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

Aaron Agius

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

person creating a customer journey map

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

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Templates

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

  • What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

  • Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

  • Customer Journey Design
  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

customer journey map google

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

hubspot customer journey map stages

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer journey map meeting to improve the customer journey experience

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

#How the Hotjar team mapped out the ‘customer using a heatmap’ journey using sticky notes

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

#A customer journey map example from Airbnb, starting when a user needs to book accommodation and ending after their stay in an Airbnb property

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

#A visual recap of your 2 and 1/2 days working on a customer journey map

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

#Website analytics from tools like Google Analytics are foundational to mapping customer journeys

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

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

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

#Get real-time input from your website users with Hotjar Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

#Use this empathy map canvas template to kick-start your customer journey mapping workshop

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

#An example of a customer journey map template with different stages and themes

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

customer journey map google

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

customer journey map google

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

customer journey map google

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

<#Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

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

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Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of using customer journey maps

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

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

Improved customer support

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

Effective marketing tactics

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

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

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

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

Product advancements or service improvements

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

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

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

A customer-focused mindset

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

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

Step 1. Set your focus

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

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Perform user research

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

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

FAQ chatbot Kusmi Tea

Get a free Heyday demo

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

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

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

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

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

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

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

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

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

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

Types of customer journey maps

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

Current state

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

Future state

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

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

Day-in-the-life

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

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

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

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

Empathy maps

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

Customer journey map template for the current state:

customer journey map template

The future state customer journey mapping template:

future state customer journey mapping template

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

day-in-the-life customer journey map

An empathy map template:

empathy map template

A customer journey map example

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

customer journey map example for "Curious Colleen Persona"

Buyer Persona:

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

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

What are their struggles?

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

What tasks do they have?

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

Opportunities:

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

Action Plan:

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

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

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

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Using Excel or Google Sheets as a free Customer Journey Mapping tool (+ template)

Learn step-by-step how you can quickly create a customer journey map using these free tools..

Published in:  Journey Mapping / Last update: December 2020

Are you looking to create a customer journey map and don't want to invest in a new tool?

Well, in that case Excel or Google Sheets might just be the tool you're looking for.

This article will show you step-by-step how you can use these tools to create a customer journey map, without going crazy.

You'll also learn how Excel and Google sheets stack up against other journey mapping tools. You might get surprised.

So let's get right into it and start creating our journey map.

The journey we're going to map in this example is that of an over excited dad going for trip to the Zoo with the kids.

customer journey map google

Click the image to open the customer journey map template in Google Sheets

You can access the final customer journey map that we're going to create in this article and use it as a template. Just click the image above and make a copy of that journey map in Google sheet.

Creating the map structure

In this example we'll be using Google Sheets but most things should just as easily translate to Microsoft Excel.

First thing you need to do is to create a new document. From the start I like to turn off the gridlines so it looks less like a spreadsheet. ( View > Gridlines )

Turn off gridlines to get rid of that spreadsheet feeling

Let's add the title and add the customer segment to the top row so we know what we're working on.

Add a title and describe the customer segment

Step 1: Creating lanes

We're going to create basic structure of our map using 4 lanes: 1) Phases, 2) Customer Activities, 3) Customer Needs and 4) Customer Emotions. Just add those names in the top 4 rows.

Add the 4 main lanes to your journey map

What you want to do next is change the background color of the lanes.

Change the background color of your lanes to make them visually stand out

And let's give them a bit more space for visual clarity.

Make your lanes higher to create some space

Finally we're going to add separator lanes which will be very useful later when we need to expand the map.

To add a separator lane just take a column, set the background color to be a bit lighter than the original color and set the size to be about 20.

Add separator lanes to make your life easier in the future

You might be tempted to use cell borders as separator lanes but I've found that it gets very messy really fast. Working with stand alone separator lanes is faster and more flexible.

By the way if you need help setting up the basic structure of your journey map check out the customer journey mapping essentials masterclass which explains it all in more detail.

Step 2: Adding details

In a physical setting you'd now start filling your journey map by adding sticky notes to it.

Adding virtual sticky notes to your journey map is really straight forward in Google sheets. You just need to fill in the blank cells with data.

Use cells to add details to your journey map

A really useful feature is that you can format the text inside a cell. So you can make words bold or color them red to add emphasis. You can change the font size of words and even turn them into links.

Change the text formatting to emphasise elements in your cards

When you have a lot of text in your cell it will get cut off. In that case just change the text wrapping property.

Set your text to wrap inside a cell

You might want to set the text wrapping at the start of your project so that when you're duplicating rows and columns to expand your map they will all have this setup correctly.

We're going to fast forward and fill the phases, customer activities and customer needs lanes of our map.

Step 3: Adding the curved lane

It's time to add the iconic lane that has made journey maps famous. The curved lane that indicates how your customer feels about the experience. We're going to add that to the customer emotions lane.

Drawing curved lines isn't what spreadsheets are made for but there's a pretty good alternative.

First thing you need to do is to add 5 sub lanes under th customer emotion lane. Give these sublanes a background color that has lighter shade.

Add 5 sub lanes to the customer emotions lane

The top sublane will represent a satisfied or happy emotion. The bottom sub lane is the unsatisfied or unhappy emotion. To clarify that just add an emoticon.

Add emoticons to the customer emotions lane

Now to create the curved emotion line the only thing we need to is to give the correct cell that corresponds to a customer activity a background color. You might want to use green for satisfied and red for unsatisfied.

Create a nice curved lane by changing the background color in cards

In the tutorial video that's at the top of this article you can learn how you can have the background color automatically appear in the cell with the press of a single button. So if you want to save some time check that out .

Step 4: Adding empathy

This might sound like a strange step but it's a really important one. Journey maps help you to step into the shoes of your customer.

The problem that we have is that a spreadsheet doesn't evoke a lot of empathy. Otherwise every journey map would be a spreadsheet right?

So how do we fix that? We need to add human layer to it.

A simple way of doing that is by using emoticons throughout your map. This already shifts it away from being a purely left brain overview.

But even a better way is by adding images and photos to tell the story. In Google sheets you can add an image into a cell (Insert > Image > Image in cell).

It's easy to add images to your journey map

So think about adding photos that you gained through user research to your map. Or if you haven't done any research just make a drawing of the customer activity and add that.

The caveat is that the image will be have the size of the cell so often it will be quite small.

Step 5: Adding clarity

Reduce complexity in your journey map by using subgroups

You'll see a + icon appear next to your lanes. By clicking that icon you can collapse or expand those lanes.

You can have multiple subgroups inside each other. So for instance we can collapse the customer emotions lanes while also being able to collapse the entire front stage section of your map.

Show or hide entire sections of your map using subgroups

If you feel the need to create nest more than 2 subgroups inside of each other it's probably a sign that you need to break your journey map down into smaller maps.

Advanced features

A customer journey map isn't a static deliverable. It's an evolving change plan that you use to drive customer centric innovation.

So now that we have our basic journey map set up let's look at some of the more advanced features. These are features that will make your life a lot easier when you use your journey map on a day to day basis.

Updating the map

Using the journey map means updating the map. You'll want to add and remove details in the map.

This is where you see a clear distinction between different journey mapping tools. Some tools are great at visualizing the map but break apart when you need to change things.

Let's see how easy this is using Google sheets.

Changing the order of lanes is as simple as dragging and dropping them. The only thing you need to be mindful of is when you have selected lanes that contain merged cells.

Drag rows or columns to update your journey map

Adding new lanes is also really straight forward. Just right click in the place where you want to insert the new lane and add it.

Adding new lanes is easy

Here you will benefit from having the separator lanes set up as described in step 1.

Let's say you want to add a new customer activity to your map. The way to do that is by inserting a new row. Just right click in the place where you want to insert it and select add.

Add a row to make room for new cards

Keep in mind that when you insert a new row you will get a empty cell in all your lanes. This is usually what.

Moving individual cards around is a bit more difficult. You can't just drag and drop them

Moving a card means doing some manual copy and pasting

You will need to manually cut and paste the content of the card to your desired cell. It's not hard. Especially if you learn to use the keyboard shortcuts. 

Tracking status

This is one of the most overlooked features by people who are just starting out with customer journey mapping. But it's one of the most important features a professional needs.

It's the ability to quickly see in the map what we're working on. And who is doing what. As we said before the journey map is a change plan not a static image.

There are a few ways you can track status in your map using Google sheets.

A simple way is to change the background color of a card to indicate a status. Green cards could be new things that you're implementing and red cards could be things that need to be removed from the journey.

Use a background color to indicate a status

The other way you can indicate a status is by using cell borders. A thick green or red border is a strong visual cue.

Use borders to indicate a status

What I strongly recommend you do when adding a status to a card is to also add a comment explaining what that status means. You do that by going using the Insert > Comment option.

Add context to cards by using comments

This brings us to the next important feature a professional wants in their journey mapping too.

Tracking progress

When you work on your journey map with a team (which you always should) a critical feature that you from your tool is to see what how your map has changed.

You want to see the progress you've made over the last 4 weeks and ideally who has contributed what. Google sheets has this feature very well implemented.

To see how your map has evolved just go to File > Version History > See version history .

Keep track of how your journey map has evolved using the version history feature

Using this option you can also create named versions of your map. Which can be really useful to indicate major milestones. For instance when you have added a lane for a new department to the map.

The cool thing about Google sheets is that you can see the changes on a per cell basis. Crazy!

Track changes to a specific card using cell history

Journey mapping is a collaborative process. This means that your tool should allow you to share the map. It won't come as a surprise that Google sheets excels at this (phun intended).

Collaboration

Being a Google product of course collaboration features are very well implemented in Google sheets.

Sharing the map

The most basic thing you'd want to do is to invite someone to work on the map together with you. You do that by via the Sharing option and make them an editor.

Share the journey map inside and outside your team

You can also give read only access to someone. This is useful when you want to spread the map in the organisation to gather feedback but don't want people to mess around with it.

Linking to cells

Another very useful collaboration feature is that you can get a unique link to any cell in the journey map.

Imagine that you want to get input from the HR department. Rather than just sending them the map and hoping they will find the right place to look, you can send them a link which opens the map directly on the HR lane for instance.

Get a unique link to any card in the journey map

It's small features like this that make your day to day work so much easier.

Adding safe gaurds

You know those inflatable tubes they add to your bowling lane to as a safe gaurd that all your balls end up in the gutter? Well Google sheets has something similar. And it's feature that you'll appreciate.

You can protect certain parts of your map from being edited by other people. You do that by selecting a group of cells and opening up Data > Protect Sheets and Ranges.

Prevent people from editing specific parts of the journey map by protecting ranges

Why is this useful? Imagine again that you want to get input from the HR department on the journey. You send them the correct link to the map as described above. And next to that you tell them that the map is setup in a way that they can only change the HR related things.

Sometimes people are reluctant to contibute to a journey map as they don't want to mess things up. Telling them that you've put safe gaurds in place will give them more confidence to contribute.

Tagging people

The final collaboration feature which you need to know about is the ability to tag people.

When you use the @ sign in the comment feature it will provide you with a list of people you can then tag in the comment. What's great about this is that the person you've tagged will get a notification through email that they have been tagged.

Tag people in the comments and send them a notification

This is extremely useful as it allows you to keep the discussion tied to the relevant parts of the journey. Rather than going back and forward via email or slack without any context.

Again this is one of those small things that just makes your life as a professional so much easier.

Exporting and printing

Imagine that you need to show the journey map to your boss tomorrow. So you want to export the map as a PDF document and send that over. Or in a world where we have physical meetings again you could print that PDF and present a tangible version of your journey map.

Google sheets makes this really easy. Go to File > Download > PDF adjust the settings to your liking and you're done.

Export the journey map ready to print

Maybe you don't want to show all the deails of your map to your boss and just want to provide a high level overview. You've learned that using subgroups you can hide certain parts of the map.

What's nice is that the hidden parts are excluded from the exported version as well. So what you see is what you get.

Finally you can also select a specific part of the map and export that. So you could export the HR lane only or just the before stage of the journey. It's really up to you what you want to show.

You can also export specific parts of the journey map

We've covered a lot of ground so far. Now it's time to answer the big question.

Is Google sheets or Excel a viable customer journey mapping tool?

Drawbacks of using Google sheets or Excel

If you've been following along you will have seen that Google sheets has a lot of potential as a journey mapping tool. But it also has some drawbacks which you should take into consideration.

No guiding structure

A spreadsheet are basically a blank canvas. You can do anything with them. This also means that it's up to you to come up with the structure of your journey map. If you've never create a journey map before this process can be a bit daunting. You can always start with a journey map template and modify that so it fits your needs.

Risk of losing empathy

Journey maps should tell a story (link naar what is a CJM). A disadvantage of using Google sheets is that it's not designed to tell stories by default. So it's very tempting to create a very left brain and rational journey map. Before you know it your journey map has become a process map that communicates zero empathy.

You've seen how to add a visual layer to your journey map. It's definitely doable. You just have to be a bit more mindful about it compared to some of the other journey mapping tools.

Harder maintain a consistent visual style

This is especially true as soon as you start messing around with things like background colors and borders. You'll find yourself fiddling around with the visual aspects of your journey map quite often. And let's be honest this is not where you want to invest your time in.

No integration with other templates

Some journey mapping tools allow you to create personas, stakeholder maps and other artefacts related to the service design process. Google sheets will never have that feature as it's a generic tool. Of course there's nothing stopping you from creating something like an empathy map in a spreadsheet. But be careful that Google sheets doesn't become your hammer and everything else a nail.

Potential licensing issues

When you introduce a new tool in an organisation licensing is always an issue. Your company might have a strict policy that doesn't allow the use of Google or Microsoft products. When you're still flying under the radar you might get away with it but when you need to start collaborating on the journey map across the organisation it becomes a problem.

Doesn't have a professional feel

Think about it. Every professional has its own set of specialized and dedicated tools. This goes for your car mechanic but also for your colleagues working at the finance department. So why shouldn't you as a CX professional have your own tools as well? Using Google sheets to create journey maps might be seen in the organisation as the finance department using a calculator to do create the yearly forecasts.

Why would I want to use Google sheets or Excel

After reading the drawbacks you might wonder why would anyone want to use Google sheets or Excel to create their journey maps, the answer is simple.

Almost everyone already has access to these tools.

The learning curve is relatively low as people are already familiar with the tool.

And Google sheets just doesn't feel as scary to managers.

Sometimes the best tool (to start with) is the one that you have at your disposal.

When should I use Google sheets or Excel

The way I see it there are basically 3 scenarios and only in one of them would I recommend Google sheets as your go to journey mapping tool. This is based on the assumption that you don't already have any other journey mapping tool in place.

Scenario 1: The workshop - use a quick and dirty tool

When you need a customer journey map for a workshop or just want to capture the results. And you don't plan to do anything with the map after the workshop then just use a quick and dirty tool. I would pick up a set of sharpies and brown paper or when it needs to be digital a tool like Miro.

Scenario 2: The project - use Google sheets

If you're in a project that runs for a few weeks and requires a journey map, Google sheets might be the tool you want to reach for. You don't have to spend a lot of time teaching your team mates how to use the tool.

You (hopefully) don't have to go through a complicated licensing process. Google sheets allows you to get up and running fast and focus most of the scares time you have in a project on the content.

Scenario 3: The strategy - use a professional tool

As soon as you start seeing customer journey maps as something that will help you to drive customer centric innovation within your organisation it's time to reach for a professional tool.

A professional tool will help you to start treating journey maps as a capital that builds up over time. The small details and nuances in professional tools allow you to work more efficiently and when you use journey maps on a day to day basis that quickly starts to add up.

Just as you don't want your don't want your journey maps to run on a spreadsheet just like you wouldn't want that for your enterprise billing system.

Get access to the Google sheets journey map template

You can get access to the journey map we've created in this article.

Just make a copy of it and start playing around.

customer journey map google

Make a copy of the customer journey map

The focus of this article was to show you how to use the tools.

The next obvious step is really to create your own journey map.

You might run into questions like: which journey should I map first, where should my journey end and how detailed should my journey map be?

If that's the case, have a look at The Perfect Map .

It will guide you step-by-step through the entire process of creating a useful journey map.

Love this, thank you. This is very helpful

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customer journey mapping

How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

  • Conduct persona research
  • Define customer touchpoints
  • Map current states
  • Map future states

Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s one-of-a-kind customer experience, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Nowadays, a clear vision and strategy for customer interactions is no longer an optional “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. As you refine your customer experience, a customer journey map is one of the most powerful ways to understand your current state and future state.

Customer Journey Map Example

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the process your customers go through in interacting with your business, such as an experience on the website, a brick and mortar experience, a service, a product, or a mix of those things.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. These visuals tell a story about how a customer moves through each phase of interaction and experiences each phase. Your customer journey map should include touchpoints and moments of truth, but also potential customer feelings, such as frustration or confusion, and any actions you want the customer to take.

Customer journey maps are often based on a timeline of events, such as a customer’s first visit on your website and the way they progress towards their first in-product experience, then purchase, onboarding emails, cancellation, etc. 

Your customer journey maps may need to be tailored to your business or product, but the best way to identify and refine these phases is to actually talk to your customers. Research your target audiences to understand how they make decisions, decide to purchase, etc. Without an essential understanding of your customers and their needs, a customer map will not lead you to success. But, a well-constructed and researched customer journey map can give you the insights to drastically improve your business’s customer experience.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering insights into your customer experience, driving business goals, and building resilience in a changing market. In a 2022 report, Hanover Research found that 94% of businesses said their customer journey maps help them develop new products and services to match customer needs. Another 91% said their maps drove sales. 

But understanding a customer’s journey across your entire organization does so much more than increase your revenue. It enables you to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty. 

This was especially evident in recent years as top of improving marketing, customer journey maps emerged as a valuable way to understand evolving buyer behavior. In fact, 1 in 3 businesses used customer journey maps to help them navigate the changing landscape during the pandemic.

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

  • Increase customer engagement through channel optimization.
  • Identify and optimize moments of truth in the CX.
  • Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
  • Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
  • Break down silos between departments and close interdepartmental gaps.
  • Target specific customer personas with marketing campaigns relevant to their identity.
  • Understand the circumstances that may have produced irregularities in existing quantitative data.
  • Assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
  • Make it possible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

Following the process outlined above, customer mapping can put your organization on a new trajectory of success. Yet, according to Hanover Research, only 47% of companies currently have a process in place for mapping customer journeys. Making the investment to map your customer journey and solidify that process as part of your company’s DNA can result in significant advantages in your competitive landscape, making your solution the go-to option that customers love.

Customer journey maps can become complicated unless you keep them focused. Although you may target multiple personas, choose just one persona and one customer scenario to research and visualize at a time. If you aren’t sure what your personas or scenarios might be, gather some colleagues and try an  affinity diagram in Lucidchart to generate ideas.

1. Set goals

Without a goal, it will be difficult to determine whether your customer journey map will translate to a tangible impact on your customers and your business. You will likely need to identify existing—and future—buyers so you can set goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.

Consider gathering the key stakeholders within your company—many of whom likely touch different points of the customer experience. To set a logical and attainable goal, cross-functional teamwork is essential. Gather unique perspectives and insights about each part of the existing customer journey and where improvements are needed, and how those improvements will be measured.

Pro Tip : If you don’t already have them in place, create buyer personas to help you focus your customer journey map on the specific types of buyers you’re optimizing for.

2. Conduct persona research

Flesh out as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on. Depending on the maturity of your business, you may only have a handful of records, reports, or other pre-existing data about the target persona. You can compile your preliminary findings to draft what you think the customer journey may look like. However, the most insightful data you can collect is from real customers or prospective customers—those who have actually interacted with your brand. Gather meaningful customer data in any of the following ways:

  • Conduct interviews.
  • Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
  • Email a survey to existing users.
  • Scour customer support and complaint logs.
  • Pull clips from recorded call center conversations.
  • Monitor discussions about your company that occur on social media.
  • Leverage web analytics.
  • Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

Look for information that references:

  • How customers initially found your brand
  • When/if customers purchase or cancel
  • How easy or difficult they found your website to use
  • What problems your brand did or didn’t solve

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative information throughout your research process ensures your business makes data-driven decisions based on the voice of real customers. To assist when conducting persona research, use one of our user persona templates .

Customer Journey Map Example

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints make up the majority of your customer journey map. They are how and where customers interact with and experience your brand. As you research and plot your touchpoints, be sure to include information addressing elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. 

The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. For example, a customer’s journey with a SaaS company will be inherently different than that of a coffee shop experience. Simply choose the touchpoints which accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand.

After you define your touchpoints, you can then start arranging them on your customer journey map.

4. Map the current state

Create what you believe is your as-is state of the customer journey, the current customer experience. Use a visual workspace like Lucidchart, and start organizing your data and touchpoints. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics. Invite input from the stakeholders and build your customer journey map collaboratively to ensure accuracy. 

Again, there is no “correct” way to format your customer journey map, but for each phase along the journey timeline, include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned ownership of a touchpoint (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.). Then, customize your diagram design with images, color, and shape variation to better visualize the different actions, emotions, transitions, etc. at a glance.

Mapping your current state will also help you start to identify gaps or red flags in the experience. Collaborators can comment directly on different parts of your diagram in Lucidchart, so it’s clear exactly where there’s room for improvement.

5. Map future states

Now that you’ve visualized the current state of the customer journey, your map will probably show some gaps in your CX, information overlap, poor transitions between stages, and significant pain points or obstacles for customers.

Use hotspots and layers in Lucidchart to easily map out potential solutions and quickly compare the current state of the customer journey with the ideal future state. Present your findings company-wide to bring everyone up to speed on the areas that need to be improved, with a clear roadmap for expected change and how their roles will play a part in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey map templates

You have all the right information for a customer journey map, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to start arranging the information in a digestible, visually appealing way. These customer journey mapping examples can help you get started and gain some inspiration about what—and how much—to include and where.

Basic Customer Journey Map Example

Don’t let the possibility of a bad customer journey keep you up at night. Know the current state of the customer journey with you business, and make the changes you need to attract and keep customers happy.

customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

About Lucidchart

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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How to make a customer journey map?

Customer journey map

Why make a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for visualizing your customers' experience. It enables you to empathize with your customers and set them up for success. But for the uninitiated, customer journey mapping can seem intimidating, time-consuming, or even useless. We’re here to tell you it’s far from that. With the right guidance, you can use customer journey map tools to form a foundational part of your business.

Let’s be real: modern customers expect a guaranteed high-quality experience. According to  a study  conducted by customer strategist and researcher Esteban Kolsky, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers regularly complains – and the rest simply stop doing business with the company altogether. Ultimately, around 91% of unhappy customers will simply leave without a complaint. That means your business can be missing out on the valuable feedback you need to correct mistakes that are costing you customers. 

This finding underlines just how crucial it is for companies to map their customer journeys. Simply put, by creating a  CJM , you are likely to unearth issues you might not hear about directly from the customers themselves. That kind of information can be beneficial to your company’s bottom line. Let’s talk about how to make a customer journey map that’s valuable to your organization – and not a waste of time.

Before you get started

If you’re thinking about creating a customer journey map without a specific, measurable goal in mind ... stop. Back up and pause a minute. Consider the reason you need a CJM at all. You’re going to need to spend some time articulating the challenges your team faces, so you can more efficiently seek answers in your CJM. 

CJMs are especially useful in scenarios like these:

You have a customer churn problem you’re looking to understand and solve. 

You’re trying to understand the buying patterns of different personas.

Your company is shifting approaches (e.g. from a bottoms-up to top-down, inside-out to outside-in, etc.). 

You’re about to release a new product or service.  

You’re looking to assign team resources to specific touchpoints within the journey.

Write down the problem or reason you need a CJM first, then consider what kind of business goal you’re looking to achieve. 

Customer journey maps are great for:

Identifying ways to engage or reach customers

Unearthing and addressing internal inefficiencies

Increasing conversions and ROI

We recommend making sure you’re setting measurable goals for your map before you get started. You can always adjust as you learn new things from your map, but it’s important to have an actual objective and KPI.

Common business KPIs to consider are:

Customer satisfaction scores

Retention or churn rates

Preliminary Customer Journey Mapping Work

Before you host a customer journey mapping workshop, it’s important to understand who needs to be involved, what tools you’ll be using to make your map, and what technology you’ll need to host your workshop.  Here are a few important steps to take before making your customer journey map. 

Map out your stakeholders

Your internal stakeholders are the people who will be impacted by the results of your customer journey map the most. Be sure to identify them before you get started, so you know who should be invited to your mapping workshop. Learn more in  The Complete Stakeholder Mapping Guide .

Set up your CJM Canvas

Many teams prefer to use pen and paper to create their journey map, and remote teams need digital tools. Regardless of how you host your workshop, you’re going to need to digitize your map at some point to share it across your organization.  Miro is a perfect visual canvas to use for your map – and a great tool when you don’t have the luxury of being in the same place as your team. Get started by opening up a board, and adding the templates you’ll need for your mapping exercise. 

Now, with your digital canvas open, write down your goals and objectives on the board for the team to review during your workshop. You can even create a quick introductory presentation on a few slides to talk through at the beginning of your workshop. 

Decide which CJM angle to take

There are different ways to structure your map, depending on your goal. Here are four common ways you can map your customer journey.

Current state : When you think of a CJM, you’re probably thinking of a current state map. These maps articulate the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience while interacting with your brand. Use current state maps to improve the customer journey.

Day-in-the-life : These maps illustrate the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience during their daily activities – regardless of whether they involve your brand. Use these types of maps to gain a broader understanding of who your customers are and to expand possible applications of your product.

Future state : As the name suggests, future state maps allow you to visualize how your customers will experience future actions, thoughts, and emotions when interacting with your brand. Use these aspirational maps to illustrate your vision for your organization’s future.

Service blueprint : To create a service blueprint, start with a simplified version of one of the other types of maps. Then add in the factors that contribute to the customer’s experience of your brand—including people, technologies, processes, and policies. Use service blueprints to identify concrete steps you must take to achieve your desired customer journey in the future. For this, you may want to consider adding another template to your board.

Once you’re ready to get started, share the Miro board with your stakeholder team and get ready for your kickoff meeting.

Running your CJM workshop

Now that you’ve invited your stakeholders and shared your workshop board, it’s time to get started. When running a customer journey mapping workshop, we recommend breaking it out into a few specific chunks:

The setup. Kick the meeting off by engaging your team with ice breakers, then present the goals and objectives of the session.

The persona exercise. First, start by identifying your target customer and understanding their point of view. This is about building empathy. 

Mapping the customer journey. Now’s when you list out the touchpoints of your customer’s experience with your company. 

Testing. Once you’ve mapped out the journey, go through it yourself to better empathize with the customer and understand the hurdles they may face/

Iterate on the map. Once you start to notice gaps, or opportunities for improvement, test out ways you can iterate on and improve the map. 

After the session, make sure you gather the key insights you found during the exercise and share them with the team. This will help you form plans and align on next steps. 

Now let’s dive into each of these areas. 

Start the meeting with an icebreaker

Ice breakers are a great way to get everyone involved feeling loosened up, engaged, and ready to go. Try this  Ice Breaker Template  for a quick, fun exercise at the beginning of the meeting.

Present the CJM’s purpose & goals

Now it’s time to kick off the customer journey map exercise. Start by speaking to the purpose and goals you’ve identified for the map. It’s important to make sure your team understands what you’re trying to accomplish, or else you run the risk of the session getting off track. 

Create personas 

Now for your first official team exercise. Drawing on your objectives, start to create personas. Personas are snapshots of ideal customers. They allow you to visualize the individuals who benefit from your products or services. When you’re mapping out your customer journey, it’s important to visualize who the customer is – and that’s where personas can help.

Try to build as exhaustive a picture of your customer as you can. If you have demographic and psychographic data, include that in your personas. You might find it useful to send out a questionnaire to customers or prospects ahead of time to get their feedback on your products or services. Include questions like:

How did you hear about our company?

What comes to mind when you think of our brand?

How do you use our product?

How often do you use our product?

What goals do you want to achieve with our company?

Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, why did you decide to purchase?

Have you ever interacted with our site intending to make a purchase but did not follow through? If so, what stopped you?

What can we do to improve your experience with our site?

How can we make it easier for you to purchase and use our products?

Remember, the goal of customer journey mapping is to center on the customer’s perspective and empathize with their experience of your product. The more complete your persona is, the more useful a tool your customer journey map will be.

List customer touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the places where your customers can interact with your brand. Think of them as signposts along a road. Drawing on your research, list all the touchpoints your customers and prospects use when visiting your site, as well as those you think they should be using.

It’s important to document the gap between touchpoints they are using and touchpoints you intend for them to use, because that helps you draw conclusions about the actions of your customers. Are they using fewer touchpoints than expected? More? This could mean your site is too complicated, or some obstacle is causing them to leave earlier than you might want.

When you’re building a list of touchpoints, be sure to include paid ads, email marketing, and third-party review sites or mentions. You can also access your Google Analytics and look at the Behavior Flow report which shows how users navigate between different pages on your site.

Test the customer journey

You’re not quite done! Next, test-drive the map yourself. Work through the CJM and see if you can start answering some questions you posed before you started mapping. How can you make it easier for customers to buy your product? How many people bounce once they click onto your site? If you’ve thoroughly built out the map, you should be able to answer these questions.

Test driving the map is important for a few reasons: For one, you want to make sure it accurately represents the customer’s journey. That ensures you’re in a good place to start making decisions based on your analysis of the map. Moreover, you want anyone from the organization to be able to use your map to perform their own analyses. Testing out the CJM transforms your map from a thought experiment into a practical tool.

Map resources you have and those you’ll need

As you’re mapping, you’ll become aware of missing pieces in the customer journey. Since your map touches on nearly every aspect of your business, you’ll quickly be able to take stock of what you’re missing. As you develop the map and get clarity on those missing parts, keep a running list of resources you have and those you’ll need to improve the customer’s journey.

Like many teams, your team might like to add those resources and tools into the map to predict how they might impact your business and drive revenue. Fleshing out the map with these added components will make it easier to get buy-in and augment parts of the customer’s journey.

Iterate on your map

After you’ve tested the map, you can start to make changes to your customer journey. And each time you do, you can also adjust the map. A customer journey map is powerful partly because it’s a living document. Review it on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep up the momentum, identify gaps as they arise, and further streamline and improve your customer journey.

Gathering and sharing insights

Now that you’ve completed your mapping exercise, make sure to list out key insights and takeaways so your team can align on what to do next. You can create a specific section on your board, or send takeaways out via email after the meeting. 

Discover more

Service blueprint vs. journey map

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

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Customer Journey Maps & Infographics

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For a product to work 100%, you must understand 100% of the customer's needs. And not only their needs, but also their opinions, understanding who the customer is, identifying their motivations and doubts or looking for the “touchpoints” between the product and the customer. All this study and process is included in the field of "customer experience". For this reason, the Slidesgo team has designed some infographics to use in presentations on customer experience studies. They are the perfect complement: just edit the one you want, copy it, and paste it into your presentation.

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Customer Journey Map

In the ever-changing area of design, it is vital to comprehend and satisfy consumer wishes. Designers make use of consumer journey mapping as a strategic tool to understand and represent the complete user experience adventure. This thorough method builds enduring ties among consumers and types in addition to enhancing user satisfaction. This publish will discuss client journey mapping in design, its importance in enhancing user revel in, a way to make effective maps practically, its advantages, and its relevance in current design principles.

Table of Content

What is a Customer Journey Map?

How customer journey mapping enhances user experience, how to make maps of customer design, benefits of creating customer design map.

An example of the exclusive factors of touch and exchanges a purchaser has with an amazing or provider over the route in their adventure is called a customer adventure map. From early awareness and attention to publish-purchase involvement and loyalty, it covers every section. Designers can gain vital insights into the reasons, feelings, and ache factors of customers at every aspect in their adventure with the aid of way of charting out those touchpoints.

The following are some techniques that purchaser adventure mapping significantly improves person revel in:

1. Empathy and Understanding:

Designers have a higher hold near of the requirements, opportunities, and problems of their customers through using placing themselves of their shoes. They are able to create solutions that in my view hook up with users thanks to their empathic technique.

2. Finding Pain Points:

Designers are capable of pinpoint areas of friction and ache factors inside the user revel in with the aid of using the mapping method. A smoother and extra fulfilling user journey effects from resolving those pain regions, that may include a hard checkout process or doubtful navigation.

3. Possibilities for Personalization:

By the usage of customer journey mapping, designers can personalize stories to match each person’s precise necessities. Personalized reviews may be evolved by means of taking into consideration the numerous touchpoints and choices of users, so that you can increase their engagement and delight.

Developing a a success patron design map requires the subsequent movements:

1. Establish the Goals and Scope:

To begin, specify the desires and scope of the customer adventure mapping technique. Determine the supposed goal market, desires, and effects of the mapping system. Choose the character adventure factors you preference to analyze, which includes the onboarding method, post-purchase interplay, or pre-purchase revel in.

2. Conduct Research:

Collect pertinent records from a range of assets, such as as customer comments, analytics, consumer studies, and stakeholder interviews. Insights on person behavior, options, problems, and motivations can be obtained from this facts. Employ both qualitative and quantitative research techniques to bring together an intensive picture of the consumer enjoy.

3. Chart the Customer Journey:

List all of the factors of touch or exchanges that clients have along with your right or service through a whole lot of channels and levels of the process. Draw out the complete consumer adventure, which include the stages of recognition, deliberation, decision-making, purchase, and after-the-purchase. Graphical representations of the consumer enjoy embody flowcharts, timelines, and diagrams.

4. Determine Meaningful Events and Emotions:

During the consumer enjoy, highlight important trades and your highs and lows emotionally.Determine the consumer’s happy, annoyed, confused, and satisfied moments at every touchpoint. Be aware of the emotional resonance of each come upon and the way it influences the consumer experience as an entire.

5. Analyze and Iterate:

Examine the mapped customer adventure to perceive regions that want improvement and improvement. Identify problem regions, roadblocks, and opportunities for growth. Collaborate with cross-useful teams to provide principles for fresh narratives and solutions that cope with the requirements and possibilities of clients. In response to person feedback and statistics insights, iteratively modify the layout to ensure a continuing and intuitive person revel in.

Mapping has numerous benefits in conservatory layout.

1. Perception User Needs:

Throughout a consumer’s involvement with a service or product, client adventure maps provide an in depth perception of the desires, motivations, and pain factors of the person. Through direction visualisation, designers might also pinpoint points of friction or problem for users, allowing them to customise answers that better align with user wishes.

2. Empathy with Users:

The patron adventure map lets in designers to emerge as greater empathic with the aid of putting them in the consumer’s position. Designers can also produce more compassionate and man or woman-targeted design solutions by way of developing a deeper expertise of customers’ desires and sentiments via empathy for their reports.

3. Finding Pain Points:

Areas of friction and ache factors within the consumer revel in are indicated with the aid of purchaser adventure maps. Designers can lessen user churn and improve universal person experience by using prioritizing modifications and optimizations based at the identification of instances of pain or discontent.

4. Touchpoint Optimization:

Through consumer journey maps, designers could make the maximum of interactions and touchpoints all during the consumer adventure. Through the identity of pivotal instances of interaction and their alignment with consumer requirements and expectancies, designers may additionally produce easy and user-friendly experiences that more correctly direct users toward their targets.

Customer adventure mapping is a essential practice in design that promotes person-centricity and excellent. Through the system of user empathy, ache point identification, and touchpoint optimization, designers are able to produce items and services which have a profound impact on their goal marketplace. Customer adventure mapping is a method that improves customer pride and enables groups prevail by using fostering lengthy-lasting relationships. Customer journey mapping is greater than in reality a device in modern day virtual global, in which consumer experience is crucial—it is important for layout creativity and quality.

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    Let's take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping. 1. Find the sweet spot where your customer goals and your own align. Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any marketing and communication you deliver during the customer journey should be focused on helping your brand reach those goals.

  17. Create a Customer Journey Map (Free Templates, Tips)

    Map out your customer journey. Start mapping the current or future states of your customer journey in a template you've chosen from Canva. Organize in the diagram all the insights and touchpoints you've gathered and listed as a team earlier. You can arrange them in the most visually appealing way you can think of.

  18. Customer Journey Map for Google Slides and PowerPoint

    Free Google Slides theme, PowerPoint template, and Canva presentation template. Prepare for your next meeting an appealing presentation where you show the customer journey, that is, what path your customers follow from the point when they're interested in your product until they purchase it. We're offering you timelines, roadmaps, tables and ...

  19. Journey Map Template

    Sheet1 Customer Journey Map Template Organization: Persona: Industry: Date: Timeline Stage,Awareness,Consideration,Decision,Loyalty & Advocacy,Close Customer Activities Customer Goals Touchpoints Questions asked Emotion Channel Context Notes KPIs Organizational Activities Responsibilities ...

  20. Discover one consumer's car-buying path to purchase

    Stacy's where-should-I-buy-it moments. Though much of the car-buying process has moved online, the visit to a dealership remains a crucial step for many car buyers. In fact, search interest for "car dealerships near me" has doubled in the past year. 3 As Stacy explored nearby dealerships, she also considered local inventory, deals, and specials.

  21. Customer Journey Maps & Infographics

    Free Google Slides theme and PowerPoint template. For a product to work 100%, you must understand 100% of the customer's needs. And not only their needs, but also their opinions, understanding who the customer is, identifying their motivations and doubts or looking for the "touchpoints" between the product and the customer.

  22. Improving the customer journey

    Top brand leaders explain how to create frictionless customer experiences that drive omnichannel sales. Today's marketers must deliver an improved customer journey across all channels. Brick-and-mortar stores, digital spaces, apps, and augmented reality all play a role in creating a seamless customer experience on the route to purchase.

  23. PDF Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty

    and experience the journey they've created. Then ask yourself all of the same questions. 5. Visualize your customer journey map Go beyond just writing down your customer journey and communication touchpoints, and actually create a visual map of them. This doesn't need to be a polished, heavily-designed visualization. Simply write each of your

  24. Customer Journey Map

    Customer adventure mapping is a method that improves customer pride and enables groups prevail by using fostering lengthy-lasting relationships. Customer journey mapping is greater than in reality a device in modern day virtual global, in which consumer experience is crucial—it is important for layout creativity and quality.