points (and the successes), you can also reflect your customer emotions. While some of this might be dictated by the quality of your service, some other emotions may be a result of the scenario the customer finds him/herself in and the goals he/she wishes to achieve.  This infographic from interactionsgroup details customer emotions (‘frustrated’, ‘overwhelmed’, etc) and how they move from ‘negative’ to ‘positive’ throughout the journey.

7. Consider what other detail can be added to the map

The more comprehensive the map is, the more likely it is to accurately represent the customer’s journey, and the higher the probability that you will be able to identify areas for improvement. Therefore, any additional details that could provide insight into the journey should be taken into consideration for inclusion. This could include examining whether a step could have been avoided or, as in the example from  Heart of the Customer  below, how long each stage would typically take for the customer.

8. Outline opportunities for improvements

Remember, the map is a means to an end, not the end itself. If the map doesn’t result in actions being taken, then it has been a waste of time. Therefore, it is important that as the map is being filled out, and pain points and opportunities for improvement are being identified, that these are charted.

As an example, this sample map from  the Smart Cities project , demonstrates how Edinburgh Council surfaced a number of areas that could be improved upon during their mapping process.

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Nike Customer Journey Design Recommendations

Can Nike use Customer Journey Design Principles?

Yes, Nike can use Customer Journey Design principles in the Footwear industry. Nike has to carefully evaluate the positioning and targeting strategy in the Consumer Cyclical sector, to build a highly effective customer journey.

What is Customer Journey? What is Customer Journey Design?

Customer Journey is the compelling series of experiences that a brand or a product delivers to the customers that keep them coming back for more. It is a sequential design of not only the product purchase journey but also post sale usage experience and service experience. For example Customer Journey Design is a deliberative act of putting in place touchpoints that can not only improve the customer experience but also reduce friction throughout the whole – pre purchase, purchase, and post purchase experience. For example

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Different types / examples of customer journey design

Some of the most prominent examples of customer journey types employed by the leading organizations are -

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Coffee shops & starbucks, learning products, fitness and hiit workouts, grocery chains, gastronomic restaurant, how nike can use customer journey design principles to better improve its customer journey.

More often than not companies try to routinize the customer journey that is making it more effortless and predictable. For example Amazon one click shopping experience. Once the product is selected customers don’t have to fill in the address and other details, don’t have to fill financial data to pay, and don’t have to follow up the order as they receive constant notifications based on what stage the delivery process is. But this constant drive to routinize the customer journey is not suitable for most products as the motivation behind the purchase varies.

What are the four archetypes of Customer Journey Design

Routine – effortless and predictable, trek – requires effort and predictable, joyride – effortless and unpredictable, odyssey – requires efforts and are unpredictable.

None of the archetypes explained above are superior to one or another. All four types of customer journeys can help organizations to achieve long-term success in the marketplace. It all boils down to the type of the product and services of the company. In fact as Nike is a multinational company in Footwear industry with diverse products and services offering – it can use all the four above archetypes for different products and services.

What are the five steps of Customer Journey Design

The firve steps of Customer Journey Design for Nike in Footwear are are – identify product service archetype Footwear industry, applying archetype design principles to Nike products & services, cue purchase decisions based on Footwear ecosystem, streamline touch points across Nike distribution & service channel, and build a post sales strategy based on product features and usage.

Identifying product archetype fit for Nike products in Footwear industry

First step of designing the customer journey design for Nike products and services in Footwear industry is to identify and categorize the products and services based on different types of archetype

Put the archetype’s design principles into action in Footwear industry

As Nike is operating in multiple product categories in the Footwear industry, the bigger challenge is how to categorize various products and services of different archetype and how to serve them using either existing backend operations.

Cue purchase decisions at the right time

Even though customer journey is not confined to streamline the purchase decision, but it is one of the most critical parts of the process. Providing right purchase cues at right time can enable Nike to increase its market share in Footwear industry.

Streamline the customer journey design at every opportunity

By streamling customer journey at every opportunity is not confined to making it effortless and routine, but to optimize the touchpoints based on product and service archetype.

Consider different customer journey archetypes for different customer segments

Finally Nike can build different customer journey designs based on the expectations and behavioral aspects of various customer segments.

To succeed in the hypercompetitive market, marketing managers must design a compelling customer journey that can make customer return for more. The customer journey design should consider – product and service archetype of Nike in Footwear industry, positioning of various products, customer expectations and existing go to market strategy, and finally providing a streamline process in line with product features, usage, and customers’ expectations.

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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.

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Digital Retail Experience

Aware of how today's consumers are utilizing both the digital and physical worlds; Nike sought to create a new 'digital' retail experience. An experience which combines retail store, eCommerce and mobile customer journeys – seamlessly. Previous collaborations with Nike made Demodern the perfect partner to envision a holistic concept. After evaluation of the customer journey we set our goals on crafting an integrated omni-channel strategy. The solution consists of three prototypes which were launched in a Berlin flagship store just in time for the 2015 Champions League final.

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Connecting the Store and the Online World

Envision a solution where the partition between the digital and physical landscapes no longer exists. To solve this we sought to create a fully integrated, 'seamless' retail environment. Seeking digital excellence in both customer frontend and technical backend. In part the solution was to create new interactions while expanding on product details and assortment with real-time availability. The other part was to deliver these experiences through leading edge technology. To better connect consumer and product we sought to create an adaptive environment which engages the consumer respective to their journey. Three custom built multi-user, multi-touch terminals expanded the brand experience with product information and online purchasing options. Focus groups and user analysis further validated our concept while strengthening insight into today's consumer expectations.

Combining Concept and Technology

The key technical task was to develop and install three stand-alone terminals, communicating via an underlying middleware and server infrastructure – within just ninety days.

Each terminal has a custom technical stack. Additionally, the terminals are integrated with the existing store's ERP catalog and eCommerce shop to inform real-time product availability. Design and development in Unity, a game engine rather than a web solution, guarantees high performance and flawless usability as well as overall stability. Backgrounds, animations and videos perform in Ultra-HD with 4k resolution.

Mobile Connect

The value proposition for the key target group of football orientated teenagers is the free WiFi which helps to make extensive use of the terminals. On heydays, more than 1,000 interactions take place, mostly in groups of three or more. For purchasing and sharing via the customer's mobile device we developed the mobile-connect feature.

How does it work?

Access to the mobile-connect feature is gained via a captive portal. This solution allows for flawless integration with the retailer's mobile phone app. Customers' smartphones connect to support their journey as they move through the retail environment. Connected users can receive content via a simple shake of their smartphones.

Image and Social: The Media Wall

A multi-touch, multi-user wall displays campaigns, products and related social media bursts. This installation allows multiple interactions across an ultra high definition surface spanning 9m2. The wall aggregates live updates from Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, with rankings and scores from international and local soccer teams. Customers can intuitively push this media rich content to their smartphones. To make the experience more engaging, customers are encouraged to leave their mark by taking a selfie which is instantaneously discoverable through a custom hashtag.

Customization and Purchase: The Replica Kiosk

A digital retail kiosk with a 65" touch display where Nike Football fans can find, customize and order their favorite Nike team products. Here one can see product availability in real-time for both in-store or online purchase. Online purchases are completed on the customer's smartphone via mobile-connect; in-store purchases are expedited via a connection to the cash desk. Terminal analytics help inform what stock is kept on-hand and ultimately how to improve overall stock efficiency. This helps to broaden the available assortment while making use of the shop area efficiently.

Interaction and Comparison: The Nike Bootroom

An 65'' interactive surface with multi-touch facilitates employees and enables customers on their continued journey. Nike products are comparable with real-time availability for size and color, detected by the ERP system. This installation is comprised of product videos, league statistics and comparable shoe data. Product detection is informed through RFiD technology paried with 3D-cameras, supporting user interaction and positioning.

Next Generation Retail Experience

Our project closes the gap between two retail worlds that have been separated for far too long – physical and digital. A holistic and seamless customer experience is one crafted of an omni-channel strategy, considering store, mobile and online-shopping experiences. A new generation of retail is manifested. Bringing together new features, tools and content, easing maintenance while increasing sell-through. We are the customers' ally.

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Best User Experience

20 th annual webby awards, nike digital retail experience.

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What are customer journeys, and why does your business need them?

Modern marketers, meet the modern customer journey. R ather than making a straightforward, linear path from awareness to purchase, the modern customer is interacting with your brand through a kaleidoscope of mediums and touchpoints; from social media to word-of-mouth, in-store visits, above-the-line advertisements, customer service calls and much more.

So for the modern marketer, customer journeys are more complex than ever before. But nailing a customer journey map is essential to creating an integrated customer experience strategy that can vastly improve your ROI. 

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey is the complete sum of interactions that a customer goes through in order to achieve a goal with your brand. A customer journey map is a visual representation of all their behaviours, needs, emotional states and pain points as they move through each possible touchpoint with your brand. 

It's important to remember that the journey doesn't necessarily end when the customer converts; there's also post-purchase and retention stages to consider.  

The core elements of a customer journey map

"It is acknowledged that the journey does not develop along a linear path. Journeys should be seen as three-dimensional, embracing every touchpoint and (with a little artistic license) you could essentially say they are alive." - Wil Lynch, Marketing Week

Here's what your customer journey map should include: 

• A timeline.  Typically the stages of the funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion and retention) will double as stages in the timeline of a customer journey map.
• All the touchpoints a customer may have with your business. The social channels, website pages, ads, emails that your customers might come across and more.
• Customer behaviours that happen within each stage of the timeline. This would detail the progression of where and how they carry out key steps in their journey, i.e. researching for ideas, or making a purchase.
• The customer's pain points and highlights as they move from stage to stage. Is the customer feeling frustrated? Curious? What are they feeling when they've finally found what they're looking for? What might they need from you after making a purchase?
• References back to your buyer personas . Each of your buyer personas will move through a different journey, so make sure you're assigning the journeys back to each distinct buyer persona, their demographics and psychographic data. 

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Since today's customer is exposed to many different on-and-offline messages and channels; they're also more likely to have a fragmented journey with your brand. This makes the journey harder for marketers to understand and also to join the dots across their marketing, sales and customer service departments.  

Customer journey maps are key to bridging those gaps in understanding so that you can fully be across the customer's experience, whether it be during their awareness, consideration, conversion or post-purchase phase. 

In fact, having an increased focus on the customer journey can boost your ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) by as much as over 50%, according to the Aberdeen Group's report The CMO Dilemma: Bridging the Gap Between Love and Money .

A customer journey map can unlock a myriad of answers to what may otherwise seem like confusing or unclear shopping behaviour. 

For example, if you were an omnichannel fashion retailer, you'd certainly want to know the reasons behind cart abandonment in your online store. Maybe you'd tweak the checkout process or send cart abandonment emails as a way to win the customer back.

But what if a portion of customers were actually abandoning their cart because they realised you had a physical store close by and could go in and try the garments on in person?

A customer journey map can help you to better identify your customer's needs, the driving forces behind them and the behaviours they lead to. This, in turn, tells you what you should be focusing on during each stage of the journey; in this case, it might be training your in-store staff on how to better assist the customers who come in after browsing online. 

Customer journey mapping also lets you:

• Understand how a customer feels at any given stage of their journey (anxious, excited etc.) which allows you to nail your messaging at that point in time - whether it be an email, advertisement or phone call. Above all, messaging that is both relevant and empathetic.
• Align your sales, marketing and customer service departments around a clear vision, with an improved understanding of where each department fits into the vision.
• Identify the higher-converting channels where you should be investing more of your time and budget into.  
• In terms of product and UX design, user journey mapping is an excellent way to keep the design process focused on the customer's needs, resulting in more user-centric products and websites.

A customer journey map can help you to better identify your customer's needs, the driving forces behind them and the behaviours they result in.

A look at Nike's customer journey and best practice

If the purpose of customer journey mapping was to deliver a more powerful, relevant and empathetic customer experience; few brands have fulfilled this purpose as well as Nike.

Let's look at how they have used both on-and-offline touchpoints to weave a completely innovative customer experience for their runners, at every stage of the customer journey/timeline:

Customer experience during the awareness stage

Nike have a long, at times controversial history of knowing how to get people talking about their brand , which is exactly what effective brand awareness campaigns set out to do. Their outdoor and digital campaigns will typically feature a mix of the following:

• Motivational, action-oriented messaging,
• Distinct colours and confident designs,
• Real people whom the customer can relate to, or real celebrities/athletes whom the customer can aspire to be,
• A timely message or relevant spokesperson to ignite further discussion and awareness.

Overall, Nike's ability to conjure emotion in people is what forms the beginning stages of their interest in the product. This doesn't come about by accident - it comes from a well-researched understanding of the highs, lows, frustrations and fears that every runner goes through.

Image from the National .

It's also important to note their omnichannel approach to advertising; while other fashion brands are increasingly focusing their marketing spend online, Nike still seizes both digital and physical spaces to reach a larger audience, driving greater moments of brand discovery.

Customer experience during consideration & conversion stages

According to PostFunnel, though customers do still frequent physical stores, they increasingly expect a digital in-store experience . Nike recently debuted 'House of Innovation' experiential stores in Shanghai and New York that aimed to bridge the online/offline divide in retail; these stores offer services including:

• A free "reserve online, try in-store" feature.
• In-store technology to enhance the customer experience including QR codes at mannequin bases that bring up product details when scanned, try-on lists and automatic requests to sales associates to bring the shoes to them.
• Instant checkouts using new or previously stored payment details so transactions can be completed with a simple scan and tap of the purchase button.

Combined with Nike's continuous digital reinvention and mobile-first eCommerce/digital strategy , this results in a personalised, holistic and seamless experience for customers as they move through the consideration and eventually conversion stages.

Customer experience that improves retention

" Building trust and loyalty is about more than just a satisfied customer. It is about consistently delivering good experiences and delivering on the promises you make." - Andrew Park, VP of Customer Experience Stratgy, InMoment

Every business knows that customer retention is important . But brands don't necessarily get to define what loyalty means; the customer does.

After purchasing Nike running shoes, a customer can download the Nike Running App and select their interests, which in turn customises the content they see. Other App features include personalised coaching tips, the ability to Tag Your Shoes and keep track of total distance run, share your runs with others and more.

Customers can also enjoy curated running playlists thanks to NIKE+ RUN CLUB (a Spotify Integration), or track their runs through their Apple Watches thanks to an ongoing partnership between the 2 brands. 

These moments of delight, along with a customer service team that centers on building trust, continue on well after the customer converts. More importantly, the customer is empowered to perpetuate a unique, personal experience with the brand. This is a key indicator of successful retention; it is at once customer-centric and customer-driven.

The good news is you don't have to have the marketing budget of Nike to begin researching your customer journey and responding to (and proactively anticipating) the needs of your customer. This is something that all marketing teams can do and those that neglect to do so will be chasing sales and offering endless discounts instead of following customer trends and building brand loyalty.

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Want more advice on how your customer journey could be mapped or applied to deliver more value to your business? Do you have a clear vision for your journey? Whatever your questions, we're always happy to help you find the answers. Get in touch!

Christina Peng

Topics: eCommerce , Conversion

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A Guide to Customer Journey Mapping in 2023

We walk through what a customer journey map is and how to create one.

What is customer journey mapping?

Four benefits of customer journey mapping, how to create a customer journey map, why an omnichannel strategy is the key to successful customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is the process of tracing a customer’s interactions with a business as they travel throughout the funnel (starting with initial awareness, all the way to their conversion). Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a user’s journey, portrayed with diagrams, spreadsheets, and so on. 

Sometimes, a customer journey map may home in on a particular aspect of the customer experience (e.g., how existing users solve product issues through your self-serve knowledge base and customer support) or it may focus on a specific persona. 

The mapping process aims to understand customer needs and resolve pain points that may pop up at critical touchpoints. 

Here’s an example of an early product roadmap we created for Personas, which eventually would become Twilio Engage.

6 Questions Your Customer Journey Map Should Answer

The point of mapping out the customer journey is to understand their experience interacting with your business. What points of friction are getting in the way of a conversion? What’s the average length of the customer journey for each persona? (For instance, a B2C company will see a much shorter customer journey than a B2B company , where more stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process.) 

The specific questions you’ll be asking yourself when plotting out your own customer journey map will depend on your business, but here are six to consider: 

Where are we seeing high drop-off rates in the customer funnel? Is there a pattern here when it comes to persona, or is it a potential UX issue? 

Which touchpoints are critical to the customer journey? ( Multi-touch attribution , or the process of understanding which touchpoints influenced a conversion, is closely tied to this.) 

Which channels are the most popular among customers? 

Is there a clear path forward for customers at each stage? (E.g., are we making it easy for people to request a demo, connect to sales, or learn more about a product/service?) 

What content or information are customers looking for at each stage? Are there any knowledge gaps we need to fill? 

Are there opportunities for cross-selling and upselling ? And when would those pitches be the most effective? 

The insights you gain from journey mapping will be instrumental in personalizing experiences, streamlining operations, and creating a customer-centric culture. 

1. Understand the role of different touchpoints & channels

By building a customer journey map, you’ll see how all the different interactions with your business influence and relate to each other.

Say a journey mapping exercise uncovers that many young shoppers visit your stores to try out a product but buy online. Such store visits might not show up in your key business metrics. But this insight could lead you to alter the store experience or even prevent closing locations that don't drive direct sales but indirectly actually do.

2. Identify customer pain points

A journey map shows the many channels customers use to complete a purchase or essential action with your business. This overview helps you identify roadblocks so you can improve the experience at each touchpoint.

For instance, you might test the onboarding and check-out experiences all the time but never be on the receiving end of your app's mobile push notifications. But those interactions are part of the customer experience, and journey mapping ensures you don't forget about optimizing these moments, too.

3. Personalize the customer journey across channels

Mapping out the journey of a particular group of customers helps you understand which channels they visit and what they're trying to do at each touchpoint. This knowledge gives you two personalization benefits. You can:

Ensure your customer's preferred channels seamlessly connect, both on the customer-facing side (the user experience) and the backend (the data that underpins them).

Tailor each touchpoint's content to the information or solution a particular type of customer is looking for on that channel.

4. Create a customer-centric culture

A customer journey map is a deliverable everyone in your organization can reference and understand. It shows the experience with your company from the customer’s perspective without regard for departments and internal processes that often set the tone and structure of other documents and tools. This viewpoint can help break down silos and create company-wide support for customer-centric goals and projects.

There's no fixed format or approach for customer journey mapping. But since the practice became popular in the nineties , several common steps and best practices have emerged.

1. Pick a goal and buyer persona

The first step is understanding what goal you want to achieve with your customer journey map and for which buyer persona.

There are four common types of customer journey maps:

Current state , to show how a journey currently works and discover opportunities for improvement.

Future state , to illustrate what you want a journey to be like and plan what it takes to get there.

Day in the life , to understand how your touchpoints fit in with everything else a customer does in their life that influences the interactions with your company.

Blueprints show a current or future state journey map with your company’s people, processes, and technologies layered on top.

Unless you're an early-stage company with one product and one customer persona, it’s best to only address one goal and customer type per map. Otherwise, it can become too generic, complex, or both.

To recap, a buyer persona refers to your ideal or target customer. Businesses often have multiple different buyer personas depending on the products they offer. These buyer personas can span from engineers to C-suite executives, and the messaging and customer journeys will vary depending on these factors. Usually, businesses write backstories for their buyer personas based on feedback, market research, and an understanding of their product-market fit. These backstories will break down each persona’s priorities, and the questions they’ll likely be most concerned with throughout the customer journey. 

While by no means a definitive list, here is a general outline of how to create a buyer persona: 

Have a clear understanding of how your product fits in the market, your competitive differentiators, and the companies you’ll likely be going up against. 

Identify your ideal customer(s). Who is your product or brand for? Get specific when it comes to job titles, communication styles,  etc. For B2B companies, working with Sales is a great way to get more insight into the questions or feedback they’re gaining from prospective customers. 

Write profiles for each persona. Highlight which talking points or specific features they’ll be most interested in, their role within the company, and so forth. 

Shopify offers great resources into creating buyer personas for retail/e-commerce companies, which you can find here.

2. Identify all touchpoints & channels

A customer journey map should include every point of contact that occurs between the business and the customer, for the specific goal it’s focusing on. A common approach is to categorize these touchpoints by funnel stages, which will generally be broken into the categories of:

Consideration

Of course, sometimes the funnel stages are talked about more granularly or more broadly, depending on the length of the customer journey, industry, etc. 

Let’s use the example of a person looking to purchase a pair of sneakers. They first became aware of the brand via a social media ad (with the brand including this user in one of their lookalike audiences ). After seeing the ad, this person visited the product page multiple times showing their interest and evaluation (e.g., did the product have positive reviews? Did it come in multiple colors and styles? How expensive were the shoes compared to other brands?). 

When the person added the item to their cart but didn’t check out, the brand recognized their intent to buy. This allowed them to tailor their messaging to fit with the person’s bottom-of-the-funnel positioning (e.g., sending discount codes or cart abandonment emails to nudge them into action). From these interactions, the business could also identify the best channels to reach the user on: do they seem to favor mobile browsing? Are they most active on Instagram (and therefore, a brand should focus their retargeting efforts on that channel)? The application of these insights will make the customer journey all the more effective at influencing a conversion.

When identifying all the touchpoints a customer journey, don’t forget these often overlooked interactions: 

404 Error pages on your website.

Subscription confirmation or opt-in email notifications.

Transactional emails like receipts or invoices.

Customer reviews of your products or services on other sites.

Real-world interactions with service personnel, like a receptionist or repair technician.

3. Analyze conversion & engagement data from different channels

With your map's touchpoints identified, collect all the data you have about them. Some common stats to look for are listed below. Ideally, break down these numbers between those that match your buyer persona versus others.

Customer retention, visitor, or user numbers of each touchpoint.

The bounce, drop-off, or unsubscribe rate at each touchpoint – people who stop their journey from that point on.

Conversation rates of customers taking an action you'd like them to take.

Customer feedback data about a touchpoint, say the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for a product feature.

4. Interview customers for direct feedback

You can't create customer journey maps without talking to customers. No matter how much data you analyze, you'll miss moments of the experience that only words and sights can convey.

Asking people about their experience is essential for creating and validating your customer journey map. Such market research will give you insights into people’s feelings and motivations. These aspects are hard to capture from quantitative data alone.

Here are some questions you can ask when you do such qualitative research :

In what ways does our product help you?

How satisfied were you with process X (e.g., onboarding, check-out)?

Aspect X of our service made it easy for me to do Y; True or false? (e.g., The instruction manual made it easy for me to put together the product. True or false?)

What else can we do to support you or improve your experience with our company?

5. Plot journeys between touchpoints based on your data & feedback

By now, you have a good understanding of your customer's journey based on the collected information. You now take all this data to build and finish your actual map:

List all the touchpoints your customer might visit on the way to the goal you've set.

Plot the routes customers take to reach the goal.

Depending on the map type and your goal, add more contextual information at essential touchpoints. For example, customers' emotions, common issues you've identified, or metrics to track for a certain step.

If you've mapped out a future state, you can use your map to plan the resources and actions necessary to build it. In other cases, you can work with a tool like Journeys , which allows you to orchestrate multi-step customer journeys based on real-time data. 

Using real-time events, Computed Traits , or even time logic, marketers can now design workflows that move users through multi-step experiences in real time.

6. Optimize your website & marketing campaigns

Like the omnichannel customer experience itself, modern journey mapping isn't linear with a clear beginning and end. Your map shouldn't be a fixed, static document but can instead serve as a tool for continuous customer journey optimization.

To do so, mark the essential points on the journey, then focus on improving those moments. You can also use your map to design and test alternative journey versions to see if those give better results than your current iteration.

To map and improve a modern customer journey, you need data from every touchpoint, plus the ability to make sense of all that information . An omnichannel strategy connects all your touchpoints so you can reach and recognize customers at any phase in their journey.

This interconnectedness means you always build your journey maps based on the latest information. And, as part of an omnichannel strategy, you continuously analyze which channels each target audience prefers and can include those in your maps, too.

Twilio Engage helps businesses collect and consolidate customer data from every profile, and unify it into a single profile that updates in real time. You can then send this data to any downstream destination for activation, and even orchestrate multi-step customer journeys across every channel.

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Frequently asked questions

How many steps are there in a customer journey map, what are the main components of a customer journey map, how can twilio engage help companies create customer journey maps.