customer journey map animation

What is a Customer Journey Map and How to Make One: A Step-by-Step Guide

A journey map, often referred to as a customer journey map or user journey map, is a visual representation that outlines the various steps and interactions a person or a customer goes through when engaging with a product, service, or organization. These maps are designed to provide a comprehensive view of the entire journey from the user’s or customer’s perspective, allowing businesses and organizations to better understand the experiences, emotions, and pain points of their users or customers.

How to Gain Valuable Insights from Your Customers with a Customer Journey Map

How to create a customer journey map, the customer journey mapping process, an example of a customer journey map, final thought.

Key components of a journey map typically include:

• Stages: The journey is divided into distinct stages or phases, which can vary depending on the context but often include stages like awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.
• Touchpoints: These are the specific points of interaction between the user or customer and the product, service, or organization. Touchpoints can be both digital (e.g., website, app) and physical (e.g., in-store visit, phone call).
• Actions: The actions or activities that the user or customer takes at each touchpoint are documented. This may include researching products, making a purchase, seeking customer support, and more.
• Emotions: Emotions experienced by the user or customer are often included to provide insight into their feelings and reactions at different points along the journey. Understanding these emotions can help businesses tailor their interactions to create more positive experiences.
• Pain Points: Any difficulties, frustrations, or challenges that users or customers encounter during their journey are noted as pain points. Identifying these pain points is crucial for making improvements and enhancing the overall experience.
• Opportunities: Opportunities for improvement, innovation, or enhancement are also highlighted. These are areas where organizations can make changes to create better experiences or provide additional value.
• User or Customer Persona: In some journey maps, a user or customer persona is included to represent the typical characteristics and needs of the individuals going through the journey. This helps in personalizing the journey map.
• Data and Insights: Relevant data, research findings, and customer feedback may be incorporated to support the observations and conclusions made in the journey map.

Journey maps are valuable tools for businesses and organizations in several ways:

• Understanding the Customer: They help in gaining a deeper understanding of how customers engage with products and services, their needs, and their pain points.
• Improving Customer Experience: By identifying pain points and opportunities, organizations can make strategic improvements to enhance the overall customer experience.
• Alignment: Journey maps can be used to align various teams and departments within an organization to ensure a consistent and customer-centric approach.
• Innovation: They can inspire innovation by highlighting areas where new features, services, or strategies could be implemented to better meet customer needs.
• Decision Making: Journey maps provide valuable insights that can inform decision-making processes related to marketing, product development, and customer support.

Overall, journey maps are a powerful tool for businesses and organizations to empathize with their users or customers and make data-driven decisions to optimize the customer experience.

Customer journey maps are invaluable tools for businesses and organizations because they offer numerous benefits and insights that help improve the overall customer experience and drive business success. Here are some of the key reasons why customer journey maps are important:

• Understanding the Customer Perspective: Customer journey maps provide a detailed view of the customer’s perspective, helping organizations empathize with their customers. This understanding is crucial for tailoring products, services, and interactions to meet customer needs and expectations.
• Identifying Pain Points: Journey maps highlight pain points and challenges that customers face during their interactions with a brand. Recognizing these pain points allows organizations to address and resolve issues, ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction.
• Optimizing Touchpoints: By analyzing the touchpoints where customers engage with a brand, organizations can identify opportunities for improvement. This may involve streamlining processes, enhancing digital interfaces, or providing better training to customer-facing teams.
• Enhancing Customer Satisfaction: When organizations use journey maps to identify pain points and make improvements, it often results in a better overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal, repeat customers and advocates for the brand.
• Personalization and Segmentation: Journey maps help in creating personalized experiences for different customer segments or personas. By tailoring interactions to specific needs and preferences, organizations can increase engagement and conversion rates.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Customer journey maps are collaborative tools that involve various departments within an organization, including marketing, sales, customer support, product development, and more. This alignment ensures a consistent and coordinated approach to customer interactions.
• Innovation and Product Development: Insights from journey maps can drive innovation by highlighting areas where new products or services can be developed to better meet customer needs. It guides product development efforts toward customer-centric solutions.
• Reducing Customer Churn: By identifying pain points and addressing them proactively, organizations can reduce customer churn. When customers have a positive and frictionless experience, they are less likely to switch to competitors.
• Measuring and Tracking Progress: Journey maps provide a baseline for measuring and tracking improvements over time. Organizations can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the impact of changes and make data-driven decisions.
• Competitive Advantage: Businesses that prioritize the customer experience and use journey maps to continually refine it gain a competitive advantage. Exceptional customer experiences can set a brand apart in a crowded market.
• Enhanced Employee Engagement: Engaged employees who understand the customer journey and their role in it are more motivated to deliver exceptional service. Journey maps help employees see the bigger picture and their contribution to it.
• Adaptation to Changing Market Conditions: As market dynamics evolve, customer journey maps can be updated to reflect changing customer behaviors and preferences. This adaptability ensures that organizations stay relevant and responsive to customer needs.

In summary, customer journey maps serve as powerful tools for enhancing the customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, and driving business growth. By putting the customer at the center of their operations and decision-making processes, organizations can build lasting relationships and succeed in today’s competitive landscape.

Gaining valuable insights from your customers through a customer journey map involves a combination of research, analysis, and empathy. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to start the process by conducting user research:

1. Define Your Objectives: Begin by clearly defining your objectives for creating the customer journey map. What specific insights are you seeking? Are you looking to identify pain points, improve satisfaction, or optimize specific touchpoints?

2. Identify Your Target Audience: Determine which customer segments or personas you want to focus on. Your insights may vary depending on the characteristics and needs of different customer groups.

3. Gather Data: Collect relevant data from various sources to inform your journey map. This data can include:

• Surveys: Create surveys to collect quantitative data on customer preferences, satisfaction, and behaviors.
• Interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews with customers to gain qualitative insights into their experiences and emotions.
• Observation: Observe how customers interact with your product or service in real-life situations to understand their behaviors.
• Analytics: Analyze data from your website, app, or other digital platforms to uncover user behavior patterns.
• Customer Support Data: Review customer support tickets and inquiries to identify common issues and challenges.
• Feedback Forms: Analyze feedback forms, comments, and reviews from customers to identify recurring themes.

4. Create User Personas (If Applicable): Develop detailed user personas representing different customer segments. These personas should include demographic information, motivations, goals, and pain points.

5. Map the Customer Journey: Create a visual representation of the customer journey, including stages and touchpoints. Map out the customer’s interactions and experiences from initial awareness through post-purchase and beyond.

6. Document Insights: At each touchpoint, document key insights, observations, and data points. Include both quantitative data (e.g., satisfaction ratings) and qualitative data (e.g., customer comments and emotions).

7. Identify Pain Points: Pay special attention to pain points where customers encounter difficulties, frustrations, or obstacles. These are areas where immediate improvement can enhance the customer experience.

8. Highlight Opportunities: Identify opportunities where you can enhance the customer journey. These may involve introducing new features, communication channels, or support options to improve the overall experience.

9. Analyze Emotions: Consider the emotions customers experience at each touchpoint. Emotional data can provide insights into how customers feel during their interactions with your brand.

10. Prioritize Insights: Prioritize your insights based on their impact on the customer experience and alignment with your objectives. Focus on actionable insights that can drive meaningful improvements.

11. Share Insights and Collaborate: Share the customer journey map and insights with relevant teams and stakeholders within your organization. Collaborate with these teams to develop action plans for improvement.

12. Implement Changes: Execute the planned improvements and changes to address identified pain points and capitalize on opportunities. Monitor the impact of these changes on customer satisfaction and other relevant metrics.

13. Continuously Iterate: Customer journey mapping is an ongoing process. Regularly revisit the map and update it to reflect changing customer behaviors, preferences, and market conditions. Continuously gather new data and feedback to refine your insights.

Starting with user research is a critical first step in creating an effective customer journey map. By understanding your customers’ needs and experiences, you can develop a map that guides improvements and optimizations to enhance the overall customer experience.

The customer journey mapping process is a systematic approach to understanding and improving the customer experience. It involves several key steps to create a visual representation of the customer’s interactions with your product, service, or brand. Here’s a detailed overview of the customer journey mapping process:

• Define Objectives and Scope: Start by clearly defining the objectives you want to achieve with the customer journey map. Identify the specific aspects of the customer experience you want to explore and improve. Decide on the scope, which could be a specific user persona, product, service, or an end-to-end journey.
• Gather Data: Collect relevant data from various sources to inform your customer journey mapping process. This data may include customer feedback, surveys, interviews, analytics, support tickets, and any other sources of customer information. Ensure that your data reflects the chosen scope and objectives.
• Create User Personas (If Applicable): If you’re focusing on specific user personas, develop detailed personas that represent your target customers. Include demographic information, motivations, goals, pain points, and preferred communication channels.
• Identify Touchpoints: Determine the various touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, product, or service. These can include website visits, social media engagement, emails, phone calls, in-store visits, and more.
• Define Customer Journey Stages: Break down the customer journey into distinct stages or phases. Common stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase. Customize these stages to match your specific context and objectives.
• Map the Journey: Start creating the visual representation of the customer journey map. For each stage, map out the touchpoints, actions, emotions, and pain points that customers experience. Consider using a visual format, such as a timeline, flowchart, or infographic.
• Document Insights: As you map the journey, document key insights, observations, and data points at each touchpoint. This should include both quantitative and qualitative information, such as customer behavior, feedback, and emotional responses.
• Analyze Pain Points and Opportunities: Identify pain points where customers face challenges or frustrations, as well as opportunities where you can enhance the customer experience. Use the insights you’ve gathered to pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Prioritize and Plan Improvements: Prioritize the pain points and opportunities based on their impact on the customer experience and alignment with your objectives. Develop an action plan to address these areas, which may involve changes to processes, products, or communication strategies.
• Share and Collaborate: Share the customer journey map with relevant teams and stakeholders within your organization. Collaborate with these teams to ensure alignment and a unified approach to improving the customer experience.
• Implement and Test Changes: Execute the planned improvements and changes to the customer journey. Monitor the impact of these changes and gather feedback from customers to ensure they are effective.
• Iterate and Update: The customer journey map is not a one-time effort. Continuously revisit and update it to reflect changes in customer behavior, market dynamics, and your business offerings. Regularly gather new data and feedback to refine the map and make ongoing improvements.

Throughout the customer journey mapping process, the goal is to gain a deep understanding of your customers, identify pain points, and create a more customer-centric approach to your business. By following this systematic process, you can enhance the overall customer experience and drive business growth.

Creating a full customer journey map typically involves various stages, from initial awareness to post-purchase experiences. Below, I’ll provide a simplified example of a customer journey map for a hypothetical e-commerce business. Please note that real customer journey maps can be much more detailed and complex, tailored to the specific needs and objectives of the organization. This example serves as a basic illustration:

Customer Persona: Sarah, a tech-savvy millennial looking to purchase a new smartphone online.

Stage 1: Awareness

• Action: Click on the ad to learn more.
• Emotion: Curious and interested.
• Action: Reads reviews and watches YouTube videos.
• Emotion: Informed and engaged.

Stage 2: Consideration

• Action: Browse product listings, read specifications, and compare prices.
• Emotion: Evaluative and selective.
• Action: Asks questions about camera quality and delivery options.
• Emotion: Inquisitive and eager for assistance.

Stage 3: Purchase

• Action: Fill in shipping and payment details.
• Emotion: Anxious but ready to buy.
• Action: Check her email for the confirmation and delivery date.
• Emotion: Relieved and anticipatory.

Stage 4: Post-Purchase

• Action: Tracks the package as it’s in transit.
• Emotion: Excited and informed.
• Action: Inspect the product, set it up, and explore features.
• Emotion: Satisfied and delighted.
• Action: Write a positive review on the e-commerce website.
• Emotion: Engaged and appreciative.
• Action: Clicks on links to explore recommended accessories.
• Emotion: Interested in enhancing the product.

This is a simplified example of a customer journey map. In reality, customer journey maps can be much more detailed, including additional stages, touchpoints, and layers of data such as user emotions, pain points, and metrics. The level of complexity and the specific touchpoints you include depends on the nature of your business and your research findings. The goal is to provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s interactions and emotions throughout their journey.

Explore the extensive collection of over 150 carefully crafted Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples and this Customer Journey Map Template .

In the dynamic landscape of modern business, understanding and optimizing the customer journey is paramount. As we conclude this step-by-step guide to crafting effective customer journey maps, remember that these maps are not just diagrams; they are invaluable tools that bridge the gap between your brand’s vision and your customers’ expectations.

By empathizing with your customers, conducting thorough research, and following a structured approach, you can create journey maps that drive meaningful change. These maps pave the way for enhanced customer experiences, improved satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.

In a world where customers hold the key to success, crafting exceptional journeys isn’t just an option—it’s a strategic imperative. So, embark on this journey of understanding, adaptability, and customer-centricity, and watch your business flourish in an age where the customer is truly king.

#CustomerJourneyMap #CXStrategy #CustomerExperience #JourneyMapping #UserResearch #CustomerEmpathy #CustomerInsights #StepByStepGuide #BusinessStrategy #CustomerCentric #UXDesign #DigitalMarketing #CustomerEngagement #MarketingStrategy #CustomerSuccess #UserExperience #CustomerFeedback #CustomerUnderstanding #CustomerSatisfaction #DataDrivenDecisions

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Customer Journey Videos – 4 Templates You Can Use Right Away

If you use a buyer journey map to organize your marketing efforts, you’re probably aware that each stage of the journey needs different messaging. In fact, that’s one of the biggest advantages of sales funnels – delivering specific messages to customers at the specific phase of the funnel.

To deliver these messages, a lot of brands are starting to rely on videos. More than 54% of customers claim that they would like to see more video content from some of the brands they support, so it makes sense to invest in this format.

More importantly, video seems to be the most interesting type of content for social media users worldwide. In fact, around 60% of users would rather watch a video online than watch TV.

So, how do you engage users with video in every stage of the sales funnel? Here is a guide on which type of customer journey videos to use, as well as some templates you can apply to your own content strategy right away.

Defining the customer journey

Before we get started, let’s define the customer journey and its importance in a good marketing strategy.

So, what is the buyer’s journey?

Simply put, the customer journey or buyer’s journey is the sum of all actions your customers take from the moment they first learn about your product until the moment they become loyal customers. So, the customer journey doesn’t stop when the user makes their first purchase. When that happens, it’s your job to transform them from one-time buyers into repeat customers that keep coming back to your offer.

Now let’s take a look at the stages of the customer journey that are most commonly accepted.

Buyer journey map: sales funnel stages

Your customer journey should essentially be a sales funnel. Its stages are ordered by the level of familiarity and purchase intent a customer is showing to your product/brand. There are several definitions and different names for these stages but most of them look something like this:

• Awareness. This is the first stage when your customers are the least familiar with your brand. They’re just starting to learn about your products as a potential solution to their problems, so your messaging in this stage should be focused on education.
• Consideration. The users in this stage are actively researching your offer and starting to consider making a purchase. These users likely need a small benefit in the form of an easy purchase process or new information that will make them feel like your offer is perfect for them.
• Purchase. These are the last few hurdles. In this stage, you want to make sure your customers don’t quit the purchase process and follow-through. You can do this by offering them a discount or free shipping, to give them that final motivation they may need.
• Loyalty. Here you have to turn those customers who made a purchase into loyal brand ambassadors. This is done by creating strong relationships – good customer service, personalized offers, and a smart onboarding process can all help.

Types of videos to use in your funnel

Now that we’ve defined the customer journey, let’s take a look at different types of videos you can use to engage your audience. Some of these videos are perfect for earlier stages of the journey while others are better for later stages – we’ll go deeper into this when we get to our templates.

Storytelling videos

Storytelling videos give you an opportunity to educate your audience and introduce them to your brand. You can promote your USPs, tell your story, and promote your products.

You can tell a story about almost anything – from your production process to your whole company history. For example, if you run an eCommerce that sells organic food, you might want to use your video to tell a story about the origin of your products: the farms they come from, the people that work in your store, etc.

This video about the history of Nestle tells us a story about their humble beginnings and ends with them as one of the most important employers in the UK.

If the goal of this video was to showcase Nestle as a desirable employer, we can agree that they succeeded to a certain extent. Depending on the goal of your video, you can tell a different story that brings you closer to your goal.

Explainer videos

At different marketing stages of your sales process, you can engage customers with explainer videos. These videos usually aren’t meant to go too deep into how to use your product – they should be short, simple instructions on how to perform simple actions.

Brands often use explainer videos to demonstrate how quick and easy it is to use their tool. Take this example from Uber:

In under 30 seconds, Uber gives you an overview of just how little it takes for you to order a ride and get your service. So, this is much more than an explainer video: it’s a promo video that focuses on one of Uber’s key USPs – speed of service.

Demo videos

Unlike explainer videos, demos usually go into more detail about how to use a product or service. Demo videos sometimes use techniques like screen recording and voiceovers to demonstrate the use of a product step-by-step.

Here is a typical example of a great demo video by Beauty Bakerie:

In this video, their CEO demonstrates how you can use several of their products, starting with no makeup on. She provides a detailed explanation of her foundation and concealer routine while promoting the products. Even without the products, this video is still a pretty useful demo that might help a lot of their potential customers.

Testimonials

Social proof is one of the best ways to add some weight to your marketing claims. It’s one thing when you have paid promotions highlighting the benefits of your products, but having your customers speak for you opens a lot of opportunities. In fact, 88% of customers treat user reviews with as much trust as personal recommendations.

You can reach out to your loyal customers and ask them to participate in your video for a small reward. As they already have a relationship with your brand, they’ll likely be interested.

Salesforce has a whole YouTube series called “Trailblazers” where they focus on success stories from small businesses that use their system. These stories are inspiring and they resonate with the audience on an emotional level. Here is a great example:

When you make testimonial videos, don’t just write a script and give it to your loyal customers to read. Try to do what Salesforce did and create impactful, true stories. Get your real fans in front of the camera, the people that believe in your product and want to share their story.

“Thank you” videos

One of our favorite types of videos here at Bonjoro is the “thank you” videos businesses send to their new users to build relationships and turn them into returning customers. Sending these videos can achieve some fantastic results in terms of email open rates and conversions. This is  especially the case if you use them to convert trialists into customers.

Here is how one of our clients managed to boost trial conversions by 29% in just one month!

>> Do you want to create engage users and get these results? Check out our “thank you” video templates! <<

Templates: Customer journey videos for each stage of the funnel

Now, let’s get to some of our templates you can use for your own video campaigns. Each of these videos will be tailored to one of the stages in your funnel. Depending on the stage and the customer types you’re trying to engage, you’ll find some of these templates more useful than the others.

Since we’re all about the personal touch here at Bonjoro, we’ll focus on the videos you can make yourself and use them to communicate directly to your customers.

Let’s start with the Awareness stage and move down the funnel.

Awareness: Educational videos as the perfect top of funnel content

At this stage, you want to educate your users about your brand and key products. Here is our script template, feel free to play with it and change it to fit your brand as much as possible, especially the product attributes.

Hi, [NAME], thank you for taking the time to consider [BRAND NAME]!

My name is [NAME], I’m a [JOB TITLE] at [BRAND], and I’d like to take this opportunity to potentially answer some of your questions about our business.

If you’re researching our brand, that probably means you’re already pretty familiar with [YOUR INDUSTRY], so I just wanted to share our story with you and briefly explain what separates us from others on the market.

As you can see, here at [BLANK] we’re all about the customer – we want to make sure you have the best experience possible, so you can always rely on our customer support for any questions you may have.

Apart from that, you’ll notice that our products are [ATTRIBUTE, USP], [ATTRIBUTE, USP], and [ATTRIBUTE, USP]. Feel free to browse around our website and make sure you check all the product descriptions. If you have any questions, hit up our [LIVE CHAT, CHATBOT, SOCIAL MEDIA]. We’ll get back to you in no time!

Enjoy your shopping!

Consideration: Use promo offers to entice customers

In the Consideration stage, the customers are already aware of your products, so you can reach out to them more directly. It’s a good idea to 

Hi, [NAME]!

My name is [NAME] and I’m a [POSITION] at [COMPANY].

I noticed you were checking out our products so I wanted to reach out to you with a special offer that I’m not sure if you noticed.

So, if you take a look at our website and visit the [PAGE NAME] page, you’ll see [PRODUCT CATEGORY or PRODUCT NAME]. As you can see, there is a promo offer on the product right now, where you get [PROMOTION DETAILS].

The offer is limited, so make sure you make your purchase before [DATE] to make the most out of it!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either me or some of our awesome customer service agents via [LIVE CHAT, SOCIAL MEDIA, EMAIL, etc].

Thank you for considering our products, bye!

Purchase: Free shipping or discounts

In this phase, you want to give your customers that final push to make the purchase. Typically, a customer has entered the Purchase stage when they displayed strong purchase intent – like putting products in the shopping cart.

You can reach out to those customers with a special offer.

My name is [NAME], I’m a [POSITION] at [COMPANY], and I wanted to thank you for taking the time and going through the shopping experience on your website. 

Since you still haven’t completed your purchase, we’d love to hear from you and understand where we could improve our process. Feel free to let us know if there is something we can do to make the purchasing experience or our products better.

And, if you’re still interested, you’re products will be waiting for you right where you left them. In fact, I negotiated [A SMALL DISCOUNT or FREE SHIPPING] with our Sales team for you personally. So, come back whenever you want and you’ll get our special offer.

Again, thanks for shopping with us, and we hope you’ll hit us up with your feedback. Bye!

Loyalty: “Thank you” video

When your customers make their first purchase, you can reach out to them and thank them for trusting you.

Hi, [NAME], thank you for joining our family!

My name is [NAME], I’m a [POSITION] at [COMPANY], and I’d like to provide you with some useful information now that you’ve made your purchase.

Your order is on its way, and you can check out your shipment progress at any time by clicking on [INSTRUCTIONS]. You can see your order details in your email. If you have any questions, if you forgot to mention something, or even if you’d like to add something to your order, you can contact our Customer Service. If the order is already packed and sent, I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out.

Thank you for your purchase and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter if you want to get special offers, curated just for you. Bye!

Customer journey videos: conclusion

Engaging users with personalized customer journey videos is one of the best ways to nurture them throughout the purchase process and build strong relationships.

Whichever types of videos you want to create, try to make them as personal as you can. The customers will almost always see through the generic, pre-made videos and your results will suffer.

If you want to create these videos easily, try Bonjoro . You can register for a free trial now and start creating customer journey videos right away, with no fancy equipment!

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey maps are a visual interpretation from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand.

This whiteboard animation (and article) shows you how to create a Customer Journey Map.

Despite best intentions and mountains of data, many organizations continue to offer lackluster experiences for their customers.

Many organizations function with an internal focus, and that becomes apparent when customers interact with their various products, services and employees. Every interaction a customer has with an organization has an effect on satisfaction, loyalty, and the bottom line. Plotting out a customer’s emotional landscape by way of a Customer Journey Map, or Experience Map, along their path sheds ­­­­light on key opportunities for deepening those relationships.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A Customer Journey map is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product or brand, over time and across channels. Occasionally, a more narrative, text-based approach is needed to describe nuances and details associated with a customer experience.  The story is told from the customer’s perspective, but also emphasizes the important intersections between user expectations and business requirements.

Inspired by user research , no two journey maps are alike, and regardless of format they allow organizations to consider interactions from their customers’ points of view, instead of taking an inside-out approach. They are one tool that can help organizations evolve from a transactional approach to one that focuses on long term relationships with customers built on respect, consistency and trust.

All organizations have business goals but leveraging customer journeys as a supporting component of an experience strategy keeps customers (or members, patients, employees, students, donors etc.) at the forefront when making design decisions. They can be used in both current state review and future state visioning to examine the present, highlight pain points and uncover the most significant opportunities for building a better experience for customers.

How Do We Use Them?

Customer engagement is not simply a series of interactions, or getting people to visit a website, “Like” something on FaceBook, or download a mobile app.  Genuine engagement centers on compatibility, and identifying how and where individuals and organizations can exist harmoniously together. Giving thought to how your organization/product/service/brand fits into customers’ lives is crucial.

I also use journey maps to gain internal consensus on how customers should be treated across distinct channels. Holding collaborative workshops with cross-disciplinary teams mixing people who otherwise never communicate with each other can be extremely valuable in large organizations in particular.

Illustrating or describing how the customer experience could be brought to life across channels allows all stakeholders from all areas of the business to better understand the essence of the whole experience from the customer’s perspective. How do they want to be spoken to, what are they thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, and doing? Journey maps help us explore answers to the “what ifs” that arise during research and conceptual design.

What Components Does a Journey Map Include?

• Personas : the main characters that illustrate the needs, goals, thoughts, feelings, opinions, expectations, and pain points of the user;
• Timeline : a finite amount of time (e.g. 1 week or 1 year) or variable phases (e.g. awareness, decision-making, purchase, renewal);
• Emotion: peaks and valleys illustrating frustration, anxiety, happiness etc.;
• Touchpoints : customer actions and interactions with the organization. This is the WHAT the customer is doing; and
• Channels : where interaction takes place and the context of use (e.g. website, native app, call center, in-store). This is the WHERE they are interacting.

Nice-to-haves

• Moments of truth : A positive interaction that leaves a lasting impression, often planned for a touchpoint known to generate anxiety or frustration; and
• Supporting characters: peripheral individuals (caregivers, friends, colleagues) who may contribute to the experience.

The Process

1. review goals.

Consider organizational goals for the product or service at large, and specific goals for a customer journey mapping initiative.

2. Gather Research

Review all relevant user research, which includes both qualitative and quantitative findings to provide insights into the customer experience . If more research is needed, get those research activities in the books. Some of my favorite research methods include customer interviews, ethnography & contextual inquiry, customer surveys, customer support/complaint logs, web analytics, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

3. Touchpoint and Channel brainstorms

As a team, generate a list of the customer touchpoints and the channels on which those touchpoints occur today. Then brainstorm additional touchpoints and/or channels that can be incorporated in the future journeys you will be mapping. For example, the touchpoint could be “pay a bill”, and the channels associated with that touchpoint could be “pay online”, “pay via mail” or “pay in person”.

4. Empathy map

Empathy maps are a depiction of the various facets of a persona and his or her experiences in a given scenario. This exercise helps me organize my observations, build a deeper understanding of customers’ experiences, and draw out surprising insights into what customers need. Empathy maps also provide a foundation of material to fuel journey mapping. The goal is to get a well-rounded sense of how it feels to be that persona in this experience, specifically focusing on what they’re thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, saying and doing.

5. Brainstorm with lenses

The goal of lensed brainstorming is to generate as many ideas as possible in a short period of time. To gain focus as I generate ideas I use “lenses”—words representing key concepts, brand attributes or mindsets that help us look at a problem or scenario in a different way. For this exercise I recommend that the team agree on 3-5 lens words (for example: accessible, social, comforting), then set the clock for 2 minutes per lens word. Each person individually writes down as many ideas as they can think of in that time. After 2 minutes switch to the next lens word until all lens words have been used as idea inspiration. This ensures that every voice on the team is heard and generates a huge inventory of ideas.

6. Affinity diagram

This is a method to visually organize ideas and find cohesion in the team’s concepts. Affinity diagramming helps us shift from casting a wide net in exploring many possibilities, to gaining focus on the right solutions for this audience. All team members should put their ideas generated in the lensed brainstorming activity up on the wall. Have someone sort the ideas into categories and label them. As a group, begin to consider where you might combine, refine, and remove ideas to form a cohesive vision of the future customer experience.

7. Sketch the journey

Drumroll, please. This is the part you’ve been waiting for! It’s now time to put together all the pieces: timeline, touchpoints, channels, emotional highs and lows, and all the wonderful new ideas the team generated for how to improve the future customer journey. Get creative with how you lay it out—it doesn’t have to be a standard left to right timeline. It could be circular or helical. It could be one large map or it could be an interactive, clickable piece with embedded video. There are no templates, and there are infinite possibilities.

8. Refine and digitize

Journeys don’t always become a sophisticated deliverable—sometimes they begin and end as sticky notes on a wall or sketches on a whiteboard. But most of the time, when you go through the activities to arrive at a solid customer journey map, you want to polish it, leverage it in your work and share it with colleagues across the organization. If visual design isn’t your strong suit, consider collaborating closely with a visual designer who can transform the journey map sketch into an impressive artefact.

While journey maps are usually a tangible deliverable, like the one above, the process of journey mapping is what’s most important – it pushes us to think deeply about how we can use experience design to have a positive impact on our customers.

9. Share and use

It can be beneficial to maintain journey maps over time. For example, you could set a time each quarter or year to evaluate how your current customer experience matches your documented vision journeys. If your organization tracks quantitative KPIs, you can integrate these into a journey benchmarking process. Socializing journeys among stakeholders is critical in moving your organization toward action.

In addition to prioritization, the output of a journey map can serve as a backbone for strategic recommendations and more tactical initiatives.

For example, if you’re a mortgage company and you identify the closing process as a key area of frustration, anxiety and opportunity for engaging with the customer and designing for the “moment of truth”, then mark this as a high priority and get that on your strategic roadmap.

Schedule enough time to properly go through the recommended process. I’ve found that you can document a current state journey in about 3 hours, and a future state journey in about 5 hours. This makes for a full day to do both for one persona.

Make sure a good mix of people are involved in the journey map creation. It’s helpful to have stakeholder participants from many areas of the organization, as well as people of varying levels of seniority.

Once the journey maps are created, share them with zeal. Shout them from the rooftops and display them prominently in common areas.

Megan Grocki

Megan Grocki is an experience strategy director at Mad*Pow. With over 15 years of experience in research, experience design and strategy, she helps clients discover the expectations and behaviors of their audiences and identify opportunities for engagement. She has presented and led workshops at several UX, healthcare, and strategy industry events. In her spare time she is earning her master's degree in gastronomy with a concentration in food policy at Boston University. She hopes to leverage her design and strategy chops to educate the public about the connections between their health and what they eat, and use design to help affect changes in food policy at local, national and global levels.

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49 comments.

The post is incredibly good and very well explained. Well done Megan. Thanks UX Mastery for gathering this content and people.

Thanks Justin—I agree Megan did a great job explaining it, and we’re pretty proud of the resulting animation!

Keep an eye on the site as we tackle other UX techniques .

Megan – can you kindly post a better quality image to your final visual please – it certainly seems it will be worth reading your output. Good work!

That’s been done, Max.

Excellent Post Megan! Your process and explanations are easy to follow and very useful. I love the video too. I help people & groups as they through change and an early step in creating a compelling future is gaining a shared understanding of where we actually want to go. Techniques like the ones you’ve described here are so important to structuring the kind of dialogue needed to build that understanding! Thanks for sharing! -Steve

Great article, I agree with everything you’ve written. In my daily workflow, I use Mediatoolkit.com for media listening activities and I highly recommend it, because it enables me to be careful around the challenges you mentioned. :)

Great article Megan! As a Customer Journey Research provider from The Netherlands, it’s very interesting to read. The process and examples are well explained!

This is a really great article. It is well written and a step-by-step tool for mapping and exploring user journeys. The video is also excellent! Thanks!

Hey Megan!!

Just doing a little bit of research on customer journey maps for a talk and boom!! here you are!! This is very helpful information!!!

Great work. Thanks for sharing your methods.

Thanks for this article! However, several points are still unclear. For example – step 5) Brainstorm with Lenses. What exactly is the team brainstorming for? What ideas are we looking for? Shouldn’t the customer journey map be based on observing what frustrations and triumphs people have at each stage in the journey?

Similarly, I didn’t understand clearly how affinity diagramming fit into this process. Is it simply gathering and organizing all the data from research into potential steps in the customer journey?

Hope to hear from you soon! :) And thanks again!

Best wishes, Eureka UX Researcher at Piktochart

I had the same thought. I assume these are the steps for creating a future state journey map, not a current state.

Great post Megan! Thank you for the explanation and process mapping.

Thank you for your post and the video! We use it sometimes to explain our students in just several minutes how to build CJM. On step 4 we also try to identify mood (experience). And on step 10 we usually say “Iterate!” (: We also created a tool to create customer journey maps online – http://uxpressia.com .

Beautifully explained…Amazing how relevant this is for transporting your customer to a virtual world during a sales demo!

Hello Megan,

Very nice article & informative vide, ths for the share.

Regards, Ayman

Thanks for the great information. Very helpful and well-outlined. Much appreciated!

Love the intelligence and delivery. Off to put to good use hopefully! Thank you Megan.

Thank you for your thoughtful post. I’m finding that different groups in my company (engineers, sales, client services) all want and could benefit from user research assets such as personas and journey maps. However, they each prioritize different content. Do you happen to know of a tool that enables storing and maintaining a lot of content pieces (modules) about a persona and enables dynamic updating of “child” content? For example, if I tweaked the empathy map in the master, all the child artifacts that included the empathy map would be updated. I’d be happy to pay for a good solution, but have not found any. I also work on a mac… Thanks in advance for your help!

hi Megan thanks for your post being a student I have to create an assignment of a customer journey map of any service or any product can you tell me which software is to be used for this purpose.

Hello Megan for sharing extreamly good idea about customer journey map.Really Great Work.Keep it up

Thanks for brilliantly mapping the steps in visual form!

Excellent Megam, process mapping really well done.

Hey guys, what tool do you use Megan for the journey map? Can people recommend good free alternatives?

Great stuff… very helpful video.

1+1=3 Ger dig snabbt en bild av värdet i kundresan ur kundens perspektiv. vilka tjänster skall jag erbjuda med utgångspunkt från kundens resa

Well Done Megan! Great video.

One thing I’d maybe add for what it’s worth is the idea of interviewing Stakeholders as you begin the process. They can add some great ideas into what they perceive the customer pain points and relevant journeys to be. But more important than that, is that the Stakeholders will be more “bought-in” to your feedback when you present the final Journey Map product. That part is priceless.

Thank you for putting this together!

Hi, thanks for such an a valuable and insightful article. I’m just curious to understand more about affinity diagram. Could you elaborate more? From my understanding, I gathered that affinity diagraming is more of an activity than a documentation that requires a team discussion to gain consensus and categorize the deliverables from the preceding procedures into something more visual/documented? Could you elaborate more and point me in the right direction?

Trying to get in touch with Mad Pow Megan Grocki, does someone have her direct email address?

Thanks, Paul L

Some time has passed since we did that, but I think it’s still actual for the community. This year we’ve published a list of free customer journey maps templates here – https://uxpressia.com/templates . It is a pretty bunch of customer journey maps templates created for different business domains (including Healthcare, Travel, Banking, Telecom, etc.). All of them are based on the actual experience. You can download the template as PDF or start creating online map inside our tool based on that template.

All perfect and fine, but what I am always missing in discussions about user journeys is an overview of what we are ‘competing’ with. To achieve a touchpoint (meaning the client or user gives his or her attention to my app, or my service, or simply to me), what else is screaming for attention that the user then has to ignore.

I tried to discuss this here: http://www.expressiveproductdesign.com/competing-for-attention/

And did an attempt to create a template to help uncover the competition here: http://www.expressiveproductdesign.com/stickiness-creating-products-services-make-people-come-back/

Not sure if I am there yet. What do you think? Is ‘competition’ an issue in user journey mapping, and how do we best deal with this?

Great article!! In addition to all the pointers mentioned, would like to add the importance of CRM in regards to customer journey mapping. Traditionally retail stores, call centers, social media, and other channels were separately managed. However, now businesses cannot take the risk of handling these channels separately as it will result in a disjointed customer service.

Today the objective should be to have a broad single channel with multiple touch points. And that is only possible when all channels are merged.

Buisnesses who use a robust CRM software like ConvergeHub, Zoho or Infusionsoft are able to combine all communication channels to have a consolidated view of the customers and deliver consistent experience across all channels. So whether customers want to make a purchase, renew a service, or resolve a problem, they can do so in any of their preferred channels.

As the customers move across physical store, online e-commerce, social media and call centers, businesses can map the entire customer journey to provide a unified experience.

I dont see the highs and lows in the CJM?

This post illustrates well on this concept, thanks Megan, hope I have chance to translate the article into Chinese soon.

This is an awesome and very helpful post! Thanks for sharing these tidbits! I’d love to learn more.

This is immensely resourceful and precise. The nuances of user journey and the process explained in a lucid manner, keeping in mind the user journey of the reader. That’s a story within a story, using your technique to explain your technique. Thanks a ton, Megan. God bless!

Ditto. Very helpful, clear process to follow and great sample of the outcome. A watershed moment for me in documenting my own businesses CJM

Great post and video, thanks.

Wonderful post Megan

Great work, thank you very much!

Thanks for sharing, very useful post.

Thanks Kevin.

This is a really great article…concise with a great visual that really ties everything together well.

However, I struggle making these types of documents because of the abstraction. Frank isn’t real and the behavior pattern (the “journey”) has never happened. I know you pulled this from real data, but since I can’t tell what is real and what isn’t from this doc I am treating real behavior with equal weight to behavior you made up.

In fact searching for Healthrageous reveals a postmortem that admits they overbuilt and didn’t focus enough on market fit. This document fully embraces that admittedly flawed business approach…almost celebrates it. Do you think this document contributed to a false sense of security? Do you think it would have helped to surface more about what was real and what wasn’t, or is this document format more a symptom of this client’s approach than a cause?

Hi, I’am a trainee from Huawei Tunisia, i want to create a customer journey map and i’m looking for some examples of customer journey map for a telecom operator. Can you help me please with some design examples? I will be very grateful. Thank you.

This is a very informative document. I can’t wait to apply them. Thank you for sharing!

Thank you so much!!! Loved it:) Simple language & full of quality information:) Good job :)

Thank you so much its good

Hi, how to write the customer journey as a critical narrative. can u guide

Gorgeous 3-D Journey Map concept. Wish it was just a little less blurry!

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Blog / Journey Tools

11 Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Navigate & Analyze User Experiences

• February 29, 2024

Table of Contents

Understanding your customers can be challenging when dealing with a vast amount of unstructured data.

On average, businesses source their customer data from 28 different channels and house it in 17 different applications. This data may help to gain insights about their customer experience and meet their expectations, but a lack of control over siloed data fails to serve the purpose.

That’s where data visualization comes into play.

Using customer journey mapping tools, you get a comprehensive view of how your customers interact with your brand and identify the different touchpoints and conversion paths they take to convert. More importantly, you can put all your collected customer data into use by visualizing it into customer journey maps without having to navigate through different platforms.

We’ve compiled a list of 11 customer journey mapping tools to help you get started and create the most accurate and data-backed maps to help with your marketing decisions.

Key Takeaways

Optimize the customer journey with real-time analytics

Visually understand the customer journey from start to finish- and how it can be improved

1. Funnelytics

Funnelytics is a customer journey mapping tool that uses whiteboard technology to help you draw your entire customer journey on a canvas.

“ I am able to show my clients exactly how their funnel will look in a clean visual way. This is a great sales tool. ” – Sam K .

Integrations with top analytics software allow for real-time, in-depth sales funnel data on an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can present this data visually to your clients and stakeholders with ease, which is very handy for agencies.

Even better, using funnel simulations, you can forecast the results of your funnel plan before implementing it. This allows you to test out the probability of success vs failure for every approach you take, and an opportunity to optimize for best results.

The learning curve to start with Funnelytics can be a little steep for people who are new to creating visual maps to track and understand customer journeys. This is why our team created a great resource in our vault of funnels (essentially templates.) You can import these funnels into your builder easily, which will jumpstart your project whether you’re a beginner or a visualization veteran.

Moreover, you’ll enjoy our onboarding process, where we help you get acquainted with the tool while also offering clients optimization workshops and same-day support to get you unstuck whenever you need.

“ Tracking multiple traffic sources across multiple domains is not easy. This is why I use Funnelytics. ” — Quentin P.

Understand your user flow with Funnelytics

We help performance-driven marketing teams plan and improve the customer journey at every level

Pricing : $199–$999 per month

Key features :

• Highly intuitive.
• Easy-to-use interface with visual drag-and-drop features for easy mapping and customer journey tracking .
• The traffic explorer feature allows you to map backward.

Smaply is a customer journey mapping platform that allows you to centralize and digitize your customer experience insights. Its simple drag-and-drop features help you visualize different types of data to review your customer experience and identify key friction points.

You can see a lot of customer data at once in Smaply, because it displays multiple channels and customer journeys simultaneously. This allows you to show the differences between the two tracks for better decision-making.

Smaply also offers customizable templates that can be duplicated and re-used and collaboration features, which allow sharing of customer journey insights to the team in real-time.

A downside to Smaply is that its users find the cost on the higher end compared to the features it offers, which can be off-putting for those with tighter budgets.

Pricing : $0 – $29 EUR per month, offers custom pricing

• Simple drag-and-drop editor
• Feedback mode and sharing to help with collaboration
• Customizable templates

3. Custellence

Custellence allows you and your team to collaborate and combine your customer journey efforts into a single dashboard. It helps you create your customer journey map in minutes, which allows you to present a strong customer case and get a buy-in from stakeholders.

With Custellence, you can create elaborate customer journey maps, easily share them with your teams, and collaborate with them on your workspace. Like Smaply, it offers a stack of templates you can adapt and tailor for your own purposes.

However, when it comes to adapting the tool for more complex journey maps, many users find it difficult to apply customer journeys for different use cases.

Pricing : $0 to $34 per member per month, offers custom pricing

• Churn management
• Intuitive, lane-based interface,
• Flexible map structure

4. UXPressia

UXPressia is more of an all-in-one tool that helps you create customer journey maps, user personas and impact maps—that means all your customer experience assets stay in one place. See statuses, tags, and ownerships of each journey map you create and visualize everything from the big picture to the micro journeys.

This makes it easier to align your team and stakeholders from different parts of your organization for better collaboration. You can create designer-quality journey maps and tweak them to present to different people, which can save you a lot of time and effort.

Moreover, you can embed website, product, or service prototypes, marketing presentations, survey results, etc. into your journey map so you don’t leave out any crucial information.

Given the vast variety of features UXPressia offers, it can be a little clunky and complex, which often bugs users looking for simpler solutions.

Pricing : $0 to $36 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• 100+ free customer journey mapping templates
• User roles and teams for access control
• Version history
• Branding elements to help you stay on brand always

5. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is a visual whiteboard tool that allows teams to collaborate seamlessly—from initial ideas to successful delivery. This tool’s user-friendly interface and diverse tools make it easy to create diagrams.

Unlike tools like Funnelytics, it’s not specifically designed for mapping customer journeys around marketing and sales funnels. It’s more of a general intelligent diagramming tool that helps you assemble funnel maps, customer journeys, and flow charts.

However, that makes it suitable for any team for different purposes—the marketing team can create elaborate funnel maps while the design team can create flowcharts for their processes.

As a general-purpose tool, Lucidchart lacks several advanced features compared to its competitors, making it less of a versatile option for users looking for high-end functionalities.

Pricing : $0 to $9 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• Virtual whiteboard to bring your ideas to life
• Intelligent diagramming to visualize complex data
• Cloud visualization to optimize your cloud environments

Figma is more of a general-purpose design tool that has different modes with different purposes—development, design, whiteboard, and prototyping—all in one platform. It’s mainly an all-in-one tool for product teams to create, test, and ship better products faster and more efficiently.

While the prototyping mode helps you create realistic prototypes to test the interactive experience before launching, the FigJam (whiteboard) is the one you can use to create your customer journey mapping while collaborating with your team on an intuitive interface.

However, one of the limitations of this tool is the lack of advanced prototyping features, which can be a challenge for those looking to build complex customer journey maps.

Pricing : $0 to $75 per editor per month

• Easy collaboration allowing brainstorming and working on complex workflows.
• Open sessions that allow you to invite anyone for 24 hours.
• Live audio calls on the board.
• Timer and voting options.

Miro is a multi-purpose online collaborative whiteboard that can be used to build funnel maps, plan marketing campaigns, develop a roadmap, and more.

It allows distributed teams to come together, work on a common goal and manage the processes throughout different lifecycle stages.

The interactive and easy-to-use whiteboard platform allows you to strategize new initiatives while considering your customers’ needs and designing customer-centric solutions.

Miro offers six core capabilities to help you with a layout to get started under different scenarios such as process mapping, workshop collaboration, product development workflows, etc. However, users find it difficult to follow through, considering its vast range of features and workflows.

Pricing : $0 to $16 per user per month, custom pricing also available

• Miro Assist to help you automatically generate mind maps, diagrams, and codes for you.
• Multiple solutions include mind mapping, flowcharts, wireframing, process mapping, technical diagramming, and more.
• Easy to collaborate

8. Visual Paradigm

Visual Paradigm is a development tool suite consisting of design, analysis, and management tools to help you manage your projects. Its customer journey mapping tool allows you to study customer experience and illustrate customer relationships with your brand.

The interface you get on creating a new customer journey map isn’t very intuitive, and some might find it pretty basic compared to other tools mentioned in this list. However, fewer features and simplicity mean the tool is easy to learn and grasp, and you can create simple customer journey mapping within minutes.

Pricing : $6 to $89 per month

• Visual modeling
• Business analysis and design
• Drag-and-drop editor

Sketch is another multi-purpose collaborative tool like Miro that markets itself as the complete design platform. It’s available as a web app and a Mac app. While you can build websites, icons, apps, illustrations, and design systems using Sketch, you can use its prototyping feature for customer journey research and mapping.

It comes with a powerful vector editor and built-in prototyping, so it’s easy to create stunning journey maps. It also allows you to collaborate with your team using its workspace feature, where you can share designs and prototypes and offer feedback.

Since it’s not specific to customer journey mapping or sales funnel, many advanced features are lacking. To get started, you’ll need to build your journey maps from scratch without the support of dedicated templates.

Pricing : Starting from $10 per month

• Powerful vector editing
• Easy, intuitive prototyping
• Shared Libraries, styles, and components
• Reusable design templates

10. Flowmapp

Flowmapp is a UX design platform popular among startups, agencies, designers, developers, and other teams. Though it’s specifically designed for end-to-end website design and development, it can be easily used for creating customer journey maps with its prototyping and wireframing features.

Using its pre-made templates, workspaces, and collaboration features, you can create stunning customer journey maps while keeping everyone on your team on the same page.

One of the main drawbacks of this tool is that it doesn’t offer a customization feature for adding specific elements to the journey map. For example, information from the SERP will be added as a text block, not a screenshot.

Pricing : $0 to $126 per month

• Visual sitemaps
• Prototyping tools with many templates
• Import and export diagrams

11.  Microsoft Visio

A diagram and flowchart tool by Microsoft, Visio helps you visualize your ideas with dozens of ready-to-use templates and thousands of customizable shapes. You can either choose to purchase Visio directly or get it as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.

You can create flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, network diagrams, customer journey maps, and more with Visio and its simple user interface. You get all the latest diagramming features such as layers, containers, validation reports, shape sheets & drawing explorer, which allows you to create elaborate journey maps.

Some users find the pricing more costly than its competitors, which can affect those with budget constraints.

Pricing : $5 to $530 per month

• Easy to set up and use
• Workflow automation
• Comprehensive template library

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

With these many options, making a choice can be overwhelming. You need to consider your business requirements and the following factors.

• Visual/design capabilities : You should be able to design your customer journey maps in the way you desire—be it flowcharts, value ladders, or elaborate mindmaps.
• Intuitive/easy-to-use platform : You and your team should find it easy to navigate through and put the tool to proper use for creating and analyzing journey maps.
• Collaborative capabilities: The tool should allow you to invite your team members to collaborate and leave comments and feedback.
• Integrations with other tools : You need a customer journey mapping tool with integration capabilities to collect data from multiple platforms.
• Templates : You also need multiple templates to save time on creating maps.
• Customer pain point and journey optimization analytics: Your tool should offer detailed insights into the friction points in the customer journey. For example, in Funnelytics, you can analyze page insights in an elaborate form, which acts as an excellent heatmap alternative .
• Segmentation features : You should be able to segment journey maps into different groups based on the journey stage, touchpoint, channel, etc.
• Customer success team powered by experts : Access to customer support whenever you’re stuck is an absolute must.

Map your customer journey with real-time data

Customer journey mapping is a fun and extensive process that offers great insights into customer behavior and thought process, and Funnelytics is an excellent choice for a mapping tool.

We’ve put it as number one on the list because it connects whiteboarding technology to the user’s data. This allows you to map customer journeys, visually see how well they perform using split testing across the customer journey , and identify what portions of the journey or product to optimize. Moreover, it’s excellent for visual learners—you can visually see how people get to their site, move across pages, and where they drop. This allows for continuous improvement.

Funnelytics also has:

• A thorough onboarding process
• Customer journey experts who host optimization workshops
• Same-day support, as well as weekly live sessions where users can ask platform or strategy questions.

Learn more about customer journey tracking through Funnelytics’ blog , or get started today .

Implement your ideas faster with Funnelytics

Our visual platform makes it easy to see where customers need the most help in their journey

● What does customer journey mapping software do?

● what features do you need in a customer journey mapping software, ● why is a customer journey visualization platform a must-have.

Related resources

Sales Funnel vs. Customer Journey: What are the Differences?

Cracking the Code: Funnel Reporting for Marketers

The Customer Lifecycle Journey: What it is and How to Use it to Create Repeat Customers

9 Best Funnel Tracking Software Tools to Streamline Your Sales Success

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 .

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

In business, as in life, it's the customer's journey that makes the company's destination worth all the trouble. No customer wants to jump through several different hoops to get to your product: they want it fast and they want it now.

Following certain customer journey mapping stages helps you improve your user's experience (UX) to create a product they love interacting with, ensures you stay ahead of key workflow tasks, and keeps stakeholders aligned. But a misaligned map can derail your plans—leading to dissatisfied users who don’t stick around long enough to convert or become loyal customers.

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This article walks you through the eight key stages of great customer journey mapping, and shows you how to adapt each to your unique business and product to optimize the customer experience from start to finish. 

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

Hotjar's Observe and Ask tools let you go ‘behind the scenes’ to understand your users’ product experiences and improve their customer journey.

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visualization of every point of interaction a user has with your company and product.

Mapping out the customer journey gives you insights into your buyers’ behavior to help you make changes that improve your website and the user flow between touchpoints. This helps you increase online sales and turn users into loyal customers and brand advocates.

Follow these eight proven steps to understand—and enhance—the customer experience.

Note: every business is distinct, so be sure to adapt these steps to your particular user and business needs. 

1. Define your purpose

The first step to creating a successful customer journey map is to define your product's vision or purpose. Without a clear purpose, your actions will be misguided and you won’t know what you want users to achieve during their journey on your website, product page, or web app. 

To define your purpose, consider your company’s mission statement and incorporate your specific user pain points as much as possible. 

Make your purpose specific to your company’s needs and goals—for example, the purpose of an ecommerce brand looking to help users navigate several different products and make multiple purchases will differ from that of a SaaS company selling subscriptions for one core product.

2. Make sure your team is aligned and roles are clear

Cross-functional collaboration is essential when mapping out your brand's or product’s user journey. Get insights from different teams within your organization to find out exactly how users engage with key touchpoints to derive a holistic sense of the user experience (UX), which will help you improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Lisa Schuck , marketing lead at Airship , emphasizes the importance of keeping “anybody that has a touchpoint with a customer” involved. She advises teams to “figure out how to align your external marketing and sales with your internal operations and service.”

Although sales, product, and marketing departments are often the key players in customer journey mapping, also involve your operations and design teams that are responsible for creating the user flow. 

If you have a SaaS company, for example, marketing creatives, sales teams, product owners and designers, and your customer experience department all need to participate in the process. Clearly define who’s responsible for different aspects of the map, and regularly check in to make sure your final map isn’t missing any important perspectives.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Highlights feature to collect and organize key product experience (PX) insights and data on user behavior from teams across your organization to help you build your customer journey map. Then use Hotjar’s Slack integration to quickly share learnings with your relevant stakeholders to get buy-in and ensure everyone is aligned.

Hotjar’s Slack integration Slack lets teams discuss insights in the moment, so they’re up to date with critical issues 

3. Create user personas

Once you’ve defined your purpose and involved all relevant stakeholders, it’s time to design your user personas . Use resources like UXPressia and HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool to help you design various product personas . 

Create a range of user personas to understand what each type of buyer needs to curate a journey that’s easy and enjoyable for every customer. This is an important early step in the customer journey mapping process—because if you don’t understand your users, you won’t be able to fully comprehend how they interact with your brand to better it.

Create user personas for all your product’s possible buyers—for example, to map out a B2B customer journey for a company in the hospitality business means developing personas for a range of different customers, from large chain hotel managers to small vacation rental owners. 

4. Understand your user goals

Once you’ve designed your user personas, it’s time to define their jobs to be done . What do your users hope to accomplish when they search for your product or service? What do they want to do when they click on your website? Address and answer these questions to build a deep understanding of your users’ goals and pain points to inform your customer journey.

In a SaaS customer journey , perhaps users are looking for helpful comparisons of product features on your website, or want to easily sign up for a trial account in the hopes that your product will solve their problems. But you won’t know until you ask . 

Once you have users or test users, get direct insights from them with Hotjar's Feedback tools and Surveys to ask buyers exactly what their goals are as they browse different pages of your website or interact with product features.

Since user goals are at the center of your customer journey map, define them early on—but keep speaking to your users throughout the entire process to make sure you’re up to date with their needs.

5. Identify customer touchpoints

After you understand your users and what their goals are, it’s time to identify the ways they interact with your company and your product. 

"Touchpoints are the moments the customer interacts with your brand, be it through social media channels, your product, or customer support. The quality of these experiences affects the overall customer experience, which is why it’s important to be aware of them. Consider what happens before, during, and after a customer makes a purchase or uses your product."

Key customer journey touchpoints for a website or product include your homepage, landing pages, product pages, CTA buttons, sign-up forms, social media accounts, and paid ads. 

Collaboration is key to identifying touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. Include insights from different teams and stakeholders —your marketing and sales teams will have a strong understanding of the touchpoints involved pre-purchase, while the customer experience department can shed light on post-purchase touchpoints. 

Post-purchase touchpoints can help turn users into loyal customers and even advocates for your brand. 

In the words of Lisa Schuck, "When you create a raving fan, or a brand advocate, who goes out and tells the world how wonderful you are, you get social credibility and validity. It’s becoming more and more important to have advocates."

Pro tip : speak with your users regularly to get direct voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights on what they love and what frustrates them on their journey. Place Hotjar Feedback widgets and Surveys at key website touchpoints like your homepage and landing pages to get valuable user insights on what you can improve. Use Hotjar’s survey templates to get inspiration for your survey questions. 

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

Once your user and product research are complete and all roles are distributed, it’s time to map out the full customer journey.

First, map out an overarching customer journey by putting your key touchpoints in order and identifying how your various user personas interact with them. Then, home in on the details, looking at how customers engage with specific aspects of your website, product, or social media accounts. 

Breaking down the mapping process into smaller phases will ensure you don’t miss any key interactions. 

Here’s how an ecommerce brand could lay out general touchpoints, then narrow each down into more specific actions:

Pro tip : it’s helpful to think of the user journey in terms of different functions when mapping it out, like:

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

Serve: how are you serving customers when they want to purchase?

Retain: how are you promoting brand advocacy and customer retention ?

7. Test the customer journey

Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to take it for a spin. You can’t understand how your users move through customer touchpoints unless you test out the user flow yourself. 

Start with an informational Google search, then visit your website, check out your social media pages, and simulate the purchase process. This will help you get a better sense of how users interact with each touchpoint and how easy it is to move between them. 

Be sure to try out the journey from the standpoint of every relevant user persona. For an enterprise software company, this could mean looking at how decision-makers move through the user flow vs. the employees who’ll use your software day to day. 

By walking through the customer journey yourself, you can identify issues and difficulties that users may have to address them proactively. 

Try out the user flow with test users to get a realistic perspective of the user experience. Be sure to use focus groups that represent every one of your user personas. 

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

Continuously map out, analyze, and evaluate the customer journey by observing users and getting their feedback. Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings help you understand how your users are experiencing the customer journey on your website: create heatmaps to see whether users are clicking on CTAs or key buttons, and watch recordings to find out how they navigate once they reach your homepage.

Then, use Google Analytics to get an overview of your website traffic and understand how customers from different channels move through the user journey. 

Finally, once you have these combined user insights, use them to make changes on your website and create a user journey that is more intuitive and enjoyable.

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

Jamie Irwin , director & search marketing expert at Straight Up Search , says companies should avoid these three common mistakes when mapping out the customer journey:

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

Start by mapping out the overall journey, and only drill down into more detail once you have a broader, higher-level overview of the customer journey

Factor in every way that customers interact with your brand, even the ones you don’t have as much visibility on, like ‘dark social’ communications about your brand shared in private channels. Talk to your users to find out what they’ve heard about your brand outside of public channels , and use sticky share buttons to keep track of when your content’s shared through email or social media messengers.

Take a data-informed approach: don’t assume you already know your users —test out your hypotheses with real users and qualitative and quantitative data. 

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

Take the time to understand your business goals and users, involve the right teams, and test frequently to consistently improve your customer journey and make the decisions that will help you map out an experience that will get you happy and loyal customers.

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping helps you visualize how users interact with your business and product, from the moment they find it until long after they make their first purchase. 

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to gain insights into the buyer's journey to create a more enjoyable, streamlined, and intuitive experience for your customers.

What are the benefits of following a customer journey mapping process?

The main benefits of a customer journey mapping process are: : 

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

What happens if you don’t follow key steps in customer journey mapping?

If you don’t follow key steps when mapping out the customer journey, your map likely won’t give you the insights you need to enhance the experience users have with your most important touchpoints —like your homepage, landing pages, CTAs, and product pages. 

This can result in high bounce rates, low conversion, and unsatisfied users who fail to become loyal customers.

CJM benefits

Previous chapter

CJM touchpoints

Next chapter

Customer Journey Map Template

Map your customer journey and help your customers successfully get from A to B. Understand the reasoning behind their choices and design the best product experience and meet your customer's needs.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Customer Journey Map Template

A customer journey map, also known as a user journey map, is a visual representation of how customers experience your brand and company across all its touchpoints. In a customer journey map template, interactions are placed in a pre-made timeline to map out the user flow.

Since customers are the backbone of your business, it is important to understand their pain points, desires and needs so that you can create a customer-centric experience for them.

Many teams use customer journey mapping tools to visually represent customers' thought processes and emotions from their initial interaction until the end goal. This practice enables businesses to assess whether they are meeting their objectives. Doing so can improve their conversion rates and enhance the overall customer experience.

How to use Miro’s customer journey map template

Here are 6 steps to create a successful CJM using the customer journey mapping template. In each section, we will dive a little deeper, but remember, every customer journey map is different, so you may spend more time on one step compared to another.

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Identify your goal for the map. Identifying your ideal outcome will help set the foundations for a successful project.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

Why are you making a customer journey map?

Who is it specifically about?

What experience is it based upon?

Based on this, you may want to create a buyer persona. This is a fictitious customer with all their demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. Having a clear persona is helpful in reminding you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

2. Identify your user personas and define their goals

Use the Game-Changer container on the template to identify your persona.

Answer these three questions:

What are their key goals and needs?

What do they struggle with most?

What tasks do they have?

Conduct user research to help you in this process. Survey customers to understand their buying journey, or ask the sales team or customer service representatives for feedback or the most frequently asked questions. You would want to hear the experience of people who are interested in your product and who have interacted with it to understand their pain points and what can be done to improve.

3. Highlight target customer personas

Once you’ve discovered all the different buyer personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow the list down and select one or two to focus on.

A customer journey map is a specific journey one customer takes, so having too many personas on one map will not be a precise indication of their journey and not a reflection of their true experience.

4. Identify all possible customer touchpoints

Based on your research, you can now use this information to map out all the possible customer touchpoints your customer will face. Use the User Journey Map Template to add the outcomes you want your customer to achieve, and then map all the steps they need to take in order to achieve these outcomes.

List out all of the touchpoints your customer currently has, and then make another list of where you would like your customers to have additional touchpoints. Then check if there are any overlaps.

This step is vital as it can show you whether you have too few or too many touchpoints and gives you a rough idea of your current customer journey experience.

Touch points are not limited to just your website. Look at other areas such as:

Social media channels

Email marketing

3rd party reviews or mentions

Pro Tip:  Run a quick Google search of your business and identify all the pages that mention your brand. Verify this using Google Analytics to see what brings in the most traffic.

This step is very important as it can help you understand things like, are the lack of touchpoints the reason why my customers are turning away? If there are more than expected, are they getting too overwhelmed?

5. Build the customer journey map and try it yourself!

Once you have gathered all the necessary information and identified all the touchpoints your customer will experience, it will finally be time to start building your own customer journey map.

Ensure that you note down every point your customer will touch your business. Remember to add their actions, needs, pains, and feelings to your customer journey map.

Creating the map alone isn’t the end of the process. You will need to go through the journey yourself and analyze the results. By going through the journey first-hand, you will see the areas where expectations might not have been met.

For each persona, go through every journey from beginning to end and take notes.

6. Adjust as needed

Once you have gone through each persona map, you will get a clearer understanding of what your customers are experiencing.

Ensure that all the needs are met and pain points are addressed. No matter how big or small the changes are, every single change has an impact. And this small impact could be the deciding factor for purchase, signup, or download.

Add all the opportunities and improvements you could introduce to your User Journey Map Template . Brainstorm with your team ideas to implement changes, and make sure you assign the right team members to each process.

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What should be included in a customer journey map template?

Every customer journey map will be different. No map is linear, so it is okay not to have a direct A to B Journey. Below we have compiled a number of points that may be included in a customer journey map template:

1. Significant milestones

In order to begin with a successful customer journey map, it is important to draft a path your customer will be journeying through to reach your business’s goal. This step is also useful as you can preemptively identify potential hiccups that might ensue here.

2. User engagement

This element is where you map out the details of how your customer will interact with your site or product. Think of how you would like this to be in order for you to achieve your goal.

3. Emotions

As we seek positive experiences, it is also important to ensure our customers feel relief, excitement, and happiness. Therefore, to mitigate any negative emotions, ensure you have a clear and concise process with appropriate branding to avoid creating negative opinions.

4. Pain Points

When your customers are experiencing a negative emotion, there is a reason why. Adding pain points to your customer journey map will help you identify the reasons behind them and come up with a solution to fix them.

5. Solutions

And finally, add solutions. Once you and your team have identified the pain points, brainstorm and implement solutions to improve your user experience.

How do I use a customer journey map template?

You can create your CJM with Miro’s free Customer Journey Map Template and customize it according to your brand or product needs. When using your own CJM template, remember to define the scope, what touchpoints you want to analyze, and who inside your organization has ownership of which step.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Using a user journey map template can be key to better understanding your customers. Customer journey mapping puts you and your team in the mind of the customer and helps you to visualize what they are experiencing at each stage and touchpoint with your business or product. Outlining the stages of interaction, while keeping the customer front and center, allows you to identify any pain points that could be improved. This will better not only the customer experience but will help with customer retention in the long run.

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. Touchpoints can be found in places where your business comes in direct contact with potential or existing customers. 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 it’s important that the different types of touch points are considered in your customer journey map because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work-in-progress. Reviewing it on a monthly or quarterly basis will help you to identify gaps and opportunities for streamlining your customer journey further. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks. It would also be helpful to schedule regular meetings to analyze any changes that might affect the customer journey.

Do all businesses need a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping is important for businesses of all sizes. From SMBs to Enterprise. It is also important for all functions. From sales and marketing to customer service. There is no one size fits all for customer journey maps. Therefore, it is important to take time to personalise your own customer journey map to fully understand your own process and identify your own pain points.

Get started with this template right now.

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Customer Journey Map (2024): How-to & Examples [+ Template]

Home » Customer Journey Map   | 🕑 

Gust de Backer

November 10, 2023.

The Customer Journey is the process your customers go through with your company. This then covers the first to last interaction someone has with your company.

Many companies do not have a map of how their customers orient, what they care about or when the company comes into the potential buyer’s mind.

Not having enough mapping of the Customer Journey puts you at risk of having, perhaps unknowingly, negative touchpoints with your (potential) customer.

I’m going to show you:

• What the Customer Journey is
• How to create your Customer Journey
• And what good examples of a Customer Journey are

Let’s get started…

Table of Contents

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is the process that maps every interaction with your brand:

The first interaction someone has with your brand is the beginning of the Customer Journey. If you find yourself in a niche market, it can also be interesting to map interactions with your niche.

The Customer Journey for B2B and B2C often looks quite different:

The Customer Journey is relevant to any business, but particularly important for companies that:

• Are customer-centric
• Want to improve customer satisfaction
• Want to increase sales

In general, you often see in companies that the marketing department is responsible for ensuring that (potential) customers have a positive experience with the brand.

A nice trend you see is that marketing/growth teams are becoming more responsible for the entire funnel rather than just reaching and bringing in new customers.

7 Stages of the Customer Journey

There are different models you can use to map out the Customer Journey, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing:

Keep in mind the different roles of the Decision-making Unit , but essentially there are 7 steps you can include in the Customer Journey….

Your (potential) customer can have 2 types of needs:

• Latent need : the person does not yet know he needs something. If you are going to buy a car you are not yet directly concerned with insurance.
• Concrete need : the person knows they have a certain need, here it is important to be visible with your brand. For example, think of buying a phone when your old one is broken.

Every Customer Journey basically starts with a certain need.

In practice, you can encounter 5 types of customers in this:

• Unaware : don’t realize they have a problem or need.
• Problem Aware : realize they have a problem or need.
• Solution Aware : they know there are solutions to their problem or need, but they don’t know you.
• Product Aware : they know you, but haven’t bought you yet.
• Most Aware : brand ambassadors.

2. Orientation

The orientation process has changed a lot in recent years thanks to digitalization, which makes it extra important to map it out using research.

You want to be visible with your brand at least in the orientation phase so that you will eventually be included in the consideration phase .

Some examples of behavior in the orientation phase:

• Concrete keywords in search engines
• Asking acquaintances for their opinions
• Checking out inspiration platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok or Instagram

3. Consideration

In the consideration phase, we examine which option from the orientation phase best meets the customer’s wishes and needs.

Here it is important to know which decision criteria weigh most heavily for the customer; this should be properly researched.

Some examples of decision criteria:

• Brand awareness

4. Decision

In the decision phase, a product or service from a specific vendor is actually chosen.

There are a number of things that make it easier for the customer to choose your product or service:

• Make it easy to compare
• Provide a good selection in different options
• Offer a good deal, make sure your customer can’t say no
• Provide a smooth payment process
• Increase engagement in your brand by providing valuable content, offers and support

Provide as few distractions as possible during the decision phase, people who are still Googling “[company name] discount code” from the checkout want to be convinced to convert.

5. Delivery

After someone has become a customer, a product or service will need to be delivered.

Here the first moments of evaluation will be whether someone actually made the right choice to choose your company, product or service.

• Make sure you deliver on time and that your product arrives in the right condition or that your service is of high quality.
• Give clear instructions on how to use or what the added value of the service is.
• Provide good support if the customer experiences problems in using your product or service.

In the use phase it is important that customers get the most out of your product or service and that they really see the added value .

You can stimulate this in a number of ways:

• Include tutorials
• Measuring and communicating impact
• Aftersales phone call

This is the ultimate evaluation moment ; if your product or service did not help the customer well, there is little chance that they will make a repeat purchase or become a brand ambassador .

In any case, it is important to prevent people from talking badly about your brand, so make sure that in the earlier stages you already make sure that people who are not ideal customers for you are excluded and that you make sure that customers see the added value of your product or service.

It is 5 to 7 times cheaper to retain a customer than to bring in a new customer. This is precisely why it is so important to encourage loyalty.

Loyalty can be expressed in the number of repeat purchases or upsells a customer eventually makes with you. You can encourage this by offering valuable content, offers and support.

The goal is for people to remain loyal to your brand and not switch to a competitor or go out of business in the first place.

There are different forms of loyalty:

• Transactional Loyalty : getting customers to make repeat purchases by giving offers.
• Social Loyalty : interacting with your customers on social media, for example.
• Engagement Loyalty : you reward people who engage with you where you can receive points for subscribing to a newsletter, for example.
• Emotional Loyalty : if your brand is positively aligned with your customer’s emotions, you can’t get this kind of loyalty with offers. In this, you want to make people feel part of something.
• Behavioral Loyalty : a level of loyalty in which you want to make customers do something like buy higher volumes where you give a third product for free after buying 2 products.
• Advocacy Loyalty : you are going to reward people who recommend others to become customers of your brand.

Customer Journey Mapping

Download the Customer Journey Canvas:

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How do you complete the Customer Journey Canvas?

Once you know who all is in your Decision-making Unit, you can start creating personas and empathy maps so you can better understand the behaviors, needs, problems and wants of those individuals.

Determine what questions you would like to have answered after doing your Customer Journey Mapping research. Some common questions are: – When do you experience X? – On a scale of 1 – 10, how much would you like a solution to X? – How much are you willing to pay for a solution on X? – How would you orient yourself to a solution for X? – What brands would you consider in a solution for X? – What should a solution for X satisfy you in? – How would you go about determining if the solution was effective?

The threshold in terms of time and cost is often somewhat lower for quantitative research than for qualitative research. In it, you can gather good insights about your target audience from a helicopter perspective. Consider, for example: – Questionnaire – Post-purchase survey – Exit-intent Survey – Search volume

Once you have a high-level validated understanding of your target audience, you can begin to supplement your findings at a detailed level using qualitative research. Consider: – Customer interviews – User tests – Screen recordings

If you have made your Customer Journey Map comprehensible, you have gathered many insights on which you can improve your Customer Journey. To prevent it from becoming a dusty document that is no longer looked at, it is important to determine follow-up actions and evaluate them accordingly.

Common mistakes

There are a number of mistakes that you often see passed in Customer Journey Mapping:

• Based on assumptions : often you see that a Customer Journey is completely based on assumptions and not on validated research.
• Wrong scope : critically determine in advance where you want your Customer Journey to begin and end otherwise you quickly lose focus and overview.
• No customer perspective : reason the Customer Journey from your persona or customer and not from your company.
• Inside-out : if you start from how you do it as a company you are not customer-centric and there is going to be a mismatch in how the customer experiences something and how your company does it. Make sure your Customer Journey is actually completed from the customer’s perspective.
• Stakeholders : it is important to involve all relevant stakeholders so that you start creating support for the Customer Journey.
• End goal : the Customer Journey is not an end goal, but a starting point. It is something that will continuously play out and needs to be changed.

And now you…

Now you’re armed with enough knowledge to start visualizing your Customer Journey.

I’m curious, what has been the biggest insight for you in understanding your target audience?

Let me know in a comment.

P.S. if you would like additional help you can email me at [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

The 7 steps of the Customer Journey are: need, orientation, consideration, decision, delivery, use and loyalty.

A customer journey is a term used in marketing and customer experience management to describe the path a customer takes through the stages of awareness, consideration, purchase and use of a product or service. The term can also be used to describe the path a potential customer takes.

A customer journey map is a visualization of a customer’s experience with a company, product or service. It begins when the customer first becomes aware of a need and ends at the level of loyalty. The map tracks all the contact moments the customer has with a brand, both online and offline. Customer journey maps can help companies understand where they need to make improvements to provide a better experience for their customers.

The Customer Journey for every business is different. It is important to research for your business what the most ideal customer journey is, in doing so you want to validate all assumptions.

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Account-Based Marketing | Business Strategy | Customer Development Process | Customer Journey | Decision-Making Unit | Digital Marketing | Lead Generation | Market Research | Marketing and Sales | Marketing Strategy

Gust’s Must-Reads 👇🏼

• TAM SAM SOM
• Value Proposition
• Brainstorming
• Decision Making Unit
• Product-Market Fit
• North Star Metric
• Market Research
• Customer Development
• Growth Hacking
• Brand Identity
• Customer Journey
• Account-Based Marketing

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Ziet er zeer volledig en praktisch uit.

Bedankt Nicole!

Thanks! I’m trying to understand how to explain this approach in simple words, and your material is one of the best so far.

Thank you, Marie!

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Customer Journey Map

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