customer journey mapping betekenis

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

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 the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better 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 would recommend creating a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing 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 at the ready.

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

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

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

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

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 UX 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 also need to 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.

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Customer Journey Map

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual depiction of all steps a customer or prospect takes when interacting with your company with a specific goal in mind. This could include, for example, the path a visitor to your website takes to reach your trial-signup page. You might also develop a customer journey map to document the entire process a customer goes through to buy your product — from their first visit to your website, through signing an agreement with a sales rep.

Why Are Customer Journey Maps Important?

Customer journey mapping is an important process because it can help various teams across a company gain a better understanding of the experience that prospective and existing customers have when dealing with their organization.

Sales teams, for example, can develop customer journey maps to get a holistic, objective view of every step a prospect must take as they move through the sales funnel. When stepping back and viewing this entire process, for example, the team might discover there are too many steps — some of which are unnecessary or could at least be shortened — and that as a result, they are losing prospects.

Similarly, when they can see and review their entire sales funnel, the team might realize there are missing steps in their customer’s journey, meaning they are asking their prospects to take too big a leap at some point to the next stage in the sales funnel.

What Can Product Managers Learn from a Customer Journey Map?

Product managers can benefit in several ways from creating customer journey maps. For example, by mapping out the entire first-time-user experience, from landing on your product’s website to actually purchasing it, you and your product team can take a more objective look at the process from a potential user’s point of view.

This can help you better understand where a prospect might become confused or frustrated along their journey — as well as where your cross-functional team has created a compelling message or painless transition that will carry the prospect along to the next stage of the buying process.

You can then share this journey map with marketing, sales, design, and other teams across the company so you can work together to improve the customer experience where it’s needed.

As an example, here is a ProductPlan customer journey map that UX Raw founder Jeremy Rawson created to depict his experience with our company, from the first website visit through creating his company’s first product roadmap with our app.

Other things product managers can learn from customer journey roadmaps include:

• Whether some area of your product itself does not allow your users to complete the desired action in a logical or streamlined way.

For a deeper discussion, read our blog on how journey maps can help product managers build better products .

How Can I Create a Customer Journey Map?

Marketing expert Aaron Agius offers the following six-step process as a customer journey map template.

Step 1: Decide what you want from this journey map.

Before you can start creating a journey map, you need to determine what your objectives are for it. Do you want to know how customers go through your sales funnel, for example, or how they interact with your support team, or how they use some aspect of your product to achieve a goal?

You can create several customer journey maps, each addressing specific interactions your customers have when interacting with your company. But you’ll want to keep each map focused on a single aspect of the customer’s journey, to avoid confusion and to give your team a clearer picture of that journey.

Step 2: Figure out your personas’ goals.

This step will help you better understand where your prospects and customers are coming from, what they need and value, and how they view themselves. When you have all of this persona data to check against your journey map, you’ll have a clearer picture of where your current customer journey conflicts with the process you’re asking them to go through.

For example, let’s assume your primary personas are executives who describe themselves as “extremely busy” in your surveys or the market research you’ve reviewed. Knowing this, when you view your journey map, you will want to make sure your current buying process does not include too many steps or take any longer than necessary.

Step 3: Identify all touchpoints.

Now you will want to identify all of the channels a prospect could possibly take as their first step with your company. This could include online ads, social media posts, organic search leading to various pages on your website, or your company’s outbound marketing emails.

Next, you’ll want to assign to each of these touchpoints the likely emotional triggers that compel users to take action and seek to engage more deeply with your company or product.

At the same time, look for any obstacles that could be stopping users from taking further action on any of these channels. When they see a social ad, for example, perhaps your product’s cost is a turnoff. Or perhaps the next-step action — filling out a lengthy form, for example — might turn prospects away.

Step 4: Determine what you want your journey map to show.

Here Agius lists the four types of customer journey maps you can use:

Current state: A detailed walkthrough of how customers currently engage with your business.

Day in the life: Also a detailed walkthrough of your customer’s journey with your company today, but put into the broader context of everything else your customer does in the day.

Future state: Your vision of how you’d like customers to interact with your product, company, etc. in the future.

Blueprint: A map of either your current-state or future-state customer’s journey, but with roles, responsibilities, and possibly timelines added for implementing your desired improvements.

Step 5: Take the customer journey yourself.

Now you’re ready to act as your customer and take the path your company has put in place to achieve whatever objective you’re trying to measure.

If you want to learn exactly what steps your prospects must go through to download your free trial, or speak with a sales rep, or complete an action using your mobile app, take that journey now.

Important: You will also want to document every step of your journey, and make notes at each stage as well about insights you’ve had, pain points you’ve identified, and any gaps or unnecessary steps in the process.

Step 6: Adjust your journey map as needed.

After you’ve completed the journey and reviewed your notes, you will want to make all necessary changes to the map.

Then you can begin translating those changes into action across your company — which could mean updating your sales process, streamlining your free trial funnel, etc.

Here are a couple of other examples, taken from Agius’s Hubspot post on customer journey maps . You can use these as templates to start your own journey map.

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When and how to create customer journey maps.

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Guide to Customer Journey Mapping in 2023

We walk through what a customer journey map is and how to create one.

What is customer journey mapping?

Four benefits of customer journey mapping, how to create a customer journey map, why an omnichannel strategy is the key to successful customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is the process of tracing a customer’s interactions with a business as they travel throughout the funnel (starting with initial awareness, all the way to their conversion). Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a user’s journey, portrayed with diagrams, spreadsheets, and so on. 

Sometimes, a customer journey map may home in on a particular aspect of the customer experience (e.g., how existing users solve product issues through your self-serve knowledge base and customer support) or it may focus on a specific persona. 

The mapping process aims to understand customer needs and resolve pain points that may pop up at critical touchpoints. 

Here’s an example of an early product roadmap we created for Personas, which eventually would become Twilio Engage.

6 Questions Your Customer Journey Map Should Answer

The point of mapping out the customer journey is to understand their experience interacting with your business. What points of friction are getting in the way of a conversion? What’s the average length of the customer journey for each persona? (For instance, a B2C company will see a much shorter customer journey than a B2B company , where more stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process.) 

The specific questions you’ll be asking yourself when plotting out your own customer journey map will depend on your business, but here are six to consider: 

Where are we seeing high drop-off rates in the customer funnel? Is there a pattern here when it comes to persona, or is it a potential UX issue? 

Which touchpoints are critical to the customer journey? ( Multi-touch attribution , or the process of understanding which touchpoints influenced a conversion, is closely tied to this.) 

Which channels are the most popular among customers? 

Is there a clear path forward for customers at each stage? (E.g., are we making it easy for people to request a demo, connect to sales, or learn more about a product/service?) 

What content or information are customers looking for at each stage? Are there any knowledge gaps we need to fill? 

Are there opportunities for cross-selling and upselling ? And when would those pitches be the most effective? 

The insights you gain from journey mapping will be instrumental in personalizing experiences, streamlining operations, and creating a customer-centric culture. 

1. Understand the role of different touchpoints & channels

By building a customer journey map, you’ll see how all the different interactions with your business influence and relate to each other.

Say a journey mapping exercise uncovers that many young shoppers visit your stores to try out a product but buy online. Such store visits might not show up in your key business metrics. But this insight could lead you to alter the store experience or even prevent closing locations that don't drive direct sales but indirectly actually do.

2. Identify customer pain points

A journey map shows the many channels customers use to complete a purchase or essential action with your business. This overview helps you identify roadblocks so you can improve the experience at each touchpoint.

For instance, you might test the onboarding and check-out experiences all the time but never be on the receiving end of your app's mobile push notifications. But those interactions are part of the customer experience, and journey mapping ensures you don't forget about optimizing these moments, too.

3. Personalize the customer journey across channels

Mapping out the journey of a particular group of customers helps you understand which channels they visit and what they're trying to do at each touchpoint. This knowledge gives you two personalization benefits. You can:

Ensure your customer's preferred channels seamlessly connect, both on the customer-facing side (the user experience) and the backend (the data that underpins them).

Tailor each touchpoint's content to the information or solution a particular type of customer is looking for on that channel.

4. Create a customer-centric culture

A customer journey map is a deliverable everyone in your organization can reference and understand. It shows the experience with your company from the customer’s perspective without regard for departments and internal processes that often set the tone and structure of other documents and tools. This viewpoint can help break down silos and create company-wide support for customer-centric goals and projects.

There's no fixed format or approach for customer journey mapping. But since the practice became popular in the nineties , several common steps and best practices have emerged.

1. Pick a goal and buyer persona

The first step is understanding what goal you want to achieve with your customer journey map and for which buyer persona.

There are four common types of customer journey maps:

Current state , to show how a journey currently works and discover opportunities for improvement.

Future state , to illustrate what you want a journey to be like and plan what it takes to get there.

Day in the life , to understand how your touchpoints fit in with everything else a customer does in their life that influences the interactions with your company.

Blueprints show a current or future state journey map with your company’s people, processes, and technologies layered on top.

Unless you're an early-stage company with one product and one customer persona, it’s best to only address one goal and customer type per map. Otherwise, it can become too generic, complex, or both.

To recap, a buyer persona refers to your ideal or target customer. Businesses often have multiple different buyer personas depending on the products they offer. These buyer personas can span from engineers to C-suite executives, and the messaging and customer journeys will vary depending on these factors. Usually, businesses write backstories for their buyer personas based on feedback, market research, and an understanding of their product-market fit. These backstories will break down each persona’s priorities, and the questions they’ll likely be most concerned with throughout the customer journey. 

While by no means a definitive list, here is a general outline of how to create a buyer persona: 

Have a clear understanding of how your product fits in the market, your competitive differentiators, and the companies you’ll likely be going up against. 

Identify your ideal customer(s). Who is your product or brand for? Get specific when it comes to job titles, communication styles,  etc. For B2B companies, working with Sales is a great way to get more insight into the questions or feedback they’re gaining from prospective customers. 

Write profiles for each persona. Highlight which talking points or specific features they’ll be most interested in, their role within the company, and so forth. 

Shopify offers great resources into creating buyer personas for retail/e-commerce companies, which you can find here.

2. Identify all touchpoints & channels

A customer journey map should include every point of contact that occurs between the business and the customer, for the specific goal it’s focusing on. A common approach is to categorize these touchpoints by funnel stages, which will generally be broken into the categories of:

Consideration

Of course, sometimes the funnel stages are talked about more granularly or more broadly, depending on the length of the customer journey, industry, etc. 

Let’s use the example of a person looking to purchase a pair of sneakers. They first became aware of the brand via a social media ad (with the brand including this user in one of their lookalike audiences ). After seeing the ad, this person visited the product page multiple times showing their interest and evaluation (e.g., did the product have positive reviews? Did it come in multiple colors and styles? How expensive were the shoes compared to other brands?). 

When the person added the item to their cart but didn’t check out, the brand recognized their intent to buy. This allowed them to tailor their messaging to fit with the person’s bottom-of-the-funnel positioning (e.g., sending discount codes or cart abandonment emails to nudge them into action). From these interactions, the business could also identify the best channels to reach the user on: do they seem to favor mobile browsing? Are they most active on Instagram (and therefore, a brand should focus their retargeting efforts on that channel)? The application of these insights will make the customer journey all the more effective at influencing a conversion.

When identifying all the touchpoints a customer journey, don’t forget these often overlooked interactions: 

404 Error pages on your website.

Subscription confirmation or opt-in email notifications.

Transactional emails like receipts or invoices.

Customer reviews of your products or services on other sites.

Real-world interactions with service personnel, like a receptionist or repair technician.

3. Analyze conversion & engagement data from different channels

With your map's touchpoints identified, collect all the data you have about them. Some common stats to look for are listed below. Ideally, break down these numbers between those that match your buyer persona versus others.

Customer retention, visitor, or user numbers of each touchpoint.

The bounce, drop-off, or unsubscribe rate at each touchpoint – people who stop their journey from that point on.

Conversation rates of customers taking an action you'd like them to take.

Customer feedback data about a touchpoint, say the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for a product feature.

4. Interview customers for direct feedback

You can't create customer journey maps without talking to customers. No matter how much data you analyze, you'll miss moments of the experience that only words and sights can convey.

Asking people about their experience is essential for creating and validating your customer journey map. Such market research will give you insights into people’s feelings and motivations. These aspects are hard to capture from quantitative data alone.

Here are some questions you can ask when you do such qualitative research :

In what ways does our product help you?

How satisfied were you with process X (e.g., onboarding, check-out)?

Aspect X of our service made it easy for me to do Y; True or false? (e.g., The instruction manual made it easy for me to put together the product. True or false?)

What else can we do to support you or improve your experience with our company?

5. Plot journeys between touchpoints based on your data & feedback

By now, you have a good understanding of your customer's journey based on the collected information. You now take all this data to build and finish your actual map:

List all the touchpoints your customer might visit on the way to the goal you've set.

Plot the routes customers take to reach the goal.

Depending on the map type and your goal, add more contextual information at essential touchpoints. For example, customers' emotions, common issues you've identified, or metrics to track for a certain step.

If you've mapped out a future state, you can use your map to plan the resources and actions necessary to build it. In other cases, you can work with a tool like Journeys , which allows you to orchestrate multi-step customer journeys based on real-time data. 

Using real-time events, Computed Traits , or even time logic, marketers can now design workflows that move users through multi-step experiences in real time.

6. Optimize your website & marketing campaigns

Like the omnichannel customer experience itself, modern journey mapping isn't linear with a clear beginning and end. Your map shouldn't be a fixed, static document but can instead serve as a tool for continuous customer journey optimization.

To do so, mark the essential points on the journey, then focus on improving those moments. You can also use your map to design and test alternative journey versions to see if those give better results than your current iteration.

To map and improve a modern customer journey, you need data from every touchpoint, plus the ability to make sense of all that information . An omnichannel strategy connects all your touchpoints so you can reach and recognize customers at any phase in their journey.

This interconnectedness means you always build your journey maps based on the latest information. And, as part of an omnichannel strategy, you continuously analyze which channels each target audience prefers and can include those in your maps, too.

Twilio Engage helps businesses collect and consolidate customer data from every profile, and unify it into a single profile that updates in real time. You can then send this data to any downstream destination for activation, and even orchestrate multi-step customer journeys across every channel.

Interested in hearing more about how Segment can help you?

Connect with a Segment expert who can share more about what Segment can do for you.

Frequently asked questions

How many steps are there in a customer journey map, what are the main components of a customer journey map, how can twilio engage help companies create customer journey maps.

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The 9 best customer journey mapping tools to grow your business

Customer journey mapping (CJM) software is a digital tool that collects and presents quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your product or website so you can better understand your buyer personas and ensure a delightful user experience (UX).

The more complicated the journey, the more data you’ll need to map it out. The right mix of CJM tools gives you data from multiple customer touchpoints and channels so you can collect as much information as possible to map your journey in detail.

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Customers will interact differently with your site or app depending on what part of the journey they’re in. Since journey maps include everything from awareness—when a customer first sees your ad on Facebook—to onboarding and using your product, the data you rely on to guide your map will vary at each stage.

This article walks you through three types of customer journey mapping software, so you understand how each fits into your different workflow stages and can choose the tool(s) that work best for your business:

Traditional website and behavior analytics tools  

Voice-of-the-customer tools for user feedback

Tools to visualize your customer journey map

Website and behavior analytics tools for customer journey mapping

Analytics tools give you insight into who your customers are and how they behave on your website.

Traditional website analytics tools give you quantitative data , including traffic and demographic metrics like bounces and bounce rate , new and returning users , and goal conversion rates .

Behavior analytics tools give you qualitative insight into how users actually experience your website and how they behave during their customer journey. These tools help you pinpoint where users spend time on individual pages, which buttons they click (or don’t), and where they exit from the funnel, so you can improve the user experience.

While traditional analytics tools tell you about the customer’s journey to your website, behavior analytics tools show where their attention goes after they’ve arrived.

Quantitative and qualitative analytics tools work together to help you identify usability issues in your customer journey and highlight opportunities to improve the customer experience .

Here are three popular analytics tools used by marketing and UX professionals to help you kickstart your customer journey mapping process:

Hotjar (hi there! 👋) helps you gain insights into customer behavior with tools like Funnels , Heatmaps , Recordings , Surveys , and a Feedback widget , giving you invaluable data on how users experience your site throughout their journey.

Hotjar Funnels shows you the path of the journey, while Heatmaps and Recordings show you how users behave along the way—where they click and scroll, where they get stuck, and the actions they take as they navigate from page to page. Hotjar’s tools also offer built-in automations—like AI for Surveys —and team collaboration features, including Highlights , which makes insight sharing quick and painless.

Hotjar reveals what numbers don’t. Funnels helped me identify where in the customer journey people drop off. Recorded user sessions let me understand what people see when they arrive on our website—what they click and what they don’t click. Heatmaps helped me identify where they spend most of their time and assess if they should be spending time there or not.

Furthermore, Hotjar Dashboards gives you key user behavior metrics, helping you prioritize how you build and fix your website to provide a better customer journey, which ultimately helps you increase conversions and improve customer satisfaction .

Hotjar complements tools like Google Analytics , giving you a full picture of customer engagement and behavior on your website.

Discover how visitors experience your site

Use Hotjar to gather data and insights into the customer journey so you can make the right changes at the right time for your visitors.

2. Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is a web analytics tool that tracks and measures website traffic metrics, like bounce and exit rates, goal conversions, sources of traffic, and user demographics.

GA tells you how much traffic your website gets, where it comes from, and which channels convert best. You can also see what your most popular landing pages are and where people are exiting from your website.

💡 Pro tip: traditional analytics and behavior analytics tools work best as a team. 🤜🤛 Combining Hotjar and Google Analytics helps you to paint a more complete picture of your customers’ journey through your site—check out Hotjar’s GA4 integration to unlock the full potential of both tools.

Heap is a no-code product analytics tool that gives you customer data on how people use your product, tracking every stage of the customer journey.

This tool comes in handy when you’re looking for customer pain points with your product and you need data to help you make decisions aimed at increasing customer retention and reducing churn . Heap helps you understand which customer segments your users come from, giving you more granular insight into the customer journey.

Voice of the customer tools for user feedback

Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools help you understand your customer needs by capturing what they really think about your business or product , in their own words. 

Learning what your customers have to say about their experience helps you get raw, authentic feedback about how they perceive your brand and product at every stage of the journey, giving you deeper insight into customer emotions and motivations that drive their decision-making.

Here are three customer feedback tools to help you understand your users:

Hotjar (hello again! 👋) gives you insights into customer behavior with feedback tools like surveys , user interviews , and a visual feedback widget.

The Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings tools show you the what and how of user behavior; Surveys and Feedback help you understand the why . 

Embed a survey or feedback widget on any page to ask customers what they think about your product experience, giving them the opportunity to share their unique perspectives. Use Hotjar’s Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations to receive survey response notifications in real time, so you and your team members are immediately notified of issues and can react promptly.

💡 Pro tip: the way you ask a question determines what kind of answer you’ll get. Open-ended questions will give you more qualitative data (and can be answered in detail), while closed-ended questions (think ‘yes/no’ questions) can help you create charts based on quantitative user research data.

Before you set up an on-site survey, know what information you want to get from your visitors—and how you’re going to use it—so you can ask questions that’ll get you the data you need.

One of our primary goals as a UX team is to understand the customer’s journey and what they’re doing on the website. Surveys give us the ability to reach out to people in context—we can just pop a survey on a page we want insights on.

2. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is an AI-powered feedback text analytics tool that collects what people say about your brand or business from every possible source and analyzes how they feel about you.

This tool is the way to go if you want to know how people really feel about your brand and business, and what the general user sentiment is. Use Clarabridge when people are already talking about your company: either on your website (through chats and surveys) or off your site (like on social media platforms).

3. InMoment

InMoment is an experience-intelligence (IX), AI-powered feedback tool that helps you get more detailed feedback from users.

For example, if you ask your users about their experience and they say ‘Good’, InMoment prompts them further: ‘What was good?’ It also offers social monitoring that gathers meaningful feedback on what your customers are saying about you online.

Tools to visualize your customer journey

Classic customer journey mapping tools are visual flowchart builders: the digital version of sticky notes, only these can be saved in the cloud, shared with your team, and turned into a remote-friendly collaborative workspace.

Once you’ve collected data about your users from user feedback and analytics tools you’ll have enough information to map out the user journey.

When you have a flowchart mapped out, it’ll be easier to:

Identify all customer touchpoints

See which pathways can be simplified

Find opportunities to increase engagement and build customer loyalty

Visualize which touchpoints belong to each part of the funnel

Create clearer CTAs and paths so users can navigate to the next step

Make an impact map to clarify and prioritize product decisions

Here are four tools to create visual and intuitive maps using customer journey software:

Miro is an online whiteboard workspace that’s great for remote teams who want to brainstorm and put their thoughts onto a shared digital whiteboard. The software lets you create a board from scratch—so you can still use your sticky note strategy, just digitally—or use one of their pre-made templates.

U se Hotjar with Miro to bring heatmaps, survey responses, and other analytics data to life. This helps ensure you and your team make data-driven decisions while visualizing your journey. Use this tool the same way you’d use a whiteboard for prototyping, wireframing, diagramming, or roadmapping.

2. UXPressia

UXPressia’s main functionality is to create customer journey maps. If you need a little more than a whiteboard, UXPressia helps you create consistently good-looking CJMs for your customer personas. 

This tool has a beautiful and intuitive interface, perfect for those who want to build maps that impress. You can easily visualize customer touchpoints and customize the maps to your own brand.

UXPressia is great for when you need a clean design and a tool that lets multiple stakeholders map data across different departments—very useful for real-time collaboration. This tool is also a good option if you're looking for a customer journey map template to help you get started.

Smaply is a mapping tool for complex customer journeys, helping you understand channel usage and backstage processes. It lets you create a repository of customer insights, including images, PDF files, and even audio files to link all your data together and get a full overview of the customer journey. Plus, it integrates with project management tools like Jira (which in turn integrates with Hotjar ).

Use this tool when you have a complex customer journey and you want to keep everything in one, easy-to-navigate place.

Gliffy is a fast and easy-to-use collaborative tool that lets you draw out large diagrams. You can drag and drop shapes from their library and leave feedback comments, and it also integrates with Google Drive. It stores past map versions and tracks changes, so you can always go back to previous iterations.

Gliffy is a great option when you don’t need a fancy customer journey mapping tool, but something simple yet versatile to get your ideas ‘on paper’.

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

The right customer journey mapping tool depends on the complexity of your journey, your level of understanding of the journey, how steep the tool’s learning curve is, the structure of your team, and why you’re mapping the customer journey in the first place—that is, what you want to learn from it.

The most important part isn’t really the tool you pick, it’s how you use it and what you do with the insights you get.

In the next chapter, we’ll dig deeper into why you need customer journey mapping tools and how specific features can help you accomplish your customer experience management goals.

FAQs about customer journey mapping tools

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map—sometimes called a user journey map or service blueprint —is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints.

What are customer journey mapping tools?

Customer journey mapping tools are digital tools that collect and present quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your product or website.

Customer journey tools—also known as user journey mapping tools—tell you where your visitors come from, how they behave on your website, and what they think about their experience.

What are the best customer journey mapping tools?

The right mix of CJM tools gives you data from multiple customer touchpoints and channels so you can collect as much information as possible to map your journey in detail. Use one or a combination of these tools to create a customer journey that delights your buyers:

Google Analytics 4

Clarabridge

CJM tips and how-tos

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CJM tools: features and how to choose

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