customer journey visualization

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

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

1. Awareness Stage

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

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

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

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

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

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

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

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

Product marketing content may include:

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

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

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

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

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

Decision-stage content may include:

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

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

4. Retention Stage

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

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

Retention-stage strategies may include:

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

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

5. Loyalty Stage

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

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

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

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

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

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

• Your products

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

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

What is the customer journey map?

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

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

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

What is UX journey mapping?

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

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

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

Why is customer journey mapping important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

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

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

2. Emotions

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

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

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

3. User Actions

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

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

4. User Research

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

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

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

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

Current State

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

Image Source

Day in the Life

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

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

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

Future State

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

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

Service Blueprint

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

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

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

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

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

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

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

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

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

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. You can create a new target customer base.

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

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

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

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

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

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

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

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

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

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

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

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

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Current State Template

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

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

2. Day in the Life Template

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

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

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

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

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

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

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

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

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

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

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

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

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

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

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This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish. 

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs. 

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app. 

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible. 

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow. 

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues 

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas . 

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners. 

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask . 

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product. 

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints. 

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand. 

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions. 

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself. 

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them. 

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day. 

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively. 

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas. 

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey. 

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase. 

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: : 

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages. 

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

CJM benefits

Previous chapter

CJM touchpoints

Next chapter

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

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

By Bree Chapin

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

PREVIOUSLY AT

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

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

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

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

What Is a Journey Map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Start with user research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identify the Lens of the Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

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

Bree Chapin

New York, NY, United States

Member since May 15, 2016

About the author

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Creating a Customer Journey Visualization: A Step-by-Step Guide

With every interaction, touchpoint, and experience, customers leave behind valuable clues about their preferences, needs, and desires.

To unlock the full potential of these insights, organizations are increasingly turning to customer journey visualization—a powerful tool that illuminates the path customers traverse throughout their engagement with a brand.

In this comprehensive step-by-step guide, we will delve into the art of creating a customer journey visualization, equipping you with the knowledge and techniques to map, analyze, and optimize your customers' experiences.

Understanding Customer Journey Visualization

The customer journey visualization is akin to a winding path that online users traverse before making a purchase.

It encompasses several distinct steps, namely the top section, middle section, and bottom of the funnel. It's important to note that these steps can vary depending on the unique sales model of a company. Every company understands the frustration of narrowly missing out on a sale. 

After dedicating weeks to pitching and demonstrating their product or service, prospects sometimes drop out of the sales funnel without making a purchase. It's an unfortunate reality. 

However, by continuously optimizing your funnel to improve conversion rates and foster revenue growth, such occurrences can be minimized.

Exploring Different Approaches to Visualize the Customer Journey

Let’s walk you through the most prominent approaches that you can take to visualize your customer’s journey.

Creating Awareness (Targeting the Entire Market)

At the initial stage of the customer journey, we have the awareness phase, where leads and prospects first become acquainted with your product.

This crucial stage often arises from various sources such as advertising, referrals, Google searches, or social media interactions.

Once your message resonates with the target market's needs, these individuals move on to the next phase: interest.

Generating Interest (Engaging Potential Prospects)

In the interest phase, prospects now acknowledge your existence and begin evaluating whether you meet their criteria. 

They may delve into your pricing, company background, customer reviews, and other offerings. Prospects might even compare you to your competitors, indicating that they are genuinely interested but are conducting final research before making a decision.

Facilitating Decision-making (Converting Leads)

After progressing through the awareness and interest stages, leads reach a critical juncture: the decision phase. 

At this point, your leads have gathered sufficient knowledge to determine whether or not they will make a purchase. 

By providing enticing promotions , compelling case studies, or valuable information that establishes your authority, you can successfully convert prospects into leads.

To further motivate leads into taking action, employing the principle of scarcity can be highly effective. Creating a sense of urgency or limited availability can nudge leads toward making a purchase decision.

Driving Action (Closing Sales)

Once leads are ready to act, the customer journey enters the action phase—where sales occur. By ensuring a seamless and well-guided journey throughout the process, you increase the likelihood of turning leads into satisfied buying customers. 

However, in cases where a lead does not convert into a sale, you can utilize the information you have gathered about them to maintain communication and stay in touch. 

This allows for ongoing opportunities to nurture the relationship and potentially convert them into customers in the future.

Advantages of Customer Journey Visualization

It’s time to introduce you to the most important benefits that customer journey visualization can bring to the table.

Comprehensive Understanding

Customer journey visualization provides a holistic and comprehensive view of the entire customer experience. 

By mapping out the various touchpoints, interactions, and emotions that customers go through, businesses gain a deep understanding of their customers' needs, pain points, and preferences. This insight allows companies to tailor their strategies and offerings to better align with customer expectations, leading to improved satisfaction and loyalty. 

Additionally, visualizing the customer journey enables organizations to identify gaps or bottlenecks in the process, facilitating targeted improvements and enhanced customer experiences at every stage.

Enhanced Decision-Making

A visual representation of the customer journey empowers businesses to make informed decisions based on data-driven insights. 

By visualizing the entire customer experience, organizations can identify patterns, trends , and correlations that impact customer behavior and decision-making. This knowledge aids in making strategic choices related to product development, marketing campaigns, customer support initiatives, and overall business strategies. 

Whether it's optimizing touchpoints, refining marketing messages, or streamlining processes, customer journey visualization enables companies to align their efforts with the specific needs and desires of their customers, leading to more effective and impactful decision-making.

Targeted Personalization 

Understanding the customer journey enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences tailored to individual customers. 

By visualizing the customer journey, organizations gain a deeper understanding of each customer's unique path, preferences, and pain points. 

This knowledge enables the customization of interactions and offerings to align with the specific needs and desires of each customer. 

With customer journey visualization, businesses can identify key moments where personalized interventions can make a significant impact, such as targeted recommendations, personalized messages, or tailored incentives. 

This level of personalization not only enhances customer satisfaction but also fosters stronger connections and loyalty, ultimately leading to increased customer retention and advocacy.

Optimized Customer Experiences

Customer journey visualization serves as a powerful tool for optimizing the end-to-end customer experience. 

By visualizing the customer journey, businesses can identify pain points, friction, or gaps in the customer experience, enabling them to take targeted actions to address these issues. 

Whether it's simplifying a complex checkout process, improving response times in customer support, or enhancing the usability of a website or application, customer journey visualization sheds light on areas where improvements can have the most significant impact. 

This iterative approach to enhancing customer experiences helps businesses create seamless, frictionless, and delightful journeys, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and improved business outcomes.

Collaborative Alignment

Customer journey visualization fosters cross-functional collaboration and alignment within organizations. 

By creating a visual representation of the customer journey, businesses can bring together teams from different departments, such as marketing, sales, customer service, and product development, to collectively understand and optimize the customer experience. 

Collaborative discussions around the customer journey visualization help break down silos, align objectives, and foster a customer-centric mindset across the organization. 

It enables teams to work together towards a common goal of delivering exceptional customer experiences at every touchpoint.

Visualizing the Customer Journey: Utilizing Sankey Diagram in Excel

Excel is a widely used tool for data visualization among businesses and professionals due to its versatility and functionality.

However, it lacks built-in capabilities for visualizing the customer journey, such as the Sankey Diagram. That being said, we're not suggesting you abandon Excel altogether.

Instead, there's a solution to transform Excel into a powerful data visualization tool specifically designed for customer journey visualizations.

By installing third-party apps, you can unlock Excel's potential and unleash visually stunning and pre-built customer journey visualizations.

Top 5 Customer Journey Visualization Tools You Need to Try

Finally, let’s take a look at some tools that users around the globe praise the most when it comes to customer journey visualization.

• UXPressia is a cloud-based customer experience management platform that helps teams to visualize, share, present, and improve their customer journeys. It offers a variety of features, including pre-built templates, collaboration tools, and integrations with other software.
• Lucidchart is a visual tool that helps you capture the customer experience. It offers a variety of templates and shapes, as well as the ability to import data from other sources. Lucidchart is a good choice for teams that need to create and collaborate on customer journey maps.
• Microsoft Visio is a diagramming software that can be used to create customer journey maps. It offers a wide range of features, including shapes, templates, and connectors. Visio is a good choice for teams that need to create complex customer journey maps.
• Smaply is a web-based customer journey mapping tool that is easy to use and affordable. It offers a variety of features, including templates, collaboration tools, and analytics. Smaply is a good choice for teams that are new to customer journey mapping or that need a quick and easy way to create a map.
• Canvanizer is a free customer journey mapping tool that offers a variety of templates and shapes. It is a good choice for teams that are on a budget or that need a quick and easy way to create a basic customer journey map.

Final Thoughts

By embracing the power of customer journey visualization, you have the opportunity to craft exceptional customer experiences, drive customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately achieve your business goals.

So, let us embark on this enlightening journey, where understanding and optimizing the customer journey becomes a cornerstone of your success.

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How to Create a Customer Journey Visualization?

Tracking customer journeys is the lifeblood of most businesses in today’s world.

Keeping a funnel full and optimizing for maximum conversion is paramount. A streamlined customer journey visualization can help your business enjoy the following:

• Speed up the sales process
• Build better relationships with leads and customers
• Provide a personalized approach to sales messages
• Generate more sales and maximize marketing efforts

To gain in-depth insights into the performance of your sales pipeline, we recommend you use a customer journey visualization.

The chart is specifically designed to help you visualize the journey taken by leads before they convert.

If you’re an ardent user of Excel, you cannot access the graph because it lacks customer journey visualization native support.

It turns out you don’t have to ditch Excel for other pricey visualization tools. There’s a viable option, which entails installing a particular add-in in your Excel to access ready-to-go customer journey visualization.

In this blog post, you’ll learn:

Table of Content:

What is a customer journey visualization, types of customer journey visualization, benefits of customer journey visualization, how to visualize customer journey using sankey diagram in excel.

• Video Tutorial: How to Create Customer Journey Visualization

Before jumping right into the how-to guide, we’ll address the following question: What is a customer journey visualization?

Definition : A customer journey is a path that online users take on the way to purchase.

There are several steps that make up a complete customer journey, namely:

• Top section
• Middle section
• Bottom of the funnel

Please note that the steps (mentioned above) may vary depending on a company’s sales model.

Any business owner knows the pain of just missing a sale. After weeks of pitches and demos, the prospect drops out of the sales funnel without buying.

It happens. 

But it happens less often if you optimize your funnel continuously for a higher conversion rate and revenue growth. Many small business sales funnels are more like sieves, with holes left by patched-together spreadsheets, sticky notes, missed appointments, and forgotten follow-ups.

To optimize your funnel for growth and reduced drop-off rates, create a Sankey Diagram . This customer journey visualization can help you determine the following if you’re a college admission officer.

• The number of individuals who visit the admissions page
• The number of students who download information.
• The subset of prospective students who then attend a meeting on campus or virtually.
• The smaller group of prospective students who apply.
• The students that enroll and begin classes.

As you can see (above), the number of participants in the college’s funnel drops as potential leads move through each stage.

In the coming section, we’ll take you through types of customer journey visualization.

The customer journey visualization is based on the AIDA model, which can be broken into the following steps

A-awareness

D-decisions

Awareness (Total market)

Leads and prospects are those individuals who just got awareness of your product. The above-mentioned phase usually results from advertising, referrals, Google searches, social media, etc. The individuals pass to the next stage (interest), once your message fulfil the requirements of target market.

Interest (Prospects)

Prospects know that you exist. Now, they will decide if you qualify for their standards or not. They might explore your pricing, company, reviews, and other products.

Prospects might compare you with your competitors. It means you have attracted them, but they are doing last minute research before deciding.

Decision (Leads)

Now your lead got sufficient knowledge to make purchase or not. By offering promotions, case studies, or information that increases your authority, can convert prospects to leads.

To motivate them to action, principle of scarcity can be used.

Action (Sales)

With help of smooth whole customer journey, you can change leads into buying customers.

There will be high probability of landing the sale, if you move leads fast and smooth in every step. If someone did not buy. You can use the information of leads to stay in touch.

Time has proven that Sankey Diagram is the best chart for visualizing customer journey.

The chart is amazingly easy to read and interpret.

In the ensuing section, we’ll take you through the benefits of customer journey visualization.

Customer journey visualization shows progress through a series of linear and interconnected stages that are aligned with the awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA) model.

Besides, it’s best suited for visualizing sales data because it’s amazingly easy to read and interpret.

Businesses use a customer journey visualization to show how the number of potential sales prospects gradually separates from buying customers. The declining number of participants at each stage is reflected by the size of the flows in a Sankey.

For instance, let’s imagine 1,000 people have visited your website. Of the 1,000 users, 600 of them clicked on your advertisement. And 300 users downloaded your product catalog.

By tracking the process over time, you can set goals to have fewer people drop off at certain or all stages.

The top of the customer journey visualization represents the awareness stage . In this stage, the target market does not know your brand and its offering.

As you trickle down to the interest stage , the number of online users decreases before turning into prospects. In the desire section , where prospects turn into leads, a further reduction is recorded.

The last section is the action. It’s the area where leads turn into customers and brand evangelists. Optimizing customer journey entails patching up the areas with significant drop-off rates.

Keep reading because, in the coming section, we’ll take you through how to visualize a customer journey using Sankey Diagram in Excel with the help of the easy-to-use Sankey Diagram Maker .

Excel is one of the go-to data visualization tools for businesses and professionals.

However, the spreadsheet tool lacks a customer journey visualization, such as Sankey Diagram.

We’re not recommending you do away with the spreadsheet app.

You can turn Excel into a reliable data visualization tool loaded with ready-made and visually stunning customer journey visualizations, by installing third-party apps, such as ChartExpo.

Why ChartExpo?

ChartExpo is an add-in you can easily install in your Excel.

With many ready-made and stunning visualizations, ChartExpo turns your complex, raw data into  compelling, easy-to-digest visual renderings that tell the story of your data.

The application produces simple and clear visualization designs and charts in excel with just a few clicks.

Yes, ChartExpo generates ready-made customer journey visualizations that are amazingly easy to interpret, even for non-technical audiences.

This section will use a customer journey visualization, such as Sankey Diagram , to visualize the data below.

• To install the ChartExpo chart add-in for Excel , click this link .
• Open the worksheet and click the Insert button to access the My Apps option.

• Select ChartExpo add-in and click the Insert button.

• Once ChartExpo is loaded, you will see a list of charts. Look for “Sankey Chart” in the list.

• Select the sheet holding your data and click the Create Chart From Selection button, as shown below.

• Check out the final chart below.

Similarly, you can use the ChartExpo add-in for Google Sheets to visualize the customer journey using Sankey Diagram in Google Sheets.

Video Tutorial: How to Create Customer Journey Visualization?

In the following video, you will learn how to create a Sankey diagram to visualize the customer journey in excel.

What are the four stages of the customer journey?

The top of the customer journey represents the awareness stage .

As you go down to the interest stage , the number of online users decreases before turning into prospects. In the desire section , prospects turn into leads.

The last section is the action. It’s the area where leads turn into customers and brand evangelists.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is a path that online users take on the way to purchase. And there are several steps that make up a complete customer journey, namely:

By tracking the customer journey over time, you can set goals to have fewer people drop off at certain or all stages.

So, always keeping it full and optimizing for maximum conversion is paramount. A streamlined customer journey visualization can help your business enjoy the following:

• Speed up the sales process.
• Build better relationships with leads and customers.
• Provide a personalized approach to sales messages.
• Generate more sales and maximize marketing efforts.

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Customer Journey Map (2024): How-to & Examples [+ Template]

Home » Customer Journey Map   | 🕑 

Gust de Backer

November 10, 2023.

The Customer Journey is the process your customers go through with your company. This then covers the first to last interaction someone has with your company.

Many companies do not have a map of how their customers orient, what they care about or when the company comes into the potential buyer’s mind.

Not having enough mapping of the Customer Journey puts you at risk of having, perhaps unknowingly, negative touchpoints with your (potential) customer.

I’m going to show you:

• What the Customer Journey is
• How to create your Customer Journey
• And what good examples of a Customer Journey are

Let’s get started…

Table of Contents

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is the process that maps every interaction with your brand:

The first interaction someone has with your brand is the beginning of the Customer Journey. If you find yourself in a niche market, it can also be interesting to map interactions with your niche.

The Customer Journey for B2B and B2C often looks quite different:

The Customer Journey is relevant to any business, but particularly important for companies that:

• Are customer-centric
• Want to improve customer satisfaction
• Want to increase sales

In general, you often see in companies that the marketing department is responsible for ensuring that (potential) customers have a positive experience with the brand.

A nice trend you see is that marketing/growth teams are becoming more responsible for the entire funnel rather than just reaching and bringing in new customers.

7 Stages of the Customer Journey

There are different models you can use to map out the Customer Journey, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing:

Keep in mind the different roles of the Decision-making Unit , but essentially there are 7 steps you can include in the Customer Journey….

Your (potential) customer can have 2 types of needs:

• Latent need : the person does not yet know he needs something. If you are going to buy a car you are not yet directly concerned with insurance.
• Concrete need : the person knows they have a certain need, here it is important to be visible with your brand. For example, think of buying a phone when your old one is broken.

Every Customer Journey basically starts with a certain need.

In practice, you can encounter 5 types of customers in this:

• Unaware : don’t realize they have a problem or need.
• Problem Aware : realize they have a problem or need.
• Solution Aware : they know there are solutions to their problem or need, but they don’t know you.
• Product Aware : they know you, but haven’t bought you yet.
• Most Aware : brand ambassadors.

2. Orientation

The orientation process has changed a lot in recent years thanks to digitalization, which makes it extra important to map it out using research.

You want to be visible with your brand at least in the orientation phase so that you will eventually be included in the consideration phase .

Some examples of behavior in the orientation phase:

• Concrete keywords in search engines
• Asking acquaintances for their opinions
• Checking out inspiration platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok or Instagram

3. Consideration

In the consideration phase, we examine which option from the orientation phase best meets the customer’s wishes and needs.

Here it is important to know which decision criteria weigh most heavily for the customer; this should be properly researched.

Some examples of decision criteria:

• Brand awareness

4. Decision

In the decision phase, a product or service from a specific vendor is actually chosen.

There are a number of things that make it easier for the customer to choose your product or service:

• Make it easy to compare
• Provide a good selection in different options
• Offer a good deal, make sure your customer can’t say no
• Provide a smooth payment process
• Increase engagement in your brand by providing valuable content, offers and support

Provide as few distractions as possible during the decision phase, people who are still Googling “[company name] discount code” from the checkout want to be convinced to convert.

5. Delivery

After someone has become a customer, a product or service will need to be delivered.

Here the first moments of evaluation will be whether someone actually made the right choice to choose your company, product or service.

• Make sure you deliver on time and that your product arrives in the right condition or that your service is of high quality.
• Give clear instructions on how to use or what the added value of the service is.
• Provide good support if the customer experiences problems in using your product or service.

In the use phase it is important that customers get the most out of your product or service and that they really see the added value .

You can stimulate this in a number of ways:

• Include tutorials
• Measuring and communicating impact
• Aftersales phone call

This is the ultimate evaluation moment ; if your product or service did not help the customer well, there is little chance that they will make a repeat purchase or become a brand ambassador .

In any case, it is important to prevent people from talking badly about your brand, so make sure that in the earlier stages you already make sure that people who are not ideal customers for you are excluded and that you make sure that customers see the added value of your product or service.

It is 5 to 7 times cheaper to retain a customer than to bring in a new customer. This is precisely why it is so important to encourage loyalty.

Loyalty can be expressed in the number of repeat purchases or upsells a customer eventually makes with you. You can encourage this by offering valuable content, offers and support.

The goal is for people to remain loyal to your brand and not switch to a competitor or go out of business in the first place.

There are different forms of loyalty:

• Transactional Loyalty : getting customers to make repeat purchases by giving offers.
• Social Loyalty : interacting with your customers on social media, for example.
• Engagement Loyalty : you reward people who engage with you where you can receive points for subscribing to a newsletter, for example.
• Emotional Loyalty : if your brand is positively aligned with your customer’s emotions, you can’t get this kind of loyalty with offers. In this, you want to make people feel part of something.
• Behavioral Loyalty : a level of loyalty in which you want to make customers do something like buy higher volumes where you give a third product for free after buying 2 products.
• Advocacy Loyalty : you are going to reward people who recommend others to become customers of your brand.

Customer Journey Mapping

Download the Customer Journey Canvas:

Good choice! Check your e-mail for the resources...

How do you complete the Customer Journey Canvas?

Once you know who all is in your Decision-making Unit, you can start creating personas and empathy maps so you can better understand the behaviors, needs, problems and wants of those individuals.

Determine what questions you would like to have answered after doing your Customer Journey Mapping research. Some common questions are: – When do you experience X? – On a scale of 1 – 10, how much would you like a solution to X? – How much are you willing to pay for a solution on X? – How would you orient yourself to a solution for X? – What brands would you consider in a solution for X? – What should a solution for X satisfy you in? – How would you go about determining if the solution was effective?

The threshold in terms of time and cost is often somewhat lower for quantitative research than for qualitative research. In it, you can gather good insights about your target audience from a helicopter perspective. Consider, for example: – Questionnaire – Post-purchase survey – Exit-intent Survey – Search volume

Once you have a high-level validated understanding of your target audience, you can begin to supplement your findings at a detailed level using qualitative research. Consider: – Customer interviews – User tests – Screen recordings

If you have made your Customer Journey Map comprehensible, you have gathered many insights on which you can improve your Customer Journey. To prevent it from becoming a dusty document that is no longer looked at, it is important to determine follow-up actions and evaluate them accordingly.

Common mistakes

There are a number of mistakes that you often see passed in Customer Journey Mapping:

• Based on assumptions : often you see that a Customer Journey is completely based on assumptions and not on validated research.
• Wrong scope : critically determine in advance where you want your Customer Journey to begin and end otherwise you quickly lose focus and overview.
• No customer perspective : reason the Customer Journey from your persona or customer and not from your company.
• Inside-out : if you start from how you do it as a company you are not customer-centric and there is going to be a mismatch in how the customer experiences something and how your company does it. Make sure your Customer Journey is actually completed from the customer’s perspective.
• Stakeholders : it is important to involve all relevant stakeholders so that you start creating support for the Customer Journey.
• End goal : the Customer Journey is not an end goal, but a starting point. It is something that will continuously play out and needs to be changed.

And now you…

Now you’re armed with enough knowledge to start visualizing your Customer Journey.

I’m curious, what has been the biggest insight for you in understanding your target audience?

Let me know in a comment.

P.S. if you would like additional help you can email me at [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

The 7 steps of the Customer Journey are: need, orientation, consideration, decision, delivery, use and loyalty.

A customer journey is a term used in marketing and customer experience management to describe the path a customer takes through the stages of awareness, consideration, purchase and use of a product or service. The term can also be used to describe the path a potential customer takes.

A customer journey map is a visualization of a customer’s experience with a company, product or service. It begins when the customer first becomes aware of a need and ends at the level of loyalty. The map tracks all the contact moments the customer has with a brand, both online and offline. Customer journey maps can help companies understand where they need to make improvements to provide a better experience for their customers.

The Customer Journey for every business is different. It is important to research for your business what the most ideal customer journey is, in doing so you want to validate all assumptions.

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Account-Based Marketing | Business Strategy | Customer Development Process | Customer Journey | Decision-Making Unit | Digital Marketing | Lead Generation | Market Research | Marketing and Sales | Marketing Strategy

Gust’s Must-Reads 👇🏼

• TAM SAM SOM
• Value Proposition
• Brainstorming
• Decision Making Unit
• Product-Market Fit
• North Star Metric
• Market Research
• Customer Development
• Growth Hacking
• Brand Identity
• Customer Journey
• Account-Based Marketing

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Bedankt Nicole!

Thanks! I’m trying to understand how to explain this approach in simple words, and your material is one of the best so far.

Thank you, Marie!

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Customer Journey Map

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Blog / Journey Tools

11 Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Navigate & Analyze User Experiences

• February 29, 2024

Table of Contents

Understanding your customers can be challenging when dealing with a vast amount of unstructured data.

On average, businesses source their customer data from 28 different channels and house it in 17 different applications. This data may help to gain insights about their customer experience and meet their expectations, but a lack of control over siloed data fails to serve the purpose.

That’s where data visualization comes into play.

Using customer journey mapping tools, you get a comprehensive view of how your customers interact with your brand and identify the different touchpoints and conversion paths they take to convert. More importantly, you can put all your collected customer data into use by visualizing it into customer journey maps without having to navigate through different platforms.

We’ve compiled a list of 11 customer journey mapping tools to help you get started and create the most accurate and data-backed maps to help with your marketing decisions.

Key Takeaways

Optimize the customer journey with real-time analytics

Visually understand the customer journey from start to finish- and how it can be improved

1. Funnelytics

Funnelytics is a customer journey mapping tool that uses whiteboard technology to help you draw your entire customer journey on a canvas.

“ I am able to show my clients exactly how their funnel will look in a clean visual way. This is a great sales tool. ” – Sam K .

Integrations with top analytics software allow for real-time, in-depth sales funnel data on an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can present this data visually to your clients and stakeholders with ease, which is very handy for agencies.

Even better, using funnel simulations, you can forecast the results of your funnel plan before implementing it. This allows you to test out the probability of success vs failure for every approach you take, and an opportunity to optimize for best results.

The learning curve to start with Funnelytics can be a little steep for people who are new to creating visual maps to track and understand customer journeys. This is why our team created a great resource in our vault of funnels (essentially templates.) You can import these funnels into your builder easily, which will jumpstart your project whether you’re a beginner or a visualization veteran.

Moreover, you’ll enjoy our onboarding process, where we help you get acquainted with the tool while also offering clients optimization workshops and same-day support to get you unstuck whenever you need.

“ Tracking multiple traffic sources across multiple domains is not easy. This is why I use Funnelytics. ” — Quentin P.

Understand your user flow with Funnelytics

We help performance-driven marketing teams plan and improve the customer journey at every level

Pricing : $199–$999 per month

Key features :

• Highly intuitive.
• Easy-to-use interface with visual drag-and-drop features for easy mapping and customer journey tracking .
• The traffic explorer feature allows you to map backward.

Smaply is a customer journey mapping platform that allows you to centralize and digitize your customer experience insights. Its simple drag-and-drop features help you visualize different types of data to review your customer experience and identify key friction points.

You can see a lot of customer data at once in Smaply, because it displays multiple channels and customer journeys simultaneously. This allows you to show the differences between the two tracks for better decision-making.

Smaply also offers customizable templates that can be duplicated and re-used and collaboration features, which allow sharing of customer journey insights to the team in real-time.

A downside to Smaply is that its users find the cost on the higher end compared to the features it offers, which can be off-putting for those with tighter budgets.

Pricing : $0 – $29 EUR per month, offers custom pricing

• Simple drag-and-drop editor
• Feedback mode and sharing to help with collaboration
• Customizable templates

3. Custellence

Custellence allows you and your team to collaborate and combine your customer journey efforts into a single dashboard. It helps you create your customer journey map in minutes, which allows you to present a strong customer case and get a buy-in from stakeholders.

With Custellence, you can create elaborate customer journey maps, easily share them with your teams, and collaborate with them on your workspace. Like Smaply, it offers a stack of templates you can adapt and tailor for your own purposes.

However, when it comes to adapting the tool for more complex journey maps, many users find it difficult to apply customer journeys for different use cases.

Pricing : $0 to $34 per member per month, offers custom pricing

• Churn management
• Intuitive, lane-based interface,
• Flexible map structure

4. UXPressia

UXPressia is more of an all-in-one tool that helps you create customer journey maps, user personas and impact maps—that means all your customer experience assets stay in one place. See statuses, tags, and ownerships of each journey map you create and visualize everything from the big picture to the micro journeys.

This makes it easier to align your team and stakeholders from different parts of your organization for better collaboration. You can create designer-quality journey maps and tweak them to present to different people, which can save you a lot of time and effort.

Moreover, you can embed website, product, or service prototypes, marketing presentations, survey results, etc. into your journey map so you don’t leave out any crucial information.

Given the vast variety of features UXPressia offers, it can be a little clunky and complex, which often bugs users looking for simpler solutions.

Pricing : $0 to $36 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• 100+ free customer journey mapping templates
• User roles and teams for access control
• Version history
• Branding elements to help you stay on brand always

5. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is a visual whiteboard tool that allows teams to collaborate seamlessly—from initial ideas to successful delivery. This tool’s user-friendly interface and diverse tools make it easy to create diagrams.

Unlike tools like Funnelytics, it’s not specifically designed for mapping customer journeys around marketing and sales funnels. It’s more of a general intelligent diagramming tool that helps you assemble funnel maps, customer journeys, and flow charts.

However, that makes it suitable for any team for different purposes—the marketing team can create elaborate funnel maps while the design team can create flowcharts for their processes.

As a general-purpose tool, Lucidchart lacks several advanced features compared to its competitors, making it less of a versatile option for users looking for high-end functionalities.

Pricing : $0 to $9 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• Virtual whiteboard to bring your ideas to life
• Intelligent diagramming to visualize complex data
• Cloud visualization to optimize your cloud environments

Figma is more of a general-purpose design tool that has different modes with different purposes—development, design, whiteboard, and prototyping—all in one platform. It’s mainly an all-in-one tool for product teams to create, test, and ship better products faster and more efficiently.

While the prototyping mode helps you create realistic prototypes to test the interactive experience before launching, the FigJam (whiteboard) is the one you can use to create your customer journey mapping while collaborating with your team on an intuitive interface.

However, one of the limitations of this tool is the lack of advanced prototyping features, which can be a challenge for those looking to build complex customer journey maps.

Pricing : $0 to $75 per editor per month

• Easy collaboration allowing brainstorming and working on complex workflows.
• Open sessions that allow you to invite anyone for 24 hours.
• Live audio calls on the board.
• Timer and voting options.

Miro is a multi-purpose online collaborative whiteboard that can be used to build funnel maps, plan marketing campaigns, develop a roadmap, and more.

It allows distributed teams to come together, work on a common goal and manage the processes throughout different lifecycle stages.

The interactive and easy-to-use whiteboard platform allows you to strategize new initiatives while considering your customers’ needs and designing customer-centric solutions.

Miro offers six core capabilities to help you with a layout to get started under different scenarios such as process mapping, workshop collaboration, product development workflows, etc. However, users find it difficult to follow through, considering its vast range of features and workflows.

Pricing : $0 to $16 per user per month, custom pricing also available

• Miro Assist to help you automatically generate mind maps, diagrams, and codes for you.
• Multiple solutions include mind mapping, flowcharts, wireframing, process mapping, technical diagramming, and more.
• Easy to collaborate

8. Visual Paradigm

Visual Paradigm is a development tool suite consisting of design, analysis, and management tools to help you manage your projects. Its customer journey mapping tool allows you to study customer experience and illustrate customer relationships with your brand.

The interface you get on creating a new customer journey map isn’t very intuitive, and some might find it pretty basic compared to other tools mentioned in this list. However, fewer features and simplicity mean the tool is easy to learn and grasp, and you can create simple customer journey mapping within minutes.

Pricing : $6 to $89 per month

• Visual modeling
• Business analysis and design
• Drag-and-drop editor

Sketch is another multi-purpose collaborative tool like Miro that markets itself as the complete design platform. It’s available as a web app and a Mac app. While you can build websites, icons, apps, illustrations, and design systems using Sketch, you can use its prototyping feature for customer journey research and mapping.

It comes with a powerful vector editor and built-in prototyping, so it’s easy to create stunning journey maps. It also allows you to collaborate with your team using its workspace feature, where you can share designs and prototypes and offer feedback.

Since it’s not specific to customer journey mapping or sales funnel, many advanced features are lacking. To get started, you’ll need to build your journey maps from scratch without the support of dedicated templates.

Pricing : Starting from $10 per month

• Powerful vector editing
• Easy, intuitive prototyping
• Shared Libraries, styles, and components
• Reusable design templates

10. Flowmapp

Flowmapp is a UX design platform popular among startups, agencies, designers, developers, and other teams. Though it’s specifically designed for end-to-end website design and development, it can be easily used for creating customer journey maps with its prototyping and wireframing features.

Using its pre-made templates, workspaces, and collaboration features, you can create stunning customer journey maps while keeping everyone on your team on the same page.

One of the main drawbacks of this tool is that it doesn’t offer a customization feature for adding specific elements to the journey map. For example, information from the SERP will be added as a text block, not a screenshot.

Pricing : $0 to $126 per month

• Visual sitemaps
• Prototyping tools with many templates
• Import and export diagrams

11.  Microsoft Visio

A diagram and flowchart tool by Microsoft, Visio helps you visualize your ideas with dozens of ready-to-use templates and thousands of customizable shapes. You can either choose to purchase Visio directly or get it as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.

You can create flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, network diagrams, customer journey maps, and more with Visio and its simple user interface. You get all the latest diagramming features such as layers, containers, validation reports, shape sheets & drawing explorer, which allows you to create elaborate journey maps.

Some users find the pricing more costly than its competitors, which can affect those with budget constraints.

Pricing : $5 to $530 per month

• Easy to set up and use
• Workflow automation
• Comprehensive template library

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

With these many options, making a choice can be overwhelming. You need to consider your business requirements and the following factors.

• Visual/design capabilities : You should be able to design your customer journey maps in the way you desire—be it flowcharts, value ladders, or elaborate mindmaps.
• Intuitive/easy-to-use platform : You and your team should find it easy to navigate through and put the tool to proper use for creating and analyzing journey maps.
• Collaborative capabilities: The tool should allow you to invite your team members to collaborate and leave comments and feedback.
• Integrations with other tools : You need a customer journey mapping tool with integration capabilities to collect data from multiple platforms.
• Templates : You also need multiple templates to save time on creating maps.
• Customer pain point and journey optimization analytics: Your tool should offer detailed insights into the friction points in the customer journey. For example, in Funnelytics, you can analyze page insights in an elaborate form, which acts as an excellent heatmap alternative .
• Segmentation features : You should be able to segment journey maps into different groups based on the journey stage, touchpoint, channel, etc.
• Customer success team powered by experts : Access to customer support whenever you’re stuck is an absolute must.

Map your customer journey with real-time data

Customer journey mapping is a fun and extensive process that offers great insights into customer behavior and thought process, and Funnelytics is an excellent choice for a mapping tool.

We’ve put it as number one on the list because it connects whiteboarding technology to the user’s data. This allows you to map customer journeys, visually see how well they perform using split testing across the customer journey , and identify what portions of the journey or product to optimize. Moreover, it’s excellent for visual learners—you can visually see how people get to their site, move across pages, and where they drop. This allows for continuous improvement.

Funnelytics also has:

• A thorough onboarding process
• Customer journey experts who host optimization workshops
• Same-day support, as well as weekly live sessions where users can ask platform or strategy questions.

Learn more about customer journey tracking through Funnelytics’ blog , or get started today .

Implement your ideas faster with Funnelytics

Our visual platform makes it easy to see where customers need the most help in their journey

● What does customer journey mapping software do?

● what features do you need in a customer journey mapping software, ● why is a customer journey visualization platform a must-have.

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Visualizing the Complete Customer Journey: Mapping and Tools for Success

The customer journey is a pivotal aspect of any business’s marketing and sales strategy. But how often do we truly visualize the customer journey in its entirety? And why is it so crucial to do so? If you’re a director-level or higher marketing expert, have you ever pondered how a comprehensive customer journey map can revolutionize your strategies? Or how the right tools can make this visualization more effective?

Table of Contents

1. Understanding the Essence and Benefits of Customer Journey Visualization

The customer journey is the complete sequence of events and interactions a customer goes through from the moment they become aware of your brand to the point of purchase and beyond. It’s not just about the buying journey; it’s about every touchpoint, every emotion, and every decision that influences the customer. But why is it so essential?

Mapping the Customer Journey: Mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of this journey. A customer journey map is a visual tool that allows businesses to understand the customer’s experience at every stage of the journey. It highlights customer touchpoints, pain points a customer might face, and opportunities for improvement.

Benefits of Customer Journey Visualization: Visualizing the customer journey offers numerous advantages. It provides insights into customer needs, pain points, and preferences. It also helps businesses improve customer experience, leading to better customer retention rates.

2. Types of Customer Journey Map Templates

Not all customer journeys are the same. Depending on the business, product, or service, the type of customer journey map you create can vary.

Basic Customer Journey Map: This is a straightforward visualization of an end-to-end customer experience. It’s ideal for businesses just starting with journey mapping.

Comprehensive Customer Journey Map: A more detailed map that covers the entire customer journey, including pre-purchase and post-purchase stages. It provides a more in-depth look into the customer’s experience.

Future State Customer Journey Map: This map visualizes the desired customer journey in the future, based on insights and data available.

3.  How to Create Customer Journey Map with Tools and Templates

Creating a customer journey map from scratch can be daunting. Thankfully, there are tools and templates available to simplify the process.

Customer Journey Map Tools: These tools offer features to create, visualize, and analyze the customer journey. Wizaly, for instance, is a platform that provides a comprehensive suite for customer journey visualization.

Free Customer Journey Map Templates: For those on a budget or looking for a quick start, free customer journey templates are available. These templates provide a foundation upon which businesses can build and customize their maps.

4. The Role of Personas in the Customer Journey Mapping Process

Understanding your customer is at the heart of the customer journey. Customer personas play a pivotal role in this understanding.

Creating the Customer Persona: This involves gathering data and insights about your target audience. It helps in visualizing the steps a customer might take and the potential challenges they might face along the journey.

How Personas Influence the Journey: By understanding the customer persona, businesses can tailor the journey to better meet their needs, leading to an exceptional customer experience.

5. Enhancing Customer Retention through Journey Mapping

Journey mapping isn’t just about understanding the customer’s path. It’s also about enhancing their experience to increase loyalty.

Identifying Pain Points: By mapping the customer journey, businesses can pinpoint areas where customers face challenges. Addressing these pain points can lead to increased customer satisfaction.

Proactive Customer Service: Journey mapping can point out areas where proactive customer service can make a difference. A proactive customer service strategy can lead to a surge in customer loyalty.

Investing in the Customer: The insights gained from the customer journey can help businesses invest in areas that matter most to their customers, further enhancing the customer experience .

Visualizing the complete customer journey is more than just a marketing exercise. It’s a strategic move that can lead to better customer experiences, increased loyalty, and business growth. By understanding every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond, businesses can tailor their strategies to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Ready to take your customer journey mapping to the next level? Reach out to Wizaly today and discover how our platform can revolutionize your marketing attribution strategies.

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Journey Visualization Tools: Simplify Customer Journey Mapping on Websites and Apps

No two digital experiences are the same on websites and apps. Journey visualizations, a digital experience analytics tool, cut down on the time and resources required for online customer journey mapping.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to the final part of Medallia’s five-part blog series, Tools of Digital Experience Analytics. Each blog defines and explains the purpose behind a fundamental tool or feature of digital experience analytics. So far, we’ve covered digital experience scores , heatmaps , session replay , and form analytics . And now we’re wrapping up the series with the final blog on journey visualizations tools.)

Common thinking around online customer behavior is that website and app users often follow familiar, defined paths. However, when you look at the journeys visitors actually take, the reality is those journeys are complicated and often different. To truly understand unpredictable online customer journeys and behaviors, journey visualization tools have become essential in today’s digital-first world.

While similar at the surface, journey visualization tools differ from popular tools like funnels, which are commonly included in web or app analytics. Funnels track key metrics, like engagement and traffic, at specific stages in a predefined journey. Whereas journey visualizations track every online customer journey taking place on a website or app. 

What are journey visualization tools?

At the highest level, journey visualization tools identify and visualize the exact paths users take on a website or app. From start to finish, journey visualizations automatically track and map out every web page or app screen that make up a customer’s online journey. This type of tool is often included as a part of a broader digital experience analytics solution.

The primary way journey visualization tools make sense of website and app journeys comes via sunburst visualizations. Sunburst visualizations show every unique path followed by users with an array of journey segments graphed in a circular display. (For definitions of all the key terms related to digital experience, check out our glossary.)  

These visualizations simplify large, complex data sets in an easy-to-digest format to quickly pinpoint bottlenecks or the fastest path to conversion. Beyond that, journey visualization tools also include standard conversion funnels to analyze dropoff and engagement across pivotal online customer journeys.

More advanced journey visualization tools come equipped with capabilities like behavior detection to reveal engagement, frustration, and confusion at key points in each journey. Additionally, this type of tool may be complemented by a digital experience score to quantify the experiences for each journey segment, along with session replays and heatmaps to investigate specific journey issues on certain pages. 

Why should you use journey visualization tools?

As websites and apps take on a more prominent role in customer experience, mapping out and improving online customer journeys have become critical. In fact, 93% of leading customer experience organizations consider a journey-based approach a high priority. And journey visualizations make adopting a journey-based approach both practical and effective.

Without a journey visualization tool, online customer journey mapping requires tedious, time-consuming efforts tracking metrics across pages to determine areas in journeys worth improving. However, journey visualization tools can take care of that for you. Automatically tracking and mapping out those online customer journeys, it cuts down on both the resources and inaccuracies of manual online customer journey mapping.

Beyond the efficiency perks, journey visualization tools help identify the quality of digital experiences across each unique journey. And with a digital experience score rating the quality of web or app journeys , you can easily distinguish between high-performing versus low-performing journeys. Paired with behavior detection, you can quickly pinpoint lackluster journeys eliciting instances of frustration and confusion. 

On top of that, a journey visualization tool allows you to assess how factors affect visitor navigation, like comparing journeys for specific personas or segments​, choosing whether to view sessions by URL or page groups, and viewing journeys across any time period. All these capabilities make finding and fixing even the most subtle journey friction a manageable undertaking.

How should you use journey visualization tools?

Although journey visualizations simplify online customer journey mapping, it takes a savvy user to make the most of this digital experience analytics tool. You shouldn’t jump straight into the journey visualizations, it takes a well thought-out plan to make the most of this tool.

Best practice is to turn to a journey visualization tool when metrics like abandonment, conversion, and digital experience scoring dip across your website or app. Follow this simple seven-step process to maximize journey visualization insights and optimize digital experience: 

• Monitor web and app analytics metrics to discover when friction arises in online journeys
• Identify good versus bad journeys with a digital experience score rating each path
• Pinpoint specific paths and pages generating frustration and confusion with behavior detection
• Use segmentation filters to narrow insights around specific journey criteria and experiences
• Check funnels to uncover dropoff in paths leading to conversion pages
• Review sunburst visualizations to determine journeys worth investigating and optimizing
• Investigate high-friction journeys by using tools like heatmaps and session replay

What matters most when choosing a journey visualization tool?

Improving online customer journeys across websites and apps has become foundational to customer experience strategy. As a result, journey mapping and journey visualization tools have become a high priority. But what capabilities actually matter? Here are the six features you should seek in the solutions you consider: 

• Sunburst visualizations to automatically show user paths for easy journey mapping on websites and apps
• Funnels to track dropoff and engagement at various stages of conversion journeys
• A digital experience score to automatically determine experience quality of every journey 
• Behavior detection to instantly pinpoint journeys and pages causing experience issues 
• Segmentation to customize path analysis and focus on specific journeys of interest
• Forensic tools integrations like session replay and heatmaps for granular experience investigations

Download “Digital Innovation Leaders: How 6 companies transformed their businesses to stay ahead of changing consumer behavior” to learn how you can prepare for what’s next in today’s digital-first world.

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Visualize Like a Pro. Top Customer Journey Mapping Tools

mins to read

Whether you are building a new product, developing extra features, or finding ways to improve your retention rates, a customer journey map is a great tool. As a design agency , we know well how valuable can be an insight from a customer journey map that is based on good research.

Creating a customer journey map requires previous research, analysis, interviews. After that you are left with loads of information that is hard to present to the team. Here you can see the best tools that can help you visualize the map and make it a pretty picture that you would really enjoy analyzing.

Customer Journey Map (CJM). Why Does It Matter?

Through the customer journey map , you can truly empathize with your users. It shows not only how people interact with the product, but also what they feel and desire. The graph shows clearly the moments of truth that make you lose or acquire clients.

Before you start working on a customer journey map, think of a concrete problem that you want to address. Make sure to include real customers in the process, do not rely on your team to provide all the information about clients’ feelings, desires, and actions.

Once you’ve gathered the information, you start thinking of a way to visualize it. The tools are various: we’ll start with the most basic ones and go on with the software created exclusively for customer journey maps visualization.

Building Customer Journey Map Using Tools That Are at Hand

Craft tools.

Let’s say that you plan a workshop with your team and customers to create a customer journey map. You expect to end up with a beautiful color scheme, where everything is crystal clear. There are plenty of tools for that, as you will see below. However, when you are working live with a group of people who are probably unfamiliar with those tools, a good old whiteboard and stickers can be your best choice.

Start building the stages of the journey during live sessions using hand-made materials. You can use this template to structure your ideas. Later, when the content is ready, you can make a pretty digital version to work with in the future.

Computer Programs

The customer journey map does not always have to be that huge graph with illustrations and icons. You can build a cjm using just Excel : if you are more of a text person than an illustration person, that would work just fine. Here is a simple customer journey map by Nielsen Norman Group, made in spreadsheets.

You can create a customer journey map in (almost) any visual editor that you know: Adobe Illustrator, XD, Figma, Sketch, etc. There are some free customer journey templates that give you a prepared set of elements to fill in with your data. Check out this template for Adobe XD .

You can also try free customer journey map templates for Sketch . And if you want to go really fancy, use this interactive template for Figma . The clickable elements allow you to fit in lots of data and metrics, including numerous personas and integrating user flows. 

Customer Journey Map Software. Web Apps

There is a bunch of software made specifically for creating customer journey maps. They allow you to use pre-made templates, visual elements to get a result that looks put-together without thinking too much of design. We’ll give you a brief overview of the most popular and useful customer journey map tools, both paid and free.

With UXPressia you can build customer journey maps, personas, and impact maps. You can choose one of many templates for any type of product – from coffee stores to online banking apps . Also, a separate template for employee journey maps is worth notice: remember that employee experience directly influences the customer experience. The app has a high rank on review websites and got the Best Value award from Capterra among Customer Journey Mapping Tools Software (2020).

UXPressia offers a free version with limited functionality and a paid one for $24 a month. The paid version allows many team members to work on the project at a time.

With Smaply, you can create a customer journey map from scratch or use one of the templates based on different types of cjms: service blueprint, communication journey, empathy journey map, and comparison between different personas. The interface is clean and minimalist. The template is black and white and basic, so adding the right colors and visual effects is up to you.

Smaply is another cloud-based tool. Other than visualizing customer journey maps, you can create personas, and stakeholders maps. The price is $25/month, and a free trial is available.

Custellence

The distinct feature of Custellence is that it emphasizes the use of the customer journey map as a change plan. You can mark right away what needs to be removed or created: great feature to remind you that cjm is about finding weak points and improving, not just visualization of data.

The templates are very detailed and each is tailored for a specific kind of business. Take a look at this template for customer journey map of retail: numerous lines, and each of them has a few sub-lanes to make your map as detailed as possible.

This is a web app and the price is higher than the competitors’. The free version allows you to make only one map without exporting it. Paid plans start at $30/month.

Miro is a very versatile tool, suitable not only for customer journey maps, but also for agile, retrospectives, mood boards, and many more. Miro is a digital whiteboard.

The website offers various templates for different uses. They are rather basic (like an actual whiteboard), but the service gives lots of possibilities for customizing. In our agency , we use Miro often for visualizing customer journey maps, as it has a perfect balance of the default instruments and the flexibility of their use.

The software is cloud-based. If you would use it only for customer journey maps, the free version with 3 boards would probably be enough. If you decide to use it for other projects, it is only $10/month and has many integration options.

Take a look at this template to see what your cjm may look like in Miro.

Visio is a diagram-building tool by Microsoft. Paid options start at $5 per month (only web app) and go up to $15 per month (web and desktop app). The service is built on Microsoft cloud, and the desktop version is not available for Mac.

Apart from customer journey maps, Visio is great for flowcharts, Gantt charts, and all sorts of diagrams. See this template for Visio .

Like Visio, Gliffy is suitable for workflows and diagrams as well as customer journey maps. The templates are rather basic and to make a detailed cjm, you have to add parameters and metrics on your own.

The paid version is $7.99 per month (cheaper if you purchase it for a team). The free version allows only a limited amount of graphs. Also note that the documents created in the free version are public, so if you need privacy, opt for another version.

Comparison Table

Collecting Feedback Software

A simple customer journey map is built based on research and interviews with users. However, if you want to go further with collecting data, test the insights of your cjm, and see how the changes work, you may need special software that helps collecting and analyzing feedback.

In this article, we focus on the tools for visualization, but if you are serious about improving customer experience, check out Clarabridge and CXsuite.

There are a bunch of tools for visualization of customer journey maps, apart from the few ones listed in this article. Some of those you already have at hand. Some you’ve used numerous times before with different objectives. We have collected some good examples of customer journey maps so you can see which one works best for your type of business.

Experts in customer journey mapping claim that the pretty picture is not the main focus, rather it is the process that drives changes. However, a nice visualization is always a plus.

Now that you know more about your customers, learn how to make them happier with these 6 strategies for customer success .

Masha Panchenko

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7 ways to analyze a customer-journey map.

March 22, 2020 2020-03-22

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A customer-journey map is an infographic visualization of the process that a persona segment goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Journey maps are useful in communicating the general narratives and themes uncovered by longitudinal research done to understand how a customer works toward a goal over time.  

This journey map includes all the information necessary for understanding and analyzing the user experience of shopping for a new car. In this illustration, we have intentionally left out one key piece of the map —  the insights and opportunities gleaned from the map. This section is often found at the bottom of a customer-journey map and highlights how the organization can optimize and improve the customer journey.

In this article we will demonstrate how to analyze a journey map and, thus, how to identify the insights and opportunities for improvement.

In This Article:

Analyzing the journey map.

Longitudinal research and analysis is necessary to create a map like this.

Every journey map will look different because the research insights and the resulting visual depend entirely on the context of the journey, its underlying activities, and the persona completing it. That said, there are 7 common elements you can and should look for when analyzing a customer journey.

1. Look for points in the journey where expectations are not met.

Users go into an interaction with an organization with certain expectations. When the interaction does not meet their expectations, you see pain points in a customer journey. To identify these instances, first reflect on who the persona is. Ask yourself; what is important to this persona, where did she come from before this journey, what has she seen and what does she know already? Putting yourself in the user’s mind space will allow you to understand which interactions conflict with user’s prior ideas and expectations.

Of course, you should look for places where users verbalized their concerns, but also use your logic to assess interactions with no explicit complaints or negative comments.

Sometimes people bring their expectations into the journey from other experiences. For example, users expect that when they pull up to a hotel, the bellman will open the door, because that’s what always happens when you pull up to a hotel with a bellman — it’s the mental model that they have formed for that situation. Some organizations set inaccurate expectations early in the customer journey. Others don’t set expectations at all, forcing users to make assumptions and possibly be disappointed if those assumptions prove wrong.

Find the trouble spot and work backward to identify the triggering factor and how the expectations were (or were not) set. Work to resolve the conflict between expectations and reality.

In the car-buying journey map, there were two clear points where Eric’s expectations weren’t met. These instances are annotated using red numbered circles.

2. Identify any unnecessary touchpoints or interactions.

Are there any steps in the customer journey that could be eliminated in order to streamline the total experience? Look for logical ways to optimize the process to reduce total interaction cost . That may mean removing an existing step that is no longer needed or adding something to the experience that bring efficiency to the overall journey.

3. Identify the low points or points of friction.

When you step back and look at the whole journey, you should be able to see where the user experiences the most pain or friction. These points are usually represented visually as dips in the journey diagram. See where the journey reaches its lowest point and compare it to other low points in the journey. These should be on your shortlist of optimizations. That said, not all fixes are created equal: there can be dependencies and constraints involved. Work with your team to decide which low points should be addressed first and which can come later. (Because of the peak-end rule , the lowest point in a journey will have a particularly ruinous impact on the branding effect of the user experience.)

4. Pinpoint high-friction channel transitions.

Many journeys take place across devices or channels . A lot of times the journey breaks down and friction appears when users change channels. For example, a user receives a newsletter about a specific offering from a company. She’s interested in the offering and clicks the call to action in the newsletter. However, instead of being taken to a landing page detailing that particular offer, the user lands on the company’s homepage. At this point, she has to put in effort to find the offer.  Or, another user may begin filling out a form on the mobile phone, but wants to complete it on the laptop when it becomes too laborious. Doing so means losing work and starting over. These channel-transition pain points should be identified and streamlined. Think outside of the box: rather than forcing users to work hard, build a bridge for them to get to the other side easily.

5. Evaluate time spent. In your journey map, provide time durations for the major stages of the journey.

This information gives you another lens for analyzing the experience.  Assess how long it takes users to achieve the underlying substeps. Are these times appropriate? Time spent often correlates to the amount of user effort. Call out areas of the journey where time and effort are problematic.

6. Look for moments of truth.

Some points in the journey are so important that the rest of the experience might hinge on them. Think about the personas’ attitudes, needs, and priorities. Is there a make–or–break moment in the journey for that persona? This moment may be where your research shows a lot of emotion or where you see a strong divergence between the paths different users take. If this moment goes well, it can save the experience. For example, think of the first time a car-insurance customer files a claim. She’s been paying her policy responsibly, and now she needs her insurance to come through seamlessly for her. The first interaction in the claim experience might be a moment of truth for this persona. If it goes wrong, the user may move to a competitor. Be sure to look for moments of truth and to call attention to them when you find them.

7. Identify high points or points where expectations are met or exceeded.

Good UX practitioners should always balance their analysis by pointing out things that are working well in any experience. Look at the high points in the journey — the interactions that users are happy with. Where do they express positive thoughts and emotions? These insights are also valuable. You may be able to amplify them or recreate similar experiences elsewhere in the journey.

Whether you’re evaluating journey research for the creation of a map or digesting a map created by another party, it’s important to know what to look for. As the creator of the map, you’ll want to identify and call attention to these important elements through visual emphasis and storytelling. As a consumer of the visualization, apply this checklist like lenses through which to view the map in order to find the most actionable insights.

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Visualizing Customer Journey Using Sankey Diagram

Customer journey mapping is the visual process of plotting a customer’s journey and analyzing their interactions with a brand.

This helps companies look at their business from the customer’s viewpoint. That, in turn, helps a business get insights into a customer’s pain points to be able to resolve them. This can be accomplished by preparing charts , heatmaps, and other interactive visualizations, including the Sankey Diagram.

But running analyses with some numbers in a sheet for this kind of mapping does not inspire much thought. What is needed then is a well-constructed, easy-to-grasp visualization to understand how your customers move and interact with your brand.

According to the survey, the value of the global data visualization market was USD 4874.4 million in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 6570.7 million by the end of 2026, with a CAGR of 5.1% over the forecast period (2021-2026).

There are several interactive visualizations available for this purpose such as charts, heat maps, and so on.

Also on the list is the Sankey Diagram, offering a better understanding of the complex data needed for customer path analytics, though it has its own limitations that we shall discuss later in the post.

This data visualization tool provides you with a visual representation of the data flows involved in a system, including the flow of energy, materials, energy, and even a customer’s journey in marketing.

Table of Contents

What is sankey diagram, main components of sankey diagram, what is a customer journey map, mapping buyer journeys with sankey diagrams, use of sankey diagrams across industry, benefits of using sankey diagrams, drawbacks of using a sankey diagram, how to create sankey diagram to map customer’s journey.

As we had said in one of our earlier blog posts on the Sankey Diagram, this type of visualization is generally used to depict “a flow” from one set of values to the next.

They are so named after an Irishman, Capt. Matthew Sankey first used them in a publication on the energy efficiency of a steam engine in 1898.

Check Complex Data Visually with Sankey Diagram

You can use a Sankey map to visually demonstrate complex processes, focusing on a single aspect or resource. Such types of flow diagrams are useful when you’re making a decision about energy, time, or money.

The main components of the Sankey Diagram consist of the following:

1. Nodes: Representing the events in each path, a “Node” is an element linked by “Flows”

2. Flows: They link the nodes. Each flow is specified by the names of its target and source nodes in the “from” and “to” fields. The value in the width field defines the thickness of the flow.

3. Drop-offs: A drop-off is a flow without a target node, and refers to the link that ends at the present node. It occurs when at least one of the paths continues beyond a node.

Essentially, if you need to see where a certain amount is coming from and where it is going, and any of the in-between steps, you can use a Sankey Diagram.

They also offer the advantage of supporting multiple viewing levels, so users may get a macro-level view, view specific details, or generate interactive views.

A user analysis diagram allows you to drill down at any level and can also determine the level of depth that works best.

The first thing to notice about a Sankey Diagram is that it has thick lines and thin lines. The thick lines are arrows. The thick lines show how much of something goes into or comes out of a system.

The thin lines show what happens to the quantity of the thing after it enters or leaves the system.

Before delving deeper into the Sankey Diagram let’s first understand what exactly is a customer journey map . As we said earlier in this post, it is a visual representation of the buyer’s movement across all touchpoints of your brand.

The latter is in the form of a website, social media channels, live chat, and even offline channels.

This customer journey mapping helps businesses get insights into common customer pain points which, in turn, allows them to better optimize and personalize the customer experience.

An example: This kind of user journey can help you scientifically understand why a customer abandoned his cart on your e-commerce website and reduce such instances.

Was it because the payment gateway was too cumbersome to use? Or because the link to the gateway showed a 404 error? Another example could be a buyer shopping for a specific item on your website, then moving on to one of your social media channels to continue his shopping there.

Sankey Diagrams and Sankey charts were originally used for visualization and the analysis of energy flows but they are a great tool to depict the flow of money, time, and resources, too .

Directional arrows between the nodes show the flows in a process, production system, or supply chain. What they help any business to do is to effectively communicate the data-based messaging to external or internal stakeholders like your customers or marketing teams, respectively.

In fact, a Sankey Diagram or user journey diagram can be very useful in digital marketing analysis.

How to use Sankey Diagrams? Sankey diagrams can be used across many industries and sectors. It is frequently used in Finance for tracking cash outflows and inflows, expenditure, and finances.

In Marketing it is used by the data analytics team to cut out the guesswork and measure the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns in a more scientific way.

Sankey diagrams are also used in the Healthcare sector to stitch together a map of the patient’s journey – from the first consultation to the end of treatment.

Simply collecting your customer’s behavior is not enough for any business. It needs to analyze the same for actionable insights. Sankeys can do that by:

• Supporting multiple viewing levels wherein one can drill down to granular insights or see specific detail. Sankeys offer multiple viewing levels. Using different types of views, users can look at high-level details, view specifics, or generate interactive views. If one of your team members likes to drill down, many tools let you share that functionality without having to spend extra time on the creator’s end. Additionally, you can choose the depth that works best for your purposes.
• Making your most prolific shoppers stand out. With a Sankey diagram, you can cross-check how many times a customer has viewed your product to find out if they are interested in it. Interested customers will read the comments and reviews. Additionally, they may add it to their cart but not buy it.
• Showing areas that can be improved upon. Why do some of your shoppers abandon their shopping carts? This is one such visualization that a Sankey Diagram can provide.
• Showing areas with the largest opportunities. It means using this form of visualization to see which of your products or services are selling like hotcakes, and why.

Express Analytics’ Oyster CDP makes it possible for clients to use a Sankey diagram to visualize their customer journey and analyze the same.  Get in touch  for more information.

• Sankey diagrams get cumbersome to draw when presenting complex data, say with three or more nodes. But this downside can be circumvented today with the availability of open-source tools
• When presenting a Sankey diagram, remember the one golden rule that the width of the lines and arrows represent the actual amounts or volumes of resources. Often, developers make a mistake here
• Overly complex data is a bit difficult to depict using a Sankey Diagram
• Not best for comparison of values

Our in-house data analyst  Mehar Singh Gambhir explains how to actually develop and interpret a Sankey diagram to map a buyer’s journey:

In this particular example of visualizing a customer’s journey throughout his/her buying experience, we start by listing the various touchpoints (nodes) that a customer goes through before a purchase is made.

We have considered a basic e-commerce platform for this exercise, and have depicted its traffic flow based on our experience of using and working with such platforms.

From landing on an online shopping website or opening an app to make a purchase, there are several nodes involved at various stages along which traffic is directed.

A company can track customers proceeding from one buying stage to another, or find out how many of them have left abruptly.

A graphic visualization like the Sankey diagram or alluvial diagram, depicting the flow of traffic across several buying stages, is a handy tool for this purpose.

The nodes at each level can vary based on the company and depending on what data points the company wants to be covered.

A customer’s journey starts from landing on the company’s website or its app from different sources. The most common event cases can be listed as:

• Direct logging into the website/app and browsing products
• Landing via organic search (redirected from a search engine based on a product search without ad/promotion)
• Clicking on an advertisement link from an external website or social media

From our experience of working with various retail firms, these are the most common data points and links considered for mapping a customer’s journey in a Sankey diagram.

Based on whether the customer has the app installed, the next level involves browsing from a mobile app or the website. From here on, there are several possibilities of how this journey may end:

• If they are really interested in the product, they view the product features in detail along with its price, while some leave without any further activity
• Some may also read the reviews and ratings about the product and then add it to their carts, leave the page or click on some other product
• Others may only be visiting to review their previous purchase. These link helps to understand customer behavior online and how he reacts at different steps
• Some customers may proceed to checkout after adding items to their cart, while others may shop for more products and add further to their cart
• Some customers may abandon their carts or clear their cart and exit. Even at the checkout point, it does happen that some customers decide against purchasing. Or, they may encounter some issue during payment, which means loss of a sale

This information can be used to find the weak links in the website/app and make respective improvements.

So, once the nodes and links were finalized, we started building this diagram. There are various tools available online through libraries from Python, R, and Javascript. For our purposes, we used the Plotly library from Python to construct the Sankey diagram.

The first step was to count the nodes (n) and assign each node a number from 0 to n-1, followed by storing the labels for each node in numerical order in a list.

We designed this visualization with 15 nodes with 7 different levels and a total of 29 links between them. The distribution of traffic from one node to another is based on dummy data, but the actual traffic flow can be extracted from raw data by some processing.

The nodes involved are:

• Landing From(0)
• External Ad/Link(1)
• Direct Search(2)
• Organic Search (3)
• Mobile App(4)
• Official Website(5)
• View product & details(6)
• Read Reviews (7)
• Click on another product (8)
• Add to Cart (9)
• Checkout(10)
• Clear Cart(11)
• Purchase(12)
• Give Reviews/Ratings(13)

After defining the nodes and their labels, separate lists of source and target nodes were created at each level for all the links.

Do not forget that the list of source and target nodes should be in the same order as the links. Another list for defining the weight of the links following the same order is called “value” and that depends on the amount of traffic that moves from a source to a target node.

Then while plotting the actual figure, we defined the colors and the width for the nodes as well as the links based on what information to depict that combination.

Once all these steps were completed, this is the Sankey diagram we created:

The diagram is quite interactive in the Python viewer, and by hovering the mouse over nodes one can look at the incoming weight and outgoing weights.

In Conclusion : A much under-rated visualization tool, Sankey diagrams, even today, can be used for visualization of events like a customer journey. They can be used to communicate your messaging effectively. Though a little cumbersome to draw, some of the best ways of creating Sankey diagrams are D3’s Sankey toolkit by Michael Bostock, charts in R, or using Pandas library in Python or Plotly, another Python graphing library.

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