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What is customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

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

It enables you to assess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

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

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

Customer journey vs process flow

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

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

Getting started with customer journey map templates

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

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

Download our free journey mapping template here

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

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

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

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

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

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

Create a diverse team

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

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

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

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

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

Step 4 – Innovate

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

Then, test it.

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

Step 5 – Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

Unsolicited data

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

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

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

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

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

Take stock and take action

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

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

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

Orchestrate your customer journey

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

Improve your employee experience

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

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

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

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

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

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

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

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How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map [Examples + Template]

Published: August 21, 2023

Did you know nearly 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2021? Why would a customer spend hours looking through a store and adding products to their cart just to close the tab right at the last second?

Well, here's the thing — understanding your customers' minds can be extremely challenging.

And even when you think you've considered every possible factor, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

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That said, while it isn't possible to predict the customer journey with 100% accuracy, customer and user experience (UX) journey mapping will allow you to understand as much as possible.

This post will explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create a journey map, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

Customer journey stages.

• What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

What's included in a customer journey map, steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps
• Customer Journey Map Best Practices

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

You might be confused about the differences between the customer 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 the customer's awareness of an existing pain point 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 to consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

The customer journey refers to your brand's place within the buyer's journey: that is, 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, which we'll discuss further below, you're taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey, instead of leaving them up to chance.

For example, the typical HubSpot customer's journey is divided into 3 stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

At each of these stages, HubSpot has a specific set of touchpoints to meet customers where they are, such as publishing blog posts to help customers learn about their pain points, then nurturing them slowly toward a paid subscription. Within later stages, there are several "moments" such as comparing tools, sales negotiations, technical setup, and so on.

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.

At this point, you may be wondering: What are the stages of the customer journey? 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 have realized that they have a problem and a pain point to solve for. At this point, a customer may not yet know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. The aim is to help customers navigate their new pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Educational content may include:

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

Educational content may 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 their offerings.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands 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 solution 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, brands deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying their products as easy and simple as possible. No 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 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 their family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience , from your website content to your sales reps, from your social media team to your product's UX. Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they will likely 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, it's advisable to carry out 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 such as Service Hub .

To visualize the specific stages of your customers' journey, it's essential to create a 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.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how the 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 on the surface — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it is 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.

Within this process, 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 data gathering is not simply for the sake of the data itself but 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 only sometimes happen linearly. Instead, buyers often take a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages in the 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, it's important to remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that is relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

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

3. User Actions

This element of the customer journey map 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 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 are researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

As the final element in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team will brainstorm potential ways to improve your buying process so that customers encounter fewer pain points as they journey.

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, a display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can 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 because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

• Use customer journey map templates.
• Set clear objectives for the map.
• Profile your personas and define their goals.
• Highlight your target customer personas.
• List out all touchpoints.
• Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.
• Take the customer journey yourself.
• Make the necessary changes.

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 .

The offer includes templates that can help you map out your buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

Utilizing these templates can help your sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. With this deeper understanding, you can come up with improvements to your product and provide a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

Before you dive into filling out your customer journey map, you need to ask yourself why you're creating a map in the first place.

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

Based on this, you should create a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer.

Having a clear persona helps remind you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research.

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, you'll need to narrow 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, as it gives you insight into your customers' actions.

If they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they are 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 can help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customer might come across you online. These 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.

Consider the following touchpoints as you create your UX journey map.

Customer Actions

List your customers' actions throughout their interaction with your brand. This might be a Google search for keywords or clicking on an email.

You may wind up with a long list of actions, and that's fine. You'll get a chance to rationalize your information later.

It's important to recognize when customers are expected to take too many actions to achieve their goals. Reducing the number of steps a customer needs to take can feel risky but pays off in higher conversion rates.

Customer Emotions & Motivations

All marketing is a result of cause and effect. Likewise, every action your customers take is motivated by emotion. And your customers' emotions will change depending on which part of their journey they're at.

A pain point or a problem is usually the emotional driver of your customer's actions. Knowing this will help you provide the right content at the right time to smooth the customer's emotional journey through your brand.

Customer Obstacles & Pain Points

Get to know what roadblocks stop your customer from taking their desired action.

One common obstacle is cost. For example, one of your customers could love your product but abandon their cart upon discovering unexpectedly high shipping rates.

Highlighting these potential obstacles in your customer journey can help you mitigate them. For example, you could provide an FAQ page that answers common questions about shipping costs.

6. Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.

Your customer journey map is going to touch on nearly every part of your business. This will highlight all the resources that go into creating the customer experience.

So taking inventory of your resources and the ones you'll need to improve the customer's journey is essential.

For example, maybe your map highlights that your team doesn't have the tools to follow up with customers properly. Using your map, you can advise management to invest in customer service tools to help your team manage customer demand.

And by including these new tools in your map, you can accurately predict how they'll impact your business and drive outsized value. This makes it much easier to convince gatekeepers and decision-makers to invest in your proposals.

7. Take the customer journey yourself.

Just because you've designed your map doesn't mean your work is done. This is the most critical part of the process: analyzing the results.

How many people click on your website but then close out before making a purchase? How can you better support customers? These are some of the questions you should be able to answer with your finished map.

Analyzing the results can show you where customer needs aren't being met.

By approaching this, you can ensure that you're providing a valuable experience and making it clear that people can find solutions to their problems with your company's help.

The whole exercise of mapping the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it out yourself.

For each of your personas, follow their journey through their social media activity, reading their emails, and searching online.

8. Make the necessary changes.

Your data analysis should give you a sense of what you want your website to be.

You can then make changes to your website to achieve these goals. Perhaps this is adding more specific call-to-action links, or it's writing longer descriptions under each product to clarify its purpose.

No matter how big or small the changes are, they will be effective as they directly correlate with what customers listed as their pain points.

Rather than blindly making changes in the hopes that they will improve customer experiences , you can feel confident that they will.

And, with the help of your visualized customer journey map, you can ensure those needs and pain points are always addressed.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work in progress.

Reviewing it monthly or quarterly will help you identify gaps and opportunities for further streamlining your customer journey. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks.

Keep all stakeholders involved in this process, which is why you should consider visualizing your maps in a collaborative tool such as Google Sheets.

Additionally, consider having regular meetings to analyze how new products or offerings have changed the customer journey.

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Template

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. By utilizing it, you can outline your customer's experience and how your product can improve their 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 customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Depending on the specific purpose of the map, you can choose the proper one.

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 are 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 your customers will experience in future interactions with your company.

Based on their current experience, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in.

These maps are best used 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.

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 you need the UX journey map 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.

You might be telling yourself, "This doesn't seem necessary for my company or me. We understand the needs and pain points of our customers." This may be true at surface level.

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

After all, everything you do should be about solving customer problems and helping them achieve long-term success with your product or service. See other benefits below.

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

Rather than trying to discover your 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 about your company and what's turning them away.

You can create content that will attract them to your company and keep them there.

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 shows you 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, suppose it's around the holidays, and you anticipate a customer service surge .

You can send a message to your customers letting them know about your team's adjusted holiday hours.

You can also tell them about additional support options if your team is unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needs immediate attention.

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 hard to coordinate all the departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are.

They often have sales and marketing goals based on things other than what real customers want.

A clear customer journey map can be shared 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.

Based on this rationale, you can't deny the importance of a customer journey map. Thus, we've created the following steps for crafting the best map to help your company and customers prosper.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

The goal of a company is to get its customers from point A to point B.

While it's up to the business or organization to decide what that goal is, it typically involves purchasing a product or service. Potential customers and clients need to be led along this journey.

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 can help organizations gain new insights on their customers 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.

The 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 the 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, in the 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 in their buying journey.

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 your journey for the customer 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 in 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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Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

Businesses need to understand their customers to increase engagement, sales, and retention. But building an understanding with your customers isn’t easy.

The customer journey is the road a person takes to convert, but this journey isn’t always obvious to business owners. Understanding every step of that journey is key to business success. After reading this article, you’ll understand the customer journey better and how to use it to improve the customer experience while achieving your business goals.

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

Use the customer journey map to optimize the customer experience, what is a customer journey.

The customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty. Businesses use the customer journey to better understand their customers’ experience, with the goal of optimizing that experience at every touchpoint.

Giving customers a positive customer experience is important for getting customers to trust a business, so optimizing the customer journey has never mattered more. By mastering the customer journey, you can design customer experiences that will lead to better customer relationships, loyalty, and long-term retention .

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

The stages of the customer’s journey are different from the stages of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey follows the customer experience from initial awareness of a brand to buying a product. The customer journey extends beyond the purchase and follows how customers interact with your product and how they share it with others.

Every lead goes through several stages to become a loyal customer. The better this experience is for customers at each stage, the more likely your leads are to stick around.

Ensure that your marketing, sales, and customer service teams optimize for these five stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, your target audience is just becoming aware of your brand and products. They need information or a solution to a problem, so they search for that information via social media and search engines.

For example, if someone searches on Google for pens for left-handed people, their customer journey begins when they’re first aware of your brand’s left-handed pen.

At this stage, potential customers learn about your business via web content, social media, influencers, and even their friends and family. However, this isn’t the time for hard sells. Customers are simply gathering information at this stage, so you should focus first on answering their questions and building trust.

2. Consideration

In the consideration phase, customers begin to consider your brand as a solution to their problem. They’re comparing your products to other businesses and alternative solutions, so you need to give these shoppers a reason to stick around.

Consideration-stage customers want to see product features that lean heavily toward solving problems and content that doesn’t necessarily push a sale. At this stage, businesses need to position their solution as a better alternative. For example, a nutrition coaching app might create content explaining the differences between using the app and working with an in-person nutritionist — while subtly promoting the benefits of choosing the app.

3. Purchase

The purchase stage is also called the decision stage because at this stage customers are ready to make a buying decision. Keep in mind that their decision might be to go with a competing solution, so purchase-stage buyers won’t always convert to your brand.

As a business, it’s your job to persuade shoppers at this stage to buy from you. Provide information on pricing, share comparison guides to showcase why you’re the superior option, and set up abandoned cart email sequences.

4. Retention

The customer journey doesn’t end once a shopper makes their first purchase. Once you’ve converted a customer, you need to focus on keeping them around and driving repeat business. Sourcing new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing clients, so this strategy can help you cut down on marketing costs and increase profits.

The key to the retention stage is to maintain positive, engaging relationships between your brand and its customers. Try strategies like regular email outreach, coupons and sales, or exclusive communities to encourage customer loyalty.

5. Advocacy

In the advocacy stage, customers are so delighted with your products and services that they spread the word to their friends and family. This goes a step beyond retention because the customer is actively encouraging other people to make purchases.

Customer journeys don’t have a distinct end because brands should always aim to please even their most loyal customers. In the advocacy stage of the customer journey, you can offer referral bonuses, loyalty programs, and special deals for your most active customers to encourage further advocacy.

Being aware of the customer journey helps shed more light on your target audience’s expectations and needs. In fact, 80% of companies compete primarily on customer experience. This means optimizing the customer journey will not only encourage your current customers to remain loyal but will also make you more competitive in acquiring new business.

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

• Understand customer behavior. Classifying every action your customers take will help you figure out why they do what they do. When you understand a shopper’s “why,” you’re better positioned to support their needs.
• Identify touchpoints to reach the customer. Many businesses invest in multichannel marketing, but not all of these touchpoints are valuable. By focusing on the customer journey, you’ll learn which of these channels are the most effective for generating sales. This helps businesses save time and money by focusing on only the most effective channels.
• Analyze the stumbling blocks in products or services. If leads frequently bail before buying, that could be a sign that something is wrong with your product or buying experience. Being conscious of the customer journey can help you fix issues with your products or services before they become a more expensive problem.
• Support your marketing efforts. Marketing requires a deep familiarity with your target audience. Documenting the customer journey makes it easier for your marketing team to meet shoppers’ expectations and solve their pain points.
• Increase customer engagement. Seeing the customer journey helps your business target the most relevant audience for your product or service. Plus, it improves the customer experience and increases engagement. In fact, 29.6% of customers will refuse to embrace branded digital channels if they have a poor experience, so increasing positive customer touchpoints has never been more important.
• Achieve more conversions. Mapping your customers’ journey can help you increase conversions by tailoring and personalizing your approach and messages to give your audience exactly what they want.
• Generate more ROI. You need to see a tangible return on your marketing efforts. Fortunately, investing in the customer journey improves ROI across the board. For example, brands with a good customer experience can increase revenue by 2–7% .
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, 94% of customers say a positive experience motivates them to make future purchases. Optimizing the customer journey helps you meet shopper expectations, which increases satisfaction and loyalty.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every step your customer takes from being a lead to eventually becoming an advocate for your brand. The goal of customer journey mapping is to simplify the complex process of how customers interact with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Businesses shouldn’t use a rigid, one-size-fits-all customer journey map. Instead, they should plan flexible, individual types of customer journeys — whether they’re based on a certain demographic or on individual customer personas. To design the most effective customer journey map, your brand needs to understand a customer’s:

• Actions. Learn which actions your customer takes at every stage. Look for common patterns. For example, you might see that consideration-stage shoppers commonly look for reviews.
• Motivations. Customer intent matters. A person’s motivations change at every stage of the customer journey, and your map needs to account for that. Include visual representation of the shopper’s motivations at each stage. At the awareness stage, their motivation might be to gather information to solve their problem. At the purchase stage, it might be to get the lowest price possible.
• Questions. Brands can take customers’ common questions at every stage of the customer journey and reverse-engineer them into useful content. For example, shoppers at the consideration stage might ask, “What’s the difference between a DIY car wash and hiring a professional detailer?” You can offer content that answers their question while subtly promoting your car detailing business.
• Pain points. Everybody has a problem that they’re trying to solve, whether by just gathering intel or by purchasing products. Recognizing your leads’ pain points will help you craft proactive, helpful marketing campaigns that solve their biggest problems.

Customer journey touchpoints

Every stage of the customer journey should also include touchpoints. Customer touchpoints are the series of interactions with your brand — such as an ad on Facebook, an email, or a website chatbot — that occur at the various stages of the customer journey across multiple channels. A customer’s actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will differ at each stage and at each touchpoint.

For example, a customer searching for a fishing rod and reading posts about how they’re made will have very different motivations and questions from when later comparing specs and trying to stay within budget. Likewise, that same customer will have different pain points when calling customer service after buying a particular rod.

It might sound like more work, but mapping the entire customer journey helps businesses create a better customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle of a customer’s interaction with your brand.

Before jumping into the steps of how to create the customer journey map, first be clear that your customer journey map needs to illustrate the following:

• Customer journey stages. Ensure that your customer journey map includes every stage of the customer journey. Don’t just focus on the stages approaching the purchase — focus on the retention and advocacy stages as well.
• Touchpoints. Log the most common touchpoints customers have at every stage. For example, awareness-stage touchpoints might include your blog, social media, or search engines. Consideration-stage touchpoints could include reviews or demo videos on YouTube. You don’t need to list all potential touchpoints. Only list the most common or relevant touchpoints at each stage.
• The full customer experience. Customers’ actions, motivations, questions, and pain points will change at every stage — and every touchpoint — during the customer journey. Ensure your customer journey map touches on the full experience for each touchpoint.
• Your brand’s solutions. Finally, the customer journey map needs to include a branded solution for each stage and touchpoint. This doesn’t necessarily mean paid products. For example, awareness-stage buyers aren’t ready to make a purchase, so your brand’s solution at this stage might be a piece of gated content. With these necessary elements in mind, creating an effective customer journey map is a simple three-step process.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target audience. It’s a helpful internal tool that businesses use to better understand their audience’s background, assumptions, pain points, and needs. Each persona differs in terms of actions, motivations, questions, and pain points, which is why businesses need to create buyer personas before they map the customer journey.

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

• Gather and analyze customer data. Collect information on your customers through analytics, surveys, and market research.
• Segment customers into specific buying groups. Categorize customers into buying groups based on shared characteristics — such as demographics or location. This will give you multiple customer segments to choose from.
• Build the personas. Select the segment you want to target and build a persona for that segment. At a minimum, the buyer persona needs to define the customers’ basic traits, such as their personal background, as well as their motivations and pain points.

For example, ClearVoice created a buyer persona called “John The Marketing Manager.” The in-depth persona details the target customer’s pain points, pet peeves, and potential reactions to help ClearVoice marketers create more customer-focused experiences.

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

Now that you’ve created your buyer personas, you need to sketch out each of the five stages of the customer journey and then list all of the potential touchpoints each buyer persona has with your brand at every one of these five stages. This includes listing the most common marketing channels where customers can interact with you. Remember, touchpoints differ by stage, so it’s critical to list which touchpoints happen at every stage so you can optimize your approach for every buyer persona.

Every customer’s experience is different, but these touchpoints most commonly line up with each stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness. Advertising, social media, company blog, referrals from friends and family, how-to videos, streaming ads, and brand activation events.
• Consideration. Email, sales calls, SMS, landing pages, and reviews.
• Purchase. Live chat, chatbots, cart abandonment emails, retargeting ads, and product print inserts.
• Retention. Thank you emails, product walkthroughs, sales follow-ups, and online communities.
• Advocacy. Surveys, loyalty programs, and in-person events.

Leave no stone unturned. Logging the most relevant touchpoints at each stage eliminates blind spots and ensures your brand is there for its customers, wherever they choose to connect with you.

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

Now that you’ve defined each touchpoint at every stage of the customer journey, it’s time to detail the exact experience you need to create for each touchpoint. Every touchpoint needs to consider the customer’s:

• Actions. Describe how the customer got to this touchpoint and what they’re going to do now that they’re here.
• Motivations. Specify how the customer feels at this moment. Are they frustrated, confused, curious, or excited? Explain why they feel this way.
• Questions. Every customer has questions. Anticipate the questions someone at this stage and touchpoint would have — and how your brand can answer those questions.
• Pain points. Define the problem the customer has — and how you can solve that problem at this stage. For example, imagine you sell women’s dress shoes. You’re focusing on the buyer persona of a 36-year-old Canadian woman who works in human resources. Her touchpoints might include clicking on your Facebook ad, exploring your online shop, but then abandoning her cart. After receiving a coupon from you, she finally buys. Later, she decides to exchange the shoes for a different color. After the exchange, she leaves a review. Note how she acts at each of these touchpoints and detail her likely pain points, motivations, and questions, for each scenario. Note on the map where you intend to respond to the customer’s motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions. If you can create custom-tailored solutions for every stage of the funnel, that’s even better.

A positive customer experience is the direct result of offering customers personalized, relevant, or meaningful content and other brand interactions. By mapping your customers’ motivations and pain points with your brand’s solutions, you’ll find opportunities to improve the customer experience. When you truly address their deepest needs, you’ll increase engagement and generate more positive reviews.

Follow these strategies to improve the customer experience with your customer journey map:

• Prioritize objectives. Identify the stages of the customer journey where your brand has the strongest presence and take advantage of those points. For example, if leads at the consideration stage frequently subscribe to your YouTube channel, that gives you more opportunities to connect with loyal followers.
• Use an omnichannel approach to engage customers. Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to gather information and create a more holistic view of the customer journey. This allows you to personalize the customer experience on another level entirely. Use an omnichannel analytics solution that allows you to capture and analyze the true cross-channel experience.
• Personalize interactions at every stage. The goal of mapping the customer journey is to create more personalized, helpful experiences for your audience at every stage and touchpoint. For example, with the right data you can personalize the retail shopping experience and customer’s website experience.
• Cultivate a mutually trusting relationship. When consumer trust is low, brands have to work even harder to earn their customers’ trust. Back up your marketing promises with good customer service, personalized incentives, and loyalty programs.

Getting started with customer journeys

Customer journeys are complicated in an omnichannel environment, but mapping these journeys can help businesses better understand their customers. Customer journey maps help you deliver the exact experience your customers expect from your business while increasing engagement and sales.

When you’re ready to get started, trace the interactions your customers have at each stage of their journey with your brand. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics — a service built on Adobe Experience Platform — can break down, filter, and query years’ worth of data and combine it from every channel into a single interface. Real-time, omnichannel analysis and visualization let companies make better decisions with a holistic view of their business and the context behind every customer action.

Learn more about Customer Journey Analytics by watching the overview video .

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/introducing-adobes-customer-journey-maturity-model

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-customer-journey-map

What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of using customer journey maps

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

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

Improved customer support

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

Effective marketing tactics

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

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

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

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

Product advancements or service improvements

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

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

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

A customer-focused mindset

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

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

Step 1. Set your focus

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

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Perform user research

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

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

Get a free Heyday demo

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

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

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

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

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

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

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

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

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

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

Types of customer journey maps

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

Current state

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

Future state

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

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

Day-in-the-life

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

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

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

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

Empathy maps

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

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

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

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

Buyer Persona:

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

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

What are their struggles?

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

What tasks do they have?

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

Opportunities:

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

Action Plan:

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Stages: Guide, How-To & Best Practices

What Is the Customer Journey?

Why is it important to understand the different customer journey stages, how to create an effective customer journey, best practices for an efficient customer journey stages.

It’s easy to fall into an if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it mindset when thinking about customer journeys—why mess with a system that’s served you well so far? The rather unsurprising answer is that your customer journey isn’t nearly as efficient, enjoyable, and profitable as it could be.

According to McKinsey , when the average business makes systematic, targeted improvements to their customer journey, they increase revenue by 15-20% while also cutting service costs by 15-20%.

Interested in this win-win scenario? You’re going to need a solid understanding of the journey stages and what they mean to your business. And in this Customerly guide, we’ll be giving you a crash course to get you started.

Let’s dive in.

A customer journey is the life cycle of a customer’s relationship with your business—from the point of initial contact to post-purchase follow-up.

The customer journey is a fluid spectrum—but that’s not an especially helpful way of thinking about it. To simplify things, people usually break the customer journey down into stages (five, to be exact) that are defined by customer needs, behaviors, and touchpoints.

When you understand each stage, you’re much better equipped to give each customer the experience they’re looking for at any given moment. 

Check out how Feed Donkey uses Customerly to engage with their clients at every stage of the journey.

What are those stages? Let’s go over them now.

The Stages of a Customer Journey

• Awareness : The customer becomes aware of your product or service. Maybe they saw an ad, or maybe they clicked on a blog post—the important point is that they know your company exists.
• Consideration : The customer isn’t simply aware of your existence; they’re actively considering your company as a solution to their problem(s). This usually involves fairly surface-level research and comparison.
• Purchase : This is the point when a customer has decided to purchase something from your company. They’ve put aside any hesitations or doubts and moved forward with their purchase.
• Retention : The customer made a purchase (congrats)—now your goal is to retain their business. In practice, that means offering incredible post-purchase support, demonstrating that you value the relationship (e.g., offers and rewards), and delivering an excellent overall experience. 
• Advocacy : This is one of the most powerful stages in terms of impact on your bottom line. In this stage, the customer is not only satisfied—they actively champion your product or service to their friends and family. This can create a snowball effect that fast-tracks growth.

We already covered two very good reasons to care about customer journey stages—increased revenue and decreased costs. But those benefits are really side effects of far more important reasons:

Allocate Resources Effectively

Your customer journey is a complex mess of touchpoints, channels, mediums, features, benefits, use cases, landing pages… you get the idea.

When you understand the stages (and what they mean for customers), it helps you identify where to invest, what features and tools to prioritize, and how best to engage with customers along their entire purchase journey. The result is a system that’s working as close to maximum efficiency as possible when it comes to generating revenue.

Personalized Customer Experience

On a related note, these stages also give you a quick and easy way to segment leads and customers into intuitive groups. These groups are easy to target for personalized messages, tailored content, and relevant product recommendations.

With Customerly, you can build custom lists of customers in our CRM using a range of characteristics, including:

• contact properties
• company properties

This helps you create much more rewarding experiences for each customer group—the kinds of experiences that earn purchases, retention, and advocacy.

Build Longer-Term Relationships

Customers want their experiences with businesses to be simple, straightforward, and rewarding—no moments of confusion, no moments of frustration. If you consciously work to make that dream a reality, you’re setting yourself apart from the competition and earning long-term advocates.

1. Create a Customer Profile

If you want to create an effective journey for your customer, you need to know who that is—in clear, concrete terms.

A customer profile (or ideal customer persona ) is like a character sheet for a TV show, movie, or D&D campaign. It’s a generalization of a customer group that’s important to your business, either because they make up a sizable portion of your total customer base or revenue.

For each customer profile you create, you’ll want to cover:

• Demographics : Who the customer is (e.g., “Chief Customer Officer at a growing B2B SaaS”).
• Psychographics : What their needs and interests are (e.g., “looking for a partner to guide the process”).
• Goals : What they hope to achieve in their journey (e.g., “boost customer support efficiency”).
• Pain Points : What keeps them awake at night (e.g., “confusing onboarding processes”).
• Current Solutions : How (if at all) they’re meeting their needs without your solution.

To get your hands on the data needed to make these generalizations, you’re going to need to run surveys to supplement CRM data. With Customerly, you can create and run custom surveys or use our pre-built customer persona template to speed the process up.

All the data you collect is automatically added to your CRM for use in analysis and automated marketing campaigns.

2. Make a List of Customer Touchpoints

Once you have a customer profile, it’s time to make a list of the customer touchpoints—or, the points of contact between them and your business.

There are an absolute ton of touchpoints that you can use to your advantage, but there’s a caveat here—not every touchpoint is well-suited to every customer at every stage of their journey.

There’s some overlap, but here’s a simplified list of common touchpoints and the stages they apply to:

• Awareness : SEO, PPC, word-of-mouth, blog content, PR, etc.
• Consideration : Organic social, case studies, demos, website visits, etc.
• Purchase : Reviews, testimonials, sales staff, branded content, etc.
• Retention : Surveys, email campaigns, etc.
• Advocacy : Loyalty programs, offers, organic social, etc.

3. Identify the Pain Points

Pain points are reliable predictors of behavior.

If you really understand a problem someone is having and know for a fact that you can solve it,  it’s much easier to make a sale.  So, the next step in this process is listing the pain points that bring customers to you—either on a segment-by-segment basis or in general.

Not sure where to start?

A product positioning survey is a great way to find out why customers choose your company over the competition. Start by using Customerly to target a valuable segment (paid customers, perhaps?) and launch our product positioning template to start generating data.

4. Create a Customer Journey Map

Now that you have a customer profile, touchpoints, and pain points identified—you can create a customer journey map. This is an interactive diagram that shows (in broad strokes) how a customer segment progresses from awareness to advocacy. 

The map should include key touchpoints, pain points, needs, customer emotions, and the owner(s) for each stage. You should also be creating a map for each persona you identified in the first step.

Here’s an example of what this might look like:

5. Determine the Course of Action

This final step is where you start using your customer journey map to fine-tune your processes.

Start by finding out which touchpoints are influencing customer satisfaction the most. Identify what’s working well and what needs improvement.

Then, brainstorm ways to improve each stage of the journey and measure success at each stage. This includes optimizing processes, running experiments, and implementing changes that will make customers feel heard and valued—ultimately leading to better engagement.

1. Establish a Good First Impression

The first impression is the most important one. That’s why it’s so important to establish a good one from the very start—especially in the awareness and consideration stages.

2. Understand What the Customer Is Getting and Why

In every stage of the customer journey, it’s important to understand what your customer is getting and why. Your messaging should be focused on communicating the value they get from your product or service—not just on pitching them something.

3. Demonstrate Value

Withholding value is an important sales tactic—but it’s important to find a balance. Demonstrate your product or service’s value without revealing too much. Simple, transparent free trials let customers experience the offering fully and allow you to showcase its value. The trial serves as a reference for informed decision-making once it ends.

4. Stay in Contact with Customers After-Sale

It’s not enough to just make a sale—you also need to stay in contact with customers after they’ve made their purchase. This will help you build a strong relationship with them and encourage repeat business. Make sure your post-sale messaging is focused on customer success—not just upselling or cross-selling.

5. Measure Your Success

To create an effective customer journey, measuring success is crucial. Track customer satisfaction , purchase frequency, and lifetime value to understand how your strategy is performing. Use tools like analytics software, surveys, and user tests.

Every well-designed customer journey begins with a deep understanding of the stages that make it up.

At Customerly , we arm businesses with all the tools they need to understand and enhance every stage of their customer journey. From marketing automation tools to intelligent live chat support, we’re here to help you create a seamless customer experience that will increase satisfaction and loyalty.

Want to see for yourself? Start your 14-day free trial and take Customerly for a test drive.

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Create a seamless customer experience that will increase satisfaction and loyalty

• Customer Advocacy
• customer experience
• Customer Journey Analysis
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Customer Journey Optimization.
• Customer Journey Stages
• Customer Pain Points
• Customer Relationship Management
• customer retention
• Customer Touchpoints

Luca Micheli

Luca Micheli is a serial tech entrepreneur with one exited company and a passion for bootstrap digital projects. He's passionate about helping companies to succeed with marketing and business development tips.

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

Back to guides

Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

Last updated

Reading time.

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

• Case studies
• Expert advice

How to create a customer journey map — a step-by-step guide with examples

Learning more about client experience is the best way to understand and improve it. As you are reading this article, you already know that 😉 

Here, you will find a detailed step-by-step guide on making a customer journey map (CJM), examples, expert tips, templates, and a PDF guide to download and save for later.

• 1 What is a customer journey map?
• 2 Benefits of client journey mapping
• 3.1 Step 1: Define your persona
• 3.2 Step 2: Set customer journey stages
• 3.3 Step 3: Define journey map sections
• 3.4 Step 4: Set customer goals
• 3.5 Step 5: Define touchpoints
• 3.6 Step 6: Processes and channels
• 3.7 Step 7: Problems and ideas
• 3.8 Step 8: Emotional graph
• 3.9 Step ?: Be Creative!
• 4 Customer journey map examples
• 5 A customer journey mapping checklist
• 6 The free guide to download

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is the final output of the collaborative visualization process called customer journey mapping. This process lets you reveal typical experiences the customers have over time when interacting with your organization, service, or product. A finished map provides insights into their actions, processes, goals, needs, channels, emotions, and many other aspects shaping the customer experience. 

Journey maps can be of different scopes. For example, a broad-scope map would include multiple customer journey stages like ‘Awareness’, ‘Decision’, ‘Purchase’, ‘Support’, and ‘Renewal’. In contrast, a map with a narrower focus would look at a few specific stages like ‘Decision’ and ‘Purchase’.

CJMs focusing on the current experience are AS-IS maps, while journey maps visualizing the future, desired, state of the experience are called TO-BE maps.

There’s also a similar technique, customer experience mapping, which is often used interchangeably with journey mapping. Experience maps are variations of CJMs, but they typically cover a wider range of interactions and contexts beyond a specific consumer-business relationship. 

Benefits of client journey mapping

Why make journey mapping your tool of choice? There are plenty of reasons, the major of which include:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

For instance, a high-end fashion retailer may discover that its younger customers prefer online shopping, while older customers enjoy the in-store experience.

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

Journey mapping will help you turn a fragmented vision of the customer experience into a unified, organization-wide one. It will have a massive impact on the decision-making process, encouraging you to consider how your actions will affect your clients and become customer-focused.

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

To make the way toward delivering a great customer experience, you will need to collaborate with others. Understanding why this collaboration is essential, departments and employees will be more inclined to participate in conversations and collaborate.

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

While working on a map, you will discover customer pain points at different stages of their journey with you. Fixing the most crucial one as quickly as possible will do you a good turn by eliminating the reasons for leaving you. If fixes take much time, look for quick wins first. 

For instance, adding details about your shipping policy on the website will take a developer half an hour, while it will set the right expectations among customers. They won’t be expecting the delivery the next day anymore, bombarding your customer support team with frustrated messages. Another example is a subscription-based video streaming service that can personalize content recommendations to keep subscribers engaged and less likely to cancel their subscriptions.

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on a specific segment or, talking journey mapping terms, specific personas. Customer journey insights will help you with this endeavor by giving you a glimpse into these people’s minds and ensuring the higher effectiveness of your marketing.

How to build a customer journey map

Although there is no gold standard for creating a customer journey map, we’ll try to create a somewhat generalized map. So that you can use it as a reference when making maps of your own.

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a CJM fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment. Oh, and there's a Personas building tool that comes with it 😉

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example of business and learn how to make a customer journey map together.

Step 1: Define your persona

Creating personas is a crucial part of customer experience service and journey mapping in particular. We won’t go into details — you can find them in this post about defining personas .

Let’s just say that our persona’s name will be Eva Moline — 29, works as a journalist and loves pizza. Eva is not really tech-savvy, and she tries to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

Stages are the steps customers take when interacting with a business. The easiest way to identify them is to think of all the actions the person has to take throughout their journey, organize them into logical groups, and name these groups. These will be your map stages. 

The number of stages varies from business to business, but we’ll take 8 for this example:

💡 Expert tips: 

• If you’re unsure about the order or names of the stages, don’t worry about that. You can change both at any time when working on the map.
• If your stages are complex, you can break them into smaller ones. Read this blog post about defining customer journey stages to learn more.

Step 3: Define journey map sections

Sections are horizontal rows with data that, together with the stages you defined, make up a customer journey map.

When picking sections for a map, your choice will depend on your journey’s type and purpose. 

As for UXPressia’s Journey Map tool, it offers a set of more or less universal sections for all kinds of maps. 

We’ll use some of the sections in the current example.

Step 4: Set customer goals

Setting customer goals at each stage is great for multiple reasons:

• It helps you understand how your business goals align with the goals of your customers.
• You can meet your customers’ needs better, gaining their loyalty by helping them achieve their goals at each stage.

Above, you can see some of the goals we set for Eva. They are self-explanatory, so there’s no need for extra details.

Step 5: Define touchpoints

Touchpoints are encounters that happen between your business and customers. In the pizza restaurant example, touchpoints happen:

• At the Awareness phase, when Eva is actively looking for a pizza place nearby. She is asking around, searching locations on Google Maps, etc.
• At the Research phase, when she is trying to find out what people say about the place by asking her friends and reading online reviews.
• At the Arrival stage, when Eva searches for a parking spot and enters the restaurant to get seated after parking the car.
• At the Order stage, when she makes an order and waits for it.
• Time to eat! At this stage, touchpoints occur when Eva is being served and when she is eating her meal.
• At the Leave stage, Eva interacts with the waiter, pays for the meal, etc.
• At the Feedback stage, she goes to the pizzeria’s website and drops a few lines on Instagram.
• At the last stage, Eva gets a promo email from the restaurant with discounts or other special offers.

Defining all the touchpoints is critical because each touchpoint leaves some impression, and your main goal is to keep it up to the mark.

You can also have a separate section to describe the actions your persona takes:

Step 6: Processes and channels

Now, you may want to add some processes and channels to the map. Just to see what channels your persona uses and what types of processes are in their journey. Luckily, our tool lets you do it in the most awesome way. Processes can be linear, non-linear & time-based, cyclic, or bi-directional. In UXPressia, you can specify up to 10 channels per process.

Step 7: Problems and ideas

It’s time to explore problems Eva might have when using our service. It could be a lack of info about the pizza house. Few reviews and ads do not show how our pizza differs from others.

Upon arriving, Eva may struggle with locating the place due to unclear information on signboards or just because of a hard-to-find location.

When making her order, Eva may look for detailed info on dish ingredients to learn whether it contains peanuts she’s allergic to. Descriptions may not be as detailed as she’d want them to be.

While waiting for the pizza, Eva may want to check out the place. Finding a restroom can turn into a nightmare if you don’t have clear signs showing what’s where in the restaurant.

Once you’re done with problems, it’s time to find solutions to these problems. Brainstorm for some ideas on how this or that problem can be solved. Here’s what we brainstormed for Eva’s case:

Step 8: Emotional graph

Never underestimate the power of visualization. And our Customer Journey tool is all about it. We added an emotional graph to see where our service example shines and where it stinks. Plus, we filled text boxes with Eva’s thoughts:

There’s also a special section ( “Think & feel” ) to put personas’ thoughts.

Step ?: Be Creative!

This is a good start, but the map is far from being complete. So, keep exploring Eva’s journey to find more insights and then add all of them to the map.

If you use our tool (which we highly recommend you to do), check out other CJM sections:

• Image section for screenshots, photos, or any other relevant imagery. You can even turn it into a storyboard , describing the journey from beginning to end with your images or those from our library.

• Charts section for communicating data in a visual and meaningful way, just like we did it in the persona:

• Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
• Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.

💡 Expert tip: The section with the persona’s questions works like a charm for marketing and content purposes. So be sure to add one 😉

Customer journey map examples

There are also a whole lot of free CJM templates for all sorts of journeys in our library. Here are three examples we picked for you.

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

This user journey map template covers the digital experience of the persona who discovers a new mobile app, installs it, and uses the app for some time before deleting it.

• Example 2: a client journey map for a corporate bank

This free template is an example of a multi-persona, B2B customer journey. The key persona is a newly opened company looking for a bank to run their business. The CJM also visualizes interactions between the personas involved. 

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

This customer journey map example shows the digital journey of three customer personas who want to buy a new pair of sneakers online. They go through the same stages, but if you look at the map, you will be able to see the differences in customer behavior, goals, and actions. It’s also a multi-persona journey map .

A customer journey mapping checklist

As a quick recap, here is a checklist with key steps to follow when creating a customer journey map:

• Do research

To represent real people, your real customers, and visualize their journeys, you must base your personas and journey maps upon actual data.

• Define your customer persona(s)

Identify your target personas. Create detailed profiles focusing on information relevant to your journey mapping initiative. Include such details as background, customer needs, motivations, channels, etc. 

• Specify journey map stages

Determine the stages you want to have on your map and come up with their names.

• Decide on the map sections

Determine which sections to include in your map (e.g., actions, touchpoints, emotions, channels).

• Set customer goals for each stage

Make sure that it is your customers’ goals, not your business goals.

• Identify touchpoints between the persona(s) and your organization, product, or service

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

Visualize the journey-specific processes and the channels your customers use at each stage. Include both digital and physical channels.

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

Identify any pain points and issues customers might encounter. Brainstorm potential solutions and quick wins to improve the experience.

• Add details about the emotional experience

Visualize the persona’s emotional journey. Include thoughts and feelings where it’s relevant.

• Use more sections

Include illustrations, images, and charts to make the map visually engaging and easy to understand. Enrich your journey map with more data, like KPIs related to journey stages.

Feel free to tailor this checklist to the specific context of your business and your project's needs.

The free guide to download

As a bonus, download our free customer journey mapping guide. Fill in the form below to get a PDF file as an email.

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

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first of all, excellent example and I’m very happy to I could understand how to create user journey map, due to for a long time I can’t understand it and how, many thanks for your efforts 🙂 I have some question about ser journey map. I hope to open your chest for me,

1-no there are rules for user journey map? 2-I need another example ?(for example Uber)?further understand 3-have I create user journey map without customer?

Hello, Karim!

I am very glad that this article helped you understand customer journey mapping 🙂

In regards to your first question, I would say that journey maps differ from business to business. However, they tend to have the same structure give or take. So no matter what industry you make a CJM for, you will end up having several stages and a bunch of sections we mentioned in this post.

If you’re looking for CJM examples of Uber customers, here is one: https://www.mindomo.com/doc.htm?d=92be818b774d422bad7eab790957ebc0&m=7d286174ccf1450bbb77c921a609ff65 Plus we have a lot more on our template page: https://uxpressia.com/templates

As for your last question, yes. You may have a journey map without a customer (persona) and use target audience segments instead (or have a generic map without personas at all, though I don’t recommend the latter as in this case it will be hard to empathize with real people). So you will certainly have to introduce a customer down the road to gain a deeper understanding of the journey.

many thanks for your reply to me and again I have some questions

1-why you don’t use in your example? user experience, empathy maps such as use goal touch point, and how to create it 2-As for the previous example (Uber) very confuse for me not as your example

Could you please rephrase your first question? And as for the Uber map, well, that’s all I managed to find. 🙂 But again, here you can find a hundred of map examples of all stripes and colors: https://uxpressia.com/templates

welcome again, my question is? what’s different between Aware and Research

The differences come from the names.

At the aware stage your client realizes that there’s a need for a service/product. Or they find out that your company exists and offer a desired service.

While at the research stage they either do research on your business (e.g. visit your website or ask their friends if they used your service) or they research what is out there on the market that can help them.

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

I am wondering , Have you done examples on B2B services. I work in Accreditation & Certification, this seems to be the least visited topic in marketing platforms and blog sites.

We have some B2B templates in our Template Library . Type B2B tag in the search placeholder and you will see all categories with the fitting templates. You can also explore the B2B mapping guide here .

Good luck and happy customers!

Great article, well articulated and detailed. I am starting off with service design and was wondering if I could get some advice mapping out a customer journey for a specific project. I was mapping out how do one approach to repair services?

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

If you’re dealing with home repair, I might suggest our pre-filled template for an interior design agency customer journey: https://uxpressia.com/templates/real-estate . Templates can be a great starting point even if they’re not a 100% match to your use case.

Other than that, you will need to create a persona. If you don’t have any research data yet, do it based on your assumptions. Then, try to visualize what their experience across all stages and interactions with the repair service might be. Once you have the first draft, you can proceed with validating it and adding more data as it comes in.

If you have more context on the project, I can look into it and come up with specific tips 🙂

I very delighted to find this internet site on bing, just what I was searching for as well saved to fav

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

Guide to the Customer Journey Stages

The 6 stages of the customer journey are awareness, evaluation, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. Read on to see what each stage covers.

There are around 6 stages that are most common in the full customer journey . These stages are Awareness , Evaluation , Consideration , Decision , Retention , and Advocacy . This is the complete journey, including everything from the very start of awareness of their need all the way through to loyalty to you, your product or company. It is important to know the customer journey in order to improve and streamline it as much as you can. We need to know each stage, how it affects the customer and how to improve the entire customer journey. How else do you know what your customers really want at key stages? I will run through an example at the end with the marathon customer journey, also used in A Guide to Mental Models , then expand on each stage.

1. Awareness

• Awareness is the potential customer’s level of awareness and how they hear about your company or product. You want your future customers to be aware of you. This means that when they are looking for the product you supply, you want them to come to you. One way to help is to realize your competitors and advertise where and how they do. Another way is to offer them inspiration on how to fulfill their goals.
• If you think of a fast-food hamburger, what restaurant do you think of? McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s? All three of these have multiple ways that we are aware of them, logos, mascot and taglines. When you see those golden arches, you know it is McDonald’s.

2. Evaluation

• Evaluation is after the customer has realized what a few companies offer, what they are looking for and are deciding who to go with. You want to show that your product or service is the best choice for them. Why they should choose you over your competitors even if they are cheaper or more well known.
• A great example is Avis, they know they weren’t the top so they emphasized that fact and their tagline for about 50 years was “we try harder”.
• When you are on a road trip and getting hungry, you decide what you want to eat. Do you want fast food, sit down dinner, french fries, cheeseburger, sandwich? Which restaurant has what you want?

3. Consideration

• Consideration is very close to evaluation which is why some people combine them in the list of customer journey stages. Evaluation is a little more research where consideration is the review of that research. The consideration is after the customer has learned about what all the companies have to offer and then make an educated decision.
• Product comparison guides are a great way to help your customers decide. If you give them the information they are looking for in one spot and you can emphasize how great your product is.
• When you are deciding to try a new restaurant, you look at the menu, prices, location and reviews. Having all of this information from the places you are looking at helps you decide which one to actually go to.
• I personally love McDonald’s french fries, so if french fries is what I feel like, McDonald’s will have a higher ranking. These decisions can be both logical and emotional.

4. Decision (or Purchase)

• For many companies the Purchase/Decision stage is their main goal. The actual money part. Once the customer has finished their evaluations and considerations they have decided you are who they want to go with. This is an important step as well and shouldn’t be taken for granted. If the purchase itself is difficult they can still choose to go with someone else.
• I recently went to register for a conference and the link was broken. If there happened to be another place that was offering the conference I was looking for, I would have been tempted. Instead, I let them know the link was broken, I heard back that it was fixed and was able to register. Even though they got my registration money, their reputation in my view dropped a little.

5. Retention

• I really like that some people call retention the experience stage! A lot of retention and loyalty comes down to your customer’s experience. Way too many companies are not focused on retention, they are all about new sales. Current customers are actually cheaper to keep than trying to find new ones. This should even include returns… if you state that you allow them, with specific rules then you should follow through.
• Our bank is a great example of retention. We changed banks because of the horrible customer service. The one we chose had great customer service, many different offerings, so when we were looking for a mortgage company, we talked to our bank as well as other options. Having multiple accounts at the same place has been really beneficial and if and when we are looking for a loan, we will certainly talk to our current bank first.

6. Advocacy

• Advocacy is the “cheapest” way to advertise! It is also the best “metric” for determining customer success. Get your customers to advertise for you. If they have had a great experience all the way through their journey, most people are happy to share with their friends and family, or really anyone who will listen. This is where having reviews is a good idea. That way happy customers can share and unhappy ones as well. If you show proper responses to the negative reviews, even they can be beneficial.
• Think about how many restaurants you have heard of through Facebook ads. It is great how they have“your friend likes this place” on the top of the sponsored posts. Not to mention the fantastic pictures of delicious looking food!

Related Articles

• Journey Mapping: What Components To Include?
• The Nitty Gritty of User Journey Maps
• Why Are Journey Maps Important?

Example of the Customer Journey Stages, A Marathon

The stages of the customer journey using my example are:

• Awareness: Going back to the marathon example, I am aware that there are marathons out there, I am sure there must be some that are not on a paved road. It is kind of hard to miss hearing about marathons anymore. Runners tend to brag a lot, as well as certain marathons, are very well known, like the Boston marathon.
• Evaluation: When deciding what marathon to run, I did quite a bit of research. I looked at where the marathon was, what the elevation change was as well as the surface I would be running on.
• Consideration: My sister in law actually had heard of the marathon we ended up going with. I also had a coworker who liked trail running who had run the same road as a half marathon.
• Purchase/Decision: Once I decided that a high elevation, gravel road was the way to go for my first marathon, I purchased an entry.
• Advocacy: Not only did I want to return the next year, I have suggested this race to many friends. They also have multiple other races to offer, running and a newer biking one over similar terrain. In case you are curious it is the Madison Marathon.

We discussed the different stages of the customer journey , some examples and a few ways to improve each step. These stages can apply to a variety of journeys. We’ve used them in healthcare, learning management systems, enterprise dashboards, and e-commerce.

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Here’s the latest related articles.

The Benefits of Creating Customer Journey Maps

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4 Strategies to Simplify the Customer Journey

• Richard L. Gruner

Making things easy is harder than you think.

While it may be tempting to offer your customers a never-ending array of products, customizations, and information, research shows that simplicity is almost always the best option for boosting both company value and customer loyalty. But what does it take to build a customer experience that’s smooth and simple from end to end? In this piece, the author offers four strategies to ensure simplicity is baked into every aspect of the customer’s journey: identify and communicate what simplicity means to your organization, look beyond product development to find ways to simplify throughout the customer journey, embrace internal complexity to achieve external simplicity, and remember that while simplicity is often necessary, it isn’t always the answer.

The modern consumer faces hundreds — if not thousands — of choices every day. What to read. Where to shop. What to buy. And each of those decisions takes a mental toll.

• RG Richard L. Gruner  holds a PhD in marketing from the University of Melbourne and is Senior Lecturer (A/Prof) at the University of Western Australia. His work has been published in many top ranked peer-reviewed international journals, and he has a professional background in the media industry. One of his main research interests lies at the intersection of consumer psychology and digital tools.  Find out more about Richard’s experience .

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map can help you gain a deeper understanding of the steps, interactions, and emotions that a customer experiences as they move through their journey.

In this blog post, we’ll cover what we mean by a journey map, the benefits and challenges, and provide a step-by-step guide to building your own, including free (and editable) templates you can share with your team.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the steps and experiences a customer has as they interact with a business, product, or service. It can be used to identify areas of friction, understand customer preferences, and create a personalized experience for each customer.

By creating a customer journey map, businesses can gain insight into how customers move from awareness to purchase, and build meaningful relationships with them.

Why is it important to map the customer journey?

• Customer journey maps provide businesses with an in-depth understanding of the steps and experiences of their customers.
• They can help identify pain points in the customer experience and identify areas for improvement.
• Customer journey maps can be used to personalize the customer experience, creating a more meaningful relationship with customers.
• They can help businesses identify new opportunities and growth areas.
• Customer journey maps can help teams create and manage customer-centric strategies.

Benefits and challenges of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map can provide businesses with invaluable insights into their customers' experiences, while also presenting some challenges in terms of gathering customer data and creating a strategy to address customer pain points.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Creating a customer journey map can provide businesses with invaluable insights into their customers' experiences. It can help identify pain points in the customer experience, understand customer preferences, create a personalized experience for each customer across different touch points, and identify new opportunities and growth areas. It also helps teams create and manage customer-centric strategies, which can help businesses stay ahead of the competition.

Challenges of customer journey mapping

Creating an accurate customer journey map can be challenging, as it requires gathering customer data from multiple sources and understanding customer needs and preferences. It can also be difficult to create an actionable strategy to address customer pain points, as different customers may have different needs and preferences. Additionally, customer journey maps can quickly become outdated, making it important for businesses to stay up-to-date on customer trends and preferences.

How to create a customer journey map

To build your customer journey map, you’ll need to follow the seven steps below. Each of these steps has multiple components that require cross-functional teamwork, making having a shared, digital space key to your success.

Duration: 2 hours

Participants: 2-10 people

1. Gather customer data from multiple sources, such as surveys, interviews, online reviews, and analytics.

The first step in creating an actionable customer journey map is to ensure that you have a very solid understanding of your customers. Without a deep appreciation for their experience and a holistic view of your interactions, it’s impossible to capture accurate insights or make informed decisions.

2. Analyze the data to understand customer needs and preferences.

It is essential to thoroughly analyze customer needs and preferences in order to create an effective customer journey map that accurately reflects the customer experience. This is where you’ll be challenging any assumptions you may have had and beginning to look for patterns or insights that can be drawn from the data impact the overall experience.

3. Identify key customer touchpoints and create a timeline of the customer journey.

Once you’ve done your analysis, it’s time to start mapping your customer journey. To map the experience, you should:

• Narrow your focus to a facet of your customer experience (for example, when building solutions for Agile teams, you may want to focus on a particular ritual, like a retrospective )
• Decide on a single user, customer, or persona whose experience your diagram will represent
• Using sticky notes, have your team collect all the places, people, and items your persona will interact with (be as comprehensive as possible)
• Make sure you include instances where you have less control (e.g., the timing of a meeting vs. the structure)
• Consider the aspects of the experience that may be connected, even — especially — where those connections may not be immediately obvious

For this, a visual, collaborative platform like Mural can be a huge help, allowing you to connect what may seem like disparate elements of an overall experience, painting an accurate picture of your customers’ experience as a whole.

4. Identify areas of friction and opportunities for improvement.

After documenting the existing state of a person’s experience, it’s time to focus on key moments to deepen your understanding. Visualize the journey as pain points, bright spots, and opportunities to create a clear picture of how to improve the product or service experience, overall.

Things to do:

• Bring together the team that created the Experience Diagram(s) or people who are familiar with the experience
• Review your notes and any other artifacts collected during diagramming or early research (notes, photos, audio or video files, etc.)
• Select three colors of sticky notes (physical or digital) to capture Roses, Thorns, and Buds — we recommend Pink (Roses), Blue (Thorns), and Green (Buds) — to capture what is going well, what needs improvement, and any opportunities to expand upon in the future

5. Create an actionable strategy to address customer pain points.

Now that you’ve conducted your analysis and brainstormed ways to improve, it’s time to turn all that good information into actionable next steps.

Once you’ve organized all the information into categories, you can assign teammates to specific tasks all within the same visual platform, so everyone knows who is working on what, and expectations are transparent for every team member.

6. Test and refine the customer journey map.

Once you have a prototype of your customer journey map, you can begin to test it. You might start by applying your changes to a segment of your audience’s experience, and seeing what the preliminary results tell you. If it works, do more of it. If it’s not working so well, gather your team again to analyze performance and see what might be negatively affecting the experience.

7. Monitor customer trends and preferences to ensure the customer journey map stays up-to-date.

Iterate, iterate, iterate. Just because you’ve successfully created a customer journey map doesn’t mean the work is finished. As you begin to implement your changes, you’ll also be collecting new feedback — use that data loop to continuously improve your customer experience by returning to check in and reflect on progress with your team at regular intervals.

Customer journey mapping templates

Mural offers free, customizable customer journey mapping templates that you can share with unlimited members, so your whole team can get engaged.

Customer journey map template

The Mural customer journey map template, built by the Product School, has five components: entice , enter , engage , exit , and extend. Each of these steps includes a breakdown of interactions, goals and motivations, positive and negative moments, and opportunities for improvement.

Experience diagramming template

With the Mural experience diagramming template, you can pull back and come to grips with an individual experience for a customer, allowing you to consider each interaction in a more open, but also more granular way.

Rose, thorn, bud and affinity clusters template

The Mural rose, thorn, bud & affinity clusters template, built by the experts at the LUMA Institute (part of Mural’s Collaboration Design Institute), is a great brainstorming tool that allows your team to identify as many positive and negative aspects of a customer journey, while also providing space to investigate opportunities and organize feedback.

Use this template after the experience diagramming template to effectively map the interactions and emotions in a customer’s journey.

Customer journey maps are a stepping-stone to a better experience

Creating an actionable customer journey map is essential for businesses to stay ahead of the competition and provide a meaningful customer experience. By turning the customer journey map into actionable next steps, businesses can identify areas of friction in the customer experience, understand customer needs and preferences, create a personalized experience for each customer, and identify new opportunities for growth.

Mural makes extraordinary teamwork simple . Get started building your customer journey map today with a Mural Free Forever plan , and invite unlimited team members, so that you can ensure broad engagement and valuable insights that can be easily lost in traditional meetings, or with traditional brainstorming methods.

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About the authors

Bryan Kitch

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Understanding Customer Journey Stages And Touchpoints

There’s no doubt that customer journeys are more complex than ever. But by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can make great strides in both customer experience and business success.

The term ‘customer journey touchpoints’ refers to the various interactions a customer has with your business during their purchasing process. This process includes stages that remain constant, whether a customer is buying a physical or digital product, signing up for a service, or making a booking.

In this article, we’ll unpack customer journey stages touchpoints, helping you to better understand how to effectively connect with and guide your customers every step of the way.

Here’s what we’ll be delving into. If you want to jump to a specific section, simply click on the corresponding link, and you’ll be taken right there.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey, the customer journey stages, how customer journey stages work in practice, customer journey stages vs customer touchpoints, why is it important to know your customer journey touchpoints, how to identify your customer journey touchpoints, how to define your customer journey, faqs about customer journey stages and touchpoints.

First things first. What do we really mean when we talk about the customer journey? The customer journey describes the customer’s path to making a purchase and beyond. Customer’s very rarely decide to buy on a whim. Instead, they work through a series of steps to become aware of, consider and evaluate their options before making a decision. 

Understanding your customer journey is essential for any business. Why? By knowing their goals and expectations every step of the way, you can do a much better job empathising with your customers and perfectly positioning your product or service. 

There are many different variations of the customer journey. However you’ll most commonly find it split into five main stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Stage 1: Awareness

This is where someone first encounters your brand, usually when they are looking for a solution to some kind of problem. 

For example, if someone wants to plan a trip to Paris, their first step will likely be to search online for hotels or apartments in the city. By clicking on things like booking portals, travel blogs and individual hotel websites, they become aware of different accommodation options.

What’s important to know is that at this stage the customer is not ready to make a decision. Rather, they are becoming familiar with what is available. Your goal here is simply to communicate what you have to offer.  

To be discovered during this early phase, online visibility is key. Things like online reviews , blog posts, social media posts and optimising your website for SEO can all help you show up in search results.

Stage 2: Consideration

This stage is where the customer begins to more seriously evaluate their options as opposed to casually browsing. They will be more specific about the features they are looking for in a product or service and will also begin to compare companies or products.

Your goal here is to convince your target customers that your product or service can resolve their problem (ideally in a way that your competitors can’t) . It’s a really important stage, because it’s one where you’re most likely to have your prospect’s full attention.

With that in mind, it’s a good point to really focus on providing the best possible customer experience . Think about content and interactions that will not only answer your prospects’ questions but also make sure they feel valued. 

Not sure where to start? Getting feedback from your existing customers is a great way to get real-life insights and see where you can improve.

Stage 3: Decision

The stage we’ve all been waiting for! The customer has now done the bulk of their research and is ready to take the plunge. But don’t get too excited just yet! It’s still possible to lose your customer at this stage. 

As a business, your role here is to make the purchasing process as easy and convenient as possible . This applies not only from a user experience perspective but also in terms of what you can offer your customer. Things like free demos, trial periods and introductory discounts can be enough to clinch the decision.

Another huge factor here is online reviews. Why? Nearly nine out of ten consumers read reviews before making a purchase (1). To make sure you are getting a steady stream of fresh opinions, a review management tool is the way to go. It will not only help to automate the process but will also provide you with valuable analysis that you can use to grow your business.

Stage 4: Retention

Remember, the customer journey does not finish as soon as they’ve made their purchase. Research shows that a 5% increase in customer retention can produce more than a 25% increase in profit (2). That’s why it’s essential to keep the contact going at this stage of the customer journey. But how?

Surveys are an essential part of the retention stage for any business. They are a fantastic way to get honest opinions from your customers and the insights you need to make sure they stick around. 

Metrics like the Customer Effort Score (CES) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) are a great indicator of customer loyalty and are really easy to implement. If you want to read more about these and other key metrics, you can have a read of our handy article: How to measure customer satisfaction KPI: NPS, CSAT, CES, & CLI .

Just bear in mind that to see real change, you not only have to collect customer feedback but also act on it! Individual follow-ups to any issues that arise can go a long way in turning things around. 

At this stage, keep the focus on strengthening the relationship with your customer and ensuring they have the best possible experience. Do that, and chances are they’ll keep coming back for more. 

Stage 5: Advocacy

This is the stage where happy customers turn into brand advocates! They let others know about their experience by leaving online reviews and generate more business through word of mouth marketing. 

The core concept at the advocacy stage is creating a community around your brand and making your customers feel appreciated . Of course, not every customer will reach this stage, but those that do are invaluable to your brand.

The advocacy stage should always include proactive ways of managing customer feedback . This means not just collecting customer feedback but also responding to it in a personal and timely way. In other words, show your customers that their opinions really matter!

Incentives are also key here. Personalised rewards, offers and referral programs are all great ways to encourage customers to spread the word. 

It’s all well and good explaining the customer journey stages, but perhaps now you’re wondering how they really work in practice. Let’s have a look at one together!

Take the example we used earlier of someone who wants to plan a trip to Paris. Here is an example of how they may work their way through the customer journey stages.

• Awareness – They begin by doing a basic online search for ‘ hotels in Paris ’. They click on a few different links and become aware of some accommodation options. While searching, they also read a few articles on some of the best things to see in Paris and the best neighbourhoods to stay in.
• Consideration – Following on from their initial search, they decide that they want to stay in a hotel in the Montmartre neighbourhood. Ideally they would like to stay somewhere with a hotel bar that offers breakfast as part of the rate. With this in mind, they begin to narrow down their options, comparing amenities, prices and reviews.
• Decision – The guest finds two hotels that fit their needs. The prices are almost exactly the same, so they take a closer look at the reviews for each. Option A has good reviews, but the latest is from several months ago and so they’re not sure how relevant it is. Option B, on the other hand, consistently gets good reviews, with one left as recently as last week. Because of this, the guest makes the decision to book option B.
• Retention – The guest has a great stay at the hotel. They can check in easily online, make requests to the front desk straight from their device, and the service and amenities exceed their expectations. They are offered a 5% discount on their next stay and feel happy about booking again for their next stay in Paris.
• Advocacy – When they get home they receive an invitation from the hotel to leave an online review, which they do gladly. Back at work the following week, their colleagues ask them about their trip and they tell them all about the hotel and how excellent it was. One particular colleague was thinking about planning a trip themselves, and asks them for a link to the hotel website where they later make a booking.

When looking at the customer journey, you may also come across the phrase customer touchpoints. While the phrases sound similar, there is a key difference between the two that it’s important to understand. 

Customer touchpoints are the individual interactions that someone has with your company during each customer journey stage. For example, in our hotel example, touchpoints might include:

• Following the hotel on social media
• Asking a question via live chat
• Checking prices or looking for information on the website
• Reading hotel reviews
• Checking in at the front desk

Note that touchpoints can be both on and offline, so it’s important to think about both throughout the customer journey.

Understanding your customer journey touchpoints is crucial to shaping a top-notch customer experience. Picture touchpoints as the moments your customers interact with your business. These interactions mold their overall impression of your brand. So, knowing these touchpoints well enables you to spot and fix problem areas, and tailor your strategy.

Consider this: you run a bakery. When a customer visits your website, places an order, enters your shop, or shares their experience on social media – those are touchpoints. Your goal is to ensure all these interactions contribute to a standout customer experience.

By tracking these touchpoints, you can allocate resources effectively, knowing when to engage with customers and when to step back. Plus, understanding customer interactions throughout their journey helps you address weak spots, turning potential churn into conversions.

Mapping out your customer journey touchpoints is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle, revealing a complete picture of your customers’ experience with your brand. Here’s how to identify these critical points:

• Start with the customer’s perspective : imagine yourself as a customer interested in your product or service. How would you find out about your business? What steps would you take to make a purchase? Walk through the entire process from discovery to post-purchase support.
• List every possible interaction : note down every possible interaction a customer may have with your brand. This includes visiting your website, following you on social media, receiving promotional emails, talking to your customer service team, and so on.
• Group touchpoints by stage : organize these interactions by customer journey stages – awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. This will help you understand the sequential order of touchpoints and their impact on the customer’s journey.
• Involve your team : your sales, marketing, and customer service teams interact with customers every day and can provide valuable insights. Use their experiences to help identify other potential touchpoints you might have missed. Tools like Miro are great for working collaboratively and getting everyone’s ideas in one place.
• Ask your customers : lastly, never underestimate the power of direct feedback. Surveying your customers about their experiences can reveal insights that internal brainstorming might miss.

By identifying and understanding your customer journey touchpoints, you’ll be well-equipped to optimise each interaction and create a better customer experience. Remember, the goal isn’t to manage every single touchpoint, but rather to manage them in a way that they collectively deliver a satisfying and cohesive customer journey.

So, now you know the basics of customer journey stages and touchpoints. But what should you do with this information? 

Customer journey mapping is an incredible tool for plotting your customer’s entire experience from A to B. It not only includes every stage but every individual touchpoint. Along with every interaction, a customer journey map also outlines any pain points your customers may encounter and details the emotions they feel along the way. 

The Benefits Of Customer Journey Mapping

Visualising your customer journey has many benefits for your business. It allows you to:

• Get a better understanding your customers goals and expectations
• Identify and eliminate pain points to make customer journeys smooth as possible
• Get rid of ineffective consumer journey touchpoints that may hurt your conversions
• Work out what customers actually receive vs. what customers want
• Assign ownership of touchpoint to increase the accountability of your employees and departments

Customer journey mapping helps make your customer experience management the best it can be. Look at it like this. The more you understand your customers, the more you can increase customer satisfaction . And the more happy customers you have, the more will reach the advocacy stage and introduce even more people to your brand. Cool, right? 

If you’d like to learn more about customer journey mapping (including step-by-step instructions for getting started), head over to our article: How a Customer Journey Map Helps you Offer Unique Experiences .

Just like customers are all unique, so is the customer journey for any given company, from a small or medium sized business to an international enterprise brand. Though the five stages we’ve shared with you are the most common way to segment the journey, feel free to do so in a way that works for you! The main thing is that you have a solid understanding of your specific customer and the journey they go on with your brand. 

By doing so, you’ll be better equipped to offer unrivalled customer satisfaction , boost your revenue and turn everyday customers into raving fans. Of course, mapping out your customer journey is easier when you have the right tool for the job.

Any good Voice of the Customer program should include a way to visualise the customer journey. At Customer Alliance, our customer journey feature gives you a holistic view of satisfaction every step of the way, plus smart analytics that enable you to compare data across individual touchpoints. 

Want to find out more? Join us for a free introductory call and see what we can achieve together. 

What does “customer journey” mean?

The customer journey is the path that a customer takes from the moment they first learn about your product or service until the point of purchase and beyond. This journey is usually split into five main stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy. Understanding this journey is essential because it helps businesses align their offerings with the customer’s goals and expectations at every stage.

What’s the difference between customer journey stages and customer touchpoints?

While customer journey stages represent the overall path a customer takes, customer touchpoints are the specific interactions a customer has with your brand at each stage. These interactions, both online and offline, can include visiting your website, following you on social media, receiving emails, engaging with customer service, etc. Touchpoints are crucial to understand as they shape a customer’s impression of your brand and influence their experience.

How can I identify my customer journey touchpoints?

Identifying your customer journey touchpoints involves considering the customer’s perspective and listing every possible interaction they may have with your brand. Group these touchpoints by stage and collaborate with your team to ensure you’ve covered all potential interactions. Don’t forget to ask your customers for feedback as well; their direct experiences can provide valuable insights you might have overlooked.

Why is customer journey mapping beneficial?

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for visualizing your customers’ experience from discovery to advocacy. This process helps businesses understand customers’ goals and expectations better, identify and eliminate pain points, streamline touchpoints, and increase accountability within the team. It aids in optimizing customer experience management and ultimately leads to increased customer satisfaction and advocacy.

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The 7 steps of the customer journey

table of contents

Customer journey: a quick intro.

In today's competitive marketplace, businesses must understand their customers in-depth to stay ahead. A crucial part of this understanding is the customer journey , which traces the customer's interactions with your brand from their perspective. Mapping this journey provides critical insights into customer needs, behaviors, and pain points, allowing businesses to improve their offerings, services, and overall customer experience.

Let's dive into the seven-step process of creating a comprehensive customer journey map.

The importance of customer journey mapping

Understanding the customer journey is vital to improving business performance. A customer journey map provides valuable insights into how customers interact with your brand across various touchpoints, revealing your service's strengths and weaknesses. This holistic view of customer interaction is beneficial in refining your business model and improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Amazon's obsession with customer experience has made it the world's most customer-centric company. Amazon has continually improved its customer experience by meticulously mapping and analyzing customer journeys, resulting in exceptional customer loyalty.

Step 1: Define your personas

A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It should include:

Demographics : Age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and education.

Psychographics : Interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle.

Behavioral traits : Buying patterns, brand interactions, and product usage.

Needs and pain points : What problems are your personas trying to solve? What obstacles do they face?

Motivations and goals : What drives your personas? What are their aspirations?

Creating detailed customer personas allows you to understand your customers' needs, experiences, behaviors, and pain points.

For example, a persona for a tech company might be 'Tech-Savvy Tim,' a 30-year-old software engineer who values cutting-edge technology and quick, reliable service. Creating personas aids in tailoring the customer journey map to cater to the unique needs of different customer segments.

And remember, personas are not real people but represent your typical or ideal customers.

Step 2: Identify touchpoints

A touchpoint refers to any interaction a customer has with your brand, from viewing a social media ad to contacting your customer service team. Identifying all these touchpoints is essential to understanding the customer journey accurately.

Mapping touchpoints involves documenting every possible customer interaction with your business. It could be divided into pre-purchase (research, reviews), buy (store visit, online checkout), and post-purchase (customer service, follow-up emails) touchpoints. Recognizing these touchpoints allows you to understand how customers move through the sales funnel and identify areas for improvement.

Step 3: Understand customer goals

At each touchpoint, customers have specific goals they aim to achieve. Whether finding product information or seeking assistance with a problem, understanding these goals is crucial to providing a positive customer experience.

Align your business processes with these customer goals. For example, if a goal at the 'research' touchpoint is to compare different products easily, make sure your website has user-friendly comparison features. You increase satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty by aligning with customer goals.

Step 4: Evaluate the customer's emotional journey

Customers are not just logical entities; their emotions significantly impact buying decisions. So, gauging customer emotions at different touchpoints is crucial for creating an empathetic and compelling customer journey.

Consider how customers might feel at each stage. Are they excited when they find your product? Frustrated when they try to navigate your website? Happy when they receive quick and efficient customer service? Understanding and addressing these emotional responses can create a more positive customer experience.

Step 5: Map out the customer path

With personas defined, touchpoints identified, goals understood, and emotions gauged, you can visually represent the customer's path. A customer journey map can take various forms, such as a spreadsheet or a storyboard, but it should always reflect the customer's perspective.

This map should illustrate the customer's path across touchpoints and depict their goals and emotional experiences at each point. Doing this allows you to step into your customers' shoes and see your brand from their perspective, helping you identify gaps in their experience.

Step 6: Identify moments of truth

Moments of truth are critical interactions that significantly impact the customer's perception of your brand. They can be positive (a delightful unboxing experience) or negative (a frustrating return process).

These moments can profoundly influence customer loyalty and your brand image. For example, the first moment of truth in the hospitality industry might be the initial greeting at a hotel. A warm, welcoming greeting can set the tone for a positive stay, while a poor greeting can do the opposite. Identifying and optimizing these moments of truth can significantly impact your customer experience.

Step 7: Optimize the journey

The ultimate goal of creating a customer journey map is to improve the customer experience. Once you've mapped the journey, analyze it for opportunities and weaknesses.

Look at your map holistically, but also drill down into specific touchpoints. Where are customers delighted? Where are they frustrated or confused? Use this analysis to optimize the customer journey. This might involve streamlining the checkout process, improving customer service response times, or enhancing the user interface on your website.

Map your customer journey with confidence

In conclusion, mapping the customer journey is critical for understanding your customers and improving their experience. It involves defining personas, identifying touchpoints, understanding customer goals, evaluating the emotional journey, mapping the path, recalling moments of truth, and optimizing the journey.

Remember, a customer journey map is not a one-time project but an evolving tool. As customer expectations and behaviors change and your business evolves, regularly update and review your map to ensure it accurately reflects the customer journey. By doing so, you'll stay customer-centric, continually improve, and ultimately thrive in today's competitive marketplace.

Discover more

How to create an ideal customer profile

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Buyer persona vs target audience

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9 Steps to your Winning Customer Journey Strategy

By   Julie Choo

Published: October 3, 2023

Last Update: January 9, 2024

TOPICS:   Service Design

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one thing remains constant: the customer is king. And to keep the king content, a well-defined customer journey strategy is paramount. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the world of customer journey strategy, exploring its intricacies, the importance of customer journey mapping, and how it all contributes to enhancing the customer experience. Buckle up; we’re about to embark on a journey of our own.

Customer Journey: What is it?

Step 1: define your objectives, step 2: identify customer personas, step 3: collect customer data, step 4: create a visual representation, step 5: define touchpoints, step 6: walk in your customers’ shoes, step 7: capture emotions and pain points, step 8: analyze and iterate, step 9: implement changes – bringing it all together, elevating customer experience: the north star of your strategy.

At its core, a customer journey represents the route a customer takes from their first interaction with your brand to the final purchase and beyond. Understanding this journey is the first step in crafting an effective customer journey strategy. It’s akin to setting up signposts along a road – guiding your customers on a seamless voyage.

A well-mapped customer journey not only benefits your customers but also your business. It enables you to anticipate customer needs, identify pain points, and optimize touchpoints to foster loyalty.

9 Steps of the Customer Journey Map

Customer journey mapping is the cartography of your customer’s experience. It’s where you take a deep dive into each step of their journey, from awareness to post-purchase engagement. Mapping allows you to see the journey from the customer’s perspective, highlighting pain points, moments of delight, and opportunities for improvement.

When crafting your map, consider customer personas, touchpoints, and channels. Visualizing the customer’s path helps in aligning your marketing, sales, and support teams to provide a cohesive and delightful experience.

Before setting sail, you need to chart your course. Start by defining your objectives. What specific aspects of the customer journey are you looking to understand or improve? Here’s a few common example of ideas to look at when considering your company’s objective

• Churn Reduction : One of the most common objectives is reducing churn or customer attrition. Your goal might be to pinpoint the exact stages in the customer journey where customers tend to drop off and identify strategies to retain them.
• Conversion Rate Optimization : If your primary aim is to increase conversions, your objectives could revolve around understanding the barriers that prevent prospects from moving smoothly through the sales funnel. What’s stopping them from becoming paying customers?
• Enhanced Customer Loyalty : For businesses seeking to boost customer loyalty, objectives may focus on identifying the touchpoints and interactions that contribute most to customer satisfaction. What can you do to turn satisfied customers into loyal advocates?
• Improved Customer Support : If customer support is a priority, you might aim to uncover pain points in the support journey. Are customers waiting too long for assistance? Are their issues resolved effectively? Your objectives could involve streamlining the support process for better customer experiences.
• Personalization and Engagement : In a world where personalization is key, objectives might be centered on tailoring the customer journey to individual preferences. What data points can you gather to offer more personalized recommendations and interactions?
• Cost Reduction : For cost-conscious businesses, objectives could revolve around optimizing the customer journey to reduce operational costs. Are there redundant touchpoints or inefficient processes that can be streamlined?

Practical implementation of this step involves convening a cross-functional team to brainstorm, discuss, and define your objectives. Each department, from marketing to customer support, should have input to ensure a comprehensive perspective.

Objectives should be documented, and their importance should be communicated throughout the organization. This clarity ensures that everyone is working toward a common goal, enhancing collaboration and alignment.

Every explorer needs a crew, and in this journey, your crew comprises customer personas. There are questions you should consider and ask. Create detailed profiles of your typical customers, considering;

• Demographics and Psychographics : Start by defining the basic demographics of your personas, such as age, gender, location, and income. Dive deeper into psychographics, understanding their values, interests, and lifestyle choices. For example, are your potential customers tech-savvy millennials seeking convenience, or are they older, price-conscious consumers looking for reliability?
• Goals and Pain Points: Delve into the goals and pain points of each persona. What are they trying to achieve when interacting with your brand? What obstacles or frustrations might they encounter along the way? Knowing these aspects allows you to provide solutions at critical touchpoints.
• Behavioral Patterns: Explore the behavioral patterns of your personas. How do they typically engage with your brand? Are they frequent visitors to your website, or do they prefer in-person interactions? Understanding these patterns helps in optimizing customer touchpoints.
• Communication Preferences: Identify how your personas prefer to communicate. Do they engage via email, social media, or phone calls? Tailor your communication channels to align with their preferences for more effective interactions.
• Decision-Making Process: Determine the decision-making process of your personas. Are they impulsive buyers, or do they conduct thorough research before making a purchase? This insight helps you align your marketing strategies and content with their decision journey.

In the realm of customer journey mapping, gathering customer data is akin to excavating precious gems of knowledge, crucial for achieving a deeper understanding of your audience and ensuring customer retention. It serves as the compass guiding your business through the intricate maze of customer preferences, behaviors, and expectations while minimizing customer churn. Effective data collection is not just a task but a strategic endeavor that requires precision and purpose, allowing you to engage with your target audience more effectively.

To embark on this data collection voyage, you must first identify the sources of valuable information within your reach. These sources span a spectrum, from website analytics and social media metrics to customer surveys designed to survey customers for insights. Categorize the data into distinct types, including demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and transactional data. For instance, understanding the preferences of tech-savvy millennials or the cautious spending habits of older customers can offer insights into customer churn and retention. Ensuring the quality and accuracy of this data is paramount, as it’s the cornerstone upon which insightful decisions are made. Implement data validation processes to minimize errors and uphold data integrity. Moreover, always respect customer privacy and adhere to data protection regulations, seeking clear consent for data collection to foster trust.

In practice, customer surveys can directly capture feedback and insights, uncovering a few examples of pain points or preferences that influence customer retention. Tools like Google Analytics help track website visitor behavior, providing essential data for tailoring your strategies. CRM systems centralize customer information, offering a unified view of interactions and preferences that can inform customer retention efforts. Social media listening uncovers sentiment and trends, guiding your engagement with the target audience. Additionally, data mining techniques reveal customer preferences that, when acted upon, boost customer retention. Regular data audits and cross-referencing data from various sources ensure data accuracy, while stringent data security measures and compliance with regulations protect sensitive information. By mastering the art of data collection, you not only unlock the secrets of the customer journey but also pave the way for crafting meaningful and personalized experiences that resonate with your target audience, thereby enhancing customer retention and reducing churn. With data as your guiding star, you’re equipped to navigate the seas of customer insights with confidence and purpose.

Now, it’s time to put pen to paper (or rather, pixels to screen) and create a visual representation of the customer journey. Use software or even a whiteboard to sketch out the different stages and touchpoints your customers go through. Each stage represents a milestone in their journey.

In the intricate tapestry of crafting an effective marketing strategy that caters to customer expectations and cultivates loyal customers. A touchpoint is any interaction between a customer and your brand, a moment when your customer journeys through your offerings, and their experience is shaped. Understanding and strategically defining these touchpoints empowers you to orchestrate a seamless, delightful journey that resonates with your audience.

To begin this journey of touchpoint definition, it’s essential to comprehensively map the customer’s journey. This involves identifying every instance where a customer comes into contact with your brand, whether it’s through a website visit, a social media interaction, a customer service call, or even an in-store experience. By recognizing these touchpoints, you can tailor your marketing strategy to meet customer expectations at each juncture.

The goal is to ensure that every interaction leaves a positive impression, fostering loyalty and trust among your customers. Whether it’s a user-friendly website interface or a personalized email campaign, every touchpoint is an opportunity to engage, delight, and convert customers into loyal advocates of your brand.

Creating a customer journey that truly engages and resonates with your audience is about stepping into your customers’ shoes, cultivating empathy, and fostering customer success. It’s not just about understanding their needs but also their emotions, challenges, and aspirations throughout their buying process.

To effectively walk in your customers’ shoes, start by revisiting your customer personas and immersing yourself in their characteristics, preferences, and pain points. Conduct interviews and surveys to gain deeper insights into their experiences and expectations. Organize workshops where cross-functional teams can collectively analyze the customer journey and identify areas for improvement. Employ mystery shopping and competitor benchmarking to uncover hidden gaps. Analyze customer feedback to spot recurring themes and issues.

Empathy should not be a one-time exercise but an integral part of your decision-making process. When empathy becomes ingrained in your organization’s culture, every team member considers its impact on customer success. By walking in your customers’ shoes, you gain a profound understanding of their journey, which becomes the foundation for designing meaningful interactions, fostering customer satisfaction, and driving brand advocacy. So, lace up those metaphorical shoes and embark on a journey to create a customer journey that ensures customer success throughout the buying process.

In the intricate world of customer journey mapping, Understanding your customer’s emotions and pain points plays a pivotal role in cultivating a deeper connection with your audience. This step revolves around the art of capturing emotions and pain points that shape customer interactions. Emotions are the driving force behind customer decisions and actions, while pain points represent the obstacles they encounter. Recognizing and understanding these aspects empowers businesses to create solutions that resonate with customers’ feelings and alleviate their concerns.

To capture emotions and pain points effectively, businesses can employ various strategies. Emotion-centric surveys can be designed to prompt customers to express their feelings and experiences at different touchpoints, be it during a purchase or while engaging with the customer service team. Empathy mapping workshops encourage collaborative creation of empathy maps, visually representing customer personas’ emotions and pain points throughout their journey. Customer interviews should go beyond the standard questions, urging customers to share emotional experiences and elaborate on their pain points.

Feedback analysis can be enriched by incorporating emotional tags to categorize responses and identify sentiments. Social media listening offers a real-time glimpse into customer emotions as they discuss brands online, providing opportunities for businesses to engage and gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s perspectives. Ultimately, applying these insights can transform ordinary interactions into memorable experiences, fostering customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy in the process.

In this step, we dive deeper into understanding and enhancing our customer journey maps. It’s like finding hidden treasures in a treasure hunt. First, we dig into all the information we’ve gathered about our customers, like feedback and surveys. Then, we use cool tools to turn this data into easy-to-understand pictures. These pictures show us how customers behave on their journey with our business.

But we don’t stop at just looking at pictures. We take action ! We listen to what customers say and what the numbers tell us. If something’s not right, like customers not staying with us for long, we figure out why and make changes. We also keep an eye on what other businesses are doing to see if we can do things better. It’s like always trying to make our customer journey maps more effective and exciting.

This isn’t a one-time job; it’s an ongoing adventure. As customers’ needs change, our journey maps should change with them. We work together across our teams to make sure our business strategy lines up with these maps. This way, we’re not just meeting but exceeding our customers’ expectations. And that’s how we keep them happy and coming back for more, making our business stand out from the crowd.

Once you’ve charted the course, it’s time to steer the ship. Implement changes and improvements based on your findings. Ensure that all departments and teams are aligned with the new strategy and understand their roles in enhancing the customer journey.

Through these nine steps, from defining objectives to implementing changes, we’ve embarked on a transformative journey ourselves. We’ve learned to see our business from the customer’s perspective, understand their emotions, and continuously adapt to meet their needs. By mastering these steps, we ensure that our customer journey maps are not just diagrams on a wall but effective tools that drive our business strategy. In doing so, we don’t just satisfy customers; we create loyal advocates who keep our business thriving. So, as we implement changes, we do it with a sense of purpose and a commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Customer experience (CX) is the heart and soul of your customer journey strategy. It’s not just about a single transaction; it’s about fostering long-term relationships. A positive CX ensures customers return, become brand advocates, and fuel business growth.

To enhance CX, focus on personalization, responsiveness, and consistency across all touchpoints. Leverage data and feedback to refine your strategy continuously. Remember, it’s the little things that make a big difference.

The Power of Customer Journey Mapping

Now that we’ve delved into the importance of customer journey mapping, let’s explore how it can transform your customer journey strategy.

Identifying Pain Points: Mapping helps pinpoint pain points in the customer journey, allowing you to address and eliminate them. This leads to a smoother and more enjoyable experience.

Optimizing Touchpoints: With a detailed map, you can optimize touchpoints, ensuring that each interaction aligns with your brand’s values and objectives.

Predicting Customer Behavior : A well-constructed customer journey map allows you to predict customer behavior, enabling you to proactively meet their needs.

Enhancing Personalization: Personalization is key to exceptional customer experiences. Mapping facilitates tailored interactions at each stage of the journey.

Measuring Success: By mapping the customer journey, you can establish clear metrics and KPIs to measure the success of your strategy.

In the realm of modern business, crafting a winning customer journey strategy is not just an option; it’s a necessity. A well-mapped customer journey, combined with a relentless focus on customer experience, can set your brand apart and drive sustainable growth. 

About the author

Julie Choo is lead author of THE STRATEGY JOURNEY book and the founder of STRATABILITY ACADEMY. She speaks regularly at numerous tech, careers and entrepreneur events globally. Julie continues to consult at large Fortune 500 companies, Global Banks and tech start-ups. As a lover of all things strategic, she is a keen Formula One fan who named her dog, Kimi (after Raikkonnen), and follows football - favourite club changes based on where she calls home.

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Subscribe →, defining your customer journey.

Date Published:

Oct 1, 2021

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Business , Strategy

This post walks through the five steps on how to map your customer journey so you can better communicate with the right people at the right time.

Today, we’re chatting about a tool that you can utilize to better communicate with your audience members. Because here’s the thing. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, there’s a high likelihood that you have audience members who just entered into your sphere of influence and people who have been consuming your content for months or years.

So the question then becomes, how do you serve both types of people well?

Enter: The Customer Journey.

In this article

>> What is the customer journey? >> How do you map your own business’ customer journey? >> How can you use that journey in your business?

What is the customer journey?

Here at Witt and Company, I define the customer journey as a four-step flow a customer goes through, from the first point of contact to the transformation, and beyond.

Those four steps are:

• Attract your ideal customer.
• Buy into your message.
• Make a purchase.
• Retain your business.

If you want an in-depth explanation of each phase, click here .

How to map your own customer journey

We love a good brain dump and that’s exactly how we’ll start the customer journey mapping process. You’re not worrying about any rhyme or reason to what you write—it’s about getting everything from your brain onto paper.

Step 01: What are the possible brand touch points?

Let’s start with the attraction phase. Simply write down all the various touch points that a potential customer may have with your business. From networking events to seeing a post on Instagram, what possible places can someone connect with you and learn about your brand?

Step 02: From there, how do they buy into your brand?

Now that they’ve had an initial connection with your brand, what’s next? Look at each of the touch points and write down the person’s next move. For example, if I am at a networking event and hand someone my business card (phase one), their next step is to either check out my website and opt into my email or send me an email directly (phase two).

You’re writing down all the connection points that get them from casually double-tapping on your Instagram post to giving permission for two-way communication. An Instagram DM means they’re buying into your message. Subscribing to your email list means they’re buying into your message. Sending you a private message on Facebook means they’re buying into your message. You’re no longer just talking at the person—they’re giving you permission to communicate directly with them.

Step 03: What does a purchase look like?

Once that permission is given, write down all the “steps” that a potential client will take to get from exchanging contact information to paying customer.

Do you send them an email sequence if they opt in to your freebie? Do you have a contact form that someone fills out when they send you over a private message on Facebook? Or do you offer a free consultation call?

Step 04: How can you bring even more delight to a paying customer?

When a potential client becomes a paying customer, you may think that the journey is over—they’re invested (literally), so your work is done, right?

Absolutely not.

The last phase of the customer journey, and in my opinion the most important step, is providing excellent customer service and retaining your client’s business. Write down all the ways that you delight your customer. From the moment they sign the contract and make it official to wrapping up the project and beyond, what are you doing to make their experience as best as possible?

Do you have a welcome series you send each new client through? Offer a referral bonus for anyone they send your way? Send a client gift to everyone you work with? Follow up a month after completing the project just to check in on them and see how things are going? While these small things may seem insignificant, I promise they’re worth the effort and can really set your brand apart from the competition.

Step 05: Organize and clarify.

Now that you’ve written everything down, it’s time to organize.

I’d recommend some sort of flow chart, which you can physically draw out, or create something simple in Excel. You can make this as high level or detailed as you want—the idea is that it makes sense to you.

Perhaps, collecting everything on paper is all you need and just having a list of what happens at each phase is enough to keep you organized.

If you’re wanting something more detailed, start with phase one and map out each option. Remember those “choose your own adventure” books you read in elementary school? This process is like that—start with the first touch point and create a map for each option, until you reach your Retention stage.

How can you use the customer journey in your own business?

Okay, so you have the customer journey all mapped out, great! But, how can you actually utilize it as a tool and put it to work for your own business?

At a high level, when you understand your customer’s journey, you gain a better insight into the experience that your brand provides. And from an action-step perspective, clarity on the customer journey will show you where things are going well and where you can improve.

For example, if your lead generation (phase one) is a little slower, you know that awareness building can be a marketing focus for the next three to six months. Or maybe you’re a rockstar when it comes to customer service (phase four) and 99% of your clients refer you to someone they know. The question to then ask would be, ‘How can you make that experience even better for your current customer?’

Remember, this is a fluid process and you learn as you go. Just like your brand, your customer’s journey is an evolution that will grow and change right along with your business.

Happy branding!

All my best,

Additional Resources

 Want an in-depth look at each stage of the customer journey? Check out this post !

Read this post if you’re wanting to tailor your brand message to each stage of the customer journey.

Build awareness with more ease in this post that walks through brand messaging for awareness building.

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Amazon's Just Walk Out technology relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop

• Amazon has spent years promoting its AI-based checkout-free Just Walk Out  technology.
• But a new report suggests that most Just Walk Out sales are reviewed by real people in India.
• Amazon is rolling back Just Walk Out at Amazon Fresh stores, shifting instead to smart shopping carts.

Amazon's Just Walk Out technology had a secret ingredient: Roughly 1,000 workers in India who review what you pick up, set down, and walk out of its stores with.

The company touted the technology, which allowed customers to bypass traditional checkouts, as an achievement powered entirely by computer vision. But Just Walk Out was still very reliant on humans, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing an unnamed person who has worked on Just Walk Out technology.

About 700 of every 1,000 Just Walk Out sales had to be reviewed by Amazon's team in India in 2022, according to The Information. Internally, Amazon wanted just 50 out of every 1,000 sales to get a manual check, according to the report.

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An Amazon spokesperson disputed that claim in a statement to Business Insider, saying that the team in India mostly helps train the model that the company used for Just Walk Out.

"Associates may also validate a small minority of shopping visits where our computer vision technology cannot determine with complete confidence an individual's purchases," the spokesperson said.

The revelation comes as Amazon is planning to replace Just Walk Out at Amazon Fresh stores with its Dash Carts , The Information reported. The smart shopping carts also allow customers to avoid waiting in a checkout line, though they have to place their purchases in the cart, which keeps track of their selections and debits their accounts.

While customers used Just Walk Out at Amazon Fresh stores, "they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store" — all options that the company's Dash Cart provides, the company spokesperson said of the change.

Just Walk Out first appeared in Amazon Go convenience stores. The technology allowed customers to enter a store by identifying themselves with their Amazon account. From there, they could pick up items, put them back on the shelves, and walk out with their final picks, all without having to interact with a cashier.

In the last few years, Amazon has rolled Just Walk Out to larger-format stores. Twenty-seven of the 44 Amazon Fresh stores currently have the tech. Amazon also added Just Walk Out to some Whole Foods stores.

Startups have also created their own versions of Just Walk Out and tested them at retailers including Aldi and Dollar General.

Do you work for Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods and have a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501.

Watch: Meet the Amazon warehouse workers paying the price for fast, free shipping

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LOS ANGELES, CA - APRIL 23: A student walks near Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA on April 23, 2012 ... [+] in Los Angeles, California. According to reports, half of recent college graduates with bachelor's degrees are finding themselves underemployed or jobless. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Navigating the complexities of college admissions can be daunting. As mentors and leaders in empowering youth, we have distilled our experiences into four actionable steps that can serve as a compass for your journey to college acceptance.

Build Your Community With Intention

Your network isn't just a collection of contacts; it's a community of mentors, peers, and professionals who resonate with your aspirations. Consider Charles Xi, an emerging swim tech entrepreneur. His ambition to create a biometric wearable for swimmers could have remained an unfocused dream without the right guidance. By connecting with a professor specializing in thermal fluids at Columbia University, Xi honed his ideas and crafted a patent-worthy design paper. It's crucial to engage with individuals who not only broaden your perspective but also challenge you to refine your goals.

Like Xi, you can take action to identify and reach out to potential mentors in your field of interest. Make sure to utilize your LinkedIn account and be proactive in seeking internships or research opportunities that align with your aspirations. Engage and build relationships with others in order to improve your impact and yourself. And remember, when it comes to building relationships, make sure to focus on your ability to give just as much as what you hope to get.

Define Your Impact Through Intellectual Vitality

Intellectual vitality goes beyond academic prowess; it's the spark of curiosity that drives you to explore and contribute meaningfully. Take Anthony Smith, a student passionate about economics without practical experience. By collaborating with an MIT mathematics lecturer, Smith delved into financial data analysis, learned new statistical software, and translated classroom knowledge into practical skills. Colleges seek students who demonstrate this kind of intellectual initiative.

You can replicate this success by creating a substantial research project or founding your own nonprofit or business. Julia Howe did this when she created the Hitting The Wall podcast. Her experiences as an endurance athlete and her participation in an entrepreneur program, prompted her to explore the possibility of taking personal experiences and turning them into a business that could help other athletes. You can seek out programs, courses, and support that match you with experts to undertake significant projects. Document your learning process and outcomes as tangible evidence of your intellectual vitality.

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Understanding what colleges value in an applicant is pivotal. Every institution has its unique ethos and set of priorities. Students can spend efforts gaining press and recognition to enhance their impact outside of the classroom and craft their narrative. Further, students can deepen their understanding of colleges by connecting directly with individuals on campus to support their high school initiatives. For example, three of our students with an interest in history got a museum internship at their top-choice colleges, which was very helpful for building their candidacies and sharing a personal vantage point into university life and environment.

An important part of preparing for the application process is researching your target colleges extensively. Know their mission statements, department strengths, and cultural nuances. Just as artists adapt to different mediums, students must tailor their applications to resonate with their chosen schools.

Take Meaningful Actions To Showcase Leadership And Initiative

Leadership isn't just about titles; it's about the impact of your actions and your ability to inspire change. And there are programs like ours, such as Research Science Institute and NIH’s Summer Internship Program, that want to help you make that change.

The essence of " doing WIT " is encapsulated by the entrepreneurial spirit of leadership. WIT , standing for Whatever It Takes, is a global nonprofit dedicated to making sure young people have the tools, access, and programs needed to become entrepreneurs and leaders.

The core of the College Admissions X-Factor , which is the strategic framework for Dr. Legatt’s organization Ivy Insight , underscores the importance of living out and showcasing your built expertise and exponential impact to match with fitting colleges. Ivy Insight also provides professor research mentorships that enable students to maximize their intellectual vitality ahead of the college application process.

You aren’t too young to start engaging in leadership roles within your community, whether by leading a team, organizing events, or launching a venture that addresses a social issue. Tackling real societal issues, pitching solutions to city officials and leaders, and documenting the journey through visuals and words demonstrates the initiative and influence of a true leader. Tyden Chinowsky did just that by dedicating his time to cleaning up a park area near his favorite beach. What started as a giving back project turned into the non-profit Native Del Mar . For Mike Shi, a collection of poems turned into a novel focused on the teenage mental health journey when Shi published his own book. Remember, sometimes taking small actions can lead to big impact. It’s just important to start.

And when it comes to taking what you’ve done and articulating it in your applications, make sure to reflect on how these experiences have shaped your character and problem-solving abilities.

Embarking on the path to college requires a blend of introspection, strategic action, and purpose-driven engagement. By building your network, showcasing intellectual vitality, tailoring your narrative to your audience, and demonstrating impactful leadership, you can distinguish yourself as more than a candidate—you become a story worth investing in and remembering. Remember, college admissions officers are not just looking for students; they are looking for future alumni who will contribute to the world and bring further acclaim to their alma mater.

So, document your journey, curate your experiences, and when the time comes, present a compelling narrative that's uniquely yours. Also, don’t forget that you are the driver in this process. You get to choose the college that is the right fit for you.

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Contact customer care, sas announces next step in its alliance transition journey.

SAS today announces exciting details about the next chapter in its future commercial relationships. SAS will remain in Star Alliance through August 31, 2024, and customers can start enjoying benefits with most SkyTeam airlines beginning September 1, 2024.   

Following this transition starting September 1, 2024, SAS EuroBonus members will enjoy loyalty benefits similar to those offered today with Star Alliance airlines with most of SkyTeam’s airlines.  

SAS is in advanced negotiations with SkyTeam and many of its member carriers to develop and grow extensive commercial relationships. We look forward to giving our customers access to 19 new airlines and more than 1,060 destinations around the globe. Customers will enjoy continued access to their favorite cities and regions, while enjoying more travel options to previously unserved destinations.  

“We are thrilled to progress on our alliance transition journey and pave the way for delightful new destinations and loyalty program benefits across the world. Our focus now is to guide customers and our EuroBonus members on each step during this transition. We look forward to sharing more details as our journey progresses, with the aim to create a smooth transition to an exciting travel future with us,” says Chief Commercial Officer at SAS, Paul Verhagen. 

We have worked closely with both Star Alliance and SkyTeam and many of their members over the last 6 months to ensure a smooth transition for all customers and our EuroBonus members. All customer benefits of Star Alliance, including earn and burn of EuroBonus points, lounge access and other benefits along the customer journey will remain through August 31, 2024. EuroBonus will remain SAS’ loyalty program, also after SAS leaves Star Alliance. 

For more information:  From Star Alliance to SkyTeam (flysas.com)

We look forward to sharing more information over the coming weeks and months.  

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AFK Journey: How To Leave Guild

Want to switch Guild but don’t know how to exit it? Here is all you have to do to leave it in AFK Journey.

Joining the Guild in AFK Journey is one of the first things players do after clearing AFK Stage 30. Since the maximum limit of members is thirty at the time of writing, finding open slots in active ones becomes quite bothersome. While scrolling through the list, you might have joined the one with most slots filled but later realized that most aren’t active in the game or completing activities.

When that happens it is better to find another and leave the current one, the items you get from Challenges, Battle Drill, Glory Expedition, and Chest are worth switching the Guild. With that said, let’s be hasty like the Starshard Artifact and leave the team.

How to Leave Guild in AFK Journey

After leaving the Guild, you must wait 30 minutes before joining the new one. So, if you plan to become part of another, it is better to talk with the members and ensure the seat doesn’t get filled during the cooldown. Now, since that is clear, let’s get to the steps:

• Tap on the Guild button from the bottom of the main screen.
• Head towards the Members section and interact with it. To reach the podium, climb the stairs on the left of the throne.
• This will take you to the members list. On the bottom right, you will see a More button; press that.
• Here, you will see the Exit option. Use it and confirm your choice to leave the Guild.

How to Switch and Join Guild in AFK Journey

Once the cooldown ends, go to the Guild option from the bottom of the main screen. This time, you will see the list of all the Guilds with open seats. Before pressing the Join button, check the Activeness given beside their name. If the Activeness is low, you would probably get stuck with the inactive one, so avoid joining such.

That is all you have to do to leave and switch Guild in AFK Journey. If you found this useful, you should check how to change the server and add friends .

From Kemco's Glorious Savior, Asdivine Dios, Revenant Saga to Haiku's Asylum, Murder Inn, and Time Library. Mysterious and RPGs have always been the soul of my life. Today Magic Awakened, TOTK, Asphalt Legends, SoS AWL, and Ni no Kuni have grasped me. But the future untold full of exciting stories are waiting to be explored, and I wish to live them all.

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