journey mapping course

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4 Takeaways from the IxDF Journey Mapping Course

Maps are one of the oldest tools humans have used to find their way around the world. They help us understand the lay of the land, where we are, and where we need to go.

Like a traditional map, journey maps also help us understand our customers’ world, where they are and where they want to go. They help us identify the roadblocks, twists, and turns they encounter and give the entire product team insights to help resolve those obstacles and create delightful customer experiences.

Find out how you and your team can benefit from these tools in Journey Mapping: Improve the Customer Journey . Here’s an overview of what you can find in this course.

1. Why Do We Need Journey Maps?

Imagine that you’ve ordered a frying pan from an online shop. The product is expected to arrive in three days. The next day, you receive notification that the product is out of stock because too many customers ordered the frying pan in the past 24 hours. Another week rolls by, the product is finally available, and you receive your frying pan, only to realize it’s two inches smaller than the one you ordered.

You would like to ask the company for a replacement. You head back to the shop, read through the entire FAQ section, and realize that your case isn’t covered. You look for a way to contact the company and decide to call the toll-free customer care number. A recorded message thanks you for your time and patience, and well, by now, you might have guessed where we’re going with this example.

As a customer, you likely have stories of both good and bad experiences. As a product manager or ​​experience designer, you’re on the other side of the equation; your goal is to ensure your customers have the best experience using your product or service. As we’ve seen in the example above, the customer’s experience spans multiple touchpoints:

The online shop

The notifications about the product being out of stock

The shipping service

The FAQ page

The toll-free customer care service

And had we continued with the example, possibly the social media team, the customer loyalty program, the payment service…

Many of these touchpoints will likely be handled by different people, teams, or even different companies. And each group may be oblivious to the customer experiences outside of their domain. Enter journey maps.

2. What Is a Journey Map?

A journey map visualizes a person’s interaction (their journey) with your product or service (or both, in the case of digital products). It helps all stakeholders gain a shared understanding of the users’ journey and helps them identify gaps and opportunities to improve the user’s experience.

We would have explained our experience with the frying pan much faster with a journey map!

In a 2019 survey , the Nielsen Norman Group found that journey mapping was the third-most-popular activity for UX professionals. The first is collaborating with subject-matter experts (which is arguably part of journey mapping), and the second, prototyping .

3. What Does a Journey Map Contain?

What you include in a map depends entirely on your objectives. For example, you can draw a map of a city from different perspectives — one map for train or subway stations and routes; one that shows the topography or the terrain; another that shows the weather pattern and so on. Similarly, how you draw your journey map depends on your project and your objective while making it.

Three common types of journey maps are:

Experience maps have the broadest scope amongst journey maps. They focus on the experience of a generic person attempting to accomplish a goal regardless of the products or services they might use. Experience maps help you explore human behavior outside of your particular product or service and explore new product or service ideas. These maps help answer the question, “What is a user’s experience while accomplishing a goal?”

Customer journey maps have a slightly narrower focus than an experience map in that they focus on a specific group of people as customers who use your product or service . These maps answer the question, “What are our customers’ experiences using our products and services?”

Service blueprints are the behind-the-scenes version of customer journey maps. Like the customer journey map, they focus on the same group of customers and product or service, but from a business’s perspective. The service blueprint answers the question, “What do we, as a business, have to do to provide a delightful experience to our customers?”

4. What Are the Best Practices for Journey Mapping?

Make sure your journey mapping workshop includes direct as well as indirect stakeholders, customers and decision-makers to get different points of view . The idea is to make sure the team collaboratively identifies problems and develops feasible and viable solutions. The facilitator plays a vital role in ensuring no conflicts and chaos happen (due to several stakeholders being present) and steering the workshop smoothly.

Define the goal: Define who will use the map and what decisions you intend to make with the help of the map. Without an “X” mark for a treasure chest, even a pirate’s map would be worthless!

Conduct research: When you include quotes from interviews and audio-visual artifacts from field studies, it will be hard for stakeholders to refute the evidence and reduce the scope for bias .

Make it customer-centric : Even a service blueprint has to be drawn from the customer’s perspective. Introduce the persona and, if possible, even invite actual customers for the journey mapping session.

Involve all the stakeholders: Journey maps depict the whole gamut of experiences. When you involve all stakeholders, you will likely have a better, more holistic view. Each stakeholder will also offer their perspective and experience that others in the team may not be privy to.

Keep it simple: Given the heavy-lifting journey maps do, keeping it simple might sound difficult or even contradictory. This is where having a cross-functional team and involving direct decision-makers will help you prioritize and synthesize the insights from numerous data points. Your research will likely have given you several points to plot on your map. However, if you create a complex, data-heavy map, you might lose its value. At best, high-priority opportunities will get mixed with low-priority ones, and at worst, people may not even see the map after the workshop.

Iterate: Journey mapping is not a one-time activity. Revisit the map after you have implemented the ideas and decisions. Customer preferences can change, new competitors might disrupt the market, and legislation can restrict what you can offer (or even open up new possibilities).

About the Journey Mapping Course

Journey Mapping is a five-week course that dives deeper into the three types of journey maps and explores different approaches to creating them. The course is ideal for designers across all levels and is especially useful for product managers who work with complex experiences. From research methods to facilitating the workshop , the course covers the entire journey of a mapping session (pun unintentional)!

Here is Christian Briggs, the lead course editor and senior product designer at the Interaction Design Foundation, with an overview of what you will learn:

• Transcript loading…

Throughout this course, you will learn from four industry experts: 

Indi Young , author of two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models , and a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang , a talented UX professional who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne.

Matt Snyder , former Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software and Head of Product & Design at Hivewire.

Christian Briggs , a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation who has been designing digital products and has been using methods like journey mapping for over ten years.

Journey Mapping: Improve the Customer Journey includes a portfolio project to strengthen your learnings. It also includes downloadable templates that you can use in your projects with your team long after you have completed the course! So, why not enroll in the course today to level up your product design skills and design better experiences for your users!

Where to Learn More

Enroll in the course Journey Mapping: Improve the Customer Journey —it’s included in your IxDF membership.

Psst: You can sneak a peek into lesson 1. Simply scroll down the page and hit the preview links when you see them!

Not yet a member? Sign up here .

Hero Image: © Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

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The best Customer Journey Mapping courses in 2020

Find the course you need to take your journey mapping skills to the next level.

Published in:  Journey Mapping / Last update: November 2020

So you want to get up to speed on that thing called customer journey mapping?

Or, maybe you already understand how to create a journey map and want to learn how to use them effectively in your organization?

Well, it's easy to spend all day on Google searching for the right bits and pieces of information...just to stumble on some articles or videos that turn out to be a waste of your time.

And if you do find something that looks interesting, it's often just a small piece of the puzzle.

This guide will help you quickly find the right customer journey mapping course that fits your needs so you can focus on improving your actual skills rather than spending your time on Google.

This overview is constantly being updated, so if you're missing a course in the list, make sure to drop me a message.

COVID-19 update

Some of the courses in this overview were added prior to the global pandemic. It goes without saying that the offline courses have come to a halt. Nevertheless you'll still find them in the overview for future reference.

Introduction

Online courses vs. offline training.

Sometimes, you'll want a course that you can start right away and follow at your own pace, while other times, it's more effective to have a coach who guides you through the process.

So, the overview here is split up into online courses and offline training.

What about service blueprints, experience maps, and user stories?

Visualizations like service blueprints, experience maps, and user stories are closely related to customer journey maps. You can find more on that in the Practical Guide to Customer Journey Mapping .

The knowledge you gain on customer journey mapping is also quite fundamental when you want to create one of these other visualizations.

The courses in this overview primarily focus on customer journey mapping, but you'll find them overlapping with the other topics as well.

Online Courses

Customer journey mapping essentials masterclass.

This is a short course that will get you up to speed on the fundamentals of customer journey mapping.

After taking this masterclass, you'll know what is really important in regards to customer journey mapping and what things you can easily ignore.

Price : Free

Level : Beginner

Format : One-hour video masterclass

• Instructors : Marc Fonteijn  &  Daniel Ewerman

Learn more: https://www.servicedesignshow.com/courses/customer-journey-mapping-essentials/

Journey Mapping workshop

If you're looking for a real-life example of how to quickly create a journey map than this online workshop might just be the thing for you.

In this workshop you'll see how you take a business challenge and step-by-step create a useful journey map around.

• Price : €49
• Format : 90-minute video
• Instructors : Marc Fonteijn

Learn more: https://www.servicedesignshow.com/courses/journey-mapping-workshop/

The Perfect Map

This course teaches you the step-by-step process of how to create a useful customer journey map from scratch.

It's aimed at customer experience professionals who want to use journey maps as a practical tool within the organization to drive sustainable customer-centric innovation (rather than a one-time overview that loses its value after a project).

As a bonus with the course, you'll get one month of Custellence Team membership for free (Custellence is a professional journey mapping tool ), so you can start creating your journey maps in a professional tool right away.

• Price : €197
• Level : Intermediate
• Format : 7 video lessons (20 to 45 minutes each), includes exercises & worksheets

Learn more: https://www.servicedesignshow.com/courses/customer-journey-mapping-guide/

Journey Map Ops

One of the big challenges around journey mapping is how to turn them into a tool which your organisation uses on a daily basis drive customer centric innovation. That is exactly the focus of this Journey Maps Ops course.

This is a course aimed at professionals who are already familiar with individual journey maps and now need to solve challenges like: How do you to keep your maps up-to-date, how do you maintain a repository of multiple maps and how do you turn journey maps into CX dashboards.

As this course includes coaching and peer feedback it starts on specific dates. Check the course website to see when the next course round starts.

• Price : €799
• Level : Advanced
• Date: starts November 11 2020
• Format : 6 online classes, interactive workshops, coaching and peer feedback
• Instructors : Marc Stickdorn

Learn more: https://www.thisisdoing.com/product/journey-map-operations

Intro to Practical Service Blueprinting

Although this course focuses on service blueprints, it deserves a spot in this overview.

In this course you'll not only learn what a service blueprint is and how to create one but also how to plan a service blueprint project and facilitate a service blueprint session.

I've reviewed the service blueprint that you'll be creating through this course in my customer journey map templates guide .

Price : $149

Format : 22 video lessons (30 sec to 30 min) spread across six modules

Instructors : Erik Flowers & Megan Miller

Learn more: https://practicalservicedesign.teachable.com/p/intro-to-practical-service-blueprinting/

Customer Journey Fundamentals

This course is offered by UXPressia , which is one of the tools we've discussed in the customer journey mapping tools review .

The primary focus of this course is the basics of a journey map itself. You'll learn about key terms like stages, channels, touchpoints, and moments of truth—definitely important knowledge for anyone who is totally new to customer journey mapping.

You can get an overview of all the lessons inside the course in the curriculum .

Where most courses offer video lessons to teach, this course is a bit different. You're guided through the theory by a series of questions from a virtual coach.

Price : $50

Format : Interactive lessons in the form of dialogue with a virtual coach

Instructors : Yuri Vedenin & Nick Efimov

Learn more: https://www.academy.uxpressia.com/cjm-fundamentals

Creating Customer Journey Maps from Scratch

This is an 30-minute introductory course to Customer Journey Mapping. The course covers the why and how of journey maps. You'll also learn how a journey map relates to other design models. 

The course has a practical focus and to put the theory into practice you'll get an exercise project to work on as you go through the lessons.

• Price : included in a Skillshare membership ($15 p/m)
• Format : 9 short video lessons
• Instructors :  Pontus Wärnestål

Learn more:  https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Creating-Customer-Journey-Maps-from-Scratch/238293019  (affiliat link)

An introduction to journey mapping

This online course is unique in the sense that it's delivered live and split up 3 over 3 days. On day 1 you'l get a general introduction to journey maps. Day 2 is about digital journey mapping and on day 3 you get the chance to ask Marc Stickdorn everything you want about journey maps.

So oven though this is an online course it's hosted on specific dates. Make sure to check the course page to see when the next edition is scheduled.

The course includes learning resources (journey map templates and cheat sheets) as well as a free full-featured account of Smaply ( see a review ) for one month so you can practice what you've learned.

• Price : €39
• Format : 3 online classes (60-90 minutes)
• Instructors : Marc Stickdorn and Zsófia Szatmári-Margitai

Learn more:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/course-an-introduction-to-journey-mapping-tickets-107672715992

Offline Courses

Nielsen norman: journey mapping to understand customer needs.

The journey mapping course by Nielsen Norman is a full-day, hands-on training organized as part of the larger multiday UX conferences they regularly host.

"The focus of this course is the actual practice of creating and using research-based journey maps to evaluate UX, better understand customer needs and envision optimized future experiences. It will help you design a holistic and integrated user experience around the users’ needs, no matter whether this experience is split across channels or happens entirely on a single device."

The term UX might scare some people off, as you might think that it's only focused on digital interfaces and interactions (which true UX is not). But based on the agenda, I'd say that it looks like a really well balanced training.

What's appealing about this course is that you won’t only learn how to create the actual journey map. You'll also learn how to set yourself up for success and what to do with the map once you have it.

The course is hosted multiple times per year, primarily in the US.

• Price : Early bird starts at $931 (depends on conference)
• Location : Primarily US
• Format : Full-day workshop
• Instructor(s) : Differs

Learn more: https://www.nngroup.com/courses/journey-mapping/

The Academy: Customer Journey Mapping Essentials

If you're based in Ireland and want to get up to speed on customer journey mapping, this is probably the best training out there.

Part of this course is an introduction to service design, stakeholder mapping, and personas. This will help you understand the broader context in which customer journey maps are created and used.

The great thing about this course is that you'll actually go outside to do some hands-on field research. Good research is the lifeline of the journey mapping process, and unfortunately, most courses fail to expose people to this. So, I’m happy to see it's part of this training.

Price : €260

Location : Belfast, Ireland

Format : Full-day training

Instructor : Gerry Scullion

Learn more: https://www.theacademy.ie/courses/customer-journey-mapping-essentials-belfast/

DesignThinkers Academy: One-Day Customer Journey Mapping Training

The DesignThinkers Academy hosts a wide range of courses. In this one-day training, you'll learn the basics of customer journey mapping.

You'll learn how journey maps help you step into the shoes of your customers and see how they interact with your service.

In the training you'll start by mapping layers of the customer journey, and then slowly dive deeper and deeper into the organizational structures and context.

This training is primarily hosted in Amsterdam.

Price : €395 (early bird starts at €315)

Location : Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Instructor(s) : Unknown

Learn more: https://www.designthinkersacademy.com/course-catalogue/customer-journey-mapping-course-2/

More than Metrics: Customer Journey Mapping Essentials

If the name More than Metrics sounds familiar, it's probably because they are the company behind the journey mapping tool called Smaply ( which has been reviewed here ).

Their essentials training is aimed at teams "who want an overview of journey mapping, stakeholder maps and personas."

It's a two-day in-person training that is facilitated on-demand. You also have the option to take this course via three online workshops. In order to sign up, you'll need to reach out to them.

There's little additional information about the training on the site, but judging by the people who are running it, you probably can't go wrong here.

Price : €7900 (in person) / €4900 (online)

Location : unknown

Level : Beginner/intermediate

Format : Two-day training

Learn more: https://www.smaply.com/training.html

Other Learning Resources

Courses are great if you're looking for a structured and guided approach to learning customer journey mapping.

But there are other resources out there that can also help you level up your journey mapping skills. Here's a list of some of the most helpful resources to get you started right away:

Customer Journey Maps Done Right

This is  a YouTube playlist with practical tips and tricks to help you create better journey maps.

Customer Journey Q&A with Daniel Ewerman

In this series of videos, Daniel Ewerman (founder of Custellence ) answers real-life questions from journey mappers like you who are going through the Perfect Map course .

Smaply Journey Mapping Toolkit

Next to offering training options, Smaply also provides a toolkit that contains "cheatsheets, case studies and more for everybody wanting to get started with service design."

The toolkit goes beyond journey mapping, but I'm sure you'll be able to pick and choose the things that are relevant to you.

You can find the toolkit over here: https://blog.morethanmetrics.com/toolkit-journey-mapping/

Custellence Knowledge Base

The people at Custellence know a thing or two about journey mapping. And the great thing is that they share a lot of their knowledge openly in their Help Center.

If you're looking for a collection of helpful articles to get you going on your journey mapping journey, make sure to browse through the articles shared by the Custellence team.

Check out all the articles here:  https://help.custellence.com/en/

This overview is constantly being updated. If you know a course that's missing in the overview, please send me a message .

Feeling overwhelmed by the number of courses?

My advice would be to just start with the one-hour journey mapping masterclass and take it from there.

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Tell the story of the experience. Identify the AHA! moment. Innovate solutions.

Whether you're new to journey mapping or looking for new ways to facilitate internal journey mapping sessions, the Journey Mapping Certification Workshop will teach you everything you need to know about journey mapping experiences. You'll get hands-on experience using your own case study to prepare a journey map. And you'll get certified in the tools and skills to lead your own journey mapping workshops!

What is journey mapping?

Each experience someone has with your organization is not a discrete, isolated event. It's one of a series of interconnected interactions that form a journey, over time, with your organization.

Journey mapping provides a collaborative, visual representation of how your users use your website/product/service which helps:

• Deliver consistently great experiences, in particular in complex interactions with your products or services;
• Identify gaps in content and functionality and between key touchpoints; critical moments; and opportunities for innovation based on user needs and business objectives;
• Breakdown silos in your organization that get in the way of how people interact with your products and services;
• Identify critical gaps, pain points, and points of failure in your user's experience; and
• Drive transformation and innovation in your organization.

You'll walk away with:

• Your own case study journey map from your organization that you can put to use right away.
• Toolkits with templates, checklists, and resources - everything you need for each step of the journey mapping process.
• UX.training Journey Mapping Certification credential you can share on your LinkedIn profile to highlight your accomplishment and boost your credibility.

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Get your customized learning plan using the YouX™ Competency Model .

In-house Training Inquiry: Journey Mapping

Online: 5 weeks

In-house: Flexible dates & duration. Contact us to learn more.

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Aren't sure where you fit in? Take YouX™ for Individual Contributors .

Program Overview

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this workshop, you'll learn how to:

• Identify four different types of journey maps.
• Overcome objections and gain buy-in for journey mapping initiatives from executives and key stakeholders.
• Plan and facilitate journey mapping workshops that deliver the AHA! moments you need.
• Storytell the experience of key interactions to create empathy.
• Build consensus among diverse stakeholders, facilitating change and/or innovation.
• Solve gnarly experience problems.
• Prioritize innovations based on impact to the experience and your organization.
• Gather objective, unbiased research to validate journey mapping findings.
• Best practices, tools, and tips for every step of the journey mapping process.
• Deliver journey maps that feature helpful insight into key experiences with your organization.
• Lead internal experience mapping initiatives that get the right results.

Topic breakdown is being finalized. In the interim, please refer to workshop objectives to gain an understanding of whether or not this workshop is right for you.

If the topic breakdown is a critical point on your buyer journey, please contact us . (See how we worked in the workshop materials?)

A complete list of topics are being finalized. Please email for additional information.

What to Expect

Pre-work Pre-work will be available online one week prior to the workshop.

Resources This training includes a workbook, as well as tools and templates to help you apply what you learned.

Online Training During this five-week online training, you will collaborate in asynchronously with your facilitator and classmates via video lessons, weekly activities, and interactive group discussions. Our training is designed to help you learn twice as much in half the time. In order to achieve the high levels of engagement needed, training is highly interactive and case study based.

Technical Information

This is an interactive, online training conducting using GoToTraining. ( GoToTraining platform requirements. ) We strongly recommended using a desktop/laptop computer and not a tablet or mobile device. Phone or microphone & speakers are necessary.

Attendance & Certificates

Certificate After submitting a finalized journey map and taking the certification exam, you'll be issued digital Certification for your LinkedIn profile to highlight your accomplishment and boost your credibility.

Training Policies

Refund Guidelines

• Sixty (60) days prior to the event, you can request a full refund.*
• Thirty (30) or more days prior to the event, you can request a 50% refund.*
• Thirty (30) or less days prior to the event, there are no refunds available. You can, however, transfer the registration to another UX.training workshop within the next year OR transfer the registration to the name of another person from your organization.

* Refunds given will be returned less fees charged by EventBrite for each registration.

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• Purchasing one license (seat in the training) and sharing it with a group.
• Duplicating the Program Materials for financial gain or commercial purposes, including creating derivitive training materials.
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What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map template, the customer journey mapping process, data inputs for your customer journey map, why should you use customer journey maps, the uses of customer journey mapping, how to improve a customer journey, tools to help you with your journey mapping, see how xm for customer frontlines works, customer journey mapping 101: definition, template & tips.

22 min read Find out about how to start customer journey mapping, and how to improve it for the benefit of your customers and the business.

If you want to improve your customer experience you need to be able to understand and adapt the customer journey you offer when someone interacts with your organization. Whether their journey is entirely online , offline, or a blend of both, there are multiple journeys a customer might undergo.

Understanding the customer journey in depth helps you identify and take action on customer pain points and repeat what’s working. By doing this, you will improve the overall experience that your customers have, which will have better outcomes for your business.

Outlining the potential customer journeys your audience might go through requires a process called customer journey mapping.

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

Creating a customer journey map is the process of forming a visual representation of customers’ processes, needs , and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take – the ones you see, and don’t – when they interact with your business.

It enables you to assess:

• Insights – from your existing customer journey, how to understand it better
• Impact – how to optimize budgets and effort for changes we want to make to the customer experiences
• Issues/opportunities – Diagnose the existing customer journey
• Innovation – where you might want to completely change the existing customer experience

A customer journey map gives you deeper insight into the customer, so you can go beyond what you already know. Many brands see the customer journey as something that is visible – where the customer interacts with the brand. But in reality, this is not true, and only accounts for a percentage of the entire customer journey. Creating a customer journey map gets you thinking about the aspects of the journey you don’t see, but have equal weight and importance to the entire experience.

When mapping out the customer journey, you are looking for the moments that matter – where there is the greatest emotional load.

If you’re buying a car, then the greatest moment of emotional load is when you go to pick the car up because it’s yours , after picking the color, choosing the model, and waiting for it to be ready.

Ensuring these moments match your customers’ expectations of your product, brand and service teams are key to helping you reach your business goals. But you can only do that by understanding the journey your customers go on in order to get there, what they’re thinking and needing from you at that time. Developing a customer journey map puts you in their shoes so you can understand them better than ever before.

Getting started when creating a customer journey map template doesn’t have to be difficult. However, your customer journey map template will need to cover several elements in order to be effective.

There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meets customer needs at that moment in time – and where the experience does not, and needs some improvement.

Understanding their behaviors and attitudes also means you can fix bad experiences more effectively too because you know why you haven’t met your customers’ expectations and what you need to do to make amends. There may be times when things go wrong, but it’s how you adapt and what you do to fix these experiences that separates the best. Knowing how the customer will be feeling makes taking that decisive action much easier.

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

• Customer behavior What is your customer trying to do?
• Customer attitudes What is your customer feeling/saying?
• The on-stage experience Who/what is your customer directly interacting with? (This includes various channels, such as TV ads or social media)
• The off-stage experience Who/what needs to be in place but which your customer is NOT directly aware of?

So what could the customer journey map examples look like when starting the process of buying a car?

Customer journey vs process flow

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

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

Getting started with customer journey map templates

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

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

Download our free journey mapping template here

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

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

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

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

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

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

Create a diverse team

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

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

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

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

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

Step 4 – Innovate

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

Then, test it.

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

Step 5 – Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

Unsolicited data

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

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

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

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

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

Take stock and take action

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

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

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

Orchestrate your customer journey

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

Improve your employee experience

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

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

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

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

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

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

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How to run a journey-mapping workshop: a step-by-step case study.

July 5, 2020 2020-07-05

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When journey maps are used in the right way — as a means to address a specific, known business goal — the benefits are vast. Our earlier research on practitioners’ journey-mapping activities identified several advantages, including aligning stakeholders around common goals and vision, enabling focus on customer needs, and helping team members establish a personal connection with the end users.

One of the biggest practitioner pain points revealed during the same research, however, is that many people are unclear about the specifics of the actual journey-mapping process. While we’ve previously provided a 5-step process for journey mapping , this article is a more detailed guide to one of those steps: the journey-mapping workshop.

Because the structure of a workshop is dependent on the skill level and preferred methods of the facilitator, there are many ways to lead a journey-mapping workshop. This article provides an overview of one way—a case study with examples from a recent workshop—but there could be many variations of the activities listed that could also be productive.

In This Article:

Before the journey-mapping workshop, during the journey-mapping workshop, after the journey-mapping workshop.

Before getting everyone together in the same room, take these steps to ensure that all contributors are engaged, prepared, and that they understand the purpose and scope of the workshop.

Step 1. Build a team: Journey mapping is a collaborative process. If you create your map in a silo without involving others, you run the risk that the people whose support you need to get things done post mapping will not believe in it or be passionate about your findings. Create a crossfunctional team of allies who can help you advertise the process and build buy-in for your recommendations. They will also be your workshop participants.

Step 2. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor ) and what journey (the scenario ) you’ll be mapping ahead of time. You should focus on one actor and one scenario per map , but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one scenario or journey map per workshop. You’ll just have to allow for extra time and figure out logistics (e.g., splitting up into small groups) to accommodate the additional complexity. If necessary, plan how you’ll split up teams before the workshop. Know who’s coming and assign each person to the most appropriate journey. (You wouldn’t want the designer of a small-business product working on the journey for consumer products.)

Step 3. Gather and share existing research: It’s often beneficial to start with what you already have. Gather and review any existing UX, marketing, analytics, or customer support data related to your journey, consolidate relevant insights, and identify knowledge gaps. Create a shared repository so everyone on the team has access to the artifacts you’ve gathered, which may include previous experience maps , research reports, data from diary studies , or brand or experience guidelines .

Step 4. Assign “homework”: Provide attendees with background reading ahead of the workshop. No matter how much you feel like you have shared, briefed, and campaigned, prime participants one last time before the workshop. Provide relevant background reading, existing research takeaways, and a few open-ended thought-starter questions to mentally prepare participants.

This particular journey-mapping workshop structure incorporates activities to lead participants through:

• Creating a current-state hypothesis map
• Evolving the current-state journey map based on customer input
• Prioritizing pain points within the journey
• Brainstorming new ideas and potential solutions with customers
• Creating a future-state vision through sketching and design-studio activities

It’s divided into three parts:

• Part I: Laying the foundation: Review of basic concepts and inputs for mapping
• Part II: Current-state mapping: Creation of an assumption map, review and evolution of the map with customers, and prioritization of pain points
• Part III: Future-state visioning: Brainstorming future-state ideas and interactions through sketching

Depending on the number of workshop attendees and the number of prioritized scenarios and actors, this workshop could be structured over a period of a couple to several days.

Part I: Laying the Foundation

The activities within the first segment of the workshop ensure that participants share the  mental model and the language of journey mapping, understand existing research, and agree on the workshop inputs — specifically, the journey-map stages, actor(s) and scenario(s) that will be used.

Step 1. Refresh and educate: Here’s something you may find shocking: Some participants may not even open your thoughtfully prepared workshop homework! That means you’ll have to find a creative way to ensure that attendees understand core concepts while not putting those who did diligently prepare to sleep. Blend teaching opportunities into methods for gaging the room’s level of preparedness with an activity such as trivia based on your provided background reading. Bonus: Trivia also acts as an energizer to start the day. Split the room into small groups so that those who were sincerely unable to prepare are not singled out and the vibe remains fun.

Step 2. Review actors and scenarios: Though you will have decided which actor(s) and scenario(s) to focus on before walking into the room, give your participants a chance to feel ownership over them (and ensure they understand these concepts). For example, enabling discussion over a quick interactive quiz like the one below helps participants connect with the narrative of the scenario and reinforces buy-in for the scenario.

Step 3. Review the research (again): Even if you consolidated and shared existing research with the team before the workshop, it’s possible that not everyone took the time to pore over it like you did. You should dedicate time within the workshop agenda to review the key findings. And even if the team is familiar with the research, it’s still better for everyone to be aligned on the takeaways as a group and for those takeaways to be fresh in everyone’s heads. The research review could take the form of one or two people simply presenting recent research findings, or it could be something more interactive.

For a recent journey-mapping workshop for a team very familiar with existing research, we did a quick postup of “what we know” about the journey. Participants worked in small groups to generate one research insight per sticky note, cluster them into groups, and then shared their themes back to the larger group. This approach has the bonus of providing an artifact that the team can hang and reference in their workspace as they begin mapping

Step 4. Provide facilitation training for participants: If customers will join your workshop, help your participants prepare. As the workshop facilitator, you’ll likely have more small groups than you can actively lead, so you’ll need to empower your attendees. Remember: This is a crossfunctional team, so not everyone is familiar with user research! Provide some guidance. I prefer to do two things: First, plan a training segment within the workshop to review facilitation guidelines . Secondly, provide teams with printed interview guides with suggested lines of inquiry related to their scenario.

Part II: Current-State Mapping

In the second segment of the workshop, teams go through a series of activities to create a draft map, update the map based on customer input, and identify pain points.

Step 1. Map the current state: Here, each team concentrates its collective knowledge into a map specific to its assigned scenario. It’s helpful to remind participants that they are creating an assumption map, meaning that there may be gaps or unknowns. At this point in time, it’s okay to make some assumptions, because they’ll continue to adapt the map and make adjustments with additional research. That’s why we make maps with sticky notes — so we can tear them off or scribble over them with Sharpies as learning evolves!

Step 2. Interview customers: The act of consolidating what the team knows from existing research creates a current-state assumption map. At this point, customers who align to each group’s primary actor or persona join the teams. Recruit your customers based on relevant screening criteria . (For example, for journeys related to opening a new credit card, it’s ideal to recruit participants who are actively looking for a new credit card or who have recently opened a credit card.) Using the provided facilitation guide, small groups interview the customers, asking open-ended questions about their experience with the journey they are assigned.

Step 3. Evolve the map: Once customers have shared experiences without seeing their team’s assumptions, the discussion moves to the wall. Teams walk customers through their assumption maps, continuing to ask open-ended questions and encouraging customers to share stories. It can be useful to provide some tangible tools to customers to lower their barrier to engagement. For example, in this journey-mapping workshop, we gave customers stickers to represent agreement or disagreement, and asked them to physically contribute to the map to reflect their experience and help us validate or evolve our assumptions.

Step 4. Generate and prioritize pain points: After time for in-depth discussion and map adaptation, allow the groups to focus on frustrations that occur throughout the journey. These frustrations, also called pain points, will serve as an input for the future-state visioning. Make pain-point generation easier for attendees by providing a fill-in-the-blank structure for them to fill in:

• I need ______ in order to ______.
• I need ______ so that ______.

Example: “I need a simple way to compare options so that I don't get overwhelmed.”

Give participants a time limit to silently generate needs statements on sticky notes, have them place the stickies on the pain-points swim lane of the map, and then discuss and affinity diagram them. After discussion, use dot voting to identify which pain points are most critical.

Part III: Future-State Visioning

The workshop concludes with a third segment: future-state visioning. Here, participants brainstorm ideas with customers, then use rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique to create future-state flows.

Step 1. Generate “big ideas”: Using the identified pain points as catalysts, both internal workshop participants and customers come up with abstract ideas that align to known frustrations within the journey. It’s useful to encourage the teams to think big and use metaphors to express their ideas so that they don’t jump to specific solutions (e.g., features) too soon. Use a time limit and provide a quantity goal (e.g., try to generate at least 5 ideas in 5 minutes) to keep participants from over-censoring their ideas. After this round of idea generation, participants post up and present their ideas to the rest of the team.

In this workshop, we followed the presentation of ideas with a round of impact and effort voting. Customers and internal participants whose primary job responsibility was user research voted on the most impactful ideas by placing a set number of gold stars on the corresponding stickies. Remaining internal team members voted on the most feasible ideas by placing the same number of green dots on the ideas. The result was a visual ranking of the ideas that takes both feasibility and impact into account. This is a good time to break, thank customers for their time, and continue the workshop with internal participants only.

Step 2. Sketch individual future-state flows: Armed with the ranked “big ideas,” internal participants begin the task of translating the ideas into a set of interactions using the design-studio technique of timed rounds of sketching, presentation, and critique. First, individuals silently sketch flows based on the most feasible and impactful big ideas. Next, they present their ideas back to their team for critique. In the example below, we used tangibles (i.e., sticky notes) to capture the critique discussion: The team members called out aspects of the sketches they thought were particularly powerful or well-aligned to known frustrations on green sticky notes (green = good). For aspects of the individual flows that could be improved, they wrote comments on yellow sticky notes (yellow = ideas). These sticky notes were placed directly on the sketches for reference.

Step 3. Create consolidated future-state flows: In the final workshop activity, small groups combine the most powerful ideas and strongest aspects of their individual sketches into one group sketch, reflecting a future-state journey for their scenario. Small groups then present their consolidated journey back to the entire workshop team.

Move quickly after the workshop in order to maintain momentum and make use of the excitement generated in the workshop.

Step 1. Share takeaways: Capture the workshop outputs by taking photos of each artifact and action shots of internal participants and customers working through the activities. (Of course, make sure you have consent ahead of time.) Share these artifacts in a central repository for reference, and capture and share next steps and action items in one place for the entire team.

Step 2. Bring the ideas life: The team members left the workshop with several strong flows and new interactions captured in sketches. Now, they can use iterative design to create low-fidelity prototypes of these flows and test them with customers, continuing to make adaptations based on user feedback.

Step 3. Keep refining the process: As you apply the workshop structure to additional journeys, continue to tweak and refine the activities to be the most successful and productive for your team.

This article provides guidance on a specific set of activities; however, there are many ways to run a journey-mapping workshop. The overall structure and activities are a starting place, created for one specific context. Use this as a starting place and adapt it based on your needs, scope, and limitations.

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