customer journey mapping wiki

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.

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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

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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.

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

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Everything you need to know before customer journey mapping

Both customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) professionals should require the use of user or customer journey mapping in determining the ideal customer and user experience, says Forrester Analyst Leah Buley in this EffectiveUI blog post .

The rising importance of CX and UX has inspired us to share our collection of the most comprehensive instructions from our corporate Miro library, which we hope will be helpful in your customer journey mapping too.

Look through this brief presentation about customer journey mapping or read the full article below.

Why did we collect this information? Because current trends prove that ideal customer experience is going to be a cornerstone of a company’s success soon.

According to Econsultancy Digital Trends 2015 report , which was based on a global survey, customer experience is considered to be the main opportunity in 2015-2020 to differentiate from competitors, beating out current markers of success (like product quality and competitive pricing).

Read our recent post on the four remote collaboration trends that drive the adoption of virtual whiteboards for customer journey mapping.

It means that customer experience soon will be, if it is not already, the key factor determining referral, retention, revenue and overall growth in the majority of businesses.

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The customer journey map (CJM) is one of the main tools that allows us to understand and improve customer experience. This video from Peer Insight shows a sample Customer Journey Map in action; but in essence, it is a graph which illustrates the steps customers go through: from initial contact, through the process of engagement, and hopefully into long-term loyalty. It may focus on a particular part of the story or give an overview of the entire customer experience as they interact with a company — whether it is a product, a website, a retail store, a service, or any combination of these. It usually treats individuals as real or potential customers, so it shows a path how people either become customers or leave.

The more interaction steps are described, the more complicated — but also the more informative and useful — such a map becomes.

There is an endless number of customer journey map templates, but a basic template includes a specific persona, the steps beginning-to-end of the customer experience (including touchpoints), and the potential emotional highs and lows. Other parts of the journey are optional and depend on your objective.

As Paul Boag, a user experience consultant, speaker & author of Digital Adaptation, says, participation in creating customer journey map is useful for all involved in product development :

However, the finished map could be simplified and expanded to the entire company under the condition of non-disclosure.

The process of customer journey mapping

The process of customer journey mapping varies from one company to another. Usually, it depends on the resources you have (people, time, equipment, etc.), the template, and the facilitator’s experience. Below you can find one of thousands of possible scenarios for customer journey mapping.

Step 1: Gathering information

During this phase, you have to define a customer persona that is relevant to your goal and the scope of activities you would like to assess, and then gather the maximum data about this persona. How does one gather this data? You will want both quantitative and qualitative information to gain the deepest insight into your customer.The more data you can get — the more chance you have to understand customer values and experience correctly.

The more data you can get — the more chance you have to understand customer values and experience correctly.

Quantitative customer research like surveys, testing, and web analytics will show you conversion rate and customers’ pain points. While this is important, it is almost useless without qualitative research that complements your data and gives deep understanding of customers’ emotions, goals, attitudes or motivations. Qualitative research includes interviews, focus groups, and field studies. Kerry Bodine , customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, even suggests inviting customers to a journey mapping workshop where you can ask them directly about their thoughts and feelings at each step of the journey.

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• Expert advice

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

Benefits of client journey mapping

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

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

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

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

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

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

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

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

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

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

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to zero in on a specific segment or, in journey mapping terms, focus on particular personas. Customer journey insights give you a deeper understanding of these individuals, helping you craft more effective marketing strategies. By identifying and analyzing key touchpoints —where your customers interact with your brand—you can better understand their needs and pain points, ensuring that each interaction is meaningful and contributes to a seamless overall experience.

How to build a customer journey map

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

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a map fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment.  

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example and learn how to make a customer journey map together. Once you understand the principles, you can apply them to create a journey map for any business, no matter the industry. 

Step 1: Define your persona

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

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

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

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

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

💡 Expert tips: 

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

Step 3: Define journey map sections

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Set customer goals

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

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

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

Step 5: Define touchpoints

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Processes and channels

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

Step 7: Problems and ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Pro tip: You can have your team vote on decisions either synchronously or asynchronously to determine which solutions to prioritize and implement. 

Step 8: Emotional graph

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

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

Step ?: Be Creative!

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

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

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

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

• Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
• Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.
• Metrics. In UXPressia, you can embed different metrics into your maps and personas, connecting your customer experience data with the customer journey and business KPIs.

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

Customer journey map examples

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

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

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

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

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

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

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

A customer journey mapping checklist

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

• Do research

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

• Define your customer persona(s)

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

• Specify journey map stages

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

• Decide on the map sections

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

• Set customer goals for each stage

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

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

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

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

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

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

• Add details about the emotional experience

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

• Use more sections

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

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

The free guide to download

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

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

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

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

Hello, Karim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The differences come from the names.

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

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

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

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

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

Good luck and happy customers!

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

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

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

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

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

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

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

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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.

Last updated

Reading time.

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 Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

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Shared understanding

Different types of teams need to share an understanding of different things.

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

The team has a  shared vision  and collective  purpose  which they support, and  confidence  they have made the right strategic bets to achieve success.

Proof of concept

Project teams.

Some sort of demonstration has been created and tested, that demonstrates why this problem needs to be solved, and demonstrates its value.

Customer centricity

Service teams.

Team members are skilled at  understanding , empathizing and  resolving  requests with an effective customer feedback loop in place that drives improvements and builds trust to improve service offerings.

• Help Center

A Guide to Customer Journey Mapping in 2023

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

What is customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

6 Questions Your Customer Journey Map Should Answer

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

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

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

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

Which channels are the most popular among customers? 

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

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

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

Four benefits of customer journey mapping

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

1. Understand the role of different touchpoints & channels

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

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

2. Identify customer pain points

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

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

3. Personalize the customer journey across channels

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

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

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

4. Create a customer-centric culture

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

1. Pick a goal and buyer persona

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

There are four common types of customer journey maps:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Identify all touchpoints & channels

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

Consideration

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

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

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

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

404 Error pages on your website.

Subscription confirmation or opt-in email notifications.

Transactional emails like receipts or invoices.

Customer reviews of your products or services on other sites.

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

3. Analyze conversion & engagement data from different channels

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

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

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

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

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

4. Interview customers for direct feedback

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

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

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

In what ways does our product help you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plot the routes customers take to reach the goal.

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

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

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

6. Optimize your website & marketing campaigns

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

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

Why an omnichannel strategy is the key to successful customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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Frequently asked questions

How many steps are there in a customer journey map.

Customer journey maps don't have a fixed amount of steps. Some maps cover a tiny part of the customer journey, others the entire lifecycle.

The number of steps each customer takes can even vary within the range of one map. Say a map portrays how people go from first brand awareness to purchase. Customer A might see an ad, search for product reviews on social media, read the company's blog, and then buy a product. Customer B is more impulsive and buys the product immediately after seeing the ad, skipping the two steps customer A took.

What are the main components of a customer journey map?

The main components of the customer journey map are its destination (or goal), the buyer persona it reflects, and all the touchpoints and their connections.

You can also add information at specific touchpoints, like customers' emotions, common issues you've identified, or metrics to track.

How can Twilio Engage help companies create customer journey maps?

Twilio Engage covers all important aspects of customer journey mapping. It helps you collect data at every touchpoint in the customer journey. It can then synthesize all that data into a single view of each customer, and use those profiles to orchestrate multi-faceted customer journeys in real time, based on user behavior.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

What is UX? Why has it become so important? Could it be a career for you? Learn the answers, and more, with a free 7-lesson video course.

Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

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1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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The 5 steps of successful customer journey mapping.

May 28, 2017 2017-05-28

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One common frustration about the process of customer journey mapping is the lack of organization-wide or even industry-wide standardization. What are the key steps of journey mapping , and in what order should they be completed?

Effective customer journey mapping follows five key high-level steps:

• Aspiration and allies: Building a core cross disciplinary team and defining the scope of the mapping initiative
• Internal investigation: Gathering existing customer data and research that exists throughout the organization
• Assumption formulation:  Formulating a hypothesis of the current state of the journey and planning additional customer research
• External research: Collecting new user data to validate (or invalidate) the hypothesis journey map
• Narrative visualization: Combining existing insights and new research to create a visual narrative that depicts the customer journey in a sound way

In This Article:

Phase 1: aspiration and allies, phase 2: internal investigation, phase 3: assumption formulation, phase 4: external research, phase 5: narrative visualization.

The first phase in a customer journey process starts well before any research or visualization has taken place. This step is easily the most critical, because, no matter how many insights a map reveals, a journey-mapping engagement without focus or buy-in will not be effective in optimizing experience.

A. Establish a cross disciplinary team of allies

Throughout a journey-mapping endeavor, you must bring stakeholders along. Without a doubt, journey mapping will reveal gaps and opportunities within the user experience that, organizationally, are beyond the authority of the UX professional driving the mapping project. You must have buy-in and engagement from a cross disciplinary team, so that, when those issues and opportunities surface, stakeholders with decision-making authority are already convinced of the soundness of your method and apt to understand the importance of resolving the problems it found.

Creating a team of allies is easier than you might think. Before you begin mapping, identify stakeholders from multiple departments whose knowledge will be helpful to you along the way, and whose help you may need once opportunities begin to surface. You’ll need to explain the value of journey mapping and what you hope to accomplish, and ask these stakeholders to be sponsors for the project in their respective departments (e.g., marketing, R&D, business analytics, or other relevant areas). Acquiring allies may be a quick process or take a long time, depending on your situation: If you are working on a small project, it could simply be a 30-minute conversation with your team; conversely, it may be a long process if you work with a B2B client or engage in an enterprise-wide journey-mapping initiative.

B. Determine the scope

A scope, or point of view, for the map must also be established before the mapping activities begin. To create focus and clarity for the map, make sure you can answer these questions: “Whose experience will I map? What experience, or journey, will I depict?” Furthermore, make sure that you and your core team (your allies) share a mutual understanding about the answers to those questions. Typically, the “who” is a critical persona or audience segment, and the “what” is a prioritized journey or scenario that has impact on ROI or long-term customer retention and relationships.

Once your core team is established and your scope is determined, begin researching within your own organization. What does your company already know about the customer or user? Most organizations have bits and pieces of data spread throughout teams; this data can be useful when pieced together to create a holistic understanding of the current state of the journey.

A. Send out a search party

You don’t have to conduct this entire search on your own. Put your core team of allies to work. Together, generate a list of questions that you would like to answer, then send your allies back to their respective teams or departments to search for any available documentation or data that can help begin to answer those questions. Good places to start include:

• Market-research surveys
• Brand audits
• Call-center or customer-support logs
• Site surveys or VOC (voice of customer) feedback
• Outputs from client advisory board (CAB) meetings

B. Perform stakeholder interviews

With these first clues in hand, interview your stakeholders to get additional insights. Use the internal data you have found to shape the interviews. For example: Did the market-research survey reveal that there is lack of trust? Maybe the front-end sales team has insight into why. Put together role-specific interview guides that can bring clarity to your findings. A typical list of roles to interview might be:

• Sales-team members
• Marketing-team members
• Support-team members (e.g., technical-support representatives)
• R&D team members or product owners

Spread your research across typical organization silos, such as products, channels, or geographic regions. If you are short on time, conduct focus groups composed of 3–4 internal employees in similar positions.

By the time you finish phase 2, you will most likely have gathered enough insight to formulate a tentative hypothesis about how certain pieces of the customer journey look, and what pain points exist. Start laying out that hypothesis in a draft framework, called an assumption map or a hypothesis map.

A. Synthesize the internal research

First, bring the internal research together into a coherent story. Share synthesized insights with your core team, as well as with any other stakeholders who need to be involved. Conduct small research share-outs or informal brown-bag sessions (where anyone can bring a lunch and catch up on the research going on in the project).

B. Create a hypothesis map as a team

Once your team has a shared understanding of the insights gathered thus far, bring them together for a collective mapping activity. It’s useful to hold a short workshop session to map out the draft framework (or hypothesis map). You can even invite customers to this meeting so that their input shapes the early draft. Just remember: This is a draft, and it needs to be validated against external research.

When the draft map is complete using data and insights from your internal investigation, the next step is to validate it with customer research to fill in gaps.

A. Use the hypothesis map to shape your user research

The hypothesis map will most likely reveal large gaps within the customer journey that you are unable to visualize because there is no existing data. These areas are critical to explore in customer research, so that, at the end of the process, there are no holes in understanding. Additionally, you’ll need to validate (or invalidate) the hypothesis map.

B. Use qualitative research methods to validate and fill in gaps

Choose research methods that put you in direct line of observation with your customers or users. Use a multipronged approach — select and combine multiple methods in order to reveal insights from different angles. Depending on the context of your project, some relevant methods for journey-mapping research include:

• Customer interviews
• Direct observation
• Contextual inquiry
• Diary studies

If your budget or timeline is limited, a small sample size (6–8 research participants) is enough to get started. Remember to continue to involve your core team of stakeholders along the way by sharing research findings, so that they are not shell-shocked if something changes within the draft journey map that they have helped build.

The map itself is simply a tool that will help you share your research findings in an engaging way with others. At this point, you need to create a visual narrative that will communicate the journey and all the critical moments, pain points, and high points within it. A good method is to have another workshop with your core team. Having built context and common ground throughout your research process, bring them back together and evolve the hypothesis map based on your primary research findings.

From here, you can determine what to do next. If you have a small, engaged team, this collectively produced (probably unpolished, sticky-note, or virtual-whiteboard) version might be enough to move forward. If you are working with a client, or need to share your insights out in a formal way, you might need to create a polished visual.

Following these five high-level steps will ensure that you produce an output based in user research, that you make use of available data, and that, most importantly, at the end of your mapping initiative, you have a team of allies that are engaged and ready to act on the insights revealed during the process.

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The Ultimate Guide to Customer Journey Mapping

Introduction.

As customer expectations reach a fever pitch, organizations can no longer get by with adequate customer experiences. To grip customers and build long-term devotees, brands need to understand the customers’ journey, identify their needs, and launch a strategy to wow them.  Customer journey mapping is the ultimate tool to help a brand reach into the customer’s experience, identify pain points, anticipate needs, and craft experiences that set companies apart. By employing customer journey maps effectively, brands can boost customer experience, fortify brand loyalty, open new cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and unlock substantial growth.  That’s why we’ve designed this ultimate resource on customer journey mapping. We dive into the ins and outs of customer journey mapping and pinpoint the secrets to mapping strategies that engage and draw in more customers.

Download a PDF version of this guide by filling out the form below

What is customer journey mapping

Why is customer journey mapping important, types of customer journey mapping plans to target, steps to building a cx-focused journey map, how to wring the most value out of journey maps, using journey analytics to supercharge strategy.

Customer journey mapping is a strategy that organizations can use to identify a customer's needs, values, desires, and friction points across different touchpoints. 

These insights can inform a broader customer experience strategy and reveal growth opportunities. It’s important to note that successful customer journey maps are not designed from the viewpoint of company leaders or brand managers. Instead, they peer into the perspective of the customer to plot out their experiences, frustrations, and needs.

7 Essential Elements of Any CX Program

Create Crazy Loyal Customers with Andrew Reise

Customer journey mapping is critical to align an organization’s mission with customers’ needs, desires, and expectations.

On a more granular level, here are a few ways that customer journey maps sharpen a view of the customer’s perspective and elevate the customer experience (CX): 

Gather in-depth customer intelligence

Customer journey maps dig deeper into the customer’s experience than traditional survey approaches. As a result, they reveal the moments that are important to customers and unearth instances that impact their perception of the brand.

Pinpoint inconsistencies and friction points

Separate intentions from reality, understand customer feelings, pinpoint opportunities.

Why Future-State Journey Mapping isn’t Optional – and How to Get Started

Why Quantitative Surveys Fall Short When it Comes to Customer Experience (CX)

Plans to Target

Customer lifecycle, moment of truth, experience capability.

• Lifecycle phases/journeys
• Micro journeys
• Mindset articulation
• Touchpoints
• Pain and gain points
• Moments of Truth
• Voice of the customer
• Operational, channel, customer score, and performance data
• Opportunities

The 3 Tiers of Customer Experience Journey Mapping

The 3 Types of Customer Journey Mapping

Wondering how to develop customer journey maps that zero in on the customer’s experience? These are the steps to building a CX-focused journey map:

Step 1: Plan

Not sure where to start? Here are a few guiding questions to carve out a plan:

• What is this map’s purpose?
• Who are the key users?
• Which customers are being targeted?
• What is already understood about these customers?
• What segments should be included?
• What time period will the map cover?
• Where will the map live? Will it be digital only, presented at a visual image in a conference room, or take another form?

Step 2: Gather Research and Data

• How did you feel when ... ?
• What’s most important to your purchase decision?
• What’s going well?
• What’s missing?
• What took too long or was harder than it should have been?
• What has been critical to your experience?
• What steps are repetitive or unnecessary?
• What would you change?

In addition to listening to customers, it’s important to gather input from key stakeholders. These figures can help identify sensitive areas or opportunities in the customer experience that deserve a deeper look.  

Step 3: Build Map and Moments of Truth

The next step is to build the map and plot critical moments. During this stage, build out the map’s wireframes and gradually fill these frames in with touch points, channels, and pain points with customer experience data to add insights to the journey. Throughout the process, it’s important to identify how customers started their journey and note any clear steps or interactions that emerge from the findings.

After customer paths and interactions are charted, search for moments of truth. These are those critical instances that define the customer’s experience, and ultimately are most impactful to a customer’s decision to purchase, engage or stay with a brand. Choose carefully. Moments of truth should be interactions that have the power to make or break the customer’s experience and bring the brand to life . 

Step 4: Identify Opportunities to Take Action

• How many people will be needed to seize this opportunity?
• What processes need to be changed?
• What technology changes are needed?

Step 5: Socialize

Customer Experience Strategy

How to Create A Customer Experience Framework

Once journey maps are designed, it’s time to start using them to deliver a memorable customer experience. At this stage, there are ways to pull more value out of mapping and drive more lasting results. These are a few creative tactics to wring more out of journey maps:

Tying Customer Journey Maps to Key Metrics

Customer behaviors can shift, and one of the best ways to keep up with those changes is to connect customer journey maps to metrics—for instance, gathering ongoing feedback about customers’ preferred digital channels or methods of communication. With this info in hand, the organization can adjust to and keep up with changing customer preferences . 

Act Out Role-Play Scenarios

One way to help employees crawl into the skin of customers is to act out roles. For instance, organizations can list out common challenges and role-play as customers and service providers. This helps bring customers to life, and it can jumpstart problem-solving. 

Create Visual Graphics 

Another way to amplify journey maps’ messages is to distill takeaways into visual graphics. This breaks down the customer’s full journey in an easily digestible way during onboarding. It’s also a useful way to pass messages on quickly to multilingual global staff members.

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The best journey maps aren’t stagnant. They’re living documents that shift alongside customers’ needs and organizations’ goals. That’s why journey analytics is so important. Measuring journey figures can identify what’s working, how customer experiences are changing, and new opportunities to propel growth. 

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Cross-channel support, common goals and a cx vision, data analytics, stakeholder management , elevate a brand’s cx capabilities.

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• Everything You Need to Know about Customer Journey Mapping

Featured in:

The approaches towards customers change over time as does the market itself. Successful entrepreneurs continuously seek and implement new management opportunities in order to attract, maintain and broaden their circle of customers.

Traditional marketing approaches are not completely suitable any longer because customers have higher expectations due to the differentiation of the market. What this means is that marketing based on managing relationships with customers must evolve into experience and engagement management.

One of the approaches which have been employed by marketers and entrepreneurs in an effort to achieve customer satisfaction is the Customer Journey Mapping . An increasing number of companies has been giving Customer Journey a chance in the past few years, and the general attitude towards it is rather positive. For the time being it is used mostly for providing clarity on customers’ attitudes, mapping out the current state of the company and identification of improvement possibilities.

© Shutterstock.com | elenabsl

In this article, we will present everything you need to know about Customer Journey through sections 1) Introduction to Customer Journey , 2) Elements of Customer Journey Mapping, 3) Touch points / Channels in Customer Journey Mapping, and 4) Customer Journey Mapping Process .

INTRODUCTION TO CUSTOMER JOURNEY

The concept of Customer Journey was created in the late 1990s as an outside-in technique in business management. The outside-in approach focuses on improvement of customers’ experience in order to resolve problems and ensure continuous positive relations with them.

It targets optimal customer engagement through proper management and credit attribution of touch points and channels through which the customer interacts with an organization or a brand . The necessity of such an approach rises from the realization that all interaction points and mediums have value in the process and should be stimulated appropriately. Moreover, it tries to create a more holistic view of customer behavioral patterns – understand emotions, desires, and needs as well as influences of the company’s endeavors on them.

One of the crucial components of Customer Journey is the collaborative approach of different departments which constitute a company. Customer Journey advocates believe that only by ‘breaking down the silos’ the company can acquire the above-mentioned insights and reach its objectives – loyal customers who advocate and bring in new ones.

The most important tool of Customer Journey is the Customer Journey Map. It is a structuralized scheme of the elements of customer experience process, touch points of interaction with the organization, channels through which it is obtained as well as a ‘behind the scenes’ overview. In other words, it includes what you want to provide to the customer and what the customer would like to receive from you in different stages and the gaps where these two lanes are not compatible. In the following sections, we will focus on description and explanation of all of these.

ELEMENTS OF CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING

Key elements of Customer Journey Mapping are phases of a customer’s experience lifecycle – that is, phases through which a consumer progresses in reference to a certain company. In this section, we will discuss most frequent elements used in Customer Journey Mapping.

Consumer awareness is the amount of recognition which a potential customer has a particular brand as well as the extent of specific product association to a brand. It is extremely beneficial for companies to be differentiated from the competition (if the awareness is not negatively-driven) because consumers tend to turn to something familiar, especially if there are too many similar options. Moreover, such brands tend to be advocated in family and friends circles and lead to continuous advertisement and establishment of a strong hold in the market.

Customer Journey Mapping has the assignment of presenting the amount of awareness your segmented customers have for your brand, the rate of success your campaigns have the awareness percentage and the gaps between what is required for and what is being done in matters of elevating customer awareness.

Once your targeted customers become aware of your products and services and gain interest in them, they undertake a process of information acquisition. Customers propose inquiries on the product and interact with branches of your company whether through a query made to a call operator or face-to-face communication with one of your sales representatives at the Point of Sale (PoS) in your store. Moreover, the process of Pricing will be put in motion by your customers. This means that they will evaluate the cost of the product or service they are interested in with reference to how much they are willing to spend for it.

Customer Journey Mapping should provide insights on whether the interaction is informative, useful and engaging for your customers and if not it should point out issues you should take care of. Also, it should detect balance or lack of it in the pricing process.

When your customers opt for the purchase of a good or service you are offering, they experience an emotional response to it. The response should contain a feeling of satisfaction, and this is achieved mainly by simple and fast transaction process as well as a feeling of paying a reasonable price.

Customer Journey Map must include quantitative and qualitative statistics on the experience your customers have in the process of purchase. If the statistics show lack of positive emotions in the majority of your segmented customers, you should revise technological strategies towards payment opportunities, sales representatives’ competencies, as well as your pricing determinants.

Post Sales Support / Use of Product or Service

Post sales support represents a wide area of consumer management after purchase of a sort has been made which is focused in ensuring proper functioning of and help with the use of a product or a service. It can be technology oriented and involve the assistance with technology merchandise, consumer-oriented when it helps customers in the management of the product and automatic which is available for consultation at all times and is mostly online based. Moreover, post sales support can be embodied in the form of permanent or provisory warranties for the purchased good or service.

Your Customer Journey framework might point out that customers are not satisfied with the quality of (some or all) your existing post sales support tools or find that your company does not provide post sales support tools which they need. Moreover, it should determine whether the usage of a product or a service meets your customer’s expectations.

One of the crucial elements in customer management is the way complaints are addressed. When a customer presents, a complaint he/she must feel like the company is engaged with the problem and is going to take care of it in a timely manner. If the customer receives no understanding or repeatedly help, he/she will probably acquire a permanent negative opinion of the company and advocate against it.

Use the Customer Journey Map to define the amount of consumer satisfaction in reference to how your company deals with their complaints.

Bonding With Product

In order to ensure loyalty of your customers, you should let them feel appreciated and thought of repeatedly. Moreover, you should offer them new and useful ways of investment with your company – this is frequently done through renewal and upgrading of your products and services according to needs and preferences of your customers.

Your Customer Journey Map will be able to provide insightful information for new projects according to specified desires of your customers.

Positive advocacy shows that you have done all of the previous elements in synchronization with your customer’s expectations and needs. Negative advocacy shows your company is doing something wrong in regard to its customers.

By setting a Customer Journey framework, you will be able to detect problems or gaps in your customer management efforts and consequently make way for improvements.

TOUCH POINTS IN CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING

As we have mentioned in the introduction, touch points have an immense value in the Customer Journey process. They represent any and every interaction a customer has with the company. In the recent decade, the touch points and channels broadened to the online market in addition to traditional face-to-face or telecommunication interaction.

Touch points in Customer Journey Mapping are regarded as a team of players who all make the conversion happen. It is like a soccer game: although one team member scores the goal, every team member who navigated the ball in an attack made the goal possible. It is essential to attribute credit properly to each of the touch points and ensure their optimal influence in the Customer Journey. Moreover, collaboration between different touch points is crucial for achieving specific contextual approaches while remaining consistent for the customer.

Below are some of the major key touch points of customer experience with an organization with the brief and general key notions on how each of them should be handled.

• Easy access (for example, implementation of Search Engine Optimization techniques)
• Simple to use (especially the payment procedure)
• Clear and informative
• Visually appealing
• Adaptation of channels for mobile usage
• Applications

Face-to-face

• Positive and pro-active approach

Word-of-mouth

• Advertising
• Brand awareness
• Satisfied loyal customers
• Constructive, personalized information or offers
• Topics which customers will find interesting and useful

Here is an example of touch points for a travel agency. Investigation on the touch points of purchasing a service – booking a trip, showed that your customers tend to look up the destination of their interest on their mobile phones though a simple inquiry on a search engine (typing ‘travel to Paris’). It would be advisable to invest in high ranking your website through the Search Engine Optimization techniques . The next step, the customer makes is reading through the information and services you offer on your webpage – it is important to adapt the utility of the page in reference to the type of medium your customers might want to employ – mobile applications, tablet or desktop. Once the information and decision for purchase have been made, you must provide a simple and useful payment system. Studies show that complex systems discourage customers and can result in cancellation of purchase or at least no desire to continue conversion relation in the future.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING PROCESS

After learning about the elements and the touch point of customer journey, the next step is to define the process of how you can develop the customer journey map of your customers. Below is an illustrative example of such map as well as the steps for you to follow to create it for your customers.

Step #1: Map

• Start With Words: After you have decided to create a Customer Journey Map, you should form a collaborative team of people whose abilities will be most beneficial for the task. Your team should be built with respect to all of the segments you wish to cover with your map in order to create a correct and insightful review of the customer journey. Agree upon a precise objective of your journey map: do you want to investigate a specific process or build your organization’s ecosystem map (an all-inclusive map of all the processes of customer management). Moreover, segment the targeted customer/s whose journey you wish to analyze. Define roles and responsibilities of your team members.
• Create a Story Board: Once you have determined the scope and scale of your Customer Journey Map, create a story board which will include all of the elements of segmented customer/s journey. Include all of the experience the customer/s had or might have with your company from initial contact (awareness) to an end of a sort (loyalty, advocacy or closure of relations).
• Define Touch Points and Channels: Determine all of the touch points where customers interact with your organization (social networks, ads, applications, search engines, website) and their channels (various mediums for virtual interaction, call centers, stores, etc.).
• Explore Your Customer’s Drivers: Define what are customer’s expectations and requirements of each of the touch points and channels. Interview your segmented personas and give them opportunities of feedback. All of the information is essential for having a correct and usable customer journey map.

Data Gathering

Here you should go as detailed as necessary in reference to your objective. Gather quantitative and qualitative statistics on sales, complaints and support requirements as well as analysis on satisfaction with the products and services.

Map Creation

Through primary stages of map creation, you should implement an interactive approach to map creation – your team might use post-its and markers to create a map which you will later install in a Customer Journey software. Customer Journey Map will include all of the gathered data in relation with key elements, touch points and channels and will provide a structuralized result of your examination.

Step #2: Analyze

• Use collaborative insights from team members of different departments in your organization;
• Prioritize and rank information in the map;
• Recognize gaps, issues and opportunities for improvement;
• Agree on some adjustments in cross-channel and intra-channel management in order to maximize utility of elements of customer experience;
• Revise touch points and optimize their efficiency in relation to the preferences and needs of your targeted customers.

Step #3: Present

• Organize all of your findings and adjustments in a ‘roadmap’ for the company;
• Present to employees, managers and owners in order to achieve full comprehension of the tasks which must be made in order to improve the customer experience (as all of them have influence on the efficiency of implementation of results and ideas);
• Monitor and manage the realization of projects;
• Do not hang the Customer Journey Map on the wall as a passive and static result. It is a tool and must be actively adjusted and updated in order to provide continuous understanding of the Customer Journey.

The market is bursting with entrepreneurs and companies in all niches. It is becoming more difficult to maintain a solid presence, maintain customers and attract new ones. The traditional inside-out approach to business management does not seem to cut it anymore. With so many options from which the customers can choose a profit-only orientation has a good chance of ending up being acquisition by a larger enterprise or bankrupt. What proves to be the only real solution is making the customers perpetually happy. For so long companies focused only on the relationship with the customers up to the point of purchase. Basically, consumers were regarded as cash machines which can be easily replaced when broken (discontent). The Consumer Journey is a process established as a helpful instrument for resolving burning issues of the modern market – keeping and broadening circle of customers. It is an effort to understand the total process which leads to conversion, ways in which it can be improved as well as issues which need to be addressed and gaps which should be filled. For further investigation on goals and features of Customer Journey Mapping take a look at the comprehensive webinar by experts on Customer Experience Management Claire Sporton and John Dalton and watch interesting short productions on Moments of Truth and Outside-In Perspective by Future Smith company.

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What is customer journey mapping?

The more steps involved to complete the specific action, the more detailed the customer journey map will be.

With the goal to improve the overall customer experience, customer journey maps help your company maintain a customer-centric mindset, identify any bottlenecks or siloes, and quickly spot what needs to be addressed. Businesses often have multiple customer journey maps, each reflecting a different area where the customer engages with your business or brand.

Customer journey mapping tools are found in many CRM systems— they can be created with standalone software or tools, or even be completed with a pen and paper.

Dynamics 365 helps tailor every customer touchpoint

The benefits of customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is an excellent way to learn more about channel performance, customer engagement, and customer needs. Here are some of the benefits of customer journey mapping:

Clarify channel performance.

Help spot bottlenecks or see significant successes—a visual representation helps you easily identify areas that need your attention.

Understand customer needs.

Create a level of familiarity with the customer experience that you may not have had previously.

Improve decision-making.

Offer direct insight that can help determine the next steps based upon the actual experience of the customer.

Improve the customer experience.

A consistent drive to improve the customer experience can boost sales and increase customer loyalty—and customer journey mapping can be instrumental in your efforts.

What type of customer journey map should you create?

You might be surprised to find that there isn’t a “correct” template or way to do a customer journey map—what you track will be specific to your business and your customers. However, there are a few common types of customer journey maps.

Current state

Providing a broad overview of all the ways your customer engages with your company, current state customer journey maps are the most commonly used. Current state customer journey maps are often found in the following scenarios:

• User experience (UX) Track how your customer engages with your website, application, or software.
• Marketing and sales automation Track the journey your customer takes when finding out about your product or service and becoming a customer.
• Customer experience Track the lifecycle of the overall customer relationship, from awareness and acquisition through to delivery and service.

Day-in-the-life

Focusing on the mood and mindset of the customer, day-in-the-life customer journey maps track actions, sentiment, and engagement touchpoints to offer unique, customer-specific insight.

Future state

Used when planning an upcoming product or experience, future-state customer journey maps help you plan and prepare the type of customer experience you would like to offer.

Service blueprint

Working in conjunction with another customer journey map, the service blueprint acts as an additional layer, helping clarify what systems need to be in place in order to deliver the customer experience you intend to provide.

How to create a customer journey map

Preparation: define the scope.

• What are you hoping to learn? Setting clear goals from the onset of a project helps define the scope and focus of your efforts. Identify what you would like to learn, which helps determine what information you will need to gather.
• What scenarios are you interested in? Consider the contexts where you’d like to gain broader insight about the customer journey. From sales to user experience, plan out the scenarios you would like to map.
• What channels are included? Based upon your goals, what data would be helpful to have? List out the information you will need related to each channel you’re looking to measure.
• Determine the number of customer journey maps you will build. Customer journey maps can provide insight across a variety of scenarios, but don’t get intimidated by the amount of work ahead of you. Start small and prioritize—you can build more customer journey maps as you go.

Step 1 – Develop a customer backstory

Who is your customer? Take the time to list everything that you know about them: Details, motivations, and what he or she does across the course of a day. Build as much of a backstory as you can; the more detail you have about your customer, the more accurate you can be in creating a thorough customer journey map.

• Outline pain points, goals, needs, etc. What does your customer struggle with throughout the process? What are the customer’s goals? What does your customer need? Get clear on the main pain points that motivate the customer to act.

Step 2 - Build the customer journey

• Create a template. Your customer journey often follows a visual progression, which can be inside a grid or table format, or can look more like a process flow. The approach you take is completely up to you. The goal is to create a structure that logically reflects the progression of the customer experience and provides the level of detail you’re trying to achieve.
• Plot each touchpoint. Touchpoints are all the moments or places where customers interact with your business. This could be in person, on the web, through a call, etc. List out each touchpoint, and then arrange them in order on your template.
• Add detail. Get clear on what action the customer must take at each touchpoint. Include what the customer is thinking, doing, feeling, and experiencing. This information can be invaluable in determining areas of friction and finding ways you can improve the customer experience.

Step 3 - Analyze the customer journey

• Evaluate the customer experience. As you review your work, clarify how your customer experience meets your business vision. Are you delivering on expectations? Is there anything you notice that needs your attention?
• Identify bottlenecks or friction. What obstacles do your customers face across the experience that you provide? Where are the most significant points of friction? Once you identify this information, what actions should you take to begin improving the customer experience?

Step 4 - Resolve areas of concern

• Take steps to make the customer journey more frictionless. With a visual representation of how your customer moves through the experience, you have a clear understanding of what requires improvement.

Why use customer journey mapping tools

Building a customer journey doesn’t have to be difficult—customer journey mapping tools are often built into  marketing automation , streamlining the process of creating and sharing customer journey maps. They’ll help you:

• Stay proactive with a real-time view. Build live, digital customer journeys that offer accurate, up-to-the-minute knowledge of funnel performance—empowering your team to take the right action.
• Create unique pipelines based upon customer behavior. The ability to scale, pivot, and build unique views helps you customize your customer journey maps to convey the information that matters most.
• Offer seamless, personalized experiences for your customers. Build live customer journeys organized by segment to deliver unique, personalized experiences.
• Improve the customer experience across all touchpoints. Customer journey maps help identify areas that need to be addressed, allowing you to continually evolve the customer experience.
• Build customer journeys quickly with an easy-to-use interface. Where paper-based, static customer journeys take time to prepare, customer journey mapping tools help you build customer journeys in minutes.

Create your own customer journey map

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