customer journey mapping focuses on the

Customer Journey Mapping

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

USE THIS PLAY TO...

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

Running the play

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

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

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

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

Set the stage (5 min)

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

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

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

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

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

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

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

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

• E.g., "Provide structure"

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

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

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

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

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

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

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

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

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

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

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

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

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

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

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

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

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAP A FUTURE STATE

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

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

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

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

KEEP IT REAL

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

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

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

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

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

Proof of concept

Project teams.

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

Customer centricity

Service teams.

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

Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

The thing is — understanding your customer base can be very challenging. Even when you think you’ve got a good read on them, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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While it isn’t possible to predict every experience with 100% accuracy, customer journey mapping is a convenient tool for keeping track of critical milestones that every customer hits. In this post, I’ll explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create one, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer’s journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service.

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

Many businesses that I’ve worked with were confused about the differences between the customer’s journey and the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user.

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand’s place within the buyer’s journey. These are the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer’s journey. When you create a customer journey map, you’re taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey instead of leaving it up to chance.

For example, at HubSpot, our customer’s journey is divided into three stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

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 your customer’s life, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and 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 recommend creating a buyer persona . This persona is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics of 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 ready.

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

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

You want feedback from people interested in purchasing your products and services 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 recommend narrowing your focus to one or two.

Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of a customer taking a particular path with your company. 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.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map. These touchpoints can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

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 customer 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 must also 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.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference? [+ Examples]

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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When and how to create customer journey maps.

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

What is a customer journey map, deconstruction of a customer journey map, why do you need a journey map and when should you have one, key elements of customer journey maps, rules for creating successful journey maps.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.

Storytelling and visualization are essential facets of journey mapping because they are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise and that creates a shared vision. Fragmented understanding is chronic in organizations where KPIs are assigned and measured per individual department or group because many organizations do not ever piece together the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical aim of journey mapping, because without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Journey mapping creates a holistic view of customer experience, and it’s this process of bringing together and visualizing disparate data points that can engage otherwise disinterested stakeholders from across groups and spur collaborative conversation and change.

Zone A: The lens provides constraints for the map by assigning (1) a persona (“who”) and (2) the scenario to be examined (“what”).

Zone B: The heart of the map is the visualized experience, usually aligned across (3) chunkable phases of the journey. The (4) actions, (5) thoughts, and (6) emotional experience of the user has throughout the journey can be supplemented with quotes or videos from research.

Zone C: The output should vary based on the business goal the map supports, but it could describe the insights and pain points discovered, and the (7) opportunities to focus on going forward, as well as (8) internal ownership.

Journey maps should always be created to support a known business goal. Maps that do not align to a business goal will not result in applicable insight. The goal could be an external issue, such as learning about a specific persona’s purchasing behaviors, or an internal issue, such as addressing lack of ownership over certain parts of the customer experience. Some potential business goals that journey mapping could be applied toward are listed below.

Shift a company’s perspective from inside-out to outside-in. If an organization lets internal processes and systems drive decisions that affect customer experience, a journey map could help turn the culture of that organization by refocusing on the thoughts, actions and emotions of customers. Journey mapping sheds light on real human experiences that often organizations know very little about.

Break down silos to create one shared, organization-wide vision. Because journey maps create a vision of the entire customer journey, they become a tool for creating cross-department conversation and collaboration. Journey mapping could be the first step in building an organization-wide plan of action to invest in customer experience, as it helps answer the question, “Where do we start?” by highlighting areas of friction.

Assign ownership of key touchpoints to internal departments. Often, areas of inconsistencies and glitches in customer journeys exist simply because no internal team has been tasked with ownership of that element. Journey maps can create clarity around alignment of departments or groups with different stages or key touchpoints in the journey that need addressing.

Target specific customers. Journey maps can help teams focus in on specific personas or customers, whether that means understanding differences or similarities across the journeys of multiple personas, prioritizing a high-value persona or exploring ways to target a new type of customer.

Understand quantitative data. If you are aware through analytics or other quantitative data that something specific is happening—maybe online sales are plateauing or an online tool is being underutilized—journey mapping can help you find out why.

While journey maps can (and should) take a wide variety of forms, certain elements are generally included:

Point of view. First and foremost, choose the “actor” of the story. Who is this journey map about? For example, a university might choose either students or faculty members, both of which would result in very different journeys. “Actors” usually aligns with personas, if they exist. As a guideline, when creating a basic journey map, use one point of view per map in order to provide a strong, clear narrative.

Scenario. Next, determine the specific experience to map. This could be an existing journey, where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet. Make sure to clarify the user’s goal during this experience. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events, such as purchasing behavior or taking a trip.

Actions, mindsets, and emotions. At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies . The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose of the map. Is the purpose to evaluate or design an entire, broad purchasing cycle or a contained system?

Touchpoints and channels. The map should align touchpoints (times when the actor in the map actually interacts with the company) and channels (methods of communication or service delivery, such as the website or physical store) with user goals and actions. These elements deserve a special emphasis because they are often where brand inconsistencies and disconnected experiences are uncovered.

Insights and ownership. The entire point of the journey-mapping process is to uncover gaps in the user experience (which are particularly common in omnichannel journeys), and then take action to optimize the experience. Insights and ownership are critical elements that are often overlooked. Any insights that emerge from journey mapping should be explicitly listed. If politically possible, also assign ownership for different parts of the journey map, so that it’s clear who’s in charge of what aspect of the customer journey. Without ownership, no one has responsibility or empowerment to change anything.

Even with all the above critical elements included, two journey maps could look completely different, yet both be perfectly suitable for the context in which they were designed.Tradeoffs in scope, focus, and breadth vs. depth are required when deciding on what elements to include. To make informed decisions on those tradeoffs, consider the following:

• What level of detail is needed in order to tell the complete story?
• What elements (such as device, channel, encountered content) are also necessary in order to provide the most truthful narrative?
• Is the purpose of this journey map to diagnose issues with a current experience or to design a new experience?
• What’s the balance between external actions (on the customer side) and internal actions (on the organization side)?
• Who will be using this journey map?

Successful journey maps require more than just the inclusion of the “right” elements. Journey mapping should be a collaborative process informed by well-defined goals, and built from research. It requires hard work to keep the process on the right track and to build the buy-in needed to evangelize the insights it provides. Below are some tips for making sure that the process starts and stays in the right direction:

Establish the “why" and the “what.”  First, identify the business goal that the journey map will support. Make sure there are clear answers to these basic key questions before you begin the process:

• What business goal does this journey map support?
• Who will use it?
• Who is it about and what experience does it address?
• How will it be shared?

Base it on truth. Journey maps should result in truthful narratives, not fairy tales. Start with gathering any existing research, but additional journey-based research is also needed to fill in the gaps that the existing research won’t cover. This is a qualitative-research process. While quantitative data can help support or validate (or aid in convincing stakeholders who may view qualitative data as “fuzzy”), quantitative data alone cannot build a story .

Collaborate with others. The activity of journey mapping (not the output itself) is often the most valuable part of the process, so involve others. Pull back the curtain and invite stakeholders from various groups to be a part of compiling the data and building the map.

Don’t jump to visualization. The temptation to create an aesthetic graphic or jump to design can lead to beautiful yet flawed journey maps. Make sure the synthesis of your data is complete and well-understood before moving to creating the visual.

Engage others with the end product. Don’t expect to get “buy-in” and foster interest in your journey map by simply sending a lovely graphic as an email attachment. Make it a living interactive document that people can be a part of. Bring up your story in meetings and conversations to promote a narrative that others believe in and begin to reference. One idea is to create a journey-mapping showroom where anyone not on the direct team can come experience the process and resulting artifacts.

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

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

Conduct Research

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

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

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

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

Make an Empathy Map

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

Sketch the Journey

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

Iterate and Refine

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

Share with Stakeholders

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

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

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

Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

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

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

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

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

Resource Intensity

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

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

Risk of Bias

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

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

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Customer Behaviors

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

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

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

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

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

Misalignment with Customer Needs

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

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

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

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

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

Over-Reliance on the Map

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

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

Data Privacy Concerns

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

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

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

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

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

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

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

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

Learn more from this insightful video:

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

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

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

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

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

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

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

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

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

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

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Everything you need to know before customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Another study conducted by Esteban Kolsky (a customer strategist, researcher, and consultant) shows, among other things, that customers are looking for a guaranteed quality experience.

Kolsky’s results show that only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers regularly complains and that the rest simply churn; he also finds that 67% of consumers cite bad experiences as the reason for churn. Ultimately, at least 91% of unhappy customers will simply leave without a complaint.

Currently, most companies are struggling to get customers’ attention and acquire new-comers, but this is not a financially sound strategy: “it is 6-7X more expensive to attract new customers than to keep existing customers,” according to the research.

That means that the real competition starts in the middle of the marketing funnel and that the focus really needs to be on improving the experience for existing customers. The question then becomes: How best to implement strategies that will be successful in this area?

What is customer journey mapping?

The customer journey map (CJM) is one of the main tools that allows us to understand and improve customer experience. This video from Peer Insight shows a sample Customer Journey Map in action; but in essence, it is a graph which illustrates the steps customers go through: from initial contact, through the process of engagement, and hopefully into long-term loyalty. It may focus on a particular part of the story or give an overview of the entire customer experience as they interact with a company — whether it is a product, a website, a retail store, a service, or any combination of these. It usually treats individuals as real or potential customers, so it shows a path how people either become customers or leave.

The more interaction steps are described, the more complicated — but also the more informative and useful — such a map becomes.

There is an endless number of customer journey map templates, but a basic template includes a specific persona, the steps beginning-to-end of the customer experience (including touchpoints), and the potential emotional highs and lows. Other parts of the journey are optional and depend on your objective.

As Paul Boag, a user experience consultant, speaker & author of Digital Adaptation, says, participation in creating customer journey map is useful for all involved in product development :

However, the finished map could be simplified and expanded to the entire company under the condition of non-disclosure.

The process of customer journey mapping

The process of customer journey mapping varies from one company to another. Usually, it depends on the resources you have (people, time, equipment, etc.), the template, and the facilitator’s experience. Below you can find one of thousands of possible scenarios for customer journey mapping.

Step 1: Gathering information

During this phase, you have to define a customer persona that is relevant to your goal and the scope of activities you would like to assess, and then gather the maximum data about this persona. How does one gather this data? You will want both quantitative and qualitative information to gain the deepest insight into your customer.The more data you can get — the more chance you have to understand customer values and experience correctly.

The more data you can get — the more chance you have to understand customer values and experience correctly.

Quantitative customer research like surveys, testing, and web analytics will show you conversion rate and customers’ pain points. While this is important, it is almost useless without qualitative research that complements your data and gives deep understanding of customers’ emotions, goals, attitudes or motivations. Qualitative research includes interviews, focus groups, and field studies. Kerry Bodine , customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, even suggests inviting customers to a journey mapping workshop where you can ask them directly about their thoughts and feelings at each step of the journey.

Step 2: Introducing the team

To kick things off, start with an introduction phase to ensure that everyone is on the same page before you begin. Set up a date for the workshop, create a shared space, and get together a cross-functional team that represents different departments and seniority levels.

Uncontrollable meetings neither help your team be productive, nor boost creativity. Usually, they lead to chaos, where everybody is speaking at the same time, or someone is starting to dominate in the conversation. Nancy Halpern , Principal at KNH Associates suggests to develop “the rules of the road” that limit each person’s speaking time to prevent anyone from dominating.

Create a shared space to get together a cross-functional team:

Once everyone has gathered, explain the stakes and the goal of the workshop and agree upon the schedule. Since customer journey mapping is a kind of brainstorming activity, consider additional exercises that will help you to warm up the participants or refresh them if they reach a deadlock.

Step 3: Brainstorming

Plan for the lion’s share of the time to be the brainstorming activity. Select a brainstorming technique  that you feel will best help your cross-functional team generate new ideas for future customer experience.

The discussion will start with a briefing about the customer persona and then an analysis of the research.

Then, the team should generate as many touchpoints as possible and consider relevant channels between them. A touchpoint is a point of contact between the customer and your product.

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to strengthen the relationships with the customer and move towards the greatest customer experience. Usually, they are mapped either as a timeline , a tree , a spider or a wheel .

It is important to let your team “tell the story.” Do not interpret user feedback; rather, let your team see the whole picture by first capturing the stories via whatever creatively makes the most sense: stickers, mapping using flowcharts, writing stories with text, illustrating with pictures, acting if necessary — whatever works!

Visualization tips from @UXlady

“Use arrows to illustrate connection type between touchpoints”.

Direct connection. One task leads on to the next.

Bidirectional connection. One task leads to the next, but user can go back.

Controlled evaluation. User moves between different variables in a controlled environment.

Open exploration. User moves between different variables, related or not.

Facilitate the process so that maximum attention can be devoted to gathering touchpoints because they determine CX and what customers think of your service. Touchpoints and the path between them are vital because they are the exact places where we see users leaving.

While brainstorming, try to map as many existing and potential touchpoints as possible and encourage your team to put themselves in the shoes of the persona when analyzing.

Step 4: Illustrating

After you have allowed sufficient time for brainstorming, the team is ready for the illustration phase, where we combine the results into one map. Each touchpoint is accompanied by specific information such as:

Make sure that even if you used a physical whiteboard for the customer journey mapping, someone is responsible for digitizing the final layout, because it should be an editable and shareable piece of work.

While digitizing your customer journey map, you are free to invent your template or use one of the thousands from the web. We use Miro template, which allows us to collaborate in real-time from any place and share the results with the entire company, including remote employees.

Step 5: Creating an action plan & implementation

After the map is ready, analyze whether each touchpoint is convenient and gives value to the customer. The gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received should be your action plan . An effective action plan should cover deadlines, responsibilities, budget, KPIs and success criteria.

In Miro brainstorm touchpoints and barriers using Sticker tool , because it is easy to copy them and transfer to sticky notes backlog, prioritize using tags or Emojis, discuss and track progress via mentions in comments .

Step 6: Revising your CJM

New popular tools, behavioral patterns and communication channels arise almost every month, and the customer journey map needs to be adapted accordingly. Consider establishing a standard schedule for revising your customer journey map. For example, it may be once per quarter. During the revision process, point out what may have changed and what KPIs have been achieved. If there are gaps or red KPIs, another brainstorming session starts. Online tools like Miro  (from $10 per month), Touchpoint Dashboard (from $65 monthly) and UX360 (from $500 monthly) will save you time on the illustration phase if you plan to repeatedly revise your CJM.

10 reasons why CJM improves CX process and generates ROI

Now that you have an idea of what CJM is, and how to go about creating one, it is important to understand why implementing this process is so necessary for a company that wants to become or remain competitive in today’s changing market.

CJM shows who, where, when and how the customer interacts with the product or service, making the experience as transparent as possible.

CJM highlights the customer and what they value because it focuses on customer needs and feelings at every stage of interaction.

CJM helps you design the most economical system for lasting value.

CJM leads not only to improvements in current features but also showcases opportunities for innovation, allowing for “a-ha!” moments.

CJM allow the team to optimize costs because it highlights priorities and areas not valued by the customers so that you can relocate resources to the most critical gaps or to the touchpoints most likely to “convert” a customer.

CJM examines the brand promise that you sell to customers through many channels (for example, a complicated sign up form doesn’t correlate with an “effortless” characteristic).

CJM shows opportunities for improvement because the map reveals barriers. It examines whether the customer life cycle is in a logical order, or if there are gaps between the desired customer experience and the one that is actually received.

CJM helps to develop cross business alignment across the organization and improve external communication.

CJM, shared with the entire company, makes people who communicate with customers in the touchpoints feel more responsible for the experience they make.

CJM helps you to find ways to differentiate from your competitors.

4 tools similar to the customer journey map

It should now be clear that having some kind of tool for your company to track customer interaction and visualize feedback is vitally important. However, you may be wondering why a customer journey map should be used. Why not a different kind of map, instead?

Several tools look quite similar to the customer journey map, although they serve different purposes and cases:

While the boundaries between the tools are becoming blurred because they all cover related topics, it is not the terminology that should be discussed, but the purposes and goals of each so that you can benefit from the tools to the fullest.

Basically, sales journeys, service blueprints , and process maps describe an Inside-out or a “backstage” company strategy. In other words — “how the service works,” “what we do,” and “how we create a set of experiences for a customer.”

On the other hand, the perfect customer journey or user experience map is a part of an Outside-in  world, where we describe “how the service is experienced” or “what happens to the individual” so it helps to adapt the product to the audience behavior.

However, there are no rules prohibiting you from merging parts from those Inside-out and Outside-in worlds, and it positively influences UX and CX when they are used in conjunction, so it could be even more useful to look at the intersection of all diagrams.

To understand how best to use each one, let’s briefly scan the tools in more detail.

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1. user experience focused maps (ux journey maps).

A UX map could be applied to:

The map shows how the experience fits into a person’s life. If a service is being considered, the UX journey map examines user engagement to improve the service and make the user’s life simpler and easier.

Both a UX journey map and a customer journey map look quite similar because they cover the same ideas. However, according to Adam Ramshaw, Australian expert in customer experience management and customer loyalty management, they are different and treating them as if they are the same is confusing for all concerned .

The difference is that the experience map looks at individuals in the context of human behavior, while the customer journey map considers individuals specifically as current or potential customers.

Also according to Adam Ramshaw, the UX journey map doesn’t necessarily describe the interaction stage (like subscribing, purchasing or getting in contact), while the customer journey map covers the whole user path starting from awareness, going through sales and finishing with continuous service usage.

This means that while both styles of map perform essentially the same function, a customer journey map is more specifically tailored to the needs of a company looking to improve customer experience and especially how to improve or increase touchpoints.

The goals of the user differ from the goals of the customer.

2. Marketing automation or sales journeys (sales automation journey maps)

A sales automation journey map helps the marketing team increase sales by mapping the user’s path to becoming a paying customer through the use of triggers, or messages that reach a customer at the right time in order to increase brand awareness and hopefully create a loyalty loop that brings the customer back time and again, as seen in the diagram below.

A sales automation journey map can often become quite complicated because it is not linear, and it needs to predict the path for many different personas to move from consideration to paying customer.

Fortunately, the steps are easily tracked and measured, which is why a sales journey map can help to customize marketing and sales strategy. It can be used to determine which scenario converts customers more frequently and which drives the biggest income from a single customer. The biggest difference from the customer journey map is that the sales journey map does not consider the product at all, merely the marketing needed to connect with the customer.

3. Service blueprint

A service blueprint is a visual tool designed to establish effective business processes. Just like product companies use blueprints to help them construct products and buildings, service businesses use blueprints to ensure all the factors are in place and the processes optimized to provide great customer experience. The service blueprint provides a visual for the person providing a service to see the steps in the process that they need to accomplish behind the scenes.

Since it focuses on the process as opposed to the experience, a service blueprint shows the backstage of the Inside-out world, but will have a lack of information on user experience. Fortunately, a customer journey map covers this problem (mapping the user experience), and these two diagrams are often aligned. In this case, the customer journey map describes a user and acts as a step in the decision cycle, while a service blueprint captures the flow of all business processes impacted by the journey.

4. Process map

The process map is very similar to the service blueprint — it maps the process activities flow, plotting out responsibilities, business standards, and KPIs or success indicators . It’s necessary to map processes if you want to train the staff to a single standard, identify opportunities for improvements or assess the influence of any upcoming changes.

A process map is often developed by specialists or by specific departments because it is important to have expertise in the internal process. This is different from how a CJM should be developed; since a customer journey map is not focused on the internal world, the team can (and should!) be cross-functional, representing all departments involved in the customer experience.

As you can see, any of the diagrams mentioned above could positively influence UX and CX, and the most powerful journey map combines all of these types of maps so that the internal perspective will be developed in conjunction with an understanding of the customer journey.

The most powerful journey map combines all of Inside-Out and Outside-In maps so that the internal perspective will be developed in conjunction with an understanding of the customer journey.

The most common mistakes while customer journey mapping

When developing a customer journey map, many companies that are eager to make use of a powerful tool fall prey to some common and easily correctable mistakes:

Customer journey map is an old document with restricted access

Customer journey map is a single linear path..

Flexibility is the key to great customer experience. Recreating a linear path of the customer experience is a waste of time because customers take many routes to complete a sale .

Customer journey map skips some touchpoints

considering them as occasional or unimportant. To make your map as useful as possible, you need to include every point where your customer comes into contact with your business. According to research from McKinsey & Company, the number of touchpoints is increasing in number by around 20% a year . Do not forget about social media channels, collision touchpoints , and the post-purchasing period!

Customer journey map is created from the company point of view

If you interpret your customer’s experience, you will wind up in a situation where you shoot in the dark because the chances that you guessed right are next to zero. Let the information speak for itself.

One customer journey map for all customers

Each customer persona is unique. You may wish to group them according to research results, but each group requires a dedicated customer journey map.

Customer journey analysis concentrates on the bad experience

It’s true that pain points are vital opportunities to dramatically increase customer satisfaction, but don’t forget to figure out your success points. These play an important role in emotional decision making, and extending the positive experience is an opportunity, too.

Customer journey map doesn’t include an action plan.

The gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received should be your action plan. Set it as a clear expectation of the result — each participant of the workshop should understand it. Then, carry the vision through planning and execution. Don’t neglect this! There are two ways to work with the gaps and barriers: improve the touchpoint or remove it from the process. If you let the situation flow as it is, it will turn out in the frozen or decreasing AARRR metrics because many disappointed users will continue silently leaving. And don’t forget that any successful changes conсern three angles of the process (not one) — customers, business processes, and corporate culture/structure.

A customer journey map is a powerful tool which, if used properly, positively influences customer experience, which in return improves retention and revenue metrics. Although it is not a magic bullet that can solve all your experience problems at once, it helps to add value for your customers.

The tool itself is rather complicated because it deals with behavioral patterns of different audiences and requires discipline. Trying to make the path simpler is tricky because it usually leads to the above-mentioned set of most common mistakes, like creating a CJM from the company perspective.

In Miro we decided that three simple rules make the customer journey map more effective:

Feel free to customize the process of the customer journey mapping and improve it from one revision to another.

Since this article is a collection of best practices across the web and Miro experience, we welcome you to share your thoughts, cases, and references in the comments below! Or check out the links to related templates (like Persona) and other useful links below.

Related templates and links

While creating the customer journey map, the following templates can help you make the process smoother. Use all of the templates together with the customer journey map on one endless online board to get a helicopter view of the problem.

Useful links:

1.  Outstanding customer journey mapping toolkit with several templates ;

2.  UX Project Canvas Template ;

3.  Practical Service Blueprinting Guide .

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What is a customer journey map and how to make your own [examples included]

Written by by Kiran Shahid

Published on  November 2, 2023

Reading time  12 minutes

Do you know what your customers see and do before they purchase from you?

They see your ads, interact with you on social media and explore your website before they buy. All these interactions—from the first ad impression to every “Please help” DM customers send—define your customer journey. To keep up with it all and better inform your social media marketing strategy , create a customer journey map as a blueprint to help you understand your customers at each stage.

Let’s explore what customer journey mapping is and how it helps your brand.

Social Customer Care by Sprout Social

What is customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of each point of interaction your customers have with your company. You can style the map like a flowchart, timeline, table or even on sticky notes.

Creating the map is a great internal exercise. Along the way, you might find pain points or touchpoints you didn’t know existed. A basic customer journey map includes the buying stages (and support touchpoints) a customer goes through.

More detailed maps include:

• actions your customers take
• good and bad emotions your customers experienced
• departments involved in customer touchpoints
• content types you serve your customers
• solutions to pain points

What is a customer touchpoint?

A touchpoint on the customer journey map is the point of interaction a customer has with your brand. It doesn’t need to be a two-way interaction. Seeing a social media ad, getting a branded newsletter and asking a friend for a product recommendation are all touchpoints.

Customers may experience emotions and actions at touchpoints. When someone asks for product recommendations, people might mention your brand. You might not serve that recommendation to them directly but someone still introduces you to a potential customer.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map puts the customer first by giving you a deeper understanding of how your customers interact with your brand. This enable you to make better decisions and improve customer experiences.

When coupled with social media market research , they help brands:

• Provide an overview of the resources your customers use . This helps determine the ROI of customer-centric engagement and service. For example, if blogs are your highest traffic sources, investing more in those channels makes sense.
• Identify content gaps . Pain points without solutions are an excellent source for content ideation and development . If customers need help with a specific product issue, for example, but find limited guidance, create in-depth video tutorials to address this pain point.
• Identify inefficiencies . Maybe some processes are repetitive, or some solutions cause more friction. If your customers have trouble checking out due to a complicated form, for example, simplify it to reduce cart abandonment rates.
• Generate marketing campaign ideas . A clear understanding of customer motivations and journey stages creates targeted campaigns. You can provide them with relevant content and incentives to move them closer to a purchase.
• Guide multiple departments. Streamline content creation, social customer care strategy and messaging optimization across every touchpoint. Departments use the customer journey map as a central reference to ensure a consistent and customer-focused approach.
• Enhance customer communication . Customer journey maps reveal critical touchpoints, like social media interactions, for timely and meaningful engagement. In fact, The Sprout Social Index™ shows 51% of customers believe the most memorable brands on social respond to customers.

Every business and industry has its unique customer journey maps, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Recently, our social team talked about using social media for the customer journey in the auto industry. Watch the video below to hear their discussion on touchpoints, customer experience and how legacy brands are going beyond traditional tactics like targeted ads to tell their story.

It’s a great example of how industry-specific customer journey follows the fundamentals but also has touchpoints specific to them.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is like a detailed travel itinerary for your customer’s experience with your brand. It includes elements like:

1. The buying process

The buying process is the step-by-step path a customer follows to make a purchase decision. It tells you where customers drop off or face obstacles during making purchases.

Use prospecting tools, content management systems (CMS) and behavior analytics tools to gather data. Facebook Shops, Instagram Shopping and TikTok Shop data also provide valuable insights into how customers find products and engage with content via social commerce .

Pro tip : Categorize the journey into stages like awareness, consideration and decision to map these steps horizontally on the customer journey map.

Don’t forget to integrate feedback mechanisms, such as customer surveys or user testing. These offer qualitative insights into the buying process. Understanding the “why” behind customer behavior can be as important as knowing the “what.”

2. Emotions

Emotions show how customers feel at different touchpoints in their interaction with your brand. Emotions heavily influence purchase decisions and brand loyalty which is exactly why it’s so important to include them.

Think about it: When someone has a great experience with your brand and feels happy, they’re more likely to buy from you again. On the flip side, if they feel frustrated or unhappy, they’ll knock on your competitor’s door.

Use surveys or feedback forms to ask customers how they felt during their experience. You might have come across these smileys during your own shopping experience:

These scales are a convenient way to gauge how your customers feel at any point.

Pay attention to what they say on social media and in reviews. You can tell if they’re happy or upset by their tone.

Tools like Sprout Social use AI-driven sentiment analysis to dig into social listening data to give you insights on what people think about your brand.

These insights are handy when creating emotional marketing campaigns . When you know how customers feel, take actionable steps to solve any negative experiences and encourage positive ones.

3. User actions

User actions are the steps customers take when they interact with your brand. They include steps like visiting your website, clicking on a product, adding items to their cart or signing up for your newsletter.

Actions highlight what people do at each stage. Each of these actions tells you something about what customers are interested in and how close they are to making a purchase.

Analytics tools for your website or app are your best bet for such data. These tools show you which pages customers visit, what they click on and where they drop off.

Once you have this information, tailor your marketing efforts and content to align with the actions customers take at each stage.

4. User research

User research examines what customers search for or where they turn for information during the buying process. This part of the customer journey map helps you understand how customers gather information.

For example, in the awareness stage, buyers often rely on search engines like Google to research solutions to their problems. But it’s not just about where they go—it’s about what they’re looking for. Knowing their specific research topics allows you to address their pain points.

What’s the trick? Keep an eye on what customers search for online. Tracking keywords and phrases they use on search engines, as well as social media market research are good places to start.

Also, monitor discussions and conversations to get a deeper understanding of the questions, concerns and topics that are top-of-mind for your potential customers.

The key is to use this information to provide potential customers with what they need at each stage. Targeted content delivery positions your brand as a valuable source of information.

5. Solutions

This section outlines the actions and strategies your brand implements to address customer pain points and improve their overall experience.

It documents the specific solutions or improvements applied at each stage of the customer journey. These include steps like changes to website design that resolve issues and improve the customer experience.

It visualizes how your brand responds to customer needs and challenges at different touchpoints. Besides that, it’s a good reference to ensure your team implements the solutions and refines them to increase customer satisfaction.

What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

A strategic approach to building a map ensures you capture every touchpoint, anticipate customer desires and address potential pain points. Here are seven steps to build a journey map unique to your customers and business needs.

1. Set your goals

What do you want to get out of this process? And why does it matter to your business? Knowing your goals sets the stage for how you assemble your map.

Some examples of goals include:

• Identify the top three customer pain points. Use these pain points to create content.
• Understand customer interests and motivations to develop better products and services.
• Total the cost of customer interactions to set a better social media budget .

2. Decide on a customer journey map type

There are several different customer journey maps and each one has its advantages. When you decide which map to work with, you know which details to focus on.

These are four of the most common types of customer journey maps: current state, future state, day in the life and service blueprint. We’ll go further into detail on each one later on.

Understanding your goals and where your brand stands in its evolution will guide you in selecting the appropriate map type.

3. Create and define your customer personas

Which customers will you focus on? It’s difficult to map a customer journey if you don’t have a customer in mind. Customer personas are fictional characters that represent each of your target customer groups. They’re detailed with everything from demographics to interests to buying behavior.

If you’ve already created social media personas to understand your audience, you’re more than halfway there. But if you haven’t, then our buyer persona template  or Xtensio’s will be useful. To really get to know someone’s purchase decisions and shopping processes, interview existing customers.

Pro tip: If you have distinctively different personas—such as, if you serve both a B2C and B2B market—set up different customer journey maps.

4. Break it down: touchpoints and stages

The customer journey map is divided into stages that usually fit within the funnel illustrated above. List out the stages to begin. Next, list out the main customer touchpoints that exist for your company. When you’re done with both lists, place the touchpoints into the different stages.

To get even more detailed, assign department owners to each touchpoint. You can identify where certain social media channels fit into the mix. And, you can assign predicted customer sentiment or emotions to different stages of the journey. It’s up to you how detailed you want the map to be.

5. Gather data and customer feedback

You need rock-solid data on how customers interact with your brand to create an accurate customer journey map. Focus on these three aspects:

Analyze existing data

Jump into the data you already have—more specifically website performance, chats with customer support and sales records. This information can tell you loads about how customers act, what they like and what frustrates them.

This quantitative data offers a foundational perspective on how customers interact with your brand, helping you identify both strengths and areas of improvement.

Conduct customer interviews

Get personal with one-on-one chats with customers. Ask them about their experiences, what bugs them and what they expect when they deal with your brand. These talks reveal qualitative insights that numbers can’t, like understanding the emotional and psychological aspects of the customer journey.

Create surveys and questionnaires

Turn to surveys and questionnaires for a more structured and broader approach to gathering feedback. Send them out to a bunch of customers and get structured feedback. Ask questions about their journey with your brand, how happy they are and where they think things could get better.

A combination of these three aspects gives you a 360-degree view of what your customers really experience with your brand.

6. Test and identify pain points

To confirm your customer touchpoints, you probably checked in on various departments and spoke to customers. This is great work but you need to take another step further: test it yourself. Go through the customer journey from the viewpoint of the customer.

While you’re testing the journey, keep an eye out for challenges, confusion or any frustrating moments. For example, if the website takes forever to load, if instructions aren’t clear or if reaching customer support is a headache, make detailed notes of these issues.

It’s also a smart move to collect feedback from both colleagues and customers who’ve gone through the journey. This way, you double-check and confirm your findings for a more complete picture.

A hands-on approach ensures your customer journey map reflects the real-world experience and equips you to take targeted actions to improve the overall customer journey.

7. Make changes and find solutions

So your map is complete. What’s next? You need to find or create solutions to the pain points you identified in the previous step.

Now’s the time to check in on the goals you established in step one and make the moves to smooth out the journey. Give yourself time and space to implement some of the solutions, whether a quarter or six months, and check back on the map to update it.

As you put these changes into action, make sure to watch your customer journey map closely. Don’t forget to keep it up to date to show the improvements and how they affect the customer experience. This keeps your customer journey map fresh and super useful for steering your brand toward delivering an exceptional customer experience.

4 types of customer journey maps and examples

Let’s take a look at the four most common customer journey maps and examples of each.

1. Current state

Current state customer journey maps are like an audit. You document how your customers experience their buying and service paths in your company’s current state. These are especially helpful to establish a baseline for your customer service experience.

Take a look at this simplified current state customer journey map from Nielsen-Norman.

The map follows the journey of “Jumping Jamie” as they navigate the process of switching to a different mobile plan. The map defines the current journey into four stages. Apart from the journey, it also highlights opportunities and metrics to track.

Current state maps are fantastic for sharing user frustrations with all departments. This helps you get everyone on board with investing in solutions and brainstorming ways to address user pain points.

2. Future state

Future state customer journey maps follow the same format as current state maps except they represent the ideal journey. You can use them alongside your current state maps to identify painpoints and areas to improve.

Here’s an example of a future state journey map:

Why does this visual work? It covers different states, feelings and even touchpoints in a cohesive format.

The map visualizes the best-case scenario to create a north star vision for your brand. It aligns your efforts toward achieving the ideal customer journey.

3. Day-in-the-life

Day-in-the-life customer journey maps outline one of your persona’s schedules as they go about their day. The interactions may or may not involve your company. Creating one of these maps helps you identify the best times and areas to interact with your customer.

Here’s a “day-in-the-life” visual from Pipedrive.

The map doesn’t just highlight when the persona does something, but it also highlights different touchpoints and the different people they interact with throughout the day. And, notice those thumbs ups and downs? Those highlight how the child feels during different activities too.

4. Service blueprint

A service blueprint customer journey map focuses solely on when you provide customer service. It ignores components like ads that might exist in other maps.

Miro, a collaborative online whiteboard for teams, created the above map with a bank in mind. You’ll notice how this map is only about a customer’s visit to the bank. This type of map helps brands look at individual service areas and interactions. It’s a macro version of the current and future state maps.

Get started with customer journey map templates

Creating a customer journey map doesn’t have to be overwhelming. There are plenty of free and paid templates out there to help you create one. If you think you’ll need more guidance or many maps, some companies offer special software to design a custom map. Build your first journey map or improve your existing one with these options.

• Current state template , provided by Bright Vessel.

• Customer journey map template by Moqups, a design and collaboration tool.

• Service blueprint template by Miro

• Customer journey map template by Mural, a planning tool.

• UXPressia’s customer journey map online tool , made specifically to create presentation-ready customer journey maps.

Create a strong foundation with a well-integrated customer journey map

A customer journey map gives you the recipe for crafting personalized, impactful interactions that build customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When you know what they are and why they’re important, it’s time to make yours. Use data to create a solid customer journey map that exceeds customer expectations at every touchpoint.

Check out how you can turn your B2B social media data into a revenue-driving powerhouse and create a memorable brand.

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

Benefits of client journey mapping

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

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

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

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

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

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

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

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

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

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

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

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

How to build a customer journey map

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

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

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

Step 1: Define your persona

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

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

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

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

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

💡 Expert tips: 

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

Step 3: Define journey map sections

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Set customer goals

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

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

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

Step 5: Define touchpoints

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Processes and channels

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

Step 7: Problems and ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Step 8: Emotional graph

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

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

Step ?: Be Creative!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer journey map examples

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

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

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

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

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

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

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

A customer journey mapping checklist

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

• Do research

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

• Define your customer persona(s)

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

• Specify journey map stages

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

• Decide on the map sections

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

• Set customer goals for each stage

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

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

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

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

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

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

• Add details about the emotional experience

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

• Use more sections

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

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

The free guide to download

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

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

Rate this post

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

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

Hello, Karim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The differences come from the names.

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

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

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

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

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

Good luck and happy customers!

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

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

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

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

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

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

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Why mapping the customer journey is so important for improving CX

Today’s savvy, well-informed buyers want an excellent customer experience (CX) every single time they interact with your product and brand.

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) helps you deeply understand every aspect of your users’ experience to help you act on your insights to boost conversions, customer satisfaction and retention—and keep up with your competitors.

Last updated

Reading time.

Our comprehensive guide of the ten most important benefits of customer journey mapping will talk you through why mapping the buyer journey is so crucial, who should map out the customer journey, and which challenges to look out for. 

Want to understand how customers really interact with your site?

Hotjar’s PX insights tools let you experience the customer journey through their eyes. 

10 reasons you need to map your customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers interact with your brand, website, and product across different stages—from external touchpoints like social media, ads, and events, to internal touchpoints like website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding processes.  

To understand your users’ experiences, desires, and pain points, do customer journey map research by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from customer interviews, surveys, and product experience (PX) insights tools. A data-informed customer journey map helps you understand your users' jobs to be done as they engage with your site or product—and what they’re thinking and feeling as they navigate.

Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers. 

1. Walk in your customers’ shoes

Collecting real-world insights helps you dig deep into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience. A strong customer journey mapping process lets you challenge your assumptions—you’ll see customers don’t always act or think how you expect . 

Understanding where users struggle to complete actions, get frustrated, or drop off helps you prioritize website and product improvements to give them a smoother experience. Maybe that’s changing the position of CTAs, or adapting your navigation architecture so important information is easy to find. 

If you build a culture of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, all stakeholders can see your brand from the customer perspective (outside-in) as well as the business perspective (inside-out) . 

A customer journey map enables you to observe sales experiences from the customer's perspective rather than the sales perspective. You can see why they chose your product or a different brand and understand their point of view more effectively.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings let you see exactly how customers navigate your site. Understand which areas they gravitate to, which they avoid, and where they get blocked or drop off.

Hotjar Session Recordings show you how users experience your page to improve low-performing touchpoints 

2. Identify unmet user needs

A strong understanding of customer needs across different interactions lets you identify gaps in the journey and offer additional touchpoints or improve existing ones, which means no more guesswork.  

Mapping out how customers navigate your site or app lets you pinpoint blockers, where they’re trying to engage but can’t, or where completing an action takes too much effort. 

Increase your awareness of customer needs to minimize frustrations by providing the right information and features at specific stages for a better user experience (UX). For example, if you see customers struggling with onboarding touchpoints, you can deliver an explanatory video or pop-up tooltip exactly when they need it. Or if they’re caught in an endless help-page loop, you can update your pages to provide the most relevant information at key points in the website journey.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Observe tools to see where user needs aren’t being met. Heatmaps show you whether key information, CTAs, and contact forms are optimally positioned so visitors can find them at the right point in their customer journey. If not, you can easily modify your layout for a better experience.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

3. Understand complex journeys across several customer touchpoints

The average customer uses multiple channels to research and interact with brands. This creates highly complex, non-linear journeys with several customer touchpoints .  

Touchpoints also vary by customer: maybe Gen Zers typically come to your website from social media and seek out video content, while Gen Xers might be more likely to arrive directly from Google searches and want written content and comparison charts before they buy.  

For B2B businesses, multiple decision-makers are also often involved—and they all have different ways of conducting research and choosing a solution.

This complexity makes creating an excellent customer experience across the board difficult. 

Customer journey mapping visualizes all these different experiences in one place—showing you exactly what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage so you can provide the right information at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.

4. Visualize emotions, not just actions

Buyer journeys are often emotional, but it’s hard to turn feelings into concrete data, and it’s even harder to imagine what your customers will actually feel when designing your product and site. 

A well-researched customer journey map helps you visualize what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing: the key to understanding their deepest needs and providing a better service. Gathering insights on customer emotions—and acting on them—helps customers feel you ‘get’ them and builds brand trust.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings go beyond tracking basic user behavior analytics to show you where users are ‘rage-clicking’ or u-turning because they’re not getting the response they expect when they click on site elements. You can even filter to see specific recordings of customers who told you they were dissatisfied/satisfied.

Hotjar's Ask tools— Surveys and Feedback widgets—also let you gather feedback on what customers are feeling as they take certain actions.

Hotjar’s tool stack gives you insights and user feedback ‘in the wild’

5. Create personalized experiences

Personalization is key to great customer experience, even with self-serve products, because customers value brands that understand their unique needs.

Mapping lets you dig deeper into user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints. 

For example: 

Create targeted landing pages with use cases for different customer segments

Show relevant social media ads to potential customers browsing online

Provide personalized support over multiple channels 

Improve onboarding by tailoring the process to each customer

Customize the post-onboarding experience so users can adapt your product to their exact needs, boosting adoption

6. Align cross-functional stakeholders

Mapping the customer journey works best with perspectives from UX, marketing, product, sales, customer service and success, shipping, management, and other teams. This can mean getting different roles physically in a room together, or collecting their feedback to understand how they interact with your customer. These diverse insights help speed up the process of solving customer journey issues—so users see improvements faster. 

This kind of cross-functional collaboration gets multiple teams on the same page and gives all stakeholders a holistic, coherent view of the customer experience.

Aligning different teams reduces politics and guesswork around what the customer wants and clarifies areas of ownership, accountability, and points of hand-off between teams. This makes it easier to keep tabs on where a customer is in their journey at any one time—and creates a smoother, more coherent interaction with your brand.

Behind every messed-up implementation is a fundamental mis- or non-alignment on customer journey outcomes. Mapping exposes gaps in customer-focused thinking, areas of functional misalignment, and organization change challenges…all of which traditional IT people are poor at, and IT vendors don't care about. The first step in resolution is realization. Mapping brings people together to a point where they understand the challenges.

7. Improve ROI and cost-effectiveness by creating satisfied customers

Between paid ads, marketing, and sales, customer acquisition is costly—so retaining customers is important to help boost your return on investment (ROI). 

Customer journey mapping provides you with opportunities to improve onboarding and features adoption, which increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and product advocacy.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar Heatmaps to spot technical issues that prevent users from signing up for a trial, or identify points when ecommerce customers abandon their shopping carts , which boosts conversions and revenue generation. 

8. Get a competitive edge 

Mapping tells you exactly how you can improve your customer experience to make your product stand out from the competition. CJMs also reveal product strategy opportunities to differentiate your brand by identifying new ways to provide customers with additional value.

These product experience and user insights help your brand stay relevant, adapt your product and business model as customer needs change, and gain a competitive edge in a moment where having a great product is no longer enough on its own. 

Crucially, mapping helps you identify your ‘halo’ customers—the group that, when you land them, makes everyone else sit up and take notice—as well as influencers and early adopters. That’s the first step in learning how to attract more of them.

More customer success for more customers is the most important outcome of strategy and the ROI from any investment in the business. If you can’t describe how this additional success will happen, or what will bring additional customers, I’d say your strategy is a bit light on specifics, risking its credibility and, ultimately, successful execution. Mapping at the value chain level helps bring coherency to a strategy.

9. Improve marketing and product-led growth

Many companies assume the customer journey starts when someone lands on their website or blog. In reality, it starts way before that—often with the customer searching for solutions or doing research in professional groups or community forums. 

Mapping the journey from start to finish helps you get to know your users, be a part of their conversations, and create content for all stages of the buyer journey that help convert visitors into paying customers. This process is particularly valuable for businesses with long, complex buyer journeys and high-value products, like the SaaS or B2B customer journey . 

Building a CJM also reduces guesswork and helps you validate ideas—from identifying the right channels, messaging, positioning, and content to building credibility and trust with customers.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar to see where users get blocked—and use the information you glean to make your product itself more intuitive, user-friendly, and well-positioned for growth. The goal here is to make your product (and the user journey within it) so good that it starts to act as its own marketing channel and practically sells itself, which is every team's dream.

10. Minimize future roadblocks

Customer journey mapping requires some time and effort up front, but it increases efficiency and saves resources later on. 

Conduct customer interviews and use PX insights tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data and minimize customer roadblocks further down the line, which ultimately helps reduce assumptions across your team and lets you anticipate challenges so you can prevent them.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Ask tools—like Surveys and Feedback —to gather quantitative and qualitative insights relevant to specific pages on your site, as users are browsing them. This gives you voice-of-the-customer feedback as to why customers are dropping off in the buyer journey, which elements confuse them or get ignored, and what’s stopping them from continuing or converting. 

The Hotjar question bank makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys 

Who should map the customer journey? 

Every company, no matter its size or niche, can benefit from mapping the customer journey. Customer journey mapping is particularly useful for giving startups and SMEs a competitive edge. 

Aligning yourself more closely with your customers by getting to know and understand their needs and blockers will allow your company to give customers exactly what they want and differentiate you from the competition. 

If you don’t understand how and why your customers are choosing you, it’s going to be extremely difficult to attract and retain more customers.

What are the challenges of customer journey mapping? 

Customer journey mapping can be a quick and easy process—take a look at our guide to creating a CJM in 2.5 days —but it comes with some challenges: 

You need a strong understanding of all your customer profiles and user groups to avoid leaving anyone out. Don’t rely on assumptions: run customer interviews and collect user feedback to inform your user personas and map.

Multiple teams usually need to be involved, which isn’t always easy to organize: get everyone on the same page and share your product experience insights with Hotjar's Slack integration . To get executive teams on board, prepare a presentation outlining the benefits of customer journey mapping and how their involvement will help.   

It can be frustrating if you don’t have the resources and staffing to immediately act on the insights revealed by customer journey mapping. However, a strong customer journey map will help you see what to prioritize, and can even help you get buy-in for more resources to make changes.

It can be hard to collect enough data for a thorough CJM, but using Hotjar's PX insights tools makes customer journey map research easy by helping teams understand the online user journey on a granular level

Customer journey mapping is a continuous process 

Mapping the customer journey tells you exactly how users interact with your brand, website, and product at different touchpoints—and what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling at each stage. 

Your CJM is a living record. Refer back to it regularly during every stage of your product's design, testing, and launch to make sure you’re delivering what your customers really want and need. 

This crucial process will help you understand and improve the customer experience, creating customer delight , and boosting adoption and loyalty.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping benefits

What is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is the process of gathering user data and insights from surveys, interviews, and product experience (PX) insights tools. Teams then use their findings to create a visual representation of how customers interact with their brand, website, or product at different touchpoints. 

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Customer journey mapping is important to better understand your customers. By visualizing their actions, thoughts, emotions, and challenges, as they interact with your business, you can make changes to improve their experience. 

What are the steps in customer journey mapping?

The steps in customer journey mapping include:

Collecting customer feedback from surveys or interviews

Collecting insights from customer-facing teams 

Using product experience (PX) insights tools to understand how users interact with your website or digital product 

Creating an empathy map

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) that showcases all the above insights

Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

• Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
• Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
• Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
• Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
• Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
• Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
• Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

• Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
• Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
• Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
• Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

• Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
• Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
• The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
• Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

• Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
• Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
• Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
• Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
• Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
• Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
• Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

• Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
• Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
• Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
• Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

• Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
• Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
• Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
• Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

Designorate

Design thinking, innovation, user experience and healthcare design

Customer Journey Mapping: A Complete Guide for Designers

According to the Digital Trend 2015 Report, customer experience is crucial to stand out from competitors. Suppose there is a single type of data to identify the success of the design outcome. In that case, I will choose the customer experience, it is the crucial element behind the design of any product or service to address customers’ needs and solve their problems. However, customer experience is more complex than we think. It involves several factors, such as satisfaction, education, and loyalty. Those factors can affect consumer experience through their journey while using any product or service, regardless of the nature of the delivery’s digital or physical evidence. Therefore,  consumer journal mapping  can help us to visually learn more about our consumers’ experience and visually map each of the customer touchpoints during their interaction with the product.

Several studies highlighted that attracting a new customer is 6X to 7X more expensive compared with the effort, time, and cost spent to keep the existing customer happy and engaged with the product or service, and one of the critical tools to achieve this goal is the customer   journey maps, which we will explore and illustrate in more details its practical application. 

What is Customer Experience?

But before digging into customer journey mapping . We need to understand the consumer experience, which refers to the experience the consumer gains as they interact with the product or service’s touch points. This experience involves human actors (e.g. consumers, employees and designers) and non-human actors (e.g. physical evidence and touchpoints). Customer experience extends through a timeline before, during and after using the product. To map and improve the consumer experience, we need to build a strategy based on collected data about the consumer experience, develop the product by considering this strategy, and finally track customer experience after applying this strategy. And to start this sequence, a clear understanding of consumer experience is required. This is where the consumer experience research comes in.

Customer experience research is an investigation and analysis of the consumer journey, the interaction between the consumers and the product or service to understand their experience, pain points (frustration), and satisfaction as they move from one step to another. The research also investigates the consumers’ behaviour, perception and practice through this journey. Several qualitative and quantitative tools can be used in consumer experience research, such as customer journey maps, interviews, questionnaires, observation, think-a-loud, user stories, and diary notes.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map (or a customer experience map) is a visual representation or diagram that tells the story of your consumers’ experience when using a product, system, or service, such as visiting a retail store. It helps us to build insight into consumers’ goals, customer expectations, the touch point with the product, and their emotions through this journey. Figure 2 shows the anatomy of the customer journey map and its main elements.

The customer journey map can be presented in different formats, including drawing on a whiteboard, digital diagrams, and infographics. These diagrams use other research methods to visualize and organize deep research for your customer’s experience. Customer journey mapping enables the use from:

• Exploring  consumers’ experience as they interact with the system. The exploration helps us to decode the process into different elements. 
• Identify  the pain points and the problems in the system associated with each step in the journey.
• Identify  the opportunities to innovate by improving the consumer experience.

We seek to collect information about the consumer experience during the customer journey mapping. While each customer journey map can include different data based on the consumer experience that needs to be investigated, there are common data essential in each journey map, such as:

• Behaviour  – This part answers the consumer’s actions in each journey step.
• Attitude  – What the customers” feel and say about their interaction with the system.
• Experience  – There are two parts to the experience. The first part is the on-stage experience, such as what the customers experience as they interact with the system. The second part is the unidentified experience or needs that the consumers may not be aware of. as I discussed earlier in The Double Diamond Design Thinking Process and How to Use it.

The Importance of the Customer Journey Mapping

The  human-centred design  focuses on customer needs and experience to drive innovation and customer retention, which can only be achieved with a deep understanding of the customer experience. Therefore, customer journey maps are a powerful tool for designers and companies to reach a consumer-centric product. The customer journey mapping can drive the below benefits for the product or service:

• Build a shared understanding of the customer’s behaviour and experience when using the product or service.
• Learn how customers use the product or service based on real-life examples.
• Identify the pain point that causes a bad emotional experience for the customers.
• Reduce or eliminate the negative factors that affect the customer experience.
• Identify the communication problems customers face when interacting with the touchpoints, such as the application interface, help desks, or customer support service.
• Build key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to evaluate the product to collect feedback to improve the future version.

Types of the Customer Journey Maps

As highlighted earlier, customer journey mapping is based on what information we need to collect from customers. Therefore, the different types of customer journey maps are based on the aim of conducting customer experience research. Generally, there are four types as following:

Current state customer journey maps

This is considered the most commonly used customer journey maps as it involves exploring the customer’s experience with a current offering by the company. It aims to explore the customer experience as they use this product or service, such as booking a flight or making a doctor’s appointment.

Day in the life customer journey maps

This map explores customers’ experiences as they go through specific daily experiences. By mapping this experience, we can identify the opportunity we can provide customers to solve their problems and address their needs.

Future state customer journey maps

Like the Day in Life map, the Future State map helps us find opportunities by envisaging customers’ experiences. Although this map starts with assumptions and previous experience, it is helpful as a starting point to build a testable experience for consumers.

Service Blueprint

Unlike the above journey maps, the service blueprint aims to map the different steps in the service and how it is linked to the company structure, such as employees, resources, and overall strategy.

Defining the Customer Persona (buyer persona)

Building the customer journey map requires deeply understanding of customers’ personalities and experiences. Customers’ character has an essential impact on their purchase behaviour, experience and achieving customer loyalty. To understand this nature, we need to have a representation of the target customer. Personas are fictional characters that represent our target customers. It includes the customer’s demographic information, financial information, goals, purchase preferences, and experience. Personas can be visualized using illustrations, sketches or any persona template applications such as UX Pressia.

Persona isn’t static but constantly refined throughout the project, especially when conducting our research to identify the target audience’s characteristics. Once our market research is completed, we have precise details about our persona. Usually, products and services target more than one target audience in a multi-segmentation structure to increase the market reach and return on investment. In this case, we usually have more than one persona. The primary persona is the main persona we target while designing the product, and secondary personas that can also be considered in the design process.

Types of Personas

There are several ways to categorize personas according to our target of the categorization, such as the persona target or emotional status that affects its purchase behaviour. In terms of the target, personas can be categorized into four types:

• Goal-oriented Persona  – In this persona type, the target customer aims to achieve a specific goal when interacting with the system. The aim of creating the persona is to identify the customer’s goals and how this affects the process and the interaction with the different elements in the system. 
• Role-Based Persona  – This type is similar to the goal-oriented persona but focuses on the customer’s role while interacting with the system. This type of persona is data-driven based on qualitative and quantitative data. The customer role while interacting with the system is the core focus of this persona and the data collected to represent it.
• Engaging Persona  – Unlike the above two types, the engaging persona focuses on interacting with the system. It examines customers’ emotional status, behaviour, psychology, and background. This persona aims to build empathy with the customer experience.

How to Create a Persona

As highlighted earlier, the persona is a dynamic tool that keeps changing as we build clarity about our customers. Even though customers’ behaviour may change, it requires optimizing the persona accordingly. To go through this journey to build and unstained your consumer through personas, the following general steps can help you develop this clarity.

• Define the focus customer (Proto-persona) In the beginning, companies have different levels of understanding of their customers. Some companies need to learn about their customers, especially when developing a new service. On the other hand, some companies have a profound understanding of their customers. This previous experience helped us to develop the so-called proto-persona. It is not an accurate persona, but it helps as a standing point to start identifying the market sample and start the market or design research.
• Conduct design research I highlighted the design research, focusing on action research, reflection, customer experience, and qualitative data. Once we have the prototype persona, we start designing the research plan and the methodologies to start market research. Several methods could be used, either qualitative or quantitative. However, in design research, quantitative data is usually used to understand the qualitative nature of customer experience.
• Data analysis Once we collected and organized the data from the previous step. We analyze the data and try to understand the customer’s profile, experience, and behaviour. The narration and looking for themes help us to identify the holistic customer’s experience rather than looking for details.
• Building the persona Once we understand the customer experience, we must build the target customer’s detailed and accurate persona. Personas can be creative and represents the information visually to be easily recognized. Several tools can help us build creative persona layouts, such as  UX Pressia , 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map we need to create is based on the data we need to collect from the consumer as we conduct marketing research or user research if we would like to make a digital user journey map. Creating the customer journey maps follows the main  critical thinking  stages; understand, reflect, and implement. Based on this flow, the creation of the customer journey maps follows the below main three stages:

Stage 1: Understand (Research)

At this stage, the design and marketing teams work together to understand customer behaviour through deep research into their experience while using the product. Before starting the research, the team defines the key elements of the journey map. At this stage, a team is recruited to collect the data using different research methods, as described below.

Elements of the Consumer Journey Map

Before conducting the research, the consumer journey map should include the below main elements:

• Define the Persona
• First, we should define the  customer persona  as we highlighted earlier. We can also build  persona empathy mapping , which allows the design team to understand the different feelings that visit the consumer while using the product or service. The personnel will represent the consumer sample used in the study.
• Define the Scenario
• The first step is to define the goal of conducting the consumer journey map. The scenario is usually a pathway of the consumer’s experience, such as buying a product from the store, booking a hotel room, or reaching technical support in a banking app. 
• Define the Journey’s Stages
• Then, we define the steps that the consumer needs to take to achieve this goal. For example, in the below consumer journey map example, the personnel needs to go through several steps to book a travel ticket. So, she goes through several steps to achieve this scenario.
• Define the Data needed.
• As mentioned, most consumer journey maps collect consumer data about their behaviour, attitude and experience. But, more data could be collected, such as the touch point channels.

Several consumer journey mapping tools can be used to create the persona and consumer map, such as:

Collect Customer Feedback

The recruited sample starts with the scenario steps and experiences the product as normal. While the consumer is using the product already, this time, the aim is to understand their experience. The consumers can provide the data based on their previous experience with the product if the scenario is the same, and they can give feedback on each step in the scenario. Several methods could be used to collect data from participants in the consumer journey mapping. The qualitative research methods can help us gain a sentimental idea about the participant’s experience, and these methods can include:

Interviews can be either structured or semi-structured. In the structured interviews, we ask the participants predefined questions with no change in the questions during the interviews. We ask them predefined questions in the semi-structured interviews, but we can elaborate with other questions during the interviews. 

Focus groups are a similar tool to interviews; the only problem is that participants may get influenced by the answers of others during the sessions.

Observation can be an excellent method to see the reaction during each consumer touch point. Still, it needs to detail the consumers’ experience and perception of the provided service.

Diary notes can be a good tool if the consumers record their experience during or after the interaction with the service. The problem with this tool is that it is not controlled, and there is no guidance while completing it. It is suitable for experienced participants who conduct the consumer journey map to evaluate the product or service.

On the other hand, the quantitive methods can be suitable to reach measurable but less sentimental data. The convenient quantitative way to use the consumer journey map is the survey. Different types of surveys can be helpful to get feedback from consumers, such as:

Customer Effort Score (CES): It measures the level of customer experience by assessing how effortlessly customers can interact with your product or service, address support problems, or access required information. The customers provide their effort ratings on a scale of 1 to 7.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): The questionnaire is designed to predict whether a customer may use the service again. Therefore, it measures customers’ experience and satisfaction with the brand.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It assesses the consumer’s experience based on one straightforward question, such as, “How satisfied were you with your experience?” The participants’ responses are based on a rank from 1 to 5 to measure their satisfaction.

Stage 2: Reflect

Once we have the data collected, we start by analyzing it and identifying the pain points that face consumers through their journey. The results from the quantitative methods are more accessible to interpret than the qualitative data. To analyze data collected through qualitative methods, the  thematic analysis  is a coherent tool for understanding the emerged themes from the qualitative data analysis. Once we have the analyzed data, we investigate the different opportunities to improve consumers’ experience, which can involve  brainstorming  and  solving problems . 

Design thinking brainstorming  tools can help us explore the different opportunities by finding the connections between other elements of data we collected, such as the below tools:

Online mind maps: flexible online brainstorming helps us to decompile the different bits of data and see how they link together to find opportunities through the visual connection between them. Another relevant tool for mind maps is the  Affinity Diagram , which allows us to organize different data based on their relation.

Reversed brainstorming :  Sometimes, we get stuck in the ideas, and finding solutions becomes challenging. This method reverses the situation by making problems more complex from different perspectives.

SCAMPER :  The SCAMPER explores the potential solutions by exploring seven possible solution areas (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Rearrange).

Starbursting Technique : This is another technique to explore ideas by asking five questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? And How?

Finding solutions can also involve trying to identify the root causes of the problem to find practical solutions that eliminate the causes of consumer unsatisfied experiences such as:

5 Whys : In this effective method, we ask the “why” question five times until we reach the root cause of the problem.

Fishbone Diagram : In this diagram, we explore the causes of the problem based on six main perspectives: people, methods, machines, materials, measurements, and the environment. 

Stage 3: Implement

After understanding the customer experience, the team should have a clear vision of the pain point that faces the customer and how to brainstorm how to overcome it by building an action plan. This plan should address these issues faced by the customer with solutions. The action plan should clearly define the timeframe and budget required to improve the product or the service to enhance customer satisfaction. The plan should include the stakeholders working n implementing these changes.

After implementing these changes, another customer journey map should be created to evaluate customer satisfaction with the new changes and if further improvement is needed. Note that the design of a product or service is an iterative process; there are always ways to improve it as the customer experience change due to the changes in the culture, education, and new technologies.

The above example went through one customer journey map template. Yet, there are varied templates and shapes of the customer journey maps depending on the visualized information, the team’s creativity, and the tool used to create the map.

In sum, customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for the company to understand their customer experience and work to improve it in the next versions of the product or service. It allows companies to collect data about the consumer and organize it in a visual form that all the stakeholders in the project can easily track. As a result of this understanding, the team can build an action plan to improve the consumer experience, which will positively reflect on the project’s success in the market.

Note: This article was first published on the 15th May 2017.

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Dr Rafiq Elmansy

As an academic and author, I've had the privilege of shaping the design landscape. I teach design at the University of Leeds and am the Programme Leader for the MA Design, focusing on design thinking, design for health, and behavioural design. I've developed and taught several innovative programmes at Wrexham Glyndwr University, Northumbria University, and The American University in Cairo. I'm also a published book author and the proud founder of Designorate.com, a platform that has been instrumental in fostering design innovation. My expertise in design has been recognised by prestigious organizations. I'm a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), the Design Research Society (FDRS), and an Adobe Education Leader. Over the course of 20 years, I've had the privilege of working with esteemed clients such as the UN, World Bank, Adobe, and Schneider, contributing to their design strategies. For more than 12 years, I collaborated closely with the Adobe team, playing a key role in the development of many Adobe applications.

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2 thoughts on “ customer journey mapping: a complete guide for designers ”.

I would create the personas after the data collection. In that way you can analyse the data, detect characteristics and specific behaviours of the various customers and based on that create more realistic personas. regards, roeland

Thanks for sharing your ideas, this is clever idea, having daft persona will surely help the researchers to know what they are looking for and the questions they need to ask.

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map: A Step-By-Step Breakdown

There are often a lot of twists and turns in the customer journey, with each individual experience being unique.

That said, there is a predictable sequence of touchpoints throughout the sales funnel.

Mapping each customer touchpoint out effectively helps enhance the user experience and increases the chances of customer success.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Simply put, a customer journey map is a visualization of the process someone undertakes as they move through the various touchpoints of the customer journey.

It typically starts with the initial interaction they have, like visiting your website for the first time when gaining brand awareness, and then moves through the subsequent stages of consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

Here’s an example of what a typical customer journey map may look like.

Notice how it concisely outlines the touchpoints customers take as they move throughout the customer journey.

It starts in the awareness stage with touchpoints like search results or paid content, moves on to the consideration stage with social media or email, then to the purchase stage, and so on.

There are four main purposes of customer journey mapping.

• Flesh out the step-by-step process someone takes from being a potential customer to a lead to an actual customer and ideally, a loyal advocate
• Understand the customer’s perspective
• Identify friction points that are causing issues with customer engagement
• Discover opportunities to reduce pain points and improve the overall customer experience

By doing so, you set the stage for better product design, more effective customer journey marketing, increased customer satisfaction, better customer retention, and ultimately, greater customer success.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

1. define business goals.

Before doing anything else, you’ll want to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking to accomplish with customer journey mapping.

Some common examples include:

• Optimizing each touchpoint in the customer experience
• Identifying areas with higher than average dropoff
• Resolving issues that are leading to excessive dropoff
• Improving the overall customer experience both during the buyer journey and post-purchase

Clearly articulating what you’re trying to achieve is essential because it will direct the path you take for subsequent steps of customer journey mapping.

Note that a big part of effectively defining business goals is getting input from multiple key stakeholders in your company who are responsible for different aspects of the customer experience.

For instance, you may want to get input from your marketing leaders when developing the awareness and consideration stages of your customer journey map, input from your sales leaders when ironing out the purchase stage, and input from your customer service leaders when constructing the retention and advocacy stages.

It’s also smart to perform extensive user research and incorporate customer feedback to ensure you address the right pain points and tackle the issues that are most pressing for creating a positive user experience and long-term customer loyalty.

This should make for cohesive CX journey mapping where touch points flow smoothly from one to the next.

2. Identify Key Stages in the Customer Journey

Next, you’ll want to pinpoint the exact sales funnel stages involved with the customer journey.

The sales funnel stages can vary slightly from company to company, but as we mentioned earlier, some common ones include:

• Consideration

Fleshing the key stages out like this will show you the path users take as they go from being a prospect to a lead to a customer to an advocate.

By visualizing the key stages like this, you’ll see how each stage flows into the next — something that’s vital for making the customer journey as seamless as possible, meeting customer needs, and improving overall customer experience quality.

This is also what the next step in constructing customer journey maps is built on, which brings us to our next point.

3. Define Customer Touchpoints

You can think of the key stages in the customer journey on the macro level and the next step in the process — defining customer touchpoints — on the micro level.

These are the smaller interactions that customers take as they move from stage to stage in the user journey.

This can include digital touchpoints like becoming aware of your brand through an online ad, a search engine, paid content, and so on.

It can also include physical touchpoints like word-of-mouth.

Customer touchpoints will account for the majority of your customer journey map and help you visualize how people interact with your brand.

The exact number of touchpoints can vary considerably, so defining them is highly individualistic.

When identifying them, you’ll want to carefully consider the typical customer journey and write down every step involved. Then, arrange each touchpoint sequentially so you can see the big picture.

4. Design a Visual Representation of the Customer Journey

After defining business goals, identifying key stages in the customer journey, and defining customer touchpoints, it’s time to actually create your customer journey map.

Here, you’ll create a visual representation of what your business’s specific customer journey looks like for a bird’s-eye view.

To do this effectively, it’s helpful to use strong visual elements like different colors, symbols, bullets, and emojis so you can easily see everything at a glance.

Here’s an example of what an online shopping customer journey map could look like.

When it comes to customer journey mapping tools, there are several options available.

If you’re looking for something bare-bones and simple, you can use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

If you want something a bit more advanced, you can use HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Template , which includes seven free templates (more on this later).

Or, if you want software with extensive features that are specifically designed for creating customer journey maps, you can find a list of the top 10 products here .

Note that most companies have more than one customer persona. Therefore, you may need to create multiple customer journey maps while targeting each individual buyer persona.

Customer Journey Map Templates

When most people think of customer journey mapping, they think of the classic buyer’s journey.

And they wouldn’t be wrong.

Generally, that’s the most commonly used customer journey map and the type of mapping we used in the customer journey map examples above.

But it’s certainly not the only type of mapping you can use.

As we’ll learn in a moment, there are also customer journey maps that target specific segments of the buyer’s journey and customer journey maps that focus on what you want your ideal journey to be like.

For the rest of this post, we’ll cover four of the most popular customer journey map templates you can use for different situations.

That way you can cover all the angles and increase the chances of customer success every step of the way.

Buyer’s Journey

As we just mentioned, this is widely considered the most classic type of customer journey mapping.

When mapping the buyer’s journey, you follow the key stages in the customer journey (awareness, consideration, purchase, etc.) like we outlined above, along with customer touchpoints.

Here’s a simple template journey map example for the buyer’s journey from HubSpot, which you can find for free here .

The default starting point is extremely simple. It includes just three stages and a handful of questions to understand customer interaction.

However, you can easily add more stages, questions, and additional information to fully customize the buyer’s journey so that it’s specific to your business.

This template, admittedly, won’t provide the same depth as some of the more advanced tools for creating customer journey maps, but it should be adequate for many business owners.

If you don’t need anything fancy and are testing out customer journey maps for the first time, HubSpot should be more than sufficient.

Whatever template you use, buyer’s journey mapping tends to be a good starting point as it helps you visualize the entire process from someone entering your sales funnel to converting to becoming a loyal customer.

This is integral for optimizing every aspect of the customer experience end-to-end, and from a product standpoint, is essential for achieving UX mastery.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re looking to improve your UX design skills, The Interaction Design Foundation is an excellent resource for doing so. They offer a wide variety of courses from the beginner to expert level and only charge a flat monthly fee for access to all courses.

Now that we’ve tackled buyer journey mapping, let’s look at three other popular types of customer journey map template options that are also available.

Future State

In most cases, the buyer’s journey is the current journey customers are taking.

While there will likely be several areas you’re satisfied with, your existing customer journey probably won’t be ideal and likely isn’t meeting customer expectations 100%.

For example, there may be friction points along the way where customers are attempting to accomplish a goal. Or, there may be higher than acceptable dropoff in a particular area like using core features or becoming a paid customer after using a free product version.

By the way, if you want to holistically understand the customer journey and generate objective customer data, you can use a customer journey analytics platform like Woopra . This enables you to analyze essential customer journey metrics so you can see what it looks like end-to-end.

With future state customer journey mapping, you design a new map with new touchpoints and engagements based on your ideal vision.

That way, you’ll know what needs to be done to create the optimal customer journey.

If you’ve already experimented with creating customer journey maps and are looking to take the next step to refine the customer experience, you’ll likely be interested in future state mapping.

HubSpot offers a free future state template as well, which allows you to outline the series of steps that need to be taken to make the customer journey as perfect as possible. And it’s completely customizable.

You simply list the steps you want to take to create an amazing customer experience and ask key questions regarding customer behavior.

It’s nothing over the top, but it should get the job done for many business owners.

Lead Nurturing

Although technically part of the buyer’s journey, some marketers choose to create a lead nurturing customer journey map because of the extreme importance of lead nurturing.

After all, any major holes in the lead nurturing process can disrupt sales as a whole. And no matter how good your marketing team is at generating leads, the impact will be negated if you can’t successfully nurture them.

To optimize this area of sales, you can create a lead nurturing map using a template like this one.

Here, the default starts with someone being a stranger, then moves on to them being a subscriber/lead, then a marketing qualified lead (MQL), a sales opportunity/demo, then a deal closed/handoff.

Again, everything is customizable, so you can adjust the lead nurturing customer journey to your exact specifications. And, it too, is available for free from HubSpot .

Customer Service and Support

Once again, a truly rewarding user experience goes beyond the purchase and ensures a customer is satisfied well after they’ve bought a product.

Like lead nurturing, customer service and support are also technically part of the buyer’s customer journey map.

However, it dives deeper into this area of the sales funnel with the intention of increasing customer retention and advocacy.

And I think we can all agree that this is incredibly important given that “Happy and satisfied customers are 87% more likely to purchase upgrades and new services.”

Here’s yet another free customer journey map template you can get from HubSpot that focuses specifically on customer service and support.

With it, you can follow how a customer goes from engaging in the normal use of a product to noticing an issue/having a complaint to asking for help/contacting customer support to speaking with support to conflict resolution.

Having a clear overview of the touchpoints involved with this process should help you fully understand the flow so you can 1) see things from a customer’s point of view and 2) identify issues that may be detrimental to customer support.

For inspiration from real-life major brands like Spotify, TurboTax, and Amazon, here’s a list of customer journey map examples you can learn from.

Crafting an Exceptional User Experience with Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is a simple yet effective way to visualize each touchpoint in the user journey holistically for each buyer persona.

From the initial moment someone becomes aware of your brand to the time of purchase and beyond, customer journey maps allow you to see how users move throughout the entire lifecycle.

And as we’ve learned, this serves several important purposes, including seeing the buying process from a customer’s point of view, identifying customer pain points, and unearthing opportunities to improve the customer experience end-to-end.

It’s just a matter of following the correct customer journey mapping guidelines and using the appropriate template to outline the buying process.

Then, tracking key customer journey metrics like engagement, churn rate, and customer satisfaction with an analytics platform like Woopra or Google Analytics should help you refine your customer journey mapping to fully optimize the customer experience.

Full insight into the customer journey. No SQL required.

Get started with Woopra for free to see who your customers are, what they do and what keeps them coming back.

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Journey Mapping 101: Fundamentals and Best Practices

One of the key tools in our toolkit is called »Journey Mapping«. It's a way for understanding what the customer or user is experiencing as they work towards a specific goal. A customer journey map helps us learn about the customer's experience across touchpoints at each stage of their journey, from the moment they first discover a product to after they've purchased it. In this article, we'll walk you through the fundamentals of journey mapping and provide practical tips and examples to help you get started.

What is Journey Mapping?

• Customer Experience
• User-Centric Design
• Product Management
• Product Innovation
• Customer Insights
• Stakeholder Alignment

A journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience as they interact with a product or service. It typically includes the customer's goals, actions, emotions (even though we encourage you to not go this way), and pain points at each touchpoint, from discovery to purchase and beyond. By creating a journey map, you can gain a deeper understanding of the customer's perspective and identify areas for improvement that can enhance the overall customer experience.

Why is Journey Mapping Important?

Journey mapping is important for several reasons. First, it helps you see the customer's experience from their perspective, which can lead to more user-centric products and services. Second, it helps you identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, which can lead to better conversion rates, customer retention, and loyalty. Finally, it can help align stakeholders around the customer's jobs and goals, which can lead to a more effective product development process.

Types of Journey Maps

Journey maps come in different types, each serving a unique purpose to help businesses understand their customers better. Here are two of the most common types of journey maps:

Current State (As Is) Journey Maps

A current state, or “as is” journey map, is a visual representation of the customer’s current experience with a product. This type of journey map focuses on mapping out the customer’s existing touchpoints, pain points, and overall experience while using a product or service. By understanding the current state of the customer’s journey, businesses can identify areas of improvement and create solutions to enhance the customer experience.

Future State (To Be) Journey Maps

A future state, or “to be” journey map, is a visual representation of the ideal customer experience that a company wants to create. This type of journey map focuses on mapping out the desired customer touchpoints, interactions, and experience a company wants to provide. Future state journey maps are helpful in identifying the gaps between the current and desired customer experience and developing strategies to bridge those gaps.

By understanding the different types of journey maps, businesses can select the one that aligns best with their goals and objectives. Each type of journey map provides a unique perspective on the customer experience and helps businesses identify areas of improvement to enhance the overall customer experience.

How to kickoff your Journey Map?

If you start from scratch, creating a journey map involves several steps. The first step is to map out the customer journey based on your own expertise and assumptions. We call this an »assumption map.« Then, you you should consider to conduct research to validate your assumptions and gather data to fill in any gaps. You can use different research methods, like surveys, interviews, and analytics, to get the information you need. Anyway, from here you can create a narrative visualization, which is a high-fidelity map that highlights the strengths, weaknesses, and overall potential of the customer journey.

Depending on where you are in your product life cycle, we pursue different goals with Journey Mapping. 

Journey Mapping during Introduction

In the early stages of product development, we examine the context in which your product will operate. We support the product team with insight into the pain points and identify opportunities so that your solution addresses a suitable problem.

Journey Mapping during Growth

The more popular your product becomes, the more important it is to understand how customers use it and how it fits into their lives. We uncover gaps and weaknesses in the journey, so you can develop features that meet customer needs, improve the customer experience and capitalise on growth opportunities.

Journey Mapping during Maturity

In this phase, your product faces more competition. Armed with knowledge of market potential, strengths, weaknesses, and the jobs of your customers, we redraw the journey and create aspirational targets that help you to design change processes and remain competitive.

The path to your Journey Map depends on where you are and where you are heading. We help you to pave it and to walk it. In any case, we want to encourage you to get started. From then on, you have a living object that you can continue to study and correct. 

Analyzing Journey Maps for UX Insights

How Telekom closes weaknesses and gaps with the help of Journey Maps

Once you have completed your customer journey mapping, the next step is to analyze the data to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Here are some key steps to follow:

• Review the Journey Map: Take a step back and look at the journey map as a whole. Identify patterns, recurring themes, and areas where customer’s experience frustration, confusion, or bottlenecks.
• Identify Key Moments: Look for key moments or touchpoints in the journey that stand out as particularly positive or negative. These moments may be critical for the customer's overall experience, and you can use them to focus your efforts on improving the journey.
• Quantify the Data: Use metrics to quantify the data, such as time spent on a task, completion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. These metrics can help you pinpoint where customer’s are struggling and prioritize which pain points to address first.
• Identify Opportunities: Once you have identified pain points, you can start brainstorming opportunities for improvement. Consider what changes you can make to the customer journey to reduce friction, increase engagement, and create a more satisfying customer experience.

By analyzing your journey map, you can gain valuable insights into the customer experience and identify opportunities for improvement. Use these insights to drive your design decisions and create a user-centric product or service.

Best Practices for Journey Mapping

When it comes to creating effective journey maps, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Keep it real : Make sure your map reflects the actual experience of your customer’s. Uncover your own biases and reality check your assumptions to be more certain.
• Collaborate : Bring together stakeholders from across the organization to contribute their insights to the journey map. This will help ensure that everyone is aligned around the customer's needs and goals.
• Focus on jobs : Do not assign your target audience to socio-demographic segments, instead divide customers by their jobs. Group together everyone who has a common concern that you’d like to help them address. 
• Determine your goals : One journey mapping is not the same as another. In each phase of your product's lifecycle, you can gain different insights to shape the product experience. Think about your goals in advance to get the most out of your journey map.
• Iterate: Journey mapping is an iterative process. You may need to go back and refine your journey map based on your analysis and insights. You can also continue to iterate on your journey map over time as you gather more data and feedback from customers.

Using Journey Maps in Product Development

How Ryzon uses Journey Maps to investigate their customer experience.

Now that you have a customer journey map in hand, here are some ways you can use it to inform product development decisions:

• Get organized: Use your journey map to create a prioritized list of features to develop based on the customer's goals and pain points that come with their job. This will help ensure that you are focusing on the most important areas first.
• Design for the user: Use the insights from your journey map to inform your UX design decisions. By also considering your customers habits and constraints, you can create designs that are truly user-centric.
• Feed your research plan: Use blind spots and insights to raise relevant research questions and validate corresponding hypotheses. This will help choose the right research method to unlock potentials efficiently. 
• Get buy-in: Share your journey map with stakeholders across the organization to help build consensus around the customer's needs and goals. This will help ensure that everyone is aligned around a common vision for the product.
• Drive customer-centric change: Use this technique to involve customers in the product development process and ensure that their needs and expectations are met. This will help make informed decisions about customer experience investments.

Journey mapping is a valuable tool for anyone involved in product development. By mapping out the customer's exprience across touchpoints, you can gain a deeper understanding of their jobs, goals and pain points, and identify opportunities for improvement. By following the best practices outlined above, you can create effective customer journey maps that inform your product development decisions and lead to more user-centric designs. Happy mapping!

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An Ultime Guide to User Journey Mapping

Craig Douglas

• March 28, 2024

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User journey mapping is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand and improve the customer experience. By visually representing the customer journey, companies can identify key interactions, or touchpoints, where customers engage with their brand. This process involves detailed user research to gather insights into customer behavior, preferences, and challenges. Customer journey mapping aims to pinpoint pain points—areas where customers may encounter frustration or obstacles. By recognizing these pain points, businesses can work to enhance customer journeys, making them smoother and more enjoyable. This, in turn, can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this guide, we will delve into the essentials of customer journey mapping. Let’s get started!

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience as they interact with a product, brand, or service. It’s like a roadmap that shows the path of a customer’s experience with a brand, highlighting key touchpoints where they engage with the company’s services or products. These maps are not just simple charts; they are detailed and customer-focused, often created using customer journey map templates to ensure all relevant aspects are included. The process of creating a customer journey map starts with user research and customer interviews. This helps to understand the different stages and journey phases that customers go through. By mapping out these stages, businesses can identify customer pain points and areas where customers might feel frustrated or have a negative experience. Service blueprint maps can also be integrated into the journey map to provide an even deeper understanding of the service teams’ roles in the customer journey. User personas, which represent the different types of customers, are used to tailor the map to specific customer needs and expectations. This ensures that the journey map is relevant to the actual users. UX journey mapping, a subset of customer journey mapping, focuses on digital interactions and user behavior online. Businesses can make informed decisions to improve customer retention, loyalty, and overall success by analyzing the customer’s journey. Whether it’s a physical store or an online platform, a well-crafted customer journey map is a strategic asset in enhancing the customer base’s experience.

Why Create User Journey Maps?

Now, let’s explore the reasons why creating user journey maps is a beneficial practice for businesses aiming to understand and serve their customers better. 

Understanding the Digital Customer Experience

In the digital world, a customer journey map provides a clear picture of how customers interact with a product or service online. It lays out the sequence of digital touchpoints and actions that customers take as they aim to fulfill a need or complete a task. Creating user journey maps allows businesses to step into their customers’ shoes and see their products from the user’s perspective, leading to a more empathetic approach to design and service.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities

One of the main reasons to create a customer journey map is to identify pain points within the digital experience. These are moments where a user might feel confused, frustrated, or dissatisfied. By pinpointing these areas, a business can focus on making improvements that will have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, journey mapping can reveal opportunities to enhance the user experience or introduce new features that meet customer needs.

Improving Customer Success and Retention

A well-designed user journey map helps businesses understand and streamline the journey stages, leading to improved customer success. When users can navigate a digital product with ease and achieve their goals without unnecessary friction, they are more likely to continue using the product and recommend it to others. This can increase customer retention and turn users into advocates for the brand.

Tailoring Experiences with Customer Personas

Customer personas are characters that represent different segments of a business’s customer base. By using personas in journey mapping, companies can create multiple journey maps that cater to the unique needs and expectations of various user groups. This tailored approach ensures that the digital product resonates with a broader audience and meets the diverse requirements of prospective customers.

Planning for the Future with Service Blueprints

Service blueprints are detailed plans that outline the processes and systems needed to deliver a digital product or service. When combined with user journey maps, they provide a comprehensive view of both the customer’s experience and the internal operations that support it. This dual perspective is crucial for planning future enhancements and ensuring that the team has the resources and internal ownership necessary to implement changes effectively.

Collaborating and Communicating Across Teams

Journey mapping is a collaborative initiative that brings together team members from different departments. By visualizing the user’s journey, everyone from designers to service teams can understand their role in shaping the customer experience. This shared understanding fosters better communication and collaboration, leading to a more cohesive and customer-focused approach to product development. Creating user journey maps is a strategic step for any business with a digital product. It provides a deliberate and brief description of the user’s emotional state, actions, and interactions with the product. By using journey maps, businesses can ensure that their digital offerings are not only functional but also enjoyable, leading to a loyal customer base that continues to grow. 

What are the Elements of a User Journey Map?

To effectively create a user journey map for a digital product, it’s essential to understand the core elements that make up this strategic tool. Each element plays a crucial role in providing a comprehensive view of the customer’s interaction with the product. Let’s explore these elements in detail.

A persona represents a segment of your user base. It’s a detailed character sketch of an ideal user, based on real data and user research. Personas help you understand who you are designing for and what their specific needs, goals, and behaviors are. When crafting a user journey map, start by selecting a persona to focus on, whether they are current users or a target audience you wish to attract. This will guide the entire mapping process, ensuring that the insights are relevant and actionable.

The scenario outlines the specific interaction or experience you are mapping. It could be a real user interaction that has been observed or an anticipated one that you expect to occur in the future. Scenarios help to set the context for the journey map, defining what the user is trying to achieve and why. For a digital product, scenarios might include signing up for a service, making a purchase, or seeking customer support.

Stages of the Journey

The journey is broken down into high-level phases or stages, which represent the major steps the user goes through in the scenario. These stages might include discovery, consideration, decision, and post-purchase or retention. Each stage is a milestone in the user’s journey with your digital product, and understanding these can help you design a more intuitive and user-friendly experience.

User Actions

Within each stage, identify the specific actions that the user can take. This could be anything from clicking a button, filling out a form, or navigating through different pages of your website or app. By mapping out these actions, you can pinpoint where users might encounter difficulties or where the flow can be optimized for better efficiency.

User Emotions and Thoughts

As users interact with your digital product, they experience a range of emotions and thoughts. Mapping these out can provide valuable insights into the user’s emotional state at each stage of the journey. It helps to identify moments of frustration, confusion, or satisfaction, which can inform how you design the user interface and overall experience.

Opportunities

Opportunities are areas where you can improve the user experience (UX) of your product or create a more effective connection with your customer. By analyzing the journey map, you can uncover gaps in the user experience or features that could be added to meet user needs better. These opportunities are the key to innovating and staying ahead of the competition.

Internal Ownership

Finally, it’s important to assign internal ownership for each part of the journey. This means identifying which team or team member will be responsible for implementing changes and improvements based on the journey map. Having clear ownership ensures that insights from the journey mapping initiative are acted upon, leading to tangible improvements in the customer experience.

How to Create a User Journey Map with Visily

Creating a user journey map is a strategic step in understanding and improving the customer experience with your digital product. Visily is a tool that can help streamline this process. Here’s how you can use Visily to create your own user journey map:

•  Sign up for Visily and create your project.
•  Once you’re in your project, you can start designing from scratch using Visily’s blank canvas. This gives you the freedom to structure the user journey map exactly how you want it.
• If you prefer to work with a guide, Visily offers a library of templates. These templates are pre-designed maps that you can choose from, saving you time and providing inspiration for your map.
• Whether you’re starting with a blank canvas or a template, you can customize your map using Visily’s smart components and sticky notes. Visily allows you to add details, such as different stages of the journey, and user actions, in an organized and visually appealing way.

After your user journey map is complete, sharing it with team members or stakeholders is easy. Visily allows you to share your map directly from the platform, facilitating collaboration and feedback.

User journey mapping is a crucial step toward enhancing the digital customer experience. It allows businesses to visualize and understand the customer’s path, identify pain points, and uncover opportunities for improvement. By incorporating personas, scenarios, stages, actions, emotions, and internal ownership, journey maps become a blueprint for customer-focused innovation. Visily is an excellent tool for creating user journey maps, offering a user-friendly platform with templates and smart components. Beyond journey mapping, Visily also supports wireframing and prototyping, making it a versatile choice for designing digital products. By using Visily, teams can collaborate effectively, ensuring that every member contributes to a seamless user experience. For businesses looking to improve their digital offerings, Visily is the right place to start. Try Visily today, and take the first step in crafting a digital experience that delights your customers and sets your brand apart. 

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Customer Journey Visualization: How to Perform It + 3 Tools to Try

10 min read

Want to conduct customer journey visualization but not sure what’s the best way to do it?

This article shows you a step-by-step process for collecting customer data and creating easy-to-understand visual maps.

• A customer journey map represents the steps users take when interacting with your brand. Understanding these steps and the motivations behind them enables you to support customers in succeeding with your tool.

Customer journey visualization is the process of taking information from the customer journey map and representing it in a visually compelling way.

Benefits of customer journey mapping:

• Tailor marketing campaigns to the customer’s buying process.
• Build data-driven product roadmaps .
• Enhance customer experience.
• Improve free trial to paid conversion .
• Increase loyalty and revenue growth .

Key components to include when mapping the customer’s journey:

• Customer journey stages .
• User emotions .
• User actions .
• Proposed solution.

Stages included in the buyer journey

• Awareness stage
• Consideration stage
• Decision stage
• Activation stage
• Adoption stage
• Renewal stage
• Expansion stage
• Loyalty stage

Step-by-step guide for visualizing the customer journey:

• Identify your buyer persona .
• Segment your users with an in-app welcome survey .
• Identify key journey stages with path analysis .
• Spot customer touchpoints with heatmaps and session recordings .
• Find features that increase customer engagement and retention .
• Collect user feedback to tap into customer emotions .
• Visualize the journey with a customer journey map template .

Best practices to use when creating customer journey maps:

• Keep the visuals simple for all stakeholders .
• Use consistent symbols and colors .
• Iterate and continually update your journey maps .

Three journey mapping tools to improve the customer experience:

• Userpilot – Best data analysis tool to track user journeys.
• Miro – Best tool for customer journey map templates.
• UXPressia – Best for UX research into the customer’s journey.

Ready to create a customer journey visualization? Book a demo now to start collecting data with Userpilot .

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What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation that illustrates the steps your customers go through when engaging with your brand. It also outlines their motivations, actions, and pain points at every stage.

The main purpose of a customer journey map is to provide a clear picture of all customer interactions with your business, from their initial contact to long-term retention.

What is customer journey visualization?

This helps understand complex customer interactions through diagrams, charts, or other graphical formats so all stakeholders can quickly glance through and grasp the emotions , needs , and goals at each customer touchpoint.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

A customer journey map that clearly outlines user activity at each journey stage has tons of benefits, including the following:

• Create targeted marketing campaigns : Journey maps reveal what motivates customers at different points—their needs, questions, and pain points. This lets you tailor messaging and offers to be most relevant where potential customers are in the buyer’s journey.
• Build data-driven product roadmaps : A customer journey map helps you understand which features move users to the next stage of the customer journey. This allows you to optimize your roadmaps and make product improvements based on real user needs.
• Enhance user experience : Positive customer experience is an easy way to stand out in a competitive landscape. The data from customer mapping enables you to deliver an improved user experience .
• Improve free trial to paid conversion : Understanding the journey from a free trial to a paid subscription helps identify the critical moments and factors influencing a customer’s decision to upgrade. This helps improve your trial conversion funnel and win more users.
• Increase loyalty and revenue growth : Customer journey mapping also enhances post-purchase experiences to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty . This allows you to take actions that foster stronger relationships, encourage repeat business , and generate more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps can vary in complexity and detail but typically include the following key components:

• Customer journey stages : The major phases your customer goes through (e.g., awareness, consideration, activation, adoption, renewal).
• User emotions : How the customer feels at each stage—excited, frustrated, satisfied, etc. Understanding emotions adds depth to your customer journey visualization.
• User actions : What the customer does at each stage (e.g., visits the website, books a demo, engages with key activation features during onboarding, and so on).
• Proposed solution : Ideas for improving specific areas of the customer journey and addressing pain points .

Stages included in a customer journey

Each customer journey stage represents a unique mindset and set of objectives that, when understood, will help funnel users smoothly till they become paying and loyal users. Let’s go over the key journey stages :

• Awareness stage : The potential customer becomes aware of a problem or need and begins seeking general information, not necessarily focused on your product.
• Consideration stage : In this second stage of the buyer’s journey, potential customers begin actively researching for potential solutions. Using channels like friends, search engines, and social media, they compare different products, assessing features , benefits, and pricing to determine what best meets their needs.
• Decision stage : After their research, the customer makes a decision by booking a demo call , signing up for your free version , or going straight for the paid plan.
• Activation stage : The new user experiences your product’s core value for the first time and sees reasons to continue engaging.
• Adoption stage : After successful activation , the user incorporates your product into their workflow and continues using it regularly.
• Renewal stage : This is where the customer decides to renew their accounts to increase the ROI of using your product.
• Expansion stage : Here, the customer purchases add-ons, upgrades their accounts , or increases their usage. This signifies trust in your company and the value it provides.
• Loyalty stage : The loyalty stage is the holy grail of the SaaS customer journey. Customers in this stage not only expand and repeatedly renew their accounts but also advocate for you through word of mouth or social media.

Step-by-step guide for visualizing the customer journey

Customer journey visualization involves several steps, each contributing to a comprehensive view of the customer’s path from initial engagement to loyalty. Here’s how to approach it:

1. Identify your customer persona

The first step is to define the persona you wish to visualize—note that the customer journey will be slightly different for each of your customer personas because they have varying needs and goals.

Once you’ve decided on the persona to visualize, the next step is to list what you already know about them . This includes their pain points, goals, jobs to be done, and any relevant information you wish to add.

Here’s a template you can use:

2. Segment your users with an in-app welcome survey

Use a welcome survey to collect important data about new users. Keep the survey short and focus on asking questions about their company size, the end user’s role in the company, and their main use cases.

How is this important to the customer journey mapping process?

The data from your welcome survey helps segment users based on their needs, preferences, and initial impressions, allowing you to create more detailed and personalized customer journeys.

3. Identify key journey stages with path analysis

Define the goal(s) for each customer journey (e.g., activation of XYZ feature). Then, implement path analysis to find all the paths users take to achieve that goal. Filter through the noise to identify the shortest path and highlight all the stages involved.

For example, a path analysis can help you identify which features drive adoption by monitoring users’ journey from signing up to becoming paying customers.

You can track all the pages they visit or the events they conduct to understand key conversion drivers.

4. Spot customer touchpoints with heatmaps and session recordings

Heatmaps provide a visual representation of user actions on your website or app in terms of UI clicks and hovers so you can identify high-engagement areas.

Session recordings perform a similar function but are even more insightful as they provide video recordings of user clicks , scrolls, zoom-ins, and other mouse movements.

Combining these two customer analytics lets you identify the key touchpoints at each user journey stage.

5. Find features that drive engagement and retention

Use trend analysis to find popular features at every journey stage. This report highlights features that are visited most often in a given period so you can gain insights into key user problems and what solutions work best for them.

You can pair your trends report with cohorts analysis to find which features drive retention and loyalty.

These highly-used features likely fulfill a core need, address a significant pain point, or provide exceptional value. Identifying them helps you map out the moments of delight in the customer journey.

6. Collect user feedback to tap into customer emotions

Feedback surveys help you hear from the horse’s mouth. By asking the right questions, you can identify customer pain points and motivations at each journey stage.

For this survey, you want to prioritize open-ended questions over close-ended ones so users can freely express themselves.

For example, asking a question like “What are the top challenges your company is facing?” allows the respondents to think and provide detailed feedback .

7. Visualize the journey with a customer journey map template

With all the data and insights you collected from the previous steps, it’s time to visualize it. Use a customer journey map template to consolidate the customer data you’ve collected.

Examples of what to include:

• Customer journey stages
• Customer touchpoints
• User emotions
• User actions
• Opportunities

Here’s a customer journey map template from Miro you can use:

Best practices to use when creating customer journey maps

Follow these best practices to ensure your customer journey map is clear, actionable , and remains relevant over time.

Keep the visual representation simple

Your visualization should have just enough data for all stakeholders to understand user motivations . The map will lose its impact as a quick reference tool if it’s too cluttered or complex.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Don’t use product jargon.
• Use illustrations to make it easy to visualize user feelings/emotions.
• Limit the detail level and attach summaries of each journey.

Use consistent symbols and colors

You’ll likely be working on multiple customer journeys across different user personas .

It’s easy to mix things up, so develop a visual key to represent different journey stages, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points .

Iterate and continually update your journey maps

Customer needs and preferences keep changing over time, so update the visualization based on new insights regularly.

Aim to conduct periodic data analytics to keep tabs on changes in the customer experience and track user behavior .

3 journey mapping tools to improve the customer experience

Below are three of the best customer journey mapping tools and what they help you accomplish.

1. Userpilot – Best data analysis tool to track user journeys

Userpilot is a product growth tool with powerful customer behavior analytics.

The platform lets you visualize customer journeys and create in-app experiences to improve your customer experience.

Relevant features:

• Funnel analysis : Visualize how users progress through each customer journey stage. The funnel analysis report shows friction points and areas where users move smoothly.

• Analytics reports : Dig into customer behavior data and uncover insights to facilitate better customer journey visualization with trend reports , cohort analysis , user paths , and heatmap analysis.
• Analytics dashboards : View all key data points from a single location with the analytics dashboard . There are different dashboards to choose from such as the product usage and core feature engagement dashboards. You can also build custom dashboards.

• Feature usage reports : Tag any feature of your choice and track all user interactions associated with it without having to involve your dev team.
• In-app surveys : From simple quantitative surveys to more in-depth, open-ended questions, Userpilot has several survey templates to make feedback collection easy.

2. Miro – Best tool for customer journey map templates

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform that enables teams to work more effectively, from brainstorming with digital sticky notes to planning and managing agile workflows.

Features that help with customer journey visualization include:

• Collaborative online whiteboards : Create and share customer journey maps in a visual and interactive environment. The workspace is flexible, allowing you to freely arrange text, shapes, and images to fit your visualization needs.
• Templates and frameworks : Access pre-built templates, including customer journey maps, to quickly start projects.
• Integration : Seamlessly integrate with tools such as Slack, Asana, and Google Drive to enhance team collaboration.

3. UXPressia – Best for UX research into the customer’s journey

UXPressia is a specialized platform dedicated to customer experience management, offering tools for customer journey mapping, persona creation, and impact mapping.

Here’s how it helps with customer journey visualization:

• Templates for customer journey mapping : Access a variety of industry-specific templates and customer journey mapping examples to streamline your mapping process with a user-friendly interface.
• Persona creation : Create personas by incorporating demographics, needs , and pain points to better understand the customer experience.
• Impact mapping : Identify and visualize the impact of different touchpoints on the customer’s experience and satisfaction.

By visualizing the steps users take to become loyal customers, you’ll spot ways to optimize your product and convert more customers.

Ready to begin? Book a Userpilot demo to access behavior analytics and user feedback for effective customer journey visualization.

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