customer journey touchpoints template

20 Customer Touchpoints That Will Optimize Your Customer Journey

Updated: June 15, 2021

Published: May 25, 2021

Have you ever made a model car, boat, or airplane? Or, built DIY furniture from IKEA? Or, maybe just played with Legos as a kid — or, like me, still do as an adult?

If you've tried any of these, you've encountered a set of instructions on how to build your product. Some are better than others, but all do the job of explaining the steps you need to take to achieve your goal.

Customer touch points (or touchpoints) work in a similar way. They represent important interactions that occur along the customer's journey. Grouping them chronologically paints a complete picture of an average customer experience with your business.

In this post, we'll explain what customer touch points are and the role they play on marketing and customer service teams. Then, we'll wrap up with a list of touch point examples and proven techniques to use them at your business.

Customer Touch Points

Touch points are interactions between businesses and customers that occur during the customer's journey. These moments significantly influence customer experience as well as brand perception. By outlining key touch points on a map, businesses can capitalize on timely opportunities to optimize their customer journey.

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

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Customer touch points are typically recorded on a customer journey map . They're put together in chronological order to demonstrate what a typical customer's experience is like with a business.

This helps marketing and customer service teams identify touchpoints that cause friction so they can remove them and enhance the customer journey.

Here's an example of what a customer touchpoint looks like on HubSpot's customer journey map .

While this is only a small section of a much larger document, it gives us a good idea of how useful touchpoints are to marketing and customer service teams. In the original document, the green dots represent interactions that are positive, and the red ones represent points of friction. Yellow dots are moments when customers have to make decisions, which leads to either a green or red dot.

With this layout, we can look at an overall view of different touchpoints occurring within various stages of the customer journey. This makes it a lot easier to spot areas of your business that can be improved to increase customer delight .

Let's take a look at some examples of customer touchpoints below.

Customer Touch Points Examples

• Social Media
• Online Advertisement
• Digital Marketing Content
• Company Events
• Peer Referral
• Conversations With Company Representatives
• Product Catalogs
• Product Reviews
• Point of Sale
• Thank You Letters
• Product Feedback Surveys
• Upsell/Cross-Sell Emails
• Billing Actions
• Subscription Renewals
• Customer Support Channels
• Customer Success Programs
• Customer Onboarding
• Customer Loyalty Programs
• Self-Service Resources

We've segmented this list to cover touch points that occur before, during, and after a purchase. Additionally, we've also added a section that's specific to customer service teams.

Touch Points Before a Purchase

1. social media.

Social media could be included in every section of this list, but it's mostly used in customer acquisition . That's because social media is a cost-effective way of reaching a large portion of your target audience. You can use it to promote products, build relationships with clients, and enhance the overall reputation of your brand.

2. Online Advertisement

Have you ever noticed banner ads displayed at the top or sidebar of a webpage? Those are touch points that take prospects back to your website. For some brands, like Best Buy below, it's an effective way to draw traffic to their sites.

Image Source

3. Digital Marketing Content

Aside from ads, digital marketing content refers to any material that your company publishes online to promote its brand. These materials could be promotional videos, infographics, or engaging blog posts — like the one you're reading right now.

4. Company Events

If you're on a marketing or sales team, then you may have attended a conference this year where you stood in a booth to promote your company. These events are an excellent way to introduce your brand to customers who may not be aware of it.

One example is INBOUND , where companies from around the world meet to discuss marketing, sales, customer service, and other business topics. It's a great chance for business leaders to connect with new partners and discover strategies that can help their organizations grow.

5. Peer Referral

It's no secret that customers trust their peers over your advertisements. 83% of customers say that their friends and family are their most trusted sources of referrals. This makes it imperative for businesses to focus on word-of-mouth marketing if they want to be seen as trustworthy.

Touch Points During a Purchase

6. conversations with company representatives.

The most direct point of contact you have with customers is your in-person interactions. These conversations that take place in your stores have an immediate impact on the customer's purchase decision.

7. Product Catalogs

Whether they're online or a hard copy, catalogs are an excellent medium for showcasing your product line. An image of the product, coupled with an enticing description, gives the customer everything they need to know before making a purchase.

You can remove friction by adding a CTA on the page that adds the product to a shopping cart, like in the example below.

8. Ecommerce

For many businesses, ecommerce is the most effective way to acquire customers and close deals. That's because websites can be accessed globally, making it possible for an SMB in one location to provide products and services to a customer on the other side of the world.

Understanding the various touch points within ecommerce can dramatically improve the customer experience for SaaS and other online companies.

9. Product Reviews

In today's digital age, product reviews are no longer a pre-purchase touch point. Now, customers have smart devices that can call up product reviews while they're shopping in your stores. Additionally, some online retailers include reviews on the listing page, so you can see what other customers think without navigating away from the page. You can see an example of this touch point in the image below.

10. Point of Sale

This is the last touch point your customers will reach before making a purchase. That's because this is where your sales rep makes their case for why the customer needs your product. For many businesses, this is a momentous step in the customer journey.

Touch Points After a Purchase

11. thank you letters.

One effective way to build customer rapport is by following up with a thank you letter. This can be an email, or, if possible, a hand-written note that thanks customers for their business. It's a great way to show customers you care and develop a long-term relationship with them.

If you're not sure how to start sending customer thank you letters, check out our guide here .

12. Product Feedback Surveys

Product feedback surveys are sent after a purchase and they evaluate the customer's experience with your product or service. If the customer leaves a negative review, the company can reach out to learn more about the issue. They then relay this information to the product development team, who makes enhancements on the next version of the product.

13. Upselling/Cross-selling Emails

Customer needs don't go away after a purchase is made. In fact, some customers have additional needs once they start to use your product.

This presents an opportunity for you to upsell or cross-sell customers on additional or premium items in your store. We can see an example of this in the image below.

14. Billing Actions

Billing is often an overlooked touch point on this list. That's because it happens after a purchase occurs and has no direct influence on the customer's decision to buy your product. However, it's still a vital step in the customer's journey because a negative experience can result in an immediate instance of churn, if not addressed properly.

15. Subscription Renewals

If you're a subscription-based business, renewals are crucial to your revenue model. You need customers to renew their subscriptions to maintain steady growth for your business. This makes it important that you remove as much friction as possible from your renewal process. After all, it should be effortless for an existing customer to stay a customer after their contract is up.

Touch Points in Customer Service

16. customer support channels.

Customer support channels are any platforms that service agents use to communicate with customers. This includes chat, email, phone, social media, peer review sites, and more. Businesses need to invest in omni-channel support if they want to create a delightful experience for their customers.

17. Customer Success Program

Customer success programs have a variety of touch points found within them. When a customer success department recognizes a potential problem, they reach out to customers to notify them of the issue or offer a solution. This demonstrates a commitment to the customer's goals, which builds additional rapport over time.

18. Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is a popular touch point for service teams because many customers abandon products shortly after buying them. That's because they either don't know how to use it, or they don't have the time to learn how to use it. Both result in churn, making it essential for companies to invest in effective onboarding programs.

19. Customer Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are another important touch point that service teams should be aware of. These programs strengthen your relationship with a customer and turn them into lifelong advocates. By incentivizing people with exclusive rewards and discounts, they'll be more likely to share positive reviews about your business.

20. Self-Service Resources

When customers are in a hurry or only have a quick question for your support team, they don't want to spend 20 minutes waiting on hold for a rep. Instead, you can offer self-service resources that feature troubleshooting steps customers can take on their own. That way, they're not dependent on your service team for answers and can find solutions on their own time, making your product more convenient and easier-to-use.

All of these touch points are essential for creating a strong customer journey. But how do you use them in your business? Let’s walk through that below.

Using Customer Touchpoints in Your Business

By using customer touchpoints, you’ll exponentially improve the customer experience . But not all touch points will make sense for your company. For instance, if you’re a SaaS business, you might not have an online catalog. And if you’re running the business on your own, your customer likely won’t run into a sales team.

To create a custom customer touchpoint map, you’ll want to take the following steps.

1. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

First and foremost, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and envision the steps they take as they make a purchase decision. Where do they look first? How do they reach a purchase decision? And what do they do if they run into problems using the product?

Let’s take a look at an example customer journey below.

• The customer becomes aware of a problem and researches ways to solve their issue.
• After finding a solution, they search for a particular product. They look through product listings on Google, then explore offerings on retailer websites such as Amazon.
• They search for product reviews.
• After finding sufficient information, they purchase the product.
• They use the product, but run into trouble. They look for articles and resources on how to solve the issue on their own.
• They reach out to a customer service representative.

After, match each of these customer actions to a certain touchpoint. Here’s what that looks like:

• Touchpoint one : A robust blog that covers commonly-researched issues by your customers.
• Touchpoint two : A series of paid ads in Google’s and Amazon’s product pages.
• Touchpoint three : A collection of un-sponsored product reviews on your website.
• Touchpoint four : A customer portal that allows customers to easily check out and see their order status.
• Touchpoint five : Self-service options such as knowledge bases and product how-tos.
• Touch point six : An easy-to-find customer service portal or phone number that allows them to get in touch.

2. Decide what’s feasible based on your company size and budget.

Now that you have a rough idea of the resources and information your customer will need during their journey, it’s time to decide which ones are easiest to implement based on your company size and budget.

If you sell a complicated product but run a one-person business, investing in a full-scale service desk with knowledge bases and ticketing features might not be feasible. But you could start by adding free live chat .

The key here is to find an alternative that’s easy to adopt for you and your team and that’s scalable as your business grows. You don’t want to be boxed in after your customer touchpoint strategy yields positive results.

3. Establish touch point tasks.

Deciding on the touch points is one thing; translating them to actionable tasks is another. You’ve decided what’s feasible, and now it’s time to turn it into action.

Here’s what that can look like for the example referenced above.

First Touchpoint Tasks

• Create a strong cluster content strategy that solves for the customer.
• Decide on the first five posts, which will be published in four weeks.
• Hire four freelancers to write the content.
• Use the in-house marketing team to leverage buyer personas and current customer acquisition data.

Second Touchpoint Tasks

• Create a Google Merchant Center account and Amazon seller account .
• Write unique descriptions for each product using the services of two freelancers.
• Source product photos and general information such as specifications, country of origin, sustainability score, and so on.
• Add product listings to Google and Amazon.

Third Touchpoint Tasks

• Add product reviews to the site using a WordPress review plugin or another solution.
• Invite current customers to write reviews by offering a 10% discount on a future purchase.
• Respond to reviews as they come in so prospects can see the brand is active.

You’d continue down the touchpoints list, adding tasks until you have a comprehensive checklist that everyone on your team can reference.

4. Leverage software tools to automate touch point tasks.

Use marketing, sales, and service software to ensure touch point tasks run smoothly with minor intervention.

Let’s say that you’ve decided to invest in social media marketing as the first touch point, but you have a three-person marketing team, and you don’t know how to get started. You can consider a social media management tool such as HubSpot’s Social Inbox (included in Marketing Hub). And if your team is new to social media management, you can have everyone take a social media certification course.

If you’ve decided that one of your customers’ touch points is chatting with a salesperson, you’d invest in a CRM that helps your sales team keep track of all communication and automatically schedule follow-up calls.

If one of your touchpoints is a discount delivered over email, you’ll want to automatically send the message using email marketing software . No need for you to manually type each email out and send it to every customer.

And if one of your touchpoints is an easy-to-reach service desk, you’ll invest in customer service software that can take care of ticketing — and even resolve simple inquiries with a customer service bot.

These tools can help you streamline your customer touchpoint process so that it progresses with minimal intervention from your team. In that way, as you serve more and more customers, no touchpoint slips through the cracks.

Use Customer Touchpoints to Enhance the Customer Journey

By using customer touch points, you can play a role at every step of the customer journey. Nothing is left up to chance. Instead, you provide targeted information at just the right time. Whether you’re a one-person business or an enterprise-level team, you should use touchpoints to enhance the customer experience, empowering you to retain more customers and grow better.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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11 Free Effective Customer Journey Map Templates

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

Creating an effective customer journey is essential to the success of any business.

It takes careful planning and consideration, as well as a deep understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences. But it doesn’t have to be daunting. With the right tools and templates, you can craft an exceptional customer experience that will keep them coming back for more.

One such tool is customer journey templates, which provide businesses with a structured approach to creating their buyer journeys.

In this article, we’ll explore what customer journey templates are and what makes a good template. Then, we’ll look at 11 examples of great customer journey templates so that you can see first-hand how tools help create great experiences for customers throughout their entire lifecycle.

What is a Customer Journey Map Template?

What makes a good customer journey mapping template, 1. clickup customer journey map template, 2. clickup agency client health tracker by zenpilot, 3. clickup user story mapping template, 4. clickup empathy map whiteboard template, 5. clickup customer success plan template, 6. clickup voice of the customer template, 7. clickup customer problem statement template, 8. clickup customer onboarding template, 9. clickup customer service escalation template, 10. slidesgo powerpoint customer journey mapping template, 11. sidesgo google slides customer journey map template, how to create a customer journey map.

A customer journey map visually represents the customer experience from start to finish. It’s similar to a project management tool , except that it helps businesses understand how different parts of their customer journey contribute to buyers’ satisfaction and loyalty. A customer journey map templates are pre-designed versions of these timelines that give users a solid place to start from.

Typically, a customer journey map template will include key steps in the customer lifecycle, such as onboarding and follow-up . It will also include key metrics such as customer satisfaction and net promoter score, which can help inform decision-making when it comes to refining the customer experience.

By using a template as part of your standard operating procedures to plan out your customer journey, you can quickly gain insight into how different touchpoints are performing and identify areas where improvement is needed. This can then be used to shape your company’s work habits around delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Additionally, templates provide a starting point for businesses that do not have the resources or in-house skills to design their own customer journey map from scratch.

Bonus: SOP software !

If you’re looking to create a fantastic customer journey, having a good template is the key. A stellar customer journey should be both enjoyable and informative, allowing your customers to feel knowledgeable and empowered throughout the entire process.

Likewise, a good customer journey template should be easy to follow and utilize, offering a structure that makes sense for both you and your customers.

• Has clearly defined stages: A good customer journey template should have clear and distinct stages that represent the various touch points or interactions the customer has with your business.
• Shows the customer perspective : The template should be designed from the customer’s perspective, highlighting their needs, expectations, and pain points at each stage of the journey.
• Represents graphically: The template should be visually appealing and easy to understand. A visual representation of the journey can help to identify areas where the customer experience could be improved.
• Is flexible and customizable: A good customer journey template should be flexible and customizable to accommodate different types of customer journeys across different industries or businesses.
• Includes metrics and feedback: The template should include business metrics that measure the success of each stage of the journey, as well as feedback mechanisms that capture customer feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• Facilitates collaboration: The template should facilitate collaboration between different departments within your organization to ensure a consistent and seamless experience across all customer touchpoints.

With a solid template and a customer journey mapping tool , you can create a customer journey that not only meets but exceeds your customers’ expectations. And having that set roadmap to follow will make the process easier and more efficient than ever before.

11 Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Customer journey templates are a powerful tool for mapping out the customer journey, as they provide a concise visual representation of the touchpoints a customer has with your business. These templates can help businesses better understand their customer’s experience, and make data-driven decisions to improve it.

Because every business’s customer journey will look a bit different, we’ve rounded up 11 of our favorite journey templates for various use cases.

If you’re trying to decide where to start on your customer journey mapping, why not keep it simple with ClickUp’s Customer Journey Map Template ?

This whiteboard-style template lays out the customer’s lifecycle from start to finish. It offers question prompts on customer actions, touchpoints, experience, and solutions, and breaks the journey into three main stages:

• Awareness: Stage 1 of the customer journey, where customers become aware of the business and its products or services.
• Consideration: The second stage of the customer journey, where customers begin to consider the business as a potential solution to their needs. At this stage, customers may begin to research the business and its products or services, compare it to other options, and evaluate its features and benefits.
• Conversion: The final stage of the customer journey, where customers make a purchase decision and become paying customers.

Each stage has 6 preloaded sticky notes underneath it, but the whiteboard workspace also allows you to add additional sticky notes, draw freehand, add shapes, arrows, and text, and include links to documents, websites, Figma files, and Google Workspace apps.

Overall, this template provides a comprehensive roadmap of the customer’s journey and helps businesses to brainstorm opportunities for improvement.

Stay ahead of your client’s needs and drive customer satisfaction with the ClickUp Agency Client Health Tracker from ZenPilot . This customizable template allows you to track the health of your customer relationships, manage account details, and more – all in one convenient location.

This template allows you to easily visualize your customer journey from beginning to end. Its customizable fields, user-friendly interface, and powerful tracking capabilities make it easy to manage your customer relationships and stay ahead of their needs.

The ClickUp Agency Client Health Tracker by Zenpilot includes:

• 8 pre-configured views
• 14 Custom Fields
• Built in activity tracking features

Customer journey mapping breaks down a user’s journey from awareness, consideration, and conversion into smaller pieces and stages, and then represents them on a visual map. This process enables businesses to gain a better understanding of the customer’s perspective and identify areas of improvement in the user experience.

If that’s something your company needs, ClickUp’s User Story Mapping Template is for you!

During the process of user story mapping, cross-functional teams work together to identify the different stages of the user journey. This can include identifying buyer personas, user activities, user steps, and more.

Our template utilizes the same whiteboard features as our Customer Journey Mapping Template , just with a different layout and pre-populated fields specific to story mapping.

• Functionality: All the flexibility of our regular whiteboard workspace. The ability to add or remove sticky notes, link out to documents and websites, add photos, shapes, arrows, and text, and even freehand draw.
• User guide: The steps on the left-hand side show you how to use the template, and there are premade sections for user activity, user steps, releases, and customer personas.

By creating a shared understanding of the user’s journey, businesses can develop more effective solutions and products that better meet their customer’s needs.

Empathy mapping enables teams to gain a more profound understanding of their buyers. Like a user persona , empathy maps represent a specific customer segment or profile. It is designed to help teams develop empathy and identify with their customers’ needs, feelings, thoughts, and motivations.

ClickUp’s Empathy Map Whiteboard Template allows team members to share insights and observations on their customers’ behaviors, experiences, and challenges. By using a user persona template and creating a visual representation of their customers’ perspectives, teams can develop a better understanding of their customers’ emotional and psychological states, ultimately leading to more customer-centered solutions.

The template features 6 sections designed to guide your understanding of your customer journeys:

• Think and feel: The customer’s worry and aspirations, what makes a difference to them, and what their mindset and character reveal about them
• See: The customer’s environment, market, and cultural preferences
• Hear: What influencers, friends/family, and boss/peers/co-workers are saying to the customer
• Say and Do: The customer’s behavior towards others, public attitude, and appearance
• Pain: The customer’s fears and frustrations
• Gain: The customer’s wants, needs, and measures of success

The Empathy Map Whiteboard Template is an essential tool for any team looking to understand their customers better. But it can also be used in-house for HR teams wanting to understand their employees better. Consider implementing empathy mapping into your HR software , or make mapping employees one of your HR goals .

Customer success is an essential aspect of maintaining and growing a loyal customer base for any business. A customer success plan is a critical tool that can help you provide an exceptional customer experience, leading to long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty.

ClickUp’s Customer Success Plan Template is an easy way to visualize critical customer information in a single place for streamlined efficiency and quicker customer support.

• Filter by status: Quickly view all customer information depending on where customers are at in your pipeline – either “onboarding,” “ongoing,” “retention,” “on hold,” “complete,” or “inactive”
• Quick view important customer information : Client name, phone number, email, location, service type, agreed upon pricing, progress percentage bar, and attachment to the contract
• Add subtasks: Add custom subtasks to the customer’s card, and visually check how many tasks have been completed just below the client’s name.

Using this template gives you a bird’s eye view of where each customer is at in your lifecycle, and which tasks still need to be completed for them to move along to the next stage. It provides accountability and oversight in a single view.

In today’s competitive business landscape, providing top-notch customer service is important for the success of any organization. To achieve this, you need to gain a deep understanding of your customer’s needs, expectations, and preferences. That’s where ClickUp’s Voice of the Customer Template comes in.

This template helps you gain insights into your customers’ experiences and improve your overall customer satisfaction. It captures customer feedback through various channels like surveys, case studies, social media, customer service interactions, and online reviews, then helps guide you toward finding a solution.

• Voice of the customer: This lets you put a soundbite of a customer’s review or feedback (ie, “This product is too difficult to use”)
• Customer need: Space to interpret what the customer is looking for that they aren’t getting based on the complaint (ie, “Customer needs instructions that are easier to understand”)
• Solution: Space to determine how you’ll meet the customer’s need (ie, “provide alternative instructions via video walkthrough and online recordings)

This “problem–need–solution” format can help you improve customer satisfaction and increase customer loyalty. When customers feel heard and see that their feedback is being acted upon, they’re more likely to become loyal to your brand and recommend your business to others.

There are numerous reasons why a product or service may fail to meet customer expectations. That’s why it’s so important to take the time to understand your customer’s challenges and problems. One way to do this is by using ClickUp’s Customer Problem Statement Template to capture customer issues and create strategies to solve them.

The customer problem statement template includes 5 sections:

• Customer profile: Where you’ll include a customer description and personal information to help identify the segments this customer fits into.
• Customer objectives: Where you’ll write what your customer hopes to accomplish with your product or service.
• Customer roadblocks : Where you’ll list any barriers standing between your customer and their objectives.
• Barrier root cause : Where you’ll identify what deeper issue is causing the roadblocks.
• Emotional impact: Where you’ll write your plan to target the pain points and help them reach their goals.

This template will help you clarify your customers’ frustrations and pain points to understand them better, improve business operations and products to meet customer needs, and educate your team so they can become more empathetic customer advocates.

An organized customer onboarding experience is essential for the success of both new clients and the company.

Good customer onboarding can lead to improved customer satisfaction, retention, upselling and cross-selling opportunities, and long-term brand loyalty. On the flip side, a negative experience can lead to customer frustration and churn. Use ClickUp’s Customer Onboarding Template to ensure your business reaps the benefits – and avoids the pitfalls.

The template offers 4 preset stages of onboarding (though, they can be edited to suit your needs):

• Welcome gift: The first stage includes sending a welcome email, present, and additional information to a new customer.
• Team assignment: The second stage includes assigning a person or team to manage and support the new customer.
• Onboarding Questionnaire: The third stage includes sending out a series of questions to the new customer, getting it back, and reviewing the responses.
• Onboarding Call: The fourth stage includes scheduling and running an onboarding meeting with the new customer.

Each stage offers fields for the new customer name, assignee, priority level, customer contact information, onboarding call date , services, and customer type, plus subtasks within each stage. Note that this template is specific to customer onboarding – but we have plenty of great resources on employee onboarding and welcoming new hires , too!

Providing excellent customer service can set a company apart from its competitors and create a loyal customer base. However, even the best customer service teams can face difficult situations that require escalation to higher levels of management. This is where ClickUp’s Customer Service Escalation Template comes in.

This template lets you see all customer service tickets in a single view, as well as additional views for tier support and team capacity. Tickets are organized by new tickets, Tier 1, Tier 2, and beyond, depending on the customer’s need.

Each support section has the following field to give your support team all the context they need to resolve customer issues.

• Task name: The subject of the issue or request in question (ie, “Product demo inquiry” or “refund status”).
• Custom task ID: To easily categorize, identify, and track support tickets.
• Assignee: To assign a particular support staff member to the request. Assignee data can be pulled later to assist in supporting staff performance reviews .
• Customer information: Including name, phone number, email, address, order ID, and support request message.
• Issue category: To help you identify the type of support the customer is requesting (ie, a refund, follow-up message, replacement, etc.).
• Attachment spots: Optional fields to capture images or files the customer provides, and to attach a copy of their receipt.
• Impact level: To determine how critical or urgent resolving this task is.

Handling customer service escalation requests in a quick and organized fashion can improve customer satisfaction, reduce customer churn, increase efficiency, improve communication, and provide valuable data for continuous improvement .

While we believe ClickUp provides the best customer journey templates possible, we know that sometimes, you don’t get to choose the software you use to conduct your business. For those who have to stick with Microsoft solutions, SlidesGo provides a Customer Journey Map Template to help you track your customer’s lifecycle.

This slide pack includes high-level, mostly visual templates to use in presentations, as well as a few more detailed journey maps that take you through the awareness, acquisition, service, and loyalty customer stages. This download includes:

• Wide variety of options: 30 different 100% editable infographics and customer journey maps
• Most common format size: Widescreen 16:9 format for all screen types
• User guide: Additional information and instructions on customizing the graphics

These templates are not quite as detailed or varied as the ClickUp options, but if you’re creating a quick slide deck for a presentation, they’re a perfect solution.

If your company uses Google Workspace and you’re required to keep your customer journey templates within the Google family, these SlidesGo Google Slides Customer Journey Map Templates are for you.

It’s important to have a complete understanding of your customer’s needs, opinions, motivations, doubts, and interactions with your product. This thorough analysis of the customer’s experience is a critical aspect of product development. This set of infographics was creed to help with these studies.

This download includes:

• Wide variety of options: 32 different 100% editable infographics and customer journey maps

These infographics are easy to use and can help elevate any presentation on customer experience studies. While they’re designed with Google Slides in mind, they can also be downloaded for use with Microsoft PowerPoint.

Related Customer Journey Resources:

• Client Management Software
• CRM Software Examples
• CRM Templates
• CRM Workflow

Now that you have a variety of templates to choose from, you may be wondering how to actually create a customer journey map. Here are some simple steps you can follow:

• Identify your target audience: The first step in creating a successful customer journey map is knowing who your customers are. Identify the demographics, interests, and pain points of your existing and potential customers. This will help you understand their needs and motivations.
• Map the stages of your customer journey: Next, map out the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your brand. These typically include awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
• Gather data: To create an accurate customer journey map, gather data from various sources such as surveys, interviews, and feedback. This will give you a better understanding of your customers’ experiences.
• Create personas: Develop fictional characters that represent the different types of customers you have. These personas should be based on real data and help you empathize with your customers for a deeper understanding of their journey.
• Analyze emotions: Customers’ emotions play a crucial role in their journey map. Identify how they may feel at each stage of the journey and make note of any pain points or moments of delight. This can help you improve their overall experience.
• Plot the map: Finally, plot all the stages, touch points, and emotions on a visual map to get a clear understanding of your customer journey. This will help you identify areas for improvement and align your strategies with your customers’ needs.

Optimize Your Workflow with Customer Journey Templates

Customer journey templates are a valuable tool for businesses looking to efficiently map and track their customers’ lifecycles. By utilizing these templates, businesses can identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and stay competitive in today’s market.

We may be biased, but we think the easiest way to get started with customer journey mapping is by using ClickUp. ClickUp’s workspace lets you easily visualize your customer lifecycle, and our templates help you to quickly and intuitively organize it, whether you’re working solo or as part of a larger team. And when you do need to collaborate with other contributors, ClickUp makes getting feedback simple.

It’s free to get started with ClickUp, so give us a try today to see how a bit of planning upfront can maximize your production in the long run.

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

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

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

Table of contents: 

Customer journey map template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the customer doing?

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

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

What is the customer thinking?

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

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

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

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

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

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

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

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

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

Consideration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand loyalty

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

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

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

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

Survey your customers and customer teams

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

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

Automate customer data collection

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

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

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

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

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

Create multiple maps for different journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day/week/month in the life map

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support experience map

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

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

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

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

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

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

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

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

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

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

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

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

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

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

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

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

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

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

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

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

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

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

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

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

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

Related reading:

Beyond the sales pipeline: Using a CRM for customer success

A quick guide to contact management

B2B email marketing: Proven strategies + examples

4 tips for creating an inbound marketing strategy

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

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Amanda Pell

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

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

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8 Free Customer Journey Mapping Templates and Examples

Published in: Journey Mapping / Last update: July 2020

So you want to create a customer journey map and are looking for a template to get you started. Well, you've come to the right place!

In this article, you'll find an overview of the best templates out there . Next to giving you a comprehensive overview, the goal of this article is also to help you get the most value out of these templates.

That’s because— no matter how good a template is —if you don't know how and when to use it, you might as well pick any random one.

You can either use the table of contents below to jump straight to the templates or continue reading to build a deeper understanding of how to get the most value out out these templates .

As you'll see, the overview in this article also contains service blueprint templates. As a customer journey is always embedded in service blueprint , it makes sense to include them.

Just a quick note that there might be affiliate links in this article, which means I get a small commission when you sign up for one of the journey mapping tools mentioned here.

Why and when to use customer journey map templates?

There are many good reasons and smart moments to use a journey map template. You just have to know what they are and be able to recognize their value.

This is also a word of warning , since reaching for a template at the wrong time, as tempting as it might be, will eventually do more harm than good.

So, let's go over some common scenarios in which you could benefit from using a customer journey map template.

DO make more informed decisions and build a solid foundation.

When you're starting out with customer journey maps, you're going to have a lot of questions around how to structure your map.

Which kinds of lanes should you add? How many should there be? What is the right order?

This is a stage in which templates and examples can be extremely helpful.

Seeing how other organizations have structured their journey maps will open up your eyes to what's possible and expand your "vocabulary."

The more informed you are, the better you'll be able to judge which information is relevant in your journey map and what's totally fine to ignore. 

Remember that you should strive to map as little as possible and not more.

You wouldn't want to spend a lot of time mapping the journey just to realize that your map is full of information you don't need anyway.

DO get a head start with plenty of time.

Starting with a blank piece of paper is one of the hardest things in any situation.

What is the first word you write? Where do you draw the first line? What should you say to start the conversation with a stranger?

The nice thing is that, when you've gone over the process a few times, you'll start to recognize patterns.

If you’re a budding artist, once you’ve drawn a few stick figures, you'll have figured out the basic structure of a face.

The same applies to customer journey maps. At some point, you'll know what the generic structure is of your customer journey.

From that moment on, it makes sense to create a template from this journey so you don't have to recreate that over and over again.

A template allows you to focus on the content of your journey map rather than how to structure the information.

DON'T copy and paste the perfect recipe.

Imagine this: You meticulously follow the perfect recipe to prepare the most amazing pasta Bolognese...only to find out that your guest has a tomato allergy. :-/

As unlikely as this might sound, this is the most common pitfall regarding customer journey map templates.

You find the perfect customer journey map template online and start filling it in with your full dedication. And of course, you manage to create an impressive journey map.

When you finally share the map within the organization , you come to the realization that it doesn't give the answers to the challenges that need to be solved.

Always be critical about the elements in your journey map template. Do you really need all of them? Is there something important missing? Could a little tweak to the template give you much better results?

DON'T get distracted by the visual aspects.

Until now, journey maps have been produced using tools ranging from PowerPoint to InDesign. The effect is that:

• There are a lot of different journey maps out there that all have a unique look and feel.
• You feel that every journey map has to be nothing less than a work of art to have any value.

So, when you're looking at templates and examples, the plethora of options can easily be overwhelming.

The truth is that most of these templates contain at their core the same key elements described in our Practical Guide to Customer Journey Mapping . They are just visualized in a different way.

It's easy to get distracted and lose yourself in trying to make your journey map look good. Just try to keep the visuals consistent and clear . Once again, less is more!

DON'T map just for the sake of it.

What's the fastest way to create a customer journey map? Not making a map when you don't need one. 

A bit cheesy, I know. But it holds a lot of truth.

Don't be the person who creates a customer journey map just because you can. We've got enough of them already.

Be a true professional and make sure that you're mapping for the right reason . Your efforts need to add real value to the organization.

Using a journey map template without first understanding what questions it needs to answer is a guarantee that you'll waste your time. Unless, of course, you aspire to become an artist who creates nice visuals in the form of a journey map.

Down below, you'll find an overview of customer journey map (and service blueprint) templates. The overview is divided into templates offered by online journey mapping tools and templates you'll find in books, articles, etc.

I've included a pros and cons list for each template, which should help you decide if the template fits your needs.

A Quick Word on Online Journey Mapping Tools

There is a difference between professional journey mapping tools (like Custellence and Smaply) and generic tools that also allow you to create journey maps (like Miro, Mural and Google Slides).

When you decide to pick one of these tools, it's good to understand the long-term implications.

If you want to learn more about how these different journey mapping tools compare, check this playlist on the Service Design Show YouTube channel.

Templates in Online Tools

Miro is a very user-friendly and flexible online whiteboarding tool. I did a full review of how to create journey maps in Miro .

In Miro, you'll find a lot of useful templates. And the good news is that there is a customer journey map and a service blueprint among them.

Customer Journey Map Template ( link )

This is probably the most bare-bones journey map template you'll find, which is good when you purely need to focus on the customer experience aspect of the journey.

(click the image to the template open in Miro)

• Super simple format, meaning no distractions and quite easy for anyone to participate in the journey mapping process
• You don't get distracted by thinking about other information lanes.
• Step-by-step instruction video on how to use this template and a quite comprehensive blog article worth reading
• The template presents touchpoints as the main storyline, while it should be customer activities & situations ( don't map touchpoints ). By basing your journey on touchpoints, you're visualizing the organizational perspective and will miss important moments for the customer’s perspective. Be careful with this!
• It's tempting to fill this template based on assumptions without further questioning the data. It would help if there were a place to add supporting insights from user and field research.
• You'll only be able to come up with meaningful pain and gain points if you know the needs of your customers. You should do that first in something like an empathy map .

When would I use this template

I would use this Customer Journey Map template from Miro as an initial conversation starter in a workshop where you have limited time.

Service Blueprint Template ( link )

We've discussed the difference between customer journey maps and service blueprints before. This template by Miro does a decent job in breaking up the service experience in the frontstage and backstage.

• The five lanes in this template provide quite a good starting point for the most basic service blueprint in a lot of situations.
• It doesn't make sense to place physical evidence as the top lane. It should almost always be customer activities & situations .
• This service blueprint template is missing the human aspect. It's not inviting you to enrich it with thick data like photos or quotes. Thereby, you run the risk of creating a process map and miss out on the customer-centric approach.
• The template contains nonlinear sequences (the arrows), which breaks the one of the most important rules of a clear journey map: a journey always moves from left to right.
• For a service blueprint to be useful, you'll quickly need to add more detailed and specific information, which this template does not cater to.
• Adding more detailed information to this template will get messy and complex. Once you get to the stage where you need a service blueprint, it's better to consider using a professional journey mapping tool .

I'd maybe consider using this Miro template to explain the basic structure of a service blueprint.

Mural is, just like Miro, another popular online whiteboarding tool. I do a walkthrough on how to create customer journey maps using Mural in this video .

You'll find many helpful templates in Mural. For our needs, they offer one service blueprint template .

The template is based on the work done by the Practical Service Design community.

(click the image to the template open in Mural)

• There are 3 versions: a blank template, one that's filled in as an example, and one that provides a guide on how to use this template. There's also a video that walks you t hrough the process .
• The template containing the real-life example provides some really helpful questions and good inspiration.
• The template gets into the processes and systems of a service quite fast. It would be good if there were more emphasis on the customer journey and experience.
• Color-coding information lanes creates an interesting visual, but it can easily get quite chaotic.
• The chosen information lanes are meaningful but don't follow general conventions around how to structure a service blueprint. This might cause some confusion.

to be honest it’s hard for me to find a useful application for this journey map template. On one hand, I feel it's too detailed to be filled in during a workshop. On the other hand, the structure and color-coding method wouldn't be my preferred way of doing this with a team outside a workshop.

If you're into journey mapping, Smaply is probably a tool that has been on your radar. It's one of the few dedicated online journey mapping tools that I'd say is specifically designed for customer experience professionals.

I've published a Smaply walkthrough video on how to create a journey map using Smaply as well as a more in-depth review of the tool.

Smaply offers 4 different journey mapping templates :

• Service Blueprint
• Communication Journey Map
• Empathy Journey Map
• Comparison Journey Map

You can also find a brief explanation of the purpose of each template .

Smaply also offers 10+ example journey maps directly on their website. So if you’re looking for even more inspiration definitely take a look at these examples.

For this review, we're going to look at the empathy journey map template inside Smaply. It focuses on understanding your customer and brings the outside-in perspective so many organizations are looking for.

(click image to enlarge the template)

• The main focus in this template is on your customers and their needs. Having a deep understanding of this helps to create all the other journey maps.
• The lanes mimic the questions of an empathy map . If you're familiar with how that works, you'll have a head start here. And if you're not familiar with empathy maps, they are well documented.
• Depending on your service, the experience throughout the journey might eventually have more similarities than differences. So, you might end up duplicating the information in a lot of fields. If you recognize that this is happening, try to identify the moments where the experience is significantly different and map those first.
• In situations where you need to get stakeholders out of their inside-out mindset and into your customers’ shoes, especially when you're dealing with stakeholders from supporting departments that don't directly interact with customers on a daily basis.
• To create a foundation for all future journey mapping and service blueprinting initiatives

4. Custellence

Currently, Custellence is my preferred online journey mapping tool . And it's the one I recommend to anyone who is serious about using journey maps as a way to drive sustainable customer-centric change within their organization.

At the time of writing there are seven journey map templates in Custellence, divided into general and tailored template categories:

• Customer Journey Map template for Ideation ( PDF )
• Service Blueprint Template ( PDF )
• The Practical Service Design Blueprint Template ( PDF )
• Retail Online/Offline Customer Journey and Service Blueprint Template ( PDF )
• Restaurant Food Ordering and Delivery Customer Journey Map Template ( PDF )
• Elderly Need for Care Customer Journey Map Template ( PDF )
• Vacation Travel Customer Journey Map Template ( PDF )

Just like with the different templates in Smaply, you have to choose wisely.

What I like about the templates in Custellence (compared to the ones offered by Mural and Miro ) is that the tailored versions much better reflect the type of information your journey map might eventually contain in real life.

Generic templates are a good starting point. But often, you'll need to tweak them to get any practical value out of them. The tailored templates in Custellence give you an impression of what that might look like.

For this review, I've looked at the travel journey map template.

(click the image to open the template in Custellence)

• It's nice that the customer activities in the template are pre-filled. This helps to express your own journey on the right level and in the right language.
• The template invites you to elaborate on the experience of your customer and to provide "insight evidence." You're challenged to have a conversation on how much you know about your customers based on research versus your own assumptions.
• The separation of touchpoints into channels shows how you can reflect your internal organization in the journey map and assign internal stakeholders per lane in the map.
• Depending on your goal , this template might be too elaborate and too detailed.

This template is a great example of what a journey map used to drive sustainable customer-centric change could look like, rather than a one-off visualization. I would use this template when my goal is to create a central journey map that helps to make smarter decisions about the projects and initiatives we should invest in.

5. UXPressia

The collection of journey mapping templates and examples you'll find in UXPressia is quite astonishing. At the moment of writing, there are about 40 templates that are sorted based on industry.

Each template is based on a "real" customer journey map that the UXPressia team found on the internet. In the accompanying articles, they added a link to the original source so you can compare how that journey map looked.

For this review, I've looked at the template for food and retail .

(click the image to open the template in UXPressia)

• There's a strong emphasis on the customer perspective in this template.
• The template is pre-filled with a story, which helps to understand what kind of information and on what level should be in the map.
• The storyboard lane invites you to visualize the customer journey—a very important aspect that is overlooked in most templates.
• The process and channels lane is a bit complex. The information in this lane overlaps with the touchpoint lane.
• Introducing nonlinear elements (in the process and channels lane) is a potential source of confusion.
• This looks like a pretty good template to kick off a high-level journey mapping workshop . The number and choice of lanes strike a nice balance between depth and breadth of information.
• The template also provides a very natural flow of questions from top to bottom, from what the customer does and expects to the problems they face in the service, and ideas for solutions.

Templates in Books, Blogs and Presentations

6. This Is Service Design Thinking

When you look at this journey map template, you'll immediately notice that it has a different structure than all the other ones. This template was part of This Is Service Design Thinking when it was published back in 2010. A lot has happened since, but it's still good to take this template into consideration, as it was one of the first out there.

You could question if this is a real journey mapping template. The title already gives a clue that it's not, as it's called The Customer Journey Canvas .

So, it more resembles a canvas (in the spirit of the business model canvas ) rather than a template. That might seem like a subtle difference, but in practice, it has some implications.

• The questions in the template are very high level. You can use this template even when you know little about journey mapping.
• It's not visually organized into lanes, which can cause some confusion if you're expecting to see a journey map.
• The template doesn't invite or guide you to really step into the shoes of your customer.
• The information manipulation-credibility axis probably isn't the best source of insights. It would make more sense to just have a channels lane and use icons to illustrate the type of information.

I haven't been in a situation where this canvas seemed to be the right way to go. The canvas structure might be familiar to people who have seen other canvases and allow for an easier transition into journey thinking. But I think in the long run, it's smarter to go with the classic lane structure of a journey map.

7. Design a Better Business

The journey mapping template offered by Design a Better Business positions itself as a canvas, just like the template from This Is Service Design Thinking, which we looked at above. This journey mapping template is part of a larger collection of templates related to different stages in the design process.

When you look at the journey mapping template, you'll immediately see that it's very basic and high level. The template consists of just three information lanes. The structure looks a lot like the journey map template we saw in Miro .

• The simple structure and step-by-step guide that comes along with the template make this a very user-friendly template to start with.
• There's room for just five "key moments" in the journey. This forces you to focus the conversation on what's really important to your customer.
• The template invites you to visualize the journey rather than just describe it with words . Seeing the experience through the eyes of your customer is as important as understanding it.
• The instructions regarding the customer persona are a bit misleading. You should focus on the needs (as stated in the canvas but not the step-by-step instructions), desires, pain, etc.
• The key moments shouldn't be about touchpoints (as stated in the instructions) but rather about customer activities and situations. Otherwise, you run the risk of turning this into a process map.

The guide for this template states that you should be able to fill it out in about 45 minutes. So, this makes the template ideal for a short workshop . I imagine that template would be a very good follow-up exercise after a presentation on what customer journey mapping is. You could, for instance, have multiple groups in the workshop fill in the same journey and then compare the differences.

Another useful application for this template would be when you have a group of people with different backgrounds and need to get them to create a shared understanding of the customer journey. For example, this could be stakeholders from different internal departments. Using a service example like the coffee shop journey described in the instructions would be a good start to get people in the right mindset.

Finally, I think this template could be useful as a tool that helps raise questions rather than find answers. So, you quickly map a journey based on assumptions and then ask, “What would we like to learn about this customer and their experience?”

8. Nielsen Norman

The first thing I want to say about the journey mapping template shared by Nielsen Norman is that it's surrounded by a wealth of knowledge on the topic. You can easily spend a few hours reading all the free articles, which is great if you want to dig deeper into what it takes to create useful customer journey maps. And if that's what you're into, you might also consider joining our Customer Journey Mapping Essentials masterclass .

What sets this journey map template from Nielsen Norman apart is the way it's divided into three zones. Each zone represents a perspective through which you should look at the customer journey. This is a smart way to help you look at the journey holistically. There are other templates that do this as well, but this one is very clear and explicit.

Another strong point of this template is that it connects the experience of your customer to the impact on business and follows that up with the question about internal ownership. This is great, as talking about ownership shifts the focus of the conversation toward action rather than just insights.

• The three zones and how they are described make a lot of sense. The business and internal perspectives are really valuable.
• The template strikes the right balance between the width and depth of information.
• The accompanying guide helps you understand which questions you should be asking per information lane.
• There isn't a downloadable version of the template.
• It would be nice if there were a pre filled example.

This is a template I'd consider for a kick-off journey mapping workshop with an internal team, especially when the goal is to help stakeholders understand that the customer experience has implications on business.

The template could also be a good starting point to create a more elaborate journey map in a tool like Custellence .

How do I pick the right template?

Well, that's a really good question, maybe even the best one in this entire article! 🙂

Picking the right template is all about understanding which bits and pieces of information you need to get the insights you're looking for. And in order to know which insights you need, we must go back to the most fundamental question: Why do you need a customer journey map in the first place ( here are 5 good reasons )?

What goals do you want to achieve? What is the next step after you've created the map?

Are you hosting a workshop to build a shared understanding about the journey? Then, a template with just the customer activities and pain points might do the job.

Do you need to map your internal process onto the customer journey ? In that case, a template that contains backstage lanes will be more useful.

Is your goal to align branding efforts across multiple touchpoints in the journey? A template that splits the touchpoints into their respective communication channels might be a good fit.

What if I don't know what the goal of my journey map is yet?

From my experience, this usually means that you're creating a map to build an overview, to facilitate a conversation and to get to some form of shared understanding, which are all very valid reasons to build a journey map.

Quick Guide to Picking the right Journey Map Template

• Start with the simplest template that has the least number of elements but still suits your needs. Expand as you go along and learn what you need to add.
• Pick a template that has elements that invite everyone who's contributing to add their knowledge. If you're working with IT, for example, make sure there's a lane for internal processes.
• Don't worry about how polished and fancy a template looks. More visuals usually means more distractions, unless your end goal is to create an art piece.

If you follow the steps in this guide, you might not pick the perfect template, but you'll definitely have a customer journey map template that’s practical and gets you to the next stage .

When should I create my own template?

A good moment to start thinking about creating your own journey map template is when you start to recognize patterns .

After you've mapped a few customer journeys, you'll start to see that every map has repeating elements. These elements could be specific to your organization, your department, or the industry you're in.

When you get to this stage, creating your own custom journey map template is a very valuable exercise. That’s because, once you have your custom template, you'll be able to dive much quicker into specific parts of the journey rather than wasting time thinking about the structure of your map.

There's one other reason why you might consider creating a custom template: to make it match your brand .

Depending on your environment, people can critique your journey mapping efforts just because of the colors and style. Silly, I know. But it happens. On those occasions, it might be a good investment to make your template visually match your brand identity.

By creating your own custom template, you're getting into the position of teacher or mentor for others . And the nice benefit of that is, you yourself will learn a lot about journey mapping in the process.

What's next

Hopefully this guide helps you pick the right journey mapping template for your next project, so you can invest your energy in delivering a great customer experience, instead of thinking about journey mapping templates.

If your favorite journey mapping template is missing in the list, leave a comment down below. I’ll try to add it to the overview.

Now that you've made it all the way here it's probably a good moment to join the Customer Journey Mapping Essentials masterclass 👇

Great article on what tools are available and when to use them. Saved us some time having to just figure it out on our own.

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Customer journey map

This basic customer journey map template can help you:

• Visualize the journey a customer takes with a product or service.
• Map out different customer touchpoints.
• Collaborate with colleagues.

Open this template to view a detailed example of a basic customer journey map that you can customize to your use case.

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Customer journey map templates to visualize your buyer’s point of view.

Use FigJam’s online whiteboard to plot your ideal customer journey from first to final touchpoints.

Bring over existing journey maps from Figma

If you already have a team library of journey map components and styles inside Figma, copy and paste them into FigJam to build out new maps faster. Curated tools and styling in FigJam let you edit most layers that you bring over.

No one journey is the same

Customer journey maps illustrate a buyer’s actions, emotions, and barriers as they interact with your brand, on a diagram. With FigJam you can:

Capture your customer personas: Create and import tabular data on target audiences directly into your FigJam workspace.

Capture and document customer’s touchpoints: Out-of-the-box shapes and connectors snap right into the grid for a visual representation of your buyer’s current and future states.

Organize, test, iterate: Widgets let you add branches to map customer interactions along the different stages of a user journey.

Chime in to bring this shared vision to life

The customer journey is something everyone should feel connected to and a part of. With audio for live conversations, cursor chats, stamps and emotes, and observation mode real-time collaboration is easier than ever. With Open sessions anyone can join your FigJam space for 24 hours—no new account required.

Get started with diagramming templates

Start diagramming with any of these free diagramming templates. Or, if you want to see how other teams jam with FigJam, head over to our Community.

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What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes when interacting with a product, service, or company. Journey mapping should include every individual touchpoint to fully understand the buyer persona, customer needs, and potential pain points. It's an effective tool for a variety of stakeholders, including customer service, marketing, product, and design teams dedicated to creating an optimal user experience.

Click here to learn more about how to make an effective customer journey map.

How do you create a customer journey map?

Our free template helps teams map out the entire customer journey.

Start by identifying your target customer - develop a buyer persona to understand their needs, pain points, and goals. Map out their journey, making sure to include every customer touchpoint. Identify key actions within each touchpoint, and evaluate if there are opportunities to optimize that customer interaction.

Further customize your customer journey map with specific details, especially after gathering data from multiple sources (including feedback forms, customer service data, and more). Test and validate your map as needed to ensure accuracy.

What are the benefits of using a customer journey map template?

Customer journey map templates help teams better understand customer behavior at each key touchpoint. In doing so, teams can address needs, create solutions for potential pain points within the buying process, and support overall customer retention efforts.

What are some tips for creating an effective customer journey map?

As part of this mapping experience, your goal should be to create an optimal customer experience. Some other tips include:

• Use multiple sources of data (qualitative and quantitative) to accurately portray customer behavior. Review market research, social media comments, customer service queries, and more.
• Get customer feedback to understand specific thought processes and feelings throughout different parts of their journey.
• Review the map regularly and make updates as needed to reflect existing and potential customers (especially if your product or service offering has changed significantly).

Other templates you might like

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Explore even more templates, widgets, and plugins—all built by the Figma community.

Customer Journey Mapping: How to Understand Your Buyers and Enhance Their Experience

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• 14 Dec, 2023
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The recent State of the Connected Customer Report  by Salesforce revealed that for 80 percent of people, the experience a brand provides is as important as its product . With customer expectations at an all-time high, businesses must deliver the best service  possible to satisfy consumers and stay competitive. For that, it’s crucial to understand what customers want and anticipate their actions.

A customer journey map is vital in this context. It helps businesses understand and manage interactions with their clientele at every touchpoint, from the first encounter to the final transaction. So this post is all about the tool that guides you in creating exceptional customer experiences and how you can get the most out of it.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is creating a visual story of customers' interactions with the brand or product. It's like drawing a route people usually take from the moment they first become aware of your product or service all the way through to purchasing and even after-sales support.

A customer journey map includes all the touchpoints the customer can have with your brand, such as seeing a social media ad, visiting a store, calling customer support, and so on. Also, it should reflect the customers’ pain points , emotions, and reactions at every stage of the journey so that you understand them better and see how to improve their experience.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Before we delve into the details of customer journey mapping, let’s say a few words about why do it at all. Here are some of its benefits.

Understand your customers better . Customer journey mapping helps you see your business through your customers' eyes. You get to understand what they like, what bothers them, and what makes them happy.

Find problems . Sometimes, there are bumps in the road that can make your customers unhappy, like a confusing website or long wait times. Journey mapping helps you spot these problems so you can address them.

Adjust your strategy . As you get to understand your customers better, you might realize that you have to tailor your offerings, pricing range, marketing campaigns, support team workflows, etc.

Improve customer experience and foster loyalty . When you know what your customers go through, you can make their journey smoother and more enjoyable. This means increased conversion  and retention  rates. Happy buyers are likelier to keep returning and recommend your brand to others. Research states that 88 percent  of customers repeat the purchase if they like the customer service.

In essence, customer journey mapping is a tool that helps businesses empathize with their customers and improve their interaction journey, leading to better customer-brand relationships and business success.

Customer journey stages

As we start exploring a customer journey map, let’s first look at what a common customer journey looks like. Here are its main phases.

Awareness . This is the initial stage where potential customers realize they have  a need or a problem that requires solving and become aware  of a product or service.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: social media, industry events, online/offline ads, search results, etc.

Consideration . At this stage, customers look for solutions. They are considering  different products or services and are researching to find the best option.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: your website, blog, knowledge base , reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.

Decision . This is the point where the customer decides  on a solution that best fits their needs.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: email newsletter, pricing information, your website, physical store, sales reps, etc.

Purchase . The customer buys the product or service and starts using it.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: customer support (phone, messages, chatbots), help desk/FAQ sections, etc.

Retention . A fter the purchase, the focus shifts to keeping the customer happy and engaged with the product or service. This stage is about building loyalty and encouraging repeat purchases.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: email, newsletters, sales reps, etc.

Please note that this is the typical scenario but not the only one. The stages can vary across industries and product types, so you might want to include other phases in your customer journey map. Or else, you might need to map out only one part of the journey, for example, pre-purchase, to better understand how your marketing campaigns work.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

When creating a customer journey map, you’ll evaluate your buyer’s interactions with your brand and look for opportunities to enhance their experience. So here are the main elements of a customer journey map.

Elements of a customer journey map

Buyer/user/customer persona  – a prototype of your target audience.

Scenario  – a short description of the interaction story.

Customer’s goals/needs/expectations  – why people turn to your brand.

Stages  – the phases your customer goes through in the interaction scenario.

Actions and touchpoints – what customers do and where the interaction happens.

Emotions and experiences  – what customers feel and think as they interact with your brand.

Emotional curve  – the visual line of how the customer sentiment changes depending on their experience.

Opportunities  – how you can improve the customer experience at each touchpoint or stage.

You can also include other elements like KPIs to track, designated people responsible for implementing improvements, and so on. T he complexity and elements of a customer journey map can vary based on the nature of your business, the type of customers, and your goals.

A simple example of a traveler journey map that an OTA or a hotel could create

The components of the customer journey map also depend on its type. There are many different modifications you can create for various business goals, so let’s talk about some of them.

Customer journey map types

Each customer journey map has its own focus and purpose. The choice of which one to use depends on your specific objectives, the complexity of your customer experience, and the information you want to capture. Here are some of the main types.

Current state journey maps provide a detailed view of the existing customer experience (just like in the illustration above). It’s the most basic map that documents touchpoints, interactions, and emotions “as is.”

Future state journey maps  envision the ideal customer journey after implementing improvements or changes. They serve as a roadmap for designing and delivering a better customer experience and help teams set goals and prioritize initiatives to reach the desired state.

Day-in-the-life journey maps  focus on a specific persona or customer segment's daily activities and how they interact with a product or service throughout their day. These maps help businesses understand a customer's routines and identify opportunities to provide value.

Channel-specific journey maps  concentrate on a particular customer interaction channel, such as a website, mobile app, social media, or in-store experience. They help businesses optimize touchpoints within a specific channel.

Service blueprints  go beyond the customer perspective and provide a comprehensive view of the entire service ecosystem. They include the customer journey, frontstage interactions (visible to the customer), and backstage processes (invisible to the customer). Service blueprints help improve alignment and coordination within an organization.

An example of a service blueprint for visiting a restaurant. Source: Miro

Some other types are emotional journey maps, lifecycle journey maps, cross-channel journey maps, etc. You can focus on a specific category or use a combination of these maps to better understand your customer journey and drive improvements in the customer experience.

How do you create and use a customer journey map ?

There’s no single best format for a customer journey map. It can be a linear timeline, flowchart, or any other visual representation that best suits your needs. You can draw it on paper, put sticky notes on a whiteboard , or design it in specialized software (we’ll talk about digital tools further on).

Since customer journey mapping is part of market research, usually, it’s the marketing or sales department that’s responsible for creating it. However, it’s worth engaging different teams in this process.

Define objectives

First of all, you have to decide on your goals – or why you want to analyze your customer journey. For example, it can be something as specific as checking how a particular marketing project works, i.e., how effective ad retargeting is. Or it can be a strategic business objective like attracting more customers, increasing sales volume per customer, or improving retentio n.

Pro tip: Make a customer journey map for a specific interaction scenario for a certain customer segment. This way, it won’t be too generic, so you’ll be able  to explore your buyers’ sentiments  more deeply at each stage of their way and get more concrete results to work with.  

Create a buyer persona

As we said, you must create a fictional representative of your target audience. To understand their needs and pain points, design a persona with a specific traits -- professional background, motivations, lifestyle, goals, and so on.

Pro tip : Add as many details as possible to make the most accurate representation of your customer. Later on, it will help you better understand their perspective.

Identify touchpoints and map the customer journey

As we said, you have to define the ways customers interact with your brand at each stage. Make a list of all the potential touchpoints and then map them out on the customer journey stages.

Use various data sources such as website analytics, customer feedback, social media interactions, and sales data to gather information about where and how customers interact with your brand. Also, engage teams from various departments (sales, customer support, marketing) and encourage their input.

Pro tip : Look at your competitors to see where they engage with customers. This can provide insights into touchpoints you haven’t considered.

Understand the customer's perspective

As you record your customers' actions at each stage, remember to make the  map from the customer's point of view. It must show what they think and feel  at each touchpoint, what they're trying to achieve, and any challenges they might face.

Watch our expert explain customer research in product discovery

Get feedback directly from your customers  through surveys, interviews , or email questionnaires to understand their  experience at different touchpoints. Ask about their motivations  and any difficulties they encountered.

Pro tip : Tools like website heat maps, open rates for emails, and engagement rates on social media can help you understand your customers’ behavior better.

Highlight emotions and experiences

A customer journey map goes beyond the actions customers take. It dives into their emotional experience, whether they're happy, frustrated, or confused at different stages.

It’s important to record both positive and negative emotions. The former exhibits opportunities to enhance the experience or exceed customer expectations, while the latter highlights pain points or bottlenecks where customers face challenges or frustrations.

Pro tip : Ask your customer support which questions they get most often. Also, pay attention to what customers say about your brand on social media, online review platforms, or other resources.

Identify opportunities for improvement

By mapping this journey, you can see where you're providing a great experience and where you fall short. This helps you find ways to enhance your strong sides and improve the weak ones. For example, some reasons for poor customer experience include long waiting times to get to customer service, unintuitive website interface, missing app functionality, high prices, and so on.

Pro tip : Conduct brainstorming sessions with different teams and encourage active cross-department collaboration. Also, try to go through the journey that you’ve depicted yourself to get first-hand experience.

Create a better customer experience

Ultimately, the goal is to use this map to make strategic decisions that enhance the customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty. Develop strategies and initiatives to address the pain points, optimize touchpoints, and leverage opportunities identified in the customer journey map.

Pro tip : Focus on your business goals when you analyze the impact of customer experience and prioritize your activities.

B2B customer journey map

If your company doesn’t work with individual customers but deals with other businesses, you can still take advantage of a customer journey map. A B2B customer journey map is a useful tool for managing client relationships. Just like the B2C analog, it visualizes the process they go through and experiences they have when interacting with your company. However, there are certain differences that impact the components of the customer journey map. 

The complexity of the decision-making process . In the B2B context, there’s a more complex decision-making process, often with multiple stakeholders. The journey may include stages like RFP (Request for Proposal) submission, detailed product evaluations, approvals from different departments, and a longer negotiation phase. In B2C, the decision-making process is usually simpler and quicker, often involving only the individual consumer or their immediate family.

Length of sales cycle . B2B sales cycles are typically longer, sometimes lasting months or even years, as they involve higher-value transactions and more deliberation. B2C sales cycles are shorter, often concluding within a few days or even instantly.

Touchpoints . B2B touchpoints include industry events, professional networks, detailed product demos, and extensive follow-up communications. B2C touchpoints often focus more  on mass marketing channels like social media, online ads, reviews, and retail environments.

Customer goals and expectations . Business customers often have specific, pragmatic goals like improving efficiency, increasing ROI, or integrating with existing systems. Meanwhile, individual consumer goals may be more diverse, including personal enjoyment, convenience, price, and brand alignment.

Relationship and engagement . B2B focuses more on building long-term relationships and ongoing engagement.   In the B2C model, while repeat business is also important, engagement is often more transactional and less personalized unless it’s a high-value product or a niche market.

Just like in a B2C context, delivering a positive experience to your business clients is important. Customer journey mapping helps you understand how you can enhance your relationships.

Customer journey mapping softwa re

As we said, you can certainly map your customer journey on a sheet of paper, but we recommend you use a specialized digital tool instead. The software helps automate this process, allows for convenient collaboration, and enables easy editing, sharing, and so on. Besides, most platforms offer several editable templates for different purposes.

There are multiple tools available to help you with customer journey mapping. A simple online search will give you a list of relevant platforms. Some are designed specifically to manage customer experience, while others are more general-purpose and can be used for different scenarios.

When choosing a tool, we recommend you consider the following factors:

• available templates,
• integration options,  
• interface intuitiveness,
• customization options,
• collaboration features, and
• customer support and training.

We’ll take a look at some of them to give you an idea of what’s out there. Please note that we don’t promote any of the tools; the choice was based on their popularity.

Customer journey mapping tools compared

Smaply  is a specialized, user-friendly tool for journey mapping. It allows businesses to create detailed customer personas,  journey maps, and other related visuals. It’s particularly good for visualizing complex customer interactions over multiple channels.

Miro  is a multipurpose online collaborative whiteboarding platform. It offers numerous templates and tools for creating detailed customer journey maps, making it easier to visualize the customer experience.

UXPressia  is specifically designed for creating customer journey maps with 100+ templates and customization options. It offers a persona creation feature, impact mapping, and the ability to integrate real data into your maps. You can also connect it to Jira, Google Analytics, and other external apps to add information to your maps.

Lucidchart is a diagramming app that helps create flowcharts, organizational charts, customer journey maps, etc. Besides creating visuals, it offers integration options with popular business tools like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Slack.

Custellence  is another focused customer journey mapping app. It has numerous templates for different industries and an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface.

Customer journey map templates

As we’ve already mentioned, most software tools provide interactive templates for different scenarios. But if you don’t want to work on any focused platform, here are some downloadable templates for you:

• the most basic PDF template  from Nielsen Norman Group,
• a collection of PowerPoint templates  from HubSpot,
• an editable Google Docs template  from WordStream, and
• a set of colored templates  available in Google Slides or PowerPoint from Slidesgo.

We realize it might be confusing at the beginning when you don’t have a clear idea of how to approach customer journey mapping. For inspiration, check out some examples of how it might look.

Customer journey map examples

Companies create customer journey maps for a wide range of scenarios and with different purposes. While the objective isn’t always about getting more profit, it’s always about enhancing customer experience.

M ultiple use cases. UXPressia has a big section with customer journey map examples  for many industries, including banking, travel, entertainment, and so on. Within each industry subsection, they cover multiple scenarios, plus they provide different user persona examples.

A customer journey map for an airplane passenger. Source: UXPressia

Attending city tours . Mural, a visual planning and collaboration tool, has created a customer journey map  for travelers on guided city tours. The steps include browsing, booking, attending, and rating the tours.

Sharing music on Spotify . Meghana Bowen, a UX/UI designer, presented a customer journey map  of using the Spotify app and sharing music with others. The author has also defined a user persona and depicted the following process of creating the sharing feature design.

Spotify customer journey map. Source: Meghana Bowen

New students coming to the university campus . Iris Wu and Mei Xue created a service to facilitate traveling to Carnegie Mellon for incoming students. As part of their research, they’ve designed current and future  customer journey maps  to better understand the difficulties that international students encounter.

Best practices

We’ve already included some pieces of practical advice in the previous sections, but we still have a few more final tips.

Collaborate . We’ve mentioned it above but still want to emphasize the importance of cross-department collaboration when creating and working with the customer journey map. And, of course, involve your customers as well. Only in this case you’ll be able to have the most detailed information about your customer experience and improve it throughout all touchpoints.

Designate . As you implement changes, it’s crucial to assign responsibilities so that everyone knows their roles and tasks in these projects.

Track . It’s also important to develop KPIs so that you can track progress. The metrics you choose will depend on your objectives, but some examples are customer satisfaction score, net promoter score , conversion rate, or churn rate.

Update . Remember that the customer journey is dynamic and can change over time. Regularly revisit and update your customer journey map to reflect any changes in customer behavior or market conditions.

3 Steps of a successful Customer Journey Map – free template included

This post is also available in: German

If you’re in the 50% of the organizations planning to invest more in customer experience innovations, the first step is identifying the key touchpoints on your customer’s journey. Once you’ve identified those touchpoints, you can analyze each of them, identifying room for improvement to ultimately boost your customer retention.

Understanding the customer journey becomes much easier when laid out visually . This is where a customer journey map template comes into play. Use our free template and read on for a simple guide on how to complete it online.

What is the Customer Journey? [2023 updated]

A customer journey is a roadmap that highlights all the experiences a customer has when interacting with your company. This journey documents the full experience of being a customer. It starts with initial awareness all the way through to post-purchase retention and every side-step, backtrack and hurdle in between.

Generating a positive customer experience boils down to ensuring that they have an equally positive experience at every moment. Just one negative experience can undo other positive experiences throughout the journey.

What is a customer journey map?

The customer journey map is a visual story-telling aid that maps the experience of customers. Gain a better understanding of the buying experience by visualizing it through the eyes of your customers.

Use the map to illustrate the customer’s attitudes and feelings at each touchpoint. This information can be sourced from customer satisfaction surveys, customer support tickets and emails, product or feature requests, group discussions, or from staff who deal with customers regularly.

How to create a customer journey map using a template

There are a few important steps you need to take before you start filling in the template, to ensure your map is as accurate as possible.

Use template

Step 1: Information Gathering

Gather information you’ve already gathered through user research or feedback surveys. If you find that your data is lacking, delay your mapping until you have collected some more relevant, complete data through surveys or staff feedback.

This data is used to:

• Identify the main touchpoints at each of the five stages
• Gain preliminary insights and feedback
• Create a list of actions performed by your customer at each stage

Step 2: Create a user persona

A user persona is a fictional character that represents the goals and behaviors of your average user. If you haven’t created one yet, t his article will guide you through the process. You should include basic demographic information, as well as a description of their needs and goals, uses of your products, and pain points.

Step 3: Begin mapping

Now it’s time to open the customer journey map template and begin filling it in.

Sections of the customer journey map template

We’ve created a simple, easy-to-use collaborative template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

The template is broken down into the five key stages on the customer journey:

• Awareness: advertising, social media, blogs, and emails.
• Consideration: website, FAQs, sales
• Acquisition: homepage layout, customer service, product range, photography quality, 
• Service: personalization, chat-bot interactions, load speed, payment options, packaging, postage, product quality and price.
• Retention: product quality, follow-up offers, loyalty memberships, returns process, reviews.

Pro tip: Run a quick Google search of your business to see all the pages that mention you. Then check your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.

Within each of these stages, you should consider the following questions in order to fully understand your customers.

Customer goals

What do users want to accomplish in this stage?

Customer actions

Describe which actions users need to do to reach the goals.

Touchpoints and channels

How do users get information to make a decision or reach goals?

Customer thoughts

What are users thinking or expecting during these actions?

Overall customer experience

What are the users’ feelings in this stage? (e.g.: happy, frustrated)

Pain points

What are the problems or negative experiences that users are facing in this stage?

Opportunities to improve

How can we help users to reach the goal? Identify opportunities that could be improved or insights.

Understanding the typical customer journey and being able to communicate it visually will greatly improve not only the experience of the customer but also your products and services.

Example of a customer journey map

Using the customer journey map template, we’ve created an example of the typical customer journey in an e-commerce store. Check it out below and use it to inspire your customer journey.

Now you’ve created your customer journey map in Conceptboard, share it with your marketing and sales departments, customer service staff, managers and key stakeholders. Anyone who is involved with customers has the ability to act on this information to improve your customers experience .

Keep learning

If you’re interested in learning more about customer experience, read about the Customer Persona ,  Customer Empathy Map and the Value Proposition canvas .

Conceptboard is the perfect canvas for your team to collaborate together on, wherever you are in the world. Give it a try for free today.

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5 Comments . Leave new

Thank you. Customer Journey map is great tool. How can I get this map as template in Conceptboard?

Hi there, I am glad you found this article very useful! Unfortunately, I cannot make this board public, so you cannot use this as a template. Definitely a good idea to keep in mind for future articles. Thanks!

I just wanted to let you know that this board can now be found as a template. Check out the Mapping out a Customer Journey: Part 2 + Template blog post and find the template! Try it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks a lot for posting this. I found this very informative. Excellent job.

Very insightful as well as reflective. Well said and very helpful tips.! Thank you so much!

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Home CX Customer Experience

Customer Journey Mapping: The Complete Guide + Free Template

Businesses need to be aware of their target market to provide the best possible customer journey. The customer journey mapping touchpoints should be as general as possible to create and retain the greatest number of repeat consumers.

At times, the process of figuring out what your customers want, what problems they have, and how they interact with your business can feel overwhelming and unnecessary.

LEARN ABOUT: Time to Value

In this blog post, we’ll explain why a customer journey map is important and how to create one. This will help you build trust, engagement, and loyalty with new and returning customers or clients. To begin, let’s define what the customer journey and customer journey map are.

LEARN ABOUT: Client Management

Content Index

• What is a Customer Journey?
• What is a Customer Journey Map Templates??
• Benefits of creating a Customer Journey Map

Starting from scratch: Build your Customer Journey Map

The 5 stages to create a customer journey map, how questionpro cx can help you create customer journey map templates, questionpro components for customer journey mapping, what is a customer journey .

A customer journey refers to the entire set of experiences that a customer goes through when interacting with a business or brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions. It encompasses all customer touchpoints and interactions with the industry, including marketing, sales, customer service , customer feedback, and support.

A customer journey is the series of interactions and experiences that a customer goes through when engaging with a company or brand. 

This can include everything from initial awareness of a product or service, to research, purchase, and post-purchase engagement. 

The customer journey is often visualized as a customer journey map or flowchart, with different stages and customer touchpoints along the way. Understanding the customer journey is important for businesses as it allows them to identify areas for improvement and optimize the overall customer experience.  

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey mapping visualizes the steps a customer takes as they interact with a company or organization to achieve a specific goal. It is a tool used to help businesses understand their customers’ experiences and identify areas where they can improve those experiences.

The journey mapping is also known as a customer experience map or customer service map. Creating a customer journey map allows businesses to see their customers’ experience from their customers’ point of view, allowing them to make adjustments that will increase customer happiness and loyalty.

Check out the following video if you want to learn what is the framework and the goals when creating a customer journey map. 

Benefits of Customer Journey Map ping

Customer journey mapping enables businesses to comprehend the viewpoint and experiences of the customer throughout their interactions with the brand. It may offer insights into areas for customer experience improvement and pain points. Creating a customer journey map has major benefits, such as:

Businesses can find ways to improve the customer experience by understanding the customer’s needs and emotions at each stage of the journey. This will lead to more satisfied and loyal customers.

Businesses can find ways to improve the customer experience by understanding the customer’s needs and emotions at each stage of the customer journey. This will lead to more satisfied and loyal customers.

Businesses can increase their conversion rates and boost their income by finding and fixing pain points in the customer journey.

Businesses can reduce customer churn and improve customer retention by pinpointing and fixing the weak spots in the customer experience.

Businesses can discover and eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their operations by understanding the customer journey, which leads to cost savings.

A customer journey map can provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s demands, which can be used to guide product development and service design .

It is important to remember that customer journey mapping is a continuous process that should be examined and modified regularly as customer demands and corporate objectives change.

LEARN ABOUT:  Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

A customer journey map that converts prospects to loyal customers starts with a stellar strategy. Follow these five steps to make sure your customers get the most relevant products and resources for their needs with a user experience that will bring them back for more.

• Understand what you have to offer and who benefits from it

Every member of your team should know how to communicate the benefits of your offerings. You can’t share something as effectively when you don’t know what it is! Likewise, you need to know who your ideal customer is. Ask yourself, “Who needs this solution the most?” This is a good opportunity to leverage easy online surveys that reveal your target demographic, their primary needs related to your offerings, and any other considerations you need to make to attract prospective customers.

• Create personas of your ideal customers

Once you have a general idea of who your ideal customers are, create a few buyer personas to give these customers a name and a face. When you have a well-developed sense of who to include in your key demographic, you’ll have a more nuanced understanding of the variations that will take place in their customer journeys.

For example, you may discover that your reusable water bottles will solve problems for athletes of all ages, sustainability-conscious millennials, and adults with limited mobility. Avoid broadening your market too much, because that can take focus and efficiency away from your marketing tactics. Create a customer persona for each of these groups within your target market, accounting for these imagined but realistic variables.

Create a persona for each of these groups within your target market, accounting for these imagined but realistic variables:  

• Economic status/income range
• Interests and hobbies
• Main sources of media and information
• Daily habits
• Consistent pain points
• Favored brands and products
• Spending habits
• Any details specific to your industry or offerings

While the general stops on their customer journey maps will be similar, each persona’s specific needs should influence your value propositions and the assets you create for marketing your product.  

• Refine your value propositions

Customer journeys are personal, but your value propositions need to remain consistent through every encounter with consumers to improve their customer experience. As you become more familiar with your target market and your customer personas, refine your value props to be inclusive, communicative, and aspirational. You will use these statements as guiding pillars in your customer journey map and marketing assets across your company.

If you like reading about what is customer journey, you might find interesting learning about  customer journey vs customer experience: the difference .

• Conduct research and gather data

Gather data about your customers and their interactions with your company or product. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer service customized reports can all be used to accomplish this.

It’s crucial to choose real customers or the intended ones. You need the opinions of individuals considering using your goods and services which have already done business with you or intend to.

Here are a few sample questionnaires you may use to conduct  research and collect data:

• How did you hear about our company or product for the first time?
• What made you decide to purchase from us?
• How easy was it for you to find what you needed on our website?
• How easy is it for you to find your way around our website on a scale of 1 to 10?
• How long have you spent on our website on average?
• Were you able to find the goods or services you needed?
• Have you ever bought something from us? If so, what made you choose that?
• Were there any problems or points of pain during the process of buying?
• Is there anything else we can do to make things easier for you?

Customizing the survey questions to your unique consumer groups and the journey touchpoints for each group is crucial. Understanding the customer’s emotions, desires, and actions at various points along the journey should be the main goal of these inquiries. Open-ended questions can also be used to ask clients for more in-depth feedback.

• Identify touchpoints

Make a list of all the significant points at which a customer interacts with your business or its offerings. This includes face-to-face meetings, phone calls, website and social media use, and electronic mail and messaging exchanges.

You can better understand the usability and goals of customer journeys by understanding the touchpoints. You may learn more about the numerous channels via which customers communicate with your business. You need to consider every possible web channel your customer could use to find you.

• Build assets for each touchpoint in the customer journey

As you map out the customer journey, you’ll have a clearer picture of what your ideal customers will be asking, which brands they might be considering, and the types of content they will most likely consume to move them from one phase to the next. Depending on your industry, that content may include the following types of assets as well as others: 

• Partnered or influencer content
• Print or email newsletters
• Infographics
• Paid media and social media copy and graphics
• Videos (ad spots, tutorials, webinars)
• Promotional flyers
• Sample kits or demos

It’s time to put your strategy and careful planning onto an actual customer journey map. At each step in the customer journey mapping process, it helps to list the following elements that will satisfy prospects and compel them to move forward. Consider these examples:

• Consumer activities and questions
• Touchpoints like websites, review forums, and advertisements
• Assets like paid media, blog posts, videos, and webinars (some assets are touchpoints)
• Strategies like SEO, social media and community management, and referral programs
• Tools like engagement reports and online surveys  

Consider what your customer personas would need and do throughout the entire process as you assign these elements to each phase in the customer journey map.  

• Analyze the map

Review the journey map to find any problems or areas where the consumer experience could be enhanced.

Identify what the client does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a certain circumstance. Next, ascertain their needs and how they are feeling at this time. Put your attention on barriers and inconveniences.

• Make the necessary changes

Make the necessary changes to the average customer experience using the journey map as a guide. If you analyzed the data, you’d get an idea of what you’re looking for. Then, you’ll be able to make the necessary adjustments to reach your objectives.

Changes will be beneficial, no matter how large or small, since they directly link with what customers identified as their pain areas. You can ensure that those needs and pain areas are always handled with the help of your visualized customer journey map.

• Monitor and review

Constantly review and monitor the customer’s journey, collect feedback, and adjust the journey map as necessary.

Do you want a head start on building your customer journey? Here you will find a completely free customer journey map templates:

Download Customer Journey Canvas

It’s time to take a closer look at what you can do to engage with prospective and new customers at each step in their customer journey.  

During the customer Awareness phase of the customer journey, consumers are searching for solutions and encountering multiple brands, products, and even DIY options. This is the time to shine if you want to grab their attention for any further consideration when they first encounter your brand.  

What consumers are doing: During this step in the customer journey map, consumers are likely conducting research. This can include keyword searching for solutions to problems online, reading blog posts and news articles, browsing online forums and print promotions, and encountering brands for the first time .  

What brands can do: You might think that consumers are doing all the heavy lifting in this stage because they’re asking questions and browsing content. However, you don’t want to approach brand awareness passively. Capture inbound search queries with a strong SEO strategy. Build your presence on social media. Start a blog or partner with content creators to address the critical concerns of your target market. Consumers will come to you when you provide engaging and informative assets about what matters to them.  

Consideration 

Once you’ve caught a prospect’s attention, either with your content or through other sources, you need to hold onto it. This is the Consideration phase. At this point, they move from looking for answers about potential solutions to looking for your answers about solutions. Most likely, your brand will be considered alongside other contenders, so ensure every impression you make is a strong one. At this point, customers are interacting directly with your brand, and you want customers to stick around for the next step in their customer journey.  

What consumers are doing: Researching specific brands and products, comparing competitors, and assessing their own priorities. This might include taking a closer look at your product and service specifications, looking into customer care policies, and turning to direct comparison reviews, such as “Brand X vs. Brand Y.” The consideration phase varies because consumer-focused media comes in many forms.  

What brands can do: Continuously optimize the user experience (UX) on all your touchpoints, including description and e-commerce transaction pages. Learn from the user data you gain each day to improve future encounters with your brand. Small things like making sure descriptions and processes are clear and all buttons function properly to make a big difference when someone is considering you against a competitor.  

The Decision (or Conversion) phase is your make-it-or-break-it moment in the customer journey. Once prospective customers are satisfied with researching and comparing their options, they will eventually make a decision. Sometimes they find that none of the brands they’ve been considering offer what they are looking for. But often they do make a positive choice; when they do, you want to make it easy to choose your brand and products with confidence.  

What consumers are doing: They are looking at “deal-breaker” factors, such as price vs. value, customer support responsiveness, company values, and policies. By the time they are at the decision phase, it’s not just about product specifications or the shopping experience. Consumers want to support a brand they can trust to deliver a quality solution to their problems.  

What brands can do: To anticipate this step, go the extra mile. This could include remarketing strategies that offer incentives to prospects who have already visited your website or engaged with your company. Make sure your return and refund policies are easy to find (and competitive), and coach your customer service team to answer key decision-making questions. Responsive community management and a dedicated email address, phone line, and chat feature are essential.  

At this junction on your customer journey map , you have a new customer. Congratulations! All that thoughtful planning and asset creation is paying off when they reach the Action phase. The consumer has decided to make their purchase with you (or convert in another way), but don’t assume this is a done deal. They still need to be able to complete the transaction and start using your offering. Like all other steps in the customer journey, this moment needs to be easy and intuitive for the user, as well as enjoyable or engaging.  

What consumers are doing: Depending on your business model, customers are taking this moment to purchase your products online or at a physical retailer, or are booking a service that they plan to experience soon. Once they have the product or service, they will start putting their purchase to use and — if you navigate the phase successfully — starting to interact with your brand as a loyal customer.  

What brands can do: Optimize the transaction experience on your customer journey map. QA your own e-commerce site or physical store, and regularly see how retailers on your stock list are optimizing the experience for consumers who take action at one of their touchpoints. Once the transaction is complete, follow up with your new customer immediately with the information they may need to care for their purchase and correspond with your team .  

If you are on you’re way to start building your customer journey, you might find it useful to review the 10 best customer journey mapping tools .

Guiding prospective customers through their customer journey takes a lot of work and careful planning. Once you’ve established a relationship with a new customer, nurture it to build customer loyalty and expand your reach. Enthusiastic customers are more likely to recommend your brand and products to a peer, which, for many, can be a deciding factor. When you keep current customers happy and exceed their expectations with innovation and excellent customer service, their journey map is shorter and your costs per transaction are lower.  

What consumers are doing: At this point, your customers are using your offerings to improve their lives. The better the results and experience they get with your product, the more likely they will be to repurchase and refer a peer. They may also start engaging with your brand more casually on social media and planning their next purchase.

  What brands can do: Take the initiative to check in with your customers in a friendly, supportive way. A brief survey about their experience navigating your customer journey map is a good way to let them know you care about their feedback. Consider offering a loyalty club for referrals and future transactions. This is also an excellent opportunity to bring consumers back to some of the relevant assets you create to build brand awareness and authority. This could include blog content with tips to enrich their experience with the product, a newsletter with updates and promotions, occasional opportunities to provide further feedback. Start a conversation with your customers .  

It’s important to note that customer journeys can also loop back to the awareness stage as they may consider your product or service again in the future.

Learn more about customer loyalty and your N et Promoter Score (NPS) to boost referrals and retention.

QuestionPro CX is a customer experience management software that may assist businesses in creating a customer journey map by offering a variety of features such as:

QuestionPro CX enables businesses to create surveys and questionnaires to collect customer feedback at various touchpoints of the customer journey, such as website visits, in-person interactions, and post-purchase follow-up.

The software enables organizations to capture real-time customer data and store it in a centralized location for simple access and analysis.

QuestionPro CX includes visual representation tools that allow businesses to generate a visual representation of the customer journey, including all interactions and the customer’s emotions and demands at each stage.

The software delivers comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities that help companies pinpoint pain points in the customer experience and chances for improvement.

QuestionPro CX allows businesses to track critical metrics, such as customer happiness, loyalty, and conversion rates, and build reports and dashboards to communicate with stakeholders.

QuestionPro CX allows organizations to track customer feedback over time, identifying trends and optimizing the customer journey map.

Businesses may use QuestionPro CX to understand the customer journey better and make data-driven decisions to enhance customer experience.

QuestionPro is the only CX solution in the market to have all 3 components of the CX ecosystem, including the customer journey mapping, journey measurement and all-the-loops systems:

• Experience and Journey Mapping
• CX Consulting
• Voice of the Customer
• Change Management/Implementation
• Reputation Management

Every consumer is different. Even the most reliable demographic data or carefully planned strategies will miss an occasional twist or turn on your customer journey map. You do not need to set these customer journey maps in stone. It’s vital to revisit them regularly and compare your strategy with real-life results. And above all, listen to your ideal customers.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

If you’d like to learn more about this tool, we invite you to request a free demo or create a free account to take advantage of everything QuestionPro CX has for you.

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Customer Journey Map Template

Build Better Customer Experiences

Understand your customer’s experience at each stage of the customer journey to identify customer needs, problems, and interactions with your brand..

• Customer journey map templates to get started quickly
• Easy visual canvas to quickly map customer journeys
• Real-time collaboration to work with teams and stakeholders

Customer Journey Map Templates to Create Seamless User Experiences

Customer Journey Map Example

Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Mapping Software

• More Templates

Understand Your Customers Better

Collect, organize, and visualize quantitative and qualitative data on how users interact with your product or website to better analyze your buyer personas. Easy-to-use visual tools, freehand drawing, extensive shape and icon libraries, prebuilt templates and customization and formatting options to create customer journey maps with the details that matter to your team.

Include Your Team’s Input at Every Stage

Collaborate with teams across departments on your journey map and share your knowledge and insights with each other. Get instant feedback from stakeholders with built-in comments, track changes with real-time mouse tracking and version control, and manage sharing and permissions with multiple access levels and roles.

Centralize All Data in One Place

Bring customer personas, user flows, storyboards, screenshots, and more on to the same canvas to easily manage your project workflows from ideation to execution. Add rich information on each step of the journey and attach customer research data from external sources with integrated notes and data fields for better context.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

How to collaborate on creating a customer journey map.

Bring together a team with diverse perspectives and skills, such as customer service, marketing, product, and sales. Determine the customer segment to focus on and gather information about their needs, goals, pain points, and behaviors.

Start by understanding your customer using sources such as surveys, customer feedback, and analytics. And develop user personas for customers at different buying stages.

Dig deep to understand the goals of your customers - exactly what they want to achieve as they go through various customer experiences during different stages.

Using a user flow diagram, create the paths different user personas may take when interacting with your business.

Referring to the flowcharts, identify the major and minor touchpoints and the user goals associated with them. Mark them down on your customer journey map.

Examine the gathered data to identify the potential roadblocks or pain points in the customer journey. Mark these down on your user journey map as well.

Share the journey map with the others in the marketing/ sales/ product team to get their input. Use built-in comments to gather feedback from stakeholders and discuss changes.

Identify ways you can remove the roadblocks to help smoothen out your customer’s journey. After incorporating feedback, finalize the map and create an action plan for improvement.

Embed the customer journey map in your intranet and other internal websites or share it with everyone, so they can easily access it and help update and improve it.

Who Can Use the Customer Journey Map Template?

A customer journey map template can be used by:

• Marketing teams to better understand and optimize customer experiences.
• Product teams to design and improve products and services.
• Customer service teams to identify pain points and improve customer support.
• Sales teams to optimize the sales process and improve customer engagement.
• Design teams to create user-centered designs that align with customer needs and goals.
• Business and strategy teams to align the organization around customer needs and make informed business decisions.
• Customer research and insights teams to gather and analyze customer data.

The customer journey map template can be adapted to various industries and businesses, including e-commerce, finance, healthcare, hospitality, and more.

FAQs on the Customer Journey Map Template

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14 customer journey touchpoints to optimize

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

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

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

Optimize your customer journey touchpoints with user insights

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

14 key touchpoints in the customer journey

According to Iga Gawronska, Product Designer at Hotjar :

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

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

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

3 external customer journey touch points to optimize 

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

1. Social media

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

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

So how can you optimize your social media touchpoints? 

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

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

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

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

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

2. Online ads 

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

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

Here’s how to optimize your online ads:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some key tips for designing impactful event touchpoints: 

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

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

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

11 internal customer journey touchpoints to optimize 

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

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

1. CTA buttons 

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

Here’s how to optimize your CTA buttons:

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

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

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

2. Homepage 

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

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

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

Use these tips to make your homepage touchpoints more effective:

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

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

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

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

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

#Hotjar Heatmaps tools

Source: Hotjar 

3. Landing pages 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Signup forms

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

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

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

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

Personalize sign-up with tools like Mailchimp

Make the signup process easy with autofill forms

5. Blog posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Video/visual media

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Product pages 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Point of exit   

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

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

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

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

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

How to optimize point of exit touchpoints: 

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

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

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

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

8. Starting a free trial

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

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

Try the following to improve your free trial customer touchpoints: 

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

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

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

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

9. Onboarding

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

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

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

Here’s how to optimize your customer onboarding: 

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

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

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

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

10. Using a new feature

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

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

Here’s how:

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

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

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

11. Customer reviews 

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

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

Here’s how to optimize your customer reviews:

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

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

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

Optimize your customer journey touchpoints for brilliant results

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

FAQs about customer journey touchpoints

What are customer journey touchpoints.

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

Important customer touchpoints for websites and products include: 

Social media channels

Landing page

Product pages

New product features

Customer support

Point of exit

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

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

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

How do you optimize the customer journey?

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

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Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Create customer journey maps to analyze the purchase path of your customers with the templates and examples of the online editor edit.org.

Create a map to analyze, understand and communicate your customer's customer journey with editable online templates from Edit.org

What is a Customer Journey Map?

It is a visual scheme that serves to visualize the steps that your clients follow from when they discover your product or service until they are regular clients and even recommend it to other people.

It is very useful to see what contact points there are and therefore take them into account for possible analysis and improvement.

A Customer Journey Map consists of 3 very important initial phases (plus 2 other phases after the acquisition of your products or contracting your services):

• Awareness (discovery). It is the moment when the potential customers discovers the existence of your product or service, which solves their problem or responds to their need.
• Consideration. It is the phase in which the person evaluates and compares your proposal.
• Acquisition (decides to purchase or not). It is the stage where he buys your product or hire your service (or decides not to and you lose this sales opportunity).
• Service (experience) or consumption. The customer makes use or consumes what is purchased.
• Loyalty or Advocady (retention and recommendation). The consumer repeats his experience, he is a satisfied customer and also prescribes your products and services to others like him.

Create a Customer Journey to analyze the contact points with your customers

Would you like to improve the shopping experience of your customers? Creating a Customer Journey Map will help you to be more aware of how many points of interaction with your company there are in each phase, with the aim of optimizing, modifying, eliminating or taking the appropriate action, with the objective to improve sales or the customer or user experience (UX).

The visualization of this map is a representation of the touchpoints with your company, and can be positive or generate friction.

To register the customers feedback for each touchpoint of the map is very practical to detect areas for improvement.

Do you want to create your own Customer Journey? Use the templates of our graphic editor to create how many versions you need for your startup or business. We explain as below.

How to design an editable journey map

In a few minutes you can have your own personalized Customer Journey downloaded to your device.

Follow these steps:

• Click on any image in this article to enter the editor
• Select the Customer Journey Map template you want to edit
• Customize the touchpoints and its text fields
• Save changes online
• Download your free custom graphic in JPG, PNG or PDF

Use editable Customer Journey templates to improve your marketing

What is a Customer Journey Map for? The key to this diagram is that you can activate it, it is to decide, it is a reflection of reality and therefore you can do tests by modifying the contact points.

We recommend that you make a new version every time you make a change in your company. Measuring the results will let you know which version works best. For example, you can create satisfaction surveys, or measure the results of sales conversion or even the evaluation of the consumer experience and thus know if it is improving or not.

Enter now the online editor and create your personalized Customer Journey Map for your business.

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Customer Journey

A customer journey describes the "journey" that a customer or potential customer experiences with a brand, product or service. It includes all direct and indirect touchpoints with a brand or product. It captures every single touchpoint need but also problems a customer has. In this way, the customer's experience is mapped from "awareness" to the final use of the product or service.

The goal is to make the customer's experience as positive as possible throughout the entire journey.

With this template you can represent a customer journey from start to finish.

The template contains the phases, jobs to be done, context and touchpoints, gains, pains and the emotions that the customer experiences.

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Customer Renewal Journey Considerations, Examples and Template

Ditch churn fears! Craft a personalized renewal journey with exclusive offers, frictionless one-click options, and ongoing engagement for thriving loyalty and recurring revenue magic.

Crafting an effective customer renewal journey is crucial for retaining valuable subscribers and building a thriving recurring revenue business. Here's a template to help you design your own:

Pre-Renewal Stage:

Evaluate customer health:  .

Analyze usage data, engagement metrics, and support interactions to identify potential churn risks. Segment customers based on activity level and risk score.

Tailor your approach:  

Develop personalized messaging based on customer segments. High-risk customers might receive targeted offers or re-engagement campaigns, while engaged customers might be offered early access or exclusive upgrades.

Set renewal reminders:  

Implement automated email or SMS reminders leading up to the renewal date. These reminders should be informative, highlight the value of the subscription, and provide clear instructions on how to renew.

Renewal Stage:

Streamline the renewal process:  .

Make it easy for customers to renew. Offer one-click options, pre-filled forms, QR codes and multiple payment methods.

Highlight renewal benefits:  

Highlight the continued value of the subscription. Emphasize exclusive content, new features, ongoing benefits, and loyalty rewards.

Offer incentives:  

Sweeten the deal with limited-time discounts, bonus items, or exclusive content upon renewal. Consider tiered or graduated incentives based on subscription length or spend.

Personalize touchpoints:  

Utilize email, SMS, or in-app messages with personalized offers and renewal details. Highlight their usage history, specific benefits they enjoy, and upcoming features they wouldn't want to miss.

Post-Renewal Stage:

Welcome back & thank you:  .

Send a personalized welcome back email or message expressing gratitude for the renewal. Show appreciation and build loyalty.

Encourage engagement:  

Re-engage customers with onboarding content, personalized recommendations, and exclusive post-renewal offers. Keep them excited about their subscription and maximize its utilization.

Monitor engagement & satisfaction:  

Continue to track customer activity and satisfaction. Use this data to inform future renewal campaigns and personalize touchpoints further.

Additional Tips:

Listen to customer feedback:  .

Use surveys, reviews, and support interactions to understand why customers renew (or don't) and make improvements based on their insights.

A/B test different approaches:  

Experiment with different messaging, offers, and timing to see what resonates best with your customers.

Leverage data analytics:  

Utilize data to personalize communications, target high-risk customers, and measure the effectiveness of your renewal journey.

Remember, a successful customer renewal journey is more than just a single email or promotion. It's an ongoing process of providing value, engaging customers, and demonstrating the ongoing benefits of your subscription. By implementing this template, tailoring it to your specific business, and continuously making improvements based on data and feedback, you can create a renewal journey that fosters loyalty, boosts retention, and propels your recurring revenue business to new heights.

Customer retention is a constant journey, not a one-time event. Invest in a personalized, data-driven renewal strategy to keep your subscribers happy and keep your recurring revenue flowing!

Segment & personalize: Pre-renewal outreach and offers should speak directly to each customer's needs and risk of churn.

Make renewal frictionless: Offer one-click options, emphasize ongoing value, and incentivize continued subscription.

Nurture post-renewal: Welcome back, re-engage with personalized content and offers, and monitor engagement to ensure ongoing satisfaction.

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