customer journey design tool

Collaborative customer journey mapping tools

Easily plan and create customer journey maps in Miro. Exercise empathy, understand your user’s wants and needs, and build exceptional customer experiences.

Over 70M+ users love Miro.

Ready-made customer journey map templates

Design transformative customer journeys with templates for persona building, touchpoint maps, service blueprints, and more. Help your team quickly visualize, collaborate, and iterate on your customer experience, bringing in data and research to make the best-informed decisions.

Create a shared understanding, faster

Build highly visual and accurate maps that bring a customer’s humanity and experience to life with dynamically populated input, feedback, and data from various sources, like Amplitude, Looker, Blossom, Loom, and UserTesting. Record interactive walkthroughs with Talktrack so everyone can engage on their own time, with all the context on the board.

Easy to share and change

Give your team easy access to customer journey maps so they can leave feedback, ask questions, and make immediate changes as needed. Keep customer-centricity top of mind by embedding it everywhere your teams work (like Confluence) and it’ll always be synced to the latest version, or export your customer journey map as an image or PDF file for presentations.

Why people love Miro for customer journey mapping

Uncover possibilities.

Miro’s infinite canvas gives you the ability to collaborate across product teams and cross-functional stakeholders on customer journeys. It serves as a team hub for mapping and research, where you can plot your customer’s paths, visualize their journey, and gather insights all in one tool.

Empathy made easy

Make sure all voices are heard and tap into your team’s collective imagination to identify customer pain points, cultivate empathy, wireframe solutions, and ship innovative products  — all with Miro’s customer journey map tools.

Be the voice of the customer

Map your user journey step-by-step and truly understand the people using your product. Bring your team with you in this process and share your customer journey map across your organization. Become the customer advocate and ensure you add value to your product.

Quickly get started

Miro’s customer journey map tool helps accelerate your team’s processes by clearly visualizing journeys, touchpoints, personas, and more. Save time by crafting your customer journey map using one of our pre-made frameworks, or build one from scratch with our many editing tools.

Deliver better results

Make better-informed decisions by getting instant feedback and craft experiences that people will remember. Tag team members, receive comments, and gain more insights with Miro’s collaborative customer journey mapping tool.

Share it with everyone

Share your insights and be proactive by running customer workshops inside your organization. Use Miro’s collaborative features, such as the timer and voting, to help lead interactive sessions and engage your team. Offer the space and tools needed for blue-sky thinking.

Related templates

Customer Journey Map Template

Design the best product experience and meet your customer's needs.

Customer Touchpoint Map Template

Identify opportunities and gain a competitive advantage.

Customer Problem Statement Template

Create a problem statement to understand your customer's point of view.

Voice of the Customer Template

Create standards to understand and improve your customer experience.

Customer Journey Mapping Template Pack

Easily create customer journey maps for projects of all kinds.

Experience Mapping Template

Bring a customer-centric approach to product development and branding.

More than just a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping in Miro is the perfect blend of structure and flexibility, so your team can seamlessly visualize, collaborate, and iterate on your user journeys. From workshops with product teams to client presentations, focus on what matters and build great customer experiences.

UX & Design

From brainstorming with your cross-functional squad to gathering feedback for iteration and reiteration, create product experiences that people love.

Research and Design

Embrace design thinking and collaborate on design sprints, customer journey maps, wireframes, and more. Transform the way your team builds products.

Strategic planning

Propel your plans from strategy through execution. Run engaging remote planning sessions, build visual presentations, and manage and track progress collaboratively.

Bring teams together and create everything you need to develop campaigns that delight customers and drive business forward — all in one place.

Wireframing

Create quick app and website wireframes, ideate on sticky notes, map user flows, and collect references. Do it all in real time with your team on one board.

Bring teams closer together and execute faster in a hybrid, collaborative Obeya room.

How to create a customer journey map with Miro

Define personas

Determine which specific customer segments or personas you want to focus on. Collect data and insights about their needs, behaviors, and preferences.

Identify touchpoints

Identify key stages of the customer journey listing the touchpoints. Detail the specific actions, emotions, and pain points customers experience at each stage.

Add context and insights

Integrate data from customer surveys, interviews, analytics, and other sources to enrich your understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.

Share and find opportunities

Identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. When ready, share with stakeholders for feedback and collaboratively draft an action plan to implement the findings.

Iterate and update

Embed the map where teams and stakeholders can easily find it. Regularly review and evolve the customer journey map as you gain more data, insights, and feedback.

Customer journey mapping tools FAQs

What makes a good customer journey.

To create a good customer journey map, make sure you add all the stages your user goes through by mapping every customer touchpoint and the phases they belong to. After you map out your customer journey, to know more about who they are, you can create a storyboard or dig deeper with an empathy map. Miro’s customer journey mapping software makes it easy to add other artifacts and maps to your board, so you can have a great overview of your customer journey and what influences your customer's experiences. It can get messy, and it’s ok! Once you have all the information you need in one shared space, it’s easier to craft your customer journey or create a new user journey map.

What are the components of a customer journey map?

In Miro’s customer journey mapping tool, you have the flexibility to add as many components as you’d like. In our template, we use the following: actions, touchpoints, customer thoughts, customer feelings, process ownership, and opportunities. Each component belongs to a customer journey stage and is added to the board. Some folks also add user research data and other tools, such as empathy maps or timelines.

Can I download or share my customer journey map?

Yes, you can download your customer journey map as an image or PDF file or share your board link with others. Embed the map everywhere your teams work, like Confluence or Notion and it'll always be synced to the latest version. The customer journey map can be treated as a living document, evolving according to your product evolution and need.

Discover more

The ultimate list of templates for understanding your customers

A field guide to customer journey mapping

3 steps to go from customer interviews to a customer journey map

Service blueprint vs. journey maps

Get on board in seconds

Join thousands of teams using Miro to do their best work yet.

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.

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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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

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10 Best Customer Journey Mapping Software Tools in 2024

Senior Content Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

Understanding your team’s needs and customer expectations is critical to running a successful business. One way to achieve this understanding is by mapping out their journey, from their first interaction to their final purchase, and yes, there are tools to automate this process and make it way easier!

This article will explore customer journey mapping tools and outline our top 10 of the crop, each with unique features and benefits. Keep reading to find the perfect software to enhance your customer engagement efforts.

What are Customer Journey Mapping Tools?

2. custellence, 4. lucidchart, 5. visual paradigm, 6. uxpressia, 9. flowmapp, 10. microsoft visio, what to look for in customer journey mapping tools.

A customer journey mapping tool is a software application or platform that helps businesses create visual representations of customer touchpoints and experiences. Customer journey mapping involves understanding and documenting a customer’s various interactions with a business, from their initial awareness and engagement to the final purchase or onboarding and post-purchase experience.

The best customer journey mapping tool typically provides user-friendly interfaces that let businesses create visual diagrams on digital Whiteboards or Mind Maps of the customer journey. These journey maps often include different stages or phases of the customer’s experience and other aspects such as awareness, consideration, decision-making, purchase, and post-purchase.

Within each stage, the user journey map tool allows the user to define and outline specific touchpoints, interactions, channels, and emotions the customer may experience.

Mastering the customer journey mapping process helps you make sense of customer data, gain insights and identify areas for improving your average customer’s experience.

10 Best Customer Journey Mapping Software to Use in 2024

Are you tired of hearing about the essence of mapping your customer journey but unsure where to start? Fear not, as we are about to give you “the tea” on the best customer journey mapping software for you to get started.

Our top 10 picks for customer journey mapping tools include the following:

ClickUp is an excellent customer journey mapping tool that lets you create the best visual workflow representations with its whiteboard feature and mind map maker. These features help you outline and view the various touchpoints of your customer lifecycle, from awareness to conversion, repeat purchases, churn, and more.

ClickUp also offers multiple customer journey map templates , so you don’t have to create yours from scratch. Create detailed workflows and approval processes with Mind Maps so you can easily create dependencies for each step.

ClickUp key features

• ClickUp’s Whiteboard : ClickUp has a whiteboard feature that allows individuals and teams to visualize ideas, improve communication and create unique CRM workflows to improve customer journeys
• Mind Map Maker : ClickUp’s Mind Mapping feature helps create dynamic visual outlines and flowcharts for ideas, projects, or existing tasks
• Customizable templates : ClickUp provides templates for multiple use cases, including creating project roadmaps and customer journey maps – so you have a base to start from
• Custom views : Choose between 15+ different views for task management, journey mapping, diagramming, or through custom Gantt charts

ClickUp limitations

• ClickUp has a ton of customizations, so it can be a little difficult to learn it all right away

ClickUp pricing

• Free Forever
• Unlimited: $7/month per user 
• Business: $12/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom pricing available–if you need software to handle your business, contact Sales to help set you up when you are ready

ClickUp customer ratings

• G2 : 4.7/5 (6,700+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.7/5 (3,600+ reviews)

Custellence is a customer journey mapping tool that helps teams and organizations understand and improve customer experiences. With its simple drag-and-drop functionality and real-time collaboration features, Custellance lets users create customer journey maps in minutes, get buy-in from stakeholders, increase customer engagement, and drive customer-centered change.

Custellence best features

• Unique image collection
• Flexible journey map structure
• Curated icons
• Broad color palette
• Multiple templates for a quick start
• Enables export to PNG, CSV, or PDF versions
• Commenting feature for seamless collaboration
• Ability to choose your preferred code system

Custellence limitations

• Text updates sometimes take a while
• No free offer to create customer journey maps from templates

Custellence pricing

• Standard : $0 
• Professional : $30/month per user
• Enterprise : Custom pricing

Custellence ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (5+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.3/5 (10+ reviews)

Smaply is one of this list’s top customer journey mapping tools because it helps create visually appealing journey maps and facilitates customer feedback tools for real-time online collaboration.

On Smaply, teams can collaborate on different maps, exchange customer feedback and visualize customer experience insights.

Smaply best features

• Online and offline collaboration features with an intuitive interface
• Drag and drop editor for detailed journey maps
• GDPR compliant
• High data security
• No credit card required

Smaply limitations

• Not enough persona templates
• No rewind button

Smaply pricing

• Free: 0 eur/month per user
• Basic: 19 eur/month per user
• Pro: 29 eur/month per user
• Enterprise: Contact Smaply for pricing

Smaply ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.6/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.4/5 (15+ reviews)

Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming software that can create customer journey and stakeholder maps. It allows teams to efficiently and collaboratively build visual presentations of complex processes , systems, and ideas.

With Lucidchart, you can easily create journey maps to understand how customers find, buy and use your products – and improve them to capture more revenue.

Lucidchart best features

• Data linking
• Auto-visualization
• Integration options like Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and more.
• Visualization filters to highlight specific customer journeys
• Automatic cloud documentation to save and share customer personas

Lucidchart limitations

• Sometimes lags when working on large, complex diagrams with multiple elements
• Steep learning curve, unlike many alternatives
• Low-resolution exports
• Some users’ pain points are with the limited brand icons, images, and shapes to illustrate user journey maps
• Importing external graphics is complicated and sometimes impossible

Lucidchart pricing

• Individual: $7.95/ month per user
• Team: $9/month per user
• Enterprise: Contact Lucidchart for pricing

Lucidchart ratings & reviews

• G2 : 4.6/5 (2300+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (1900+ reviews)

Check out these Lucidchart alternatives!

Visual Paradigm is a suite of agile project tools for boosting productivity. The platform offers visual modeling and diagramming features that can be used to build journey maps and gain insight into customer emotions as they interact with your brand.

Visual Paradigm has several diagram types for conducting user research and building more precise visual representations of customer behaviors and journey maps.

Visual Paradigm best features

• Customer experience design tool
• Process map designer to highlight customer touchpoints
• Online diagram tool for detailed customer and stakeholder maps
• Report generation for customer journeys
• Textual analysis
• Mind mapping tool for customer journey maps
• Project publisher
• Infographics and diagram maker
• Drag-and-drop diagram editor for simple journey mapping

Visual Paradigm limitations

• Diagram connections can be complicated for some when building customer journey maps
• Some users found the app’s shortcuts sometimes don’t work
• Lacks some of the collaborative features users are looking for

Visual Paradigm pricing

• Modeler: $6/month per user
• Standard: $19/month per user
• Professional: $35/month per user
• Enterprise: $89/month per user

Visual Paradigm ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.5/5 (2+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.2/5 (15+ reviews

UXPressia is a visual collaboration software for creating not just customer journey maps but user personas and impact maps as well. The software enables real-time collaboration and offers customer experience courses to help individuals and teams perform better.

UXPressia best features

• High-quality exports with custom branding
• 70+ customer journey maps, personas, and impact map templates
• Interactive online courses
• Online persona creator to highlight pain points
• Experience graph
• Integrated web analytics to detail the customer experience
• File attachments
• Presentation mode to display journey maps online

UXPressia limitations

• Some users felt constrained by limited features and unintuitive workflow
• No Jira or Confluence integration can make it difficult for users with that software in their workflow
• Steep learning curve for some users creating customer journey maps

UXPressia pricing

• Starter : $16/month per user
• Pro : $36/month per user
• Enterprise : Contact UXPressia for pricing

UXPressia ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (70+ reviews)

Sketch enables users to create different designs for their projects. With its robust features, like copy and paste, image editing and adjustments, library management, and more, Sketch can build journey maps across customer touchpoints.

Recently, the journey map company introduced an experimental feature menu for users to try unreleased features and share feedback before launch.

Sketch best features

• Available on multiple platforms – MacOS and web
• Advanced vector editing with its mapping tool
• Reusable design templates
• Intuitive prototyping
• Shared libraries
• Solo design or real-time collaboration
• Customizable toolbars

Sketch limitations

• Mapping tool is not available on iPad, which makes it tough for on-the-go Mac users
• It takes time to learn the full of the journey mapping capabilities
• Doesn’t work on Windows devices

Sketch pricing

• Standard: $12/month per editor
• Business: $20/month per editor

Sketch ratings & reviews

• G2 : 4.5/5 (1,100+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.6/5 (750+ reviews)

Figma is a collaborative interface design software famous for its prototyping capabilities. With Figma, individuals and teams can create designs from scratch, including customer journey maps that can be used to visualize and improve customer satisfaction.

This customer experience and journey mapping tool stands out in this list because it offers a whiteboarding function for freehand wireframing and designing. Figma is targeted at user interface/experience (UI/UX) design rather than customer journey mapping, unlike many other tools on this list.

Figma best features

• Modern pen tool
• Plugins for automating tasks and improving workflows
• Flexible styles
• Accessible libraries
• Unlimited viewers
• Easy export to share the customer experience with your team

Figma limitations

• Not available offline, which can be difficult if you’re traveling where there’s spotty wifi
• It can be difficult to find resources in the community section
• Some users felt there weren’t enough image manipulation options—especially when creating customer journey maps

Figma pricing

• Figma professional : $12/month per editor
• Figma organization : $45/month per editor

Figma ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (800+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (600+ reviews)

One of the leading UX tools for web design workflows , FlowMapp allows individuals and teams to create and iterate sitemaps. It also offers features that track the status and comments/ongoing conversations about each design.

FlowMapp’s design functionalities come in handy for customer experience management, journey mapping, and the creation of customer personas.

FlowMapp best features

• Intuitive sitemaps for visualizing team workflows
• Flowchart diagrams for user journey and website planning
• User flow diagrams for planning a better customer journey and improved user experiences
• Ability to share, transfer, or archive projects or customer experience logs
• Drag and drop interface

FlowMapp limitations

• Inflexible nodes and templates compared to alternatives
• No separate input field specifically for search engine results page (SERP) information
• Some users struggled to navigate between projects
• Not enough integrations for some journey mapping tool users

FlowMapp pricing

• Pro : $18/month per user
• Team : $54/month for up to five team members
• Agency : $180/month for an unlimited number of team members

FlowMapp ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (80+ reviews)
• Capterra: Unavailable

Microsoft Visio uses stencils, premade templates, starter diagrams, and flowcharts to help customer journey managers and individuals looking to create easy-to-understand visuals.

With Visio, you can create, edit, and collaborate in Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft Visio best features

• Built-in templates for flowchart creation
• Organization chart
• Export and import functionality
• Highly customizable diagrams and graphics

Microsoft Visio limitation

• Difficulty with linking elements and sharing large files
• Limited collaboration options
• Does not integrate well with various wireframe programs
• Incompatible with tools outside the Microsoft Suite

Microsoft Visio pricing

• Visio plan 1: $5/month per user
• Visio plan 2: $15/month per user

Microsoft Visio ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (600+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (3000+ reviews)

Customer journey mapping software is indispensable for businesses that want to enhance their customer experiences. When selecting a customer journey mapping software, it is crucial to consider the following:

• Multi-channel journey mapping : Your customer journey mapping software should support multi-channel mapping, allowing you to capture and analyze interactions across different channels, including websites, mobile apps, social media, physical stores, call centers, and more.
• Data integration and automation : Look for software that seamlessly integrates with other data sources, such as CRM and project management systems, marketing automation platforms, or analytics tools. This integration lets you gather real-time data and automate the mapping process, saving time and improving the accuracy of the information.
• Collaboration and sharing features : The software should facilitate collaboration among team members, allowing them to work simultaneously, leave comments, and track changes.
• Analytics and metrics tracking : Look for customer journey maps with built-in analytics and metrics tracking capabilities to measure the effectiveness of your customer journey initiatives. It should allow you to set and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer experience and other relevant metrics.
• Scalability and flexibility : You want journey mapping tools that can manage large datasets, support complex customer journeys, and adapt to changing business needs. Look for customizable features that allow you to tailor the software to match your specific requirements, ensuring flexibility and long-term usability.
• Customer support and training : Evaluate the level of customer support and training the software vendor provides. That includes assets like comprehensive documentation , tutorials, and training resources to assist users in maximizing the software’s potential. 

A customer journey mapping tool with the right blend of these features will help you gain valuable customer insights, improve user satisfaction, and drive sustainable business growth.

ClickUp—Your Best Customer Journey Mapping Software

ClickUp is the best customer experience management and journey mapping software out there. It’s like having a super-smart assistant who knows your customer’s ins and outs.

Say goodbye to the headache of manually organizing customer data, and hello to a tool that makes your customer analytics process so much easier.

Try ClickUp’s customer journey map template today .

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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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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

Last updated

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

Customer journey mapping software

Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation.

Grasp the customer experience with our customer journey mapping tool

Create in-depth diagrams that capture the customer experience

Understanding your customer’s expectations, objectives, and interactions with your company is essential for creating a flawless customer experience. By mapping the customer journey from your consumer’s perspective, you can gain insight into the individual interactions that make up their experience from beginning to end. With customizable templates and extensive formatting options, our customer journey software lets you easily visualize and share your findings, helping you target specific personas, increase customer engagement, and ultimately increase your organization’s revenue.

Build a streamlined site with our user story software

As a UX designer, a user journey map can help you visualize your customer’s experience as they interact with your site or app. Our intuitive user story mapping tools let you easily outline how individual personas navigate and ultimately reach your site’s point of sale, allowing you to cater to your audience’s motivations and eliminate pain points. Lucidchart’s easy-to-use interface makes it simple to build and refine your user story map as your organization and customer experience evolve.

Collaborate with other departments and stakeholders

Ensure that your customer journey map is as comprehensive as possible. Lucidchart helps you collaborate with the stakeholders and teams responsible for each touchpoint in the customer journey. Using real-time collaboration and in-editor commenting and chatting, your team can keep your map up to date without worrying about version control or wasted time. No matter where or when your team is working, your customer journey map will reflect all of your latest updates.

Share, publish, and implement your customer journey map

Our dynamic sharing options and powerful integrations make it easy to distribute your diagram amongst stakeholders and decision makers. Easily invite others to view and edit your diagram via email or embed your diagram in collaborative platforms like Jira, Salesforce, or Slack. Once the final version of your customer journey map is complete, publish and share your diagram company-wide to keep your organization on the same page as you implement action items and revise your customer journey.

How to create a customer journey map

Define clear objectives for the map.

Identify the purpose of your customer journey map, the experience it is based on, and its audience. Your map can be based on an actual, hypothetical, or future customer experience.

Conduct customer persona research to understand your customer's goals

Collect info on your customer, including variables they're likely to experience during their journey with your company. List related touchpoints, actions, channels, motivations, pain points, and ownership.

Start mapping the user journey to include touchpoints

With your customer's info collected, add elements to your customer journey map that address the touchpoints and objectives specific to your customer.

Identify gaps along the customer journey and refine

Identify potential pain points in the customer journey. Lucidchart makes it easy to visualize and refine the journey to ensure the customer has an efficient and satisfying experience.

Present and share

Share your user journey map with stakeholders to implement appropriate solutions. Keep your map accessible to easily test, update, and improve it every six months or so.

Frequently asked questions about creating a customer journey map online

You can create a customer journey map from scratch by dragging and dropping basic shapes, or you can customize a customer journey map from our template gallery.

Read the blog post linked below for tips to create and keep your customer journey map organized.

Yes! We have an assortment to choose from, depending on your customer journey map’s objective. Type "customer journey" in the template gallery search bar to browse through templates.

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“I have used [Lucidchart] extensively to map the customer journey. It's an intuitive tool, enabling the visual display and explanation of complicated workflows through easy-to-make diagrams.”

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

By Bree Chapin

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

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

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

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

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

What Is a Journey Map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Start with user research.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identify the Lens of the Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

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

Bree Chapin

New York, NY, United States

Member since May 15, 2016

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Blog / Journey Tools

11 Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Navigate & Analyze User Experiences

• February 29, 2024

Table of Contents

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

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

That’s where data visualization comes into play.

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

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

Key Takeaways

Optimize the customer journey with real-time analytics

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

1. Funnelytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand your user flow with Funnelytics

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

Pricing : $199–$999 per month

Key features :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Custellence

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

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

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

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

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

4. UXPressia

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Lucidchart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pricing : $0 to $75 per editor per month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Visual Paradigm

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

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

Pricing : $6 to $89 per month

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

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

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

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

Pricing : Starting from $10 per month

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

10. Flowmapp

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

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

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

Pricing : $0 to $126 per month

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

11.  Microsoft Visio

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

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

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

Pricing : $5 to $530 per month

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

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

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

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

Map your customer journey with real-time data

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

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

Funnelytics also has:

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

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

Implement your ideas faster with Funnelytics

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

● What does customer journey mapping software do?

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

Related resources

Sales Funnel vs. Customer Journey: What are the Differences?

Cracking the Code: Funnel Reporting for Marketers

The Customer Lifecycle Journey: What it is and How to Use it to Create Repeat Customers

9 Best Funnel Tracking Software Tools to Streamline Your Sales Success

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Customer journey vs process flow

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

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

Getting started with customer journey map templates

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

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

Download our free journey mapping template here

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

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

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

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

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

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

Create a diverse team

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

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

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

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

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

Step 4 – Innovate

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

Then, test it.

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

Step 5 – Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

Unsolicited data

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

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

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

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

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

Take stock and take action

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

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

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

Orchestrate your customer journey

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

Improve your employee experience

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

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

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

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

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

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

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

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

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

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

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

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

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

Conduct Research

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

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

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

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

Make an Empathy Map

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

Sketch the Journey

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

Iterate and Refine

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

Share with Stakeholders

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

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

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

Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

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

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

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

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

Resource Intensity

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

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

Risk of Bias

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

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

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Customer Behaviors

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

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

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

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

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

Misalignment with Customer Needs

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

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

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

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

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

Over-Reliance on the Map

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

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

Data Privacy Concerns

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

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

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

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

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

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

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

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

Learn more from this insightful video:

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

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

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

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

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

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

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

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

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

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

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

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

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

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

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

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

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a closer look.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UI DESIGN]

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

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

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

2. Define your persona and scenario

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

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

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Identify opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

6. Define action points and next steps 

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

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

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

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

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

For more how-to guides, check out:

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

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The Power of Customer Journey Mapping: 101

We all need maps to show us the way sometimes––the journey is just as important as the destination!

In this three-part blog series, we’re breaking down one of our favourite service design tools: Customer Journey Maps! We will cover:

Customer Journey Mapping 101: What are customer journey maps, and why do you need them? (this post)

Customer Journey Mapping 201: How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Mapping 301: Designing for the future, evolving your map, and making it actionable

This week we’ll introduce you to customer journey mapping, we’ll discuss the different types of maps used in service design, and then we’ll clarify why creating customer journey maps is so ridiculously beneficial for your organization!

What is journey mapping?

Customer Journey Mapping is a powerful storytelling and design tool that will reveal the complexity of your customer/citizen/user experience in a way that is truly easy to understand, by literally mapping it out in front of you. Journey maps, based on research with real people, enable you to clearly see the paths your customers are taking with your organization, products, and services (their “Current State” Journey), in order to better envision, build, and re-route their experiences and paths into the “Ideal” or “Future State” Journey.

With journey mapping, you can identify your customers’ major pain points as well as key areas for opportunity and improvement, and with this research well in-hand, you and your team can make a prioritized action plan and roadmap for the future.

Why are journey maps important?

Journey maps are crucial business tools for many reasons. Not only is the market tough and competition high, but user expectations are increasing every day. Customers today expect beautiful, easy-to-navigate apps–and this expectation of ease and intolerance for “frustrating” experiences has also bled into other sectors…specifically, their non-digital and physical interactions with services.

Brand loyalty is also more precarious than ever. Simple interactions with companies now entail complex systems and interconnected webs of people and technology. Customers expect that there is a single chain of information carried throughout all of their interactions with a brand, but this is often not the case. For example, if you call your insurance company’s customer support line to process a claim or discuss an issue, and you get put on hold, or passed to another agent who gives you different information, or you never receive a call back, you’re much more likely to become frustrated with that insurance brand…and you may harp about this bad experience to your friends––or change providers all together.

When we look closer at brand impressions, we can see that it is the sum of experiences across all touchpoints that leaves users feeling positively or negatively about a company. If a user generally has a good impression of a brand––but the experience falls apart when they call customer service for the third consecutive time and find themselves repeating everything––this can ruin their entire experience, even if it’s only one part of their “journey.” Interestingly, people have a tendency to remember the end of their journey more than the middle or beginning, so it’s incredibly important to finish on a high note!

Related to this is the simple yet inarguable fact that millennials ( one of the largest segments of the population ) have very different purchasing behaviours than previous generations. They are much more skeptical of brands , and are far more willing to try new brands (or switch completely!) if it means they will have access to better services and products. For all of these reasons, in 2020, it’s crucial that companies continually seek to improve their end-to-end customer experiences––and journey maps can do just that.

What kinds of journeys can you map? 

 Journey mapping is best applied to map complex, multi-touchpoint (meaning: multiple points of contact or interaction with a company), multi-platform experiences––and each map often includes a fixed time frame, where tasks occur in a linear and chronological order. For instance, you could map how well users learn to use a specific tool or product over the course of one year. You might ask: When and why did they call customer or tech support? What feelings did they have after using the application? Were their expectations met?

MAPPING A PRODUCT OR SERVICE EXPERIENCE

You can map a customer’s experience with a single product or service best if their journey involves other touchpoints, too––e.g. researching the product online, purchasing it via the website, calling IT support, watching online tutorials, attending a class, and so on. If you’d simply like to understand a user’s experience downloading a cooking app directly from the App store, for example, a customer journey map may not be the right tool. Journey maps are best applied to multi-touchpoint products/services.

MAPPING A USER’S EXPERIENCE WITH TECHNOLOGY, OR A “DAY-IN-THE-LIFE” MAP

Mapping a user’s general experience with technology as they go about their daily activities is another common type of journey-mapping exercise. A physician who sees patients in the hospital, at a rehab centre, and in their private clinic might be using multiple different applications or manual ways to track patient data––and these systems often do not talk to each other. This can cause major headaches and a lack of continuity for doctors, nurses, office staff, patients, and their families, in addition to potentially serious miscommunications around medication, prescriptions, allergies, and so on. In this case, a healthcare provider or hospital team might be interested in understanding more about a physician’s typical daily routine, how many patients they interact with, and where information is falling through the cracks. “Day-in-the-Life” journey maps can be particularly useful for identifying areas of opportunity where a new feature or new technology could solve every-day frustrations.

MAPPING A USER’S JOURNEY TO ACHIEVE A SPECIFIC GOAL

Imagine that you are a financial institution, and you’d like to better understand a first-time home buyer’s experience acquiring a mortgage. Your ultimate goal is to offer better mortgage services in order to successfully attract more home buyers. Customer journey mapping would be a great resource for you. The map would outline a new home buyer’s entire current journey, including researching mortgages online, making an appointment through your company’s website, meeting in-person with one of your brokers, printing and signing the required documentation, feeling stressed the entire way along (etc.) The outcome of this research might indicate that your financial institution could do a better job at supporting first-time home buyers in the documentation aspect of their journey. From there, you would have the information you need to improve your services and products to attract more first-time home buyers to your company. Goal-oriented journey mapping can be extremely powerful.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Outwitly | UX & Service Design (@outwitly)

Click through to explore a client journey map…

Who are you mapping?

Something that constantly bugs us at Outwitly is trying to establish how best to refer to the person or target at the centre of the journey map. Are they a customer, a user, a citizen, a doctor, an employee, a Siberian Tiger… (just kidding – but you get the point!) At the end of the day, the map represents someone’s journey. Whoever that person is depends on the project, so it could be a Customer Journey Map, a Citizen’s Journey Map, a Refugee’s First Year Living in Canada Journey Map, and on and on. Choose a term that makes sense for your specific project.

Different Service Design Mapping Tools

In the world of service design, human-centered design, and UX, there are many different types of visual storytelling tools and maps we keep in our design toolbox. We’ve created a list of a few that you may sometimes hear about.

Service Blueprints are similar to journey maps, except that they show both the front and back of house operations for a service or organization. Whereas a customer journey map shows one side of the story (the customer’s journey), service blueprints explore what employees are doing as they interact with the customer along the journey, whether that’s processing the customer’s information, assisting them in-store, shipping packages, and so on.

Experience Maps are generally interchangeable with customer journey maps. However, they tend more often to be non-linear (showing steps in a journey that are not necessarily occuring in chronological order), and they place a stronger emphasis on the user’s emotions, thoughts, and feelings throughout a journey. At Outwitly, we don’t draw a strict line between experience and customer journey mapping––we apply the tool (or a mix) that feels best suited for each project.

Customer Journey Maps, as we’ve explained, are most often linear and chronological. They depict the tasks, touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for innovation and improvement as the customer or user interacts with various products, services, or technologies.

Ecosystem Maps illustrate all of the different stakeholders, people, organizations, tools, associations (etc.) involved in a particular initiative. They are best used for large complex projects that involve many different governing forces, stakeholders who need to be consulted, and/or lots of bureaucratic “red tape” that needs to be crossed.

Process Maps/Workflow Diagrams/Flow Charts are more traditional diagrams that depict a particular workflow or business process. They outline the steps needed in order to accomplish a workflow or process, as well as the individuals responsible for each step. They don’t often show pain points or issues in the workflow. At Outwitly, we typically don’t use these maps as they are non-user-focused. But they may be right for you depending on the scale of your project.

Journey Mapping Benefits 

We believe customer journey mapping to be widely beneficial for so many reasons, as you’ve likely gleaned so far. Conducting any form of user research is great on its own, but journey mapping is unique in that it allows organizations to see the entire end-to-end experience (a holistic view) in one highly visual document. Journey mapping brings each pain point and part of the journey into perspective, showing relative importance as compared to other “less” painful parts of a journey. This relative importance can help an organization prioritize which areas to tackle and change first, and which initiatives can be tabled for later. A customer support team may think that their role in the customer’s journey is the worst, yet if studied across the entire experience, the product development team may be surprised to find that the mobile app is having some serious issues that are quite painful for the user and that the company should divert funds towards and address much sooner.

Journey mapping can also reveal the complexity and system-level problems facing customers, i.e. an experience at the beginning of a user’s journey can actually be at the core of their frustrations at a later part in the journey. These revelations have the added bonus of bringing together different departments and teams to talk through successes, failures, and things they’ve noticed, to align around common goals, and to ultimately work together to solve problems that were identified through the journey-mapping research.

Top Reasons for Journey Mapping

To recap, customer journey maps are powerful tools that can:

Allow organizations to understand and see an end-to-end experience in one document

Help companies understand their user/customers’ biggest pain points

Identify and correct operational inefficiencies

Show relative importance of pain points across the journey in relation to one another

Help prioritize initiatives and next-steps

Force different departments to come together to solve problems and create solutions, as well as breaking down silos and aligning stakeholders

Discover new product and service opportunities

Help your team build empathy for your customers

Improve your overall customer experience!

Are you ready to map your heart out? In Part Two of this series , we give you all the tools you need to research and create a beautiful journey map.

Resources we like…

Set strategic priorities with Outwitly’s FREE ebook, Building a Lasting Vision with North Star Principles

Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams by Jim Kalbach. Check out pg 97 where Outwitly CEO and founder Sara Fortier’s work is featured!

Mapping Experiences Guide by Capital One Design (formerly Adaptive Path)

Related Posts

How to Research and Build a Customer Journey Map: 201

Making your Journey Map Actionable and Creating Change: 301

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Mastering customer experience design strategies.

Customer experience design (CXD) is designing and improving customers’ experiences when interacting with a brand. It goes beyond product design to encompass the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase support.

Cultivating positive customer experiences is crucial for businesses, as it helps to create customer loyalty, drive repeat business, and establish a competitive advantage. Businesses can increase customer satisfaction and retention by creating a seamless and engaging customer experience, driving business growth and success.

Understanding Customers

Developing customer personas.

Developing customer personas is a crucial step in understanding customer needs and behaviors. Personas help to create a deeper understanding of what motivates customers and how they interact with products and services.

Conducting Customer Research

Customer research methods such as surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback can provide valuable insights into customer preferences and pain points.

Segmenting Customer Data

Segmenting customer data involves organizing customers into groups based on shared characteristics or behaviors. This allows for more targeted marketing efforts and personalized experiences tailored to the specific needs of each segment.

Analyzing Customer Feedback

Analyzing customer feedback collected through various channels provides valuable insights into customer satisfaction levels and areas for improvement. This includes input from surveys, social media, online reviews, and customer support interactions. Businesses can make informed decisions to enhance the overall customer experience by understanding customer sentiments and opinions.

Mapping Customer Journey

Identifying customer touchpoints.

Mapping the customer journey involves tracking and analyzing customer interactions with a brand at each stage of the purchase and post-purchase experience. Identifying key touchpoints within the customer journey provides insights into customer behaviors and preferences.

Analyzing Customer Interactions

Analysis of customer interactions throughout the journey involves tracking how customers interact with different touchpoints, such as websites, apps, and customer service representatives. This analysis helps identify pain points and areas for improvement in the customer journey.

Optimizing Customer Engagement

Once customer touchpoints are identified and interactions are analyzed, the next step is to optimize customer engagement across all channels. This entails leveraging insights from the analysis to enhance the customer experience at each touchpoint. Strategies include streamlining website navigation, improving app functionality, and providing better training for customer service representatives. By optimizing customer engagement, brands can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving business growth.

Designing Customer Experience

Creating engaging content.

Creating engaging and informative content is a critical part of CXD. Engaging content can include visuals, videos, blogs, and social media posts that provide valuable information and a personalized experience. A CX design agency can assist in crafting compelling content strategies tailored to your audience’s preferences and behaviors.

Providing Personalized Experiences

Personalizing the customer experience involves tailoring interactions and content to specific customer preferences and needs. Personalization can include recommendations based on past purchases, customized emails, and personalized product demos.

Optimizing User Experience

Optimizing user experience involves creating a seamless and intuitive interface that makes it easy for customers to interact with a brand. This includes optimizing website and mobile app navigation, providing clear and concise messaging, and reducing friction throughout the user journey.

Measuring Customer Experience

Defining key performance indicators.

Key performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, churn rate, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of CXD strategies and areas for improvement.

Conducting Surveys and Feedback

Surveys and feedback mechanisms such as customer satisfaction surveys and social media listening can provide valuable feedback on customer experiences. This feedback can be used to identify areas for improvement and inform CXD strategies.

Implementing Customer Journey Mapping

Implementing customer journey mapping involves visualizing the customer’s interactions with the brand across various touchpoints and stages. This helps businesses understand the entire customer experience and identify opportunities for enhancement.

Utilizing Customer Analytics Tools

Utilizing customer analytics tools enables businesses to gather and analyze data on customer behavior, preferences, and interactions. These tools provide valuable insights into customer trends and patterns, allowing businesses to make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience.

Improving Customer Experience

Identifying pain points.

Identifying pain points in the customer journey, such as long wait times or confusing navigation, is crucial for improving the customer experience. Addressing these pain points promptly and effectively can help improve overall customer satisfaction.

Implementing Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement involves monitoring and adjusting CXD strategies to effectively meet customer needs. This consists of analyzing customer feedback and metrics, testing new methods, and iterating on existing strategies.

Mastering customer experience design involves understanding customers, mapping the customer journey, designing engaging experiences, measuring performance, and implementing continuous improvement. By following these strategies, businesses can cultivate positive experiences that drive customer loyalty and business success.

CXD strategies must adapt as customer expectations evolve to meet these changing needs. By staying abreast of evolving customer needs and preferences, businesses can continue to provide experiences that drive customer loyalty and growth.