definition of customer journey map

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

Customer journey maps are visual representations of customer experiences with an organization. They provide a 360-degree view of how customers engage with a brand over time and across all channels. Product teams use these maps to uncover customer needs and their routes to reach a product or service. Using this information, you can identify pain points and opportunities to enhance customer experience and boost customer retention.

“ Data often fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences of customers. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.” — Paul Boag, UX designer, service design consultant & digital transformation expert

In this video, Frank Spillers, CEO of Experience Dynamics, explains how you can include journey maps in your design process.

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Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

Customer journey maps are research-based tools. They show common customer experiences over time To help brands learn more about their target audience. 

Maps are incredibly effective communication tools. See how maps simplify complex spaces and create shared understanding.

Unlike navigation maps, customer journey maps have an extra dimension—time. Design teams examine tasks and questions (e.g., what-ifs) regarding how a design meets or fails to meet customers’ needs over time when encountering a product or service. 

Customer journey maps should have comprehensive timelines that show the most essential sub-tasks and events. Over this timeline framework, you add insights into customers' thoughts and feelings when proceeding along the timeline. The map should include: 

A timescale - A defined journey period (e.g., one week). This timeframe should include the entire journey, from awareness to conversion to retention.

Scenarios - The context and sequence of events where a user/customer must achieve a goal. An example could be a user who wants to buy a ticket on the phone. Scenarios are events from the first actions (recognizing a problem) to the last activities (e.g., subscription renewal).

Channels – Where do they perform actions (e.g., Facebook)?

Touchpoints – How does the customer interact with the product or service? What actions do they perform?

Thoughts and feelings – The customer's thoughts and feelings at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map helps you understand how customer experience evolves over time. It allows you to identify possible problems and improve the design. This enables you to design products that are more likely to exceed customers’ expectations in the future state. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

Before creating a customer journey map, you must ask yourself why you're making one in the first place. Clarify who will use it and what user experience it will address.

Conduct Research

Use customer research to determine customer experiences at all touchpoints. Get analytical/statistical data and anecdotal evidence. Leverage customer interviews, surveys, social media listening, and competitive intelligence.

Watch user researcher Ditte Hvas Mortensen talk about how user research fits your design process and when you should do different studies. 

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

List customer touchpoints (e.g., paying a bill) and channels (e.g., online). Look for more touchpoints or channels to include.

Make an Empathy Map

Pinpoint what the customer does, thinks, feels, says, hears, etc., in a given situation. Then, determine their needs and how they feel throughout the experience. Focus on barriers and sources of annoyance.

Sketch the Journey

Piece everything—touchpoints, timescale, empathy map output, new ideas, etc.). Show a customer’s course of motion through touchpoints and channels across the timescale, including their feelings at every touchpoint.

Iterate and Refine

Revise and transform your sketch into the best-looking version of the ideal customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders

Ensure all stakeholders understand your map and appreciate how its use will benefit customers and the organization.

Buyer Journey vs User Journey vs Customer Journey: What's the Difference?

You must know the differences between buyer, user, and customer journeys to optimize customer experiences. A customer journey map is often synonymous with a user flow diagram or buyer journey map. However, each journey gives unique insights and needs different plans.

Customer Journey

The customer journey, or lifecycle, outlines the stages a customer goes through with a business. This journey can vary across organizations but includes five key steps:

1. Awareness : This is the first stage of the customer journey, where the customers realize they have a problem. The customer becomes aware of your brand or product at this stage, usually due to marketing efforts.

2. Consideration : Once customers know about your product or service, they start their research and compare brands.

3. Purchase : This is the stage where the customer has chosen a solution and is ready to buy your product or service.

4. Retention : After the purchase, it's about retaining that customer and nurturing a relationship. This is where good customer service comes in.

5. Advocacy : Also called the loyalty stage, this is when the customer not only continues to buy your product but also recommends it to others.

The journey doesn't end when the customer buys and recommends your solution to others. Customer journey strategies are cyclical and repetitive. After the advocacy stage, ideally, you continue to attract and retain the customers, keeping them in the cycle. 

There is no standard format for a customer journey map. The key is to create one that works best for your team and product or service. Get started with customer journey mapping with our template:

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

The buyer's journey involves the buyer's path towards purchasing. This includes some of the steps we saw in the customer journey but is specific to purchasing :

1. Awareness Stage : This is when a prospective buyer realizes they have a problem. However, they aren't yet fully aware of the solutions available to them.

2. Consideration Stage : After identifying their problem, the buyer researches and investigates different solutions with more intent. They compare different products, services, brands, or strategies here.

3. Decision Stage : The buyer then decides which solution will solve their problem at the right price. This is where the actual purchasing action takes place.  

4. Post-Purchase Evaluation : Although not always included, this stage is critical. It's where the buyer assesses their satisfaction with the purchase. It includes customer service interactions, quality assessment, and attitudinal loyalty to the brand.

All these stages can involve many touchpoints, including online research, social media interactions, and even direct, in-person interactions. Different buyers may move through these stages at different speeds and through various channels, depending on a wide range of factors.

User Journey

The user journey focuses on people's experience with digital platforms like websites or software. Key stages include:

1. Discovery : In this stage, users become aware of your product, site, or service, often due to marketing efforts, word-of-mouth, or organic search. It also includes their initial reactions or first impressions.

2. Research/Consideration : Here, users dig deeper, exploring features, comparing with alternatives, and evaluating if your offering suits their needs and preferences.

3. Interaction/Use : Users actively engage with your product or service. They first-hand experience your solution's functionality, usability, and usefulness to achieve their goal.

4. Problem-solving : If they encounter any issues, how they seek help and resolve their issues fall into this stage. It covers user support, troubleshooting, and other assistance.

5. Retention/Loyalty : This stage involves how users stay engaged over time. Do they continue using your product, reduce usage, or stop altogether? It includes their repeated interactions, purchases, and long-term engagement over time.

6. Advocacy/Referral : This is when users are so satisfied they begin to advocate for your product, leaving positive reviews and referring others to your service.

Download this user journey map template featuring an example of a user’s routine. 

Understanding these stages can help optimize the user experience, providing value at each stage and making the journey seamless and enjoyable. 

Always remember the journey is as important as the destination. Customer relationships start from the first website visit or interaction with marketing materials. These initial touchpoints can influence the ongoing relationship with your customers.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

All customer interactions, pre and post-purchase.

Pre-purchase stages: awareness, consideration, conversion.

Subset of interactions in digital platforms.

Start/End Point

From marketing to end of customer relationship.

From awareness to conversion stages.

From user entry to exit on a digital platform.

All types of products and services—software and non—software interactions.

Decision-making before a purchase

Primarily digital platform interactions.

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is valuable yet has limitations and potential drawbacks. Recognize these challenges and create more practical and realistic journey maps.

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

Customer journey maps often risk simplifying complex customer experiences . They may depict varied and unpredictable customer behaviors as straightforward and linear. This simplification can lead to misunderstandings about your customers' needs and wants. As a result, you might overlook customers' diverse and unique paths. 

Always remember that real customer experiences are more complex than any map. When you recognize this, you steer clear of decisions based on simple models.

Resource Intensity

Creating detailed customer journey maps requires a lot of resources and time. You must gather extensive data and update the maps to keep them relevant. This process can strain small businesses or those with limited resources. 

You need to balance the need for comprehensive mapping with available resources. Efficient resource management and prioritization are crucial to maintaining effective journey maps.

Risk of Bias

Creating customer journey maps carries the inherent risk of biases . These biases can arise from various sources. They can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of the maps. 

Alan Dix, an expert in HCI, discusses bias in more detail in this video.  

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

Assumption Bias: When teams make decisions based on preconceived notions rather than customer data.

Selection Bias: When the data doesn’t represent the entire customer base..

Confirmation Bias : When you focus on information that supports existing beliefs and preferences. Simultaneously, you tend to ignore or dismiss data that contradicts those beliefs.

Anchoring Bias : Relying on the first information encountered (anchor) when making decisions.

Overconfidence Bias : Placing too much trust in the accuracy of the journey map. You may overlook its potential flaws.

These biases may misguide the team, and design decisions based on these maps might not be effective.

To address these biases, review and update journey maps with real user research data. Engage with different customer segments and gather a wide range of feedback to help create a more accurate and representative map. This approach ensures the journey map aligns with actual customer experiences and behaviors.

Evolving Customer Behaviors

Customer behaviors and preferences change with time. A journey map relevant today can become outdated. You need to update and adapt your maps to reflect these changes. This requires you to perform market research and stay updated with trends and customer feedback. 

Getting fresh data ensures your journey map stays relevant and effective. You must adapt to evolving customer behaviors to maintain accurate and valuable customer journey maps.

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

Capturing emotions accurately in customer journey maps poses a significant challenge. Emotions influence customer decisions, yet you may find it difficult to quantify and represent them in maps. Most journey maps emphasize actions and touchpoints, often neglecting the emotional journey. 

You must integrate emotional insights into these maps to understand customer experiences. This integration enhances the effectiveness of customer engagement strategies. You can include user quotes, symbols such as emojis, or even graphs to capture the ups and downs of the users’ emotions..

Misalignment with Customer Needs

Misalignments in customer journey maps can manifest in various ways. It can impact the effectiveness of your strategies. Common misalignments include:

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

Not seeing or serving the varied needs of different customer types.

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

Engage with your customers to understand their needs and preferences if you want to address these misalignments. Incorporate their direct feedback into the journey map. This approach leads to more effective customer engagement and satisfaction.

Over-Reliance on the Map

Relying too much on customer journey maps can lead to problems. These maps should serve as tools rather than definitive guides. Viewing them as perfect can restrict your responsiveness to customer feedback and market changes. Treat journey maps as evolving documents that complement direct customer interactions and feedback. 

Make sure you get regular updates and maintain flexibility in your approach. Balance the insights from the map with ongoing customer engagement. This approach keeps your business agile and responsive to evolving customer needs.

Data Privacy Concerns

Collecting customer data for journey mapping poses significant privacy concerns. Thus, you need to create a balance. You must adhere to data protection laws and gather enough information for mapping. 

You need a careful strategy to ensure customer data security. Stay vigilant to adapt to evolving privacy regulations and customer expectations. This vigilance helps maintain trust and compliance.

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

Take our Journey Mapping course to gain insights into the how and why of journey mapping. Learn practical methods to create experience maps , customer journey maps, and service blueprints for immediate application.

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

Creating a customer journey map requires visually representing the customer's experience with your product or company. Harness the strength of visual reasoning to understand and present this journey succinctly. Instead of detailing a lengthy narrative, like a book, a well-crafted map allows stakeholders, whether designers or not, to grasp the journey quickly. It's a democratized tool that disseminates information, unifies teams, and aids decision-making by illuminating previously unnoticed or misunderstood aspects of the customer's journey.

The customer journey encompasses five distinct stages that guide a customer's interaction with a brand or product:

Awareness: The customer becomes aware of a need or problem.

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

Purchase: The customer decides on a solution and makes a purchase.

Retention: Post-purchase, the customer uses the product and forms an opinion.

Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, sharing their positive experiences.

For a comprehensive understanding of these stages and how they intertwine with customer touchpoints, refer to Interaction-Design.org's in-depth article .

A perspective grid workshop is a activity that brings together stakeholders from various departments, such as product design, marketing, growth, and customer support, to align on a shared understanding of the customer's journey. These stakeholders contribute unique insights about customer needs and how they interact with a product or service. The workshop entails:

Creating a matrix to identify customers' jobs and requirements, not initially linked to specific features.

Identifying the gaps, barriers, pains, and risks associated with unmet needs, and constructing a narrative for the journey.

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

Discuss the implied technical and non-technical capabilities required to deliver this value.

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

The ultimate aim is to foster alignment within the organization and produce a user journey map based on shared knowledge. 

Learn more from this insightful video:

Customer journey mapping is vital as it harnesses our visual reasoning capabilities to articulate a customer's broad, intricate journey with a brand. Such a depiction would otherwise require extensive documentation, like a book. This tool offers a cost-effective method to convey information succinctly, ensuring understanding of whether one is a designer or lacks the time for extensive reading. It also helps the team to develop a shared vision and to encourage collaboration.  Businesses can better comprehend and address interaction points by using a journey map, facilitating informed decision-making and revealing insights that might otherwise remain obscured. Learn more about the power of visualizing the customer journey in this video.

Pain points in a customer journey map represent customers' challenges or frustrations while interacting with a product or service. They can arise from unmet needs, gaps in service, or barriers faced during the user experience. Identifying these pain points is crucial as they highlight areas for improvement, allowing businesses to enhance the customer experience and meet their needs more effectively. Pain points can relate to various aspects, including product usability, communication gaps, or post-purchase concerns. Explore the detailed article on customer journey maps at Interaction Design Foundation for a deeper understanding and real-world examples.

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

It provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting areas for improvement. This ensures that products or services meet users' needs effectively.

The process fosters team alignment, ensuring everyone understands and prioritizes the customer's perspective.

It helps identify pain points, revealing opportunities to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

This visualization allows businesses to make informed decisions, ensuring resources target the most impactful areas.

To delve deeper into the advantages and insights on journey mapping, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on key takeaways from the IXDF journey mapping course .

In design thinking, a customer journey map visually represents a user's interactions with a product or service over time. It provides a detailed look at a user's experience, from initial contact to long-term engagement. Focusing on the user's perspective highlights their needs, emotions, pain points, and moments of delight. This tool aids in understanding and empathizing with users, a core principle of design thinking. When used effectively, it bridges gaps between design thinking and marketing, ensuring user-centric solutions align with business goals. For a comprehensive understanding of how it fits within design thinking and its relation to marketing, refer to Interaction Design Foundation's article on resolving conflicts between design thinking and marketing .

A customer journey map and a user journey map are tools to understand the experience of users or customers with a product or service.

A customer journey map is a broader view of the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It considers physical and digital channels, multiple user personas, and emotional and qualitative aspects.

A user journey map is a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service. It only considers digital channels, one user persona, and functional and quantitative aspects.

Both are useful to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. However, they have different scopes, perspectives, and purposes. A customer journey map provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience across multiple channels and stages. A user journey map provides a detailed view of the steps to complete a specific task or goal within a product or service.

While user journeys might emphasize specific tasks or pain points, customer journeys encapsulate the entire experience, from research and comparison to purchasing and retention. 

Customer journey maps and service blueprints are tools to understand and improve the experience of the users or customers with a product or service. A customer journey map shows the entire customer experience across multiple touchpoints and stages. It focuses on the front stage of the service, which is what the customers see and experience. It considers different user personas and emotional aspects.

A service blueprint shows how a service is delivered and operated by an organization. It focuses on the back stage of the service, which is what the customers do not see or experience. It considers one user persona and functional aspects. What are the steps that the customer takes to complete a specific task or goal within the service? What are the channels and devices that the customer interacts with at each step?

For an immersive dive into customer journey mapping, consider enrolling in the Interaction Design Foundation's specialized course . This course offers hands-on lessons, expert guidance, and actionable tools. Furthermore, to grasp the course's essence, the article “4 Takeaways from the IXDF Journey Mapping Course” sheds light on the core learnings, offering a snapshot of what to expect. These resources are tailored by industry leaders, ensuring you're equipped with the best knowledge to craft impactful customer journey maps.

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

Why do designers create customer journey maps?

• To document internal company processes and designer feedback
• To replace other forms of customer feedback
• To visualize customer experiences and identify pain points

In which stage do customers first recognize they have a problem?

What element is essential in a customer journey map?

• Competitor analysis
• Customer's thoughts and feelings
• Empathy maps and user stories

Why are scenarios included in a customer journey map?

• To exemplify the design thinking process
• To list product features
• To show the context and sequence of events

Why should designers iterate and refine customer journey maps?

• To ensure it remains relevant and accurate
• To keep the map visually appealing
• To reduce the number of customer interactions

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Literature on Customer Journey Maps

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Journey Maps by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

Take a deep dive into Customer Journey Maps with our course Journey Mapping .

This course will show you how to use journey mapping to turn your own complex design challenges into simple, delightful user experiences . If you want to design a great shopping experience, an efficient signup flow or an app that brings users delight over time, journey mapping is a critical addition to your toolbox. 

We will begin with a short introduction to mapping — why it is so powerful, and why it is so useful in UX. Then we will get familiar with the three most common types of journey map — experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints — and how to recognize, read and use each one. Then you will learn how to collect and analyze data as a part of a journey mapping process. Next you will learn how to create each type of journey map , and in the final lesson you will learn how to run a journey mapping workshop that will help to turn your journey mapping insights into actual products and services. 

This course will provide you with practical methods that you can start using immediately in your own design projects, as well as downloadable templates that can give you a head start in your own journey mapping projects. 

The “Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project” includes three practical exercises where you can practice the methods you learn, solidify your knowledge and if you choose, create a journey mapping case study that you can add to your portfolio to demonstrate your journey mapping skills to future employers, freelance customers and your peers. 

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

Indi Young will provide wisdom on how to gather the right data as part of your journey mapping process. She has written two books,  Practical Empathy  and  Mental Models . Currently she conducts live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was a founder of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency that was an early innovator in journey mapping. 

Kai Wang will walk us through his very practical process for creating a service blueprint, and share how he makes journey mapping a critical part of an organization’s success. Kai is a talented UX pro who has designed complex experiences for companies such as CarMax and CapitalOne. 

Matt Snyder will help us think about journey mapping as a powerful and cost-effective tool for building successful products. He will also teach you how to use a tool called a perspective grid that can help a data-rich journey mapping process go more smoothly. In 2020 Matt left his role as the Sr. Director of Product Design at Lucid Software to become Head of Product & Design at Hivewire. 

Christian Briggs will be your tour guide for this course. He is a Senior Product Designer and Design Educator at the Interaction Design Foundation. He has been designing digital products for many years, and has been using methods like journey mapping for most of those years.  

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

14 ux deliverables: what will i be making as a ux designer.

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What is a customer journey map?

Table of Contents

Definition of customer journey mapping.

A customer journey map (or CJM) is a visual representation of the process your customers go through when interacting with your company. This diagram takes you through the exact steps that lead to a customer choosing your specific product and buying it from your business. Creating a customer journey map will provide you with a visual storyline of how a buyer or a customer persona engages with your business at every touchpoint. From seeing your brand on social media to going into the store to buy the product — the customer journey will document the entire story. Customer journey maps are especially useful when they chart the experience of a single persona. By taking one specific customer persona, such as a small business owner or a single mother, the journey map can be detailed and specific — providing you with data and information about how to target specific customers. If you include too many personas on one customer journey map, you risk your diagram becoming too generic, and you may overlook new opportunities. You’ll likely need multiple customer journey maps to accurately depict the many personas of your target audience. But of course, you’ll need to define those personas first. Miro has a user persona template that can help you represent your target audience and better understand how to satisfy their needs with your product.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Ever wondered what makes a customer buy a specific product from a certain company? The answer often lies in the journey the customer takes above all else. Here’s why mapping the customer journey is so important for every business, no matter how big or small.

Makes complex customer journeys easy to understand

Like other diagrams and concept maps, turning a complex process like a customer journey into a visual representation brings clarity and shared understanding. Instead of trying to describe a customer journey model exclusively with words, the diagram gives everyone on your team a visual overview of the entire customer experience.

Most customer journey touchpoints are mapped on a timeline, which creates a chronological understanding of the needs and wants of the customer at each stage of the process. Having a tool that makes it easier for your team to understand these complex journeys is crucial, as often, a customer journey doesn’t align with one specific department. For example, marketing, sales, customer service, and technical support may all need to be involved in creating an ideal user experience.

Everyone from each of these departments needs to be clear on how the journey works, where the handoffs are, and how to maximize the experience. By having one diagram act as a point of reference, different departments can ensure they are on the same page and can make informed, collaborative decisions.

Puts you in the customer’s shoes

An effective customer journey map helps you learn not only customer behavior but also how customers interact with your product. It also helps you understand your customers on an emotional level, acknowledging what causes them frustration, happiness, and excitement. By putting yourself in a customer’s shoes, you can follow their entire journey from brand awareness to advocacy. This allows you to gain deeper insights into the customer’s pain points and what compelled them to choose your company’s product. Based on this analysis, you can tailor your business processes to attract similar personas and increase conversions.

Creates a clearer understanding of your customer’s expectations

Customer journey mapping is a strategic approach that allows your company to understand customer expectations as well as what attracts certain personas to buy your product. By taking the time to understand the customer’s journey, you can understand what they expect from their experience with your business and product. This deeper understanding of what they need from your business allows you to proactively support them. It may also identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

Contributes to long-term customer retention

Striving to understand what the customer needs and following their journey will allow you to optimize their experience with your company. This will make your customer feel heard and appreciated, and, as a result, brand loyalty among your customer base will increase. In turn, this will lead to high customer retention and, hopefully, an increase in purchase frequency, which will benefit your company greatly in the long term.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Many great tools can help you understand the customer journey. Why should you care about this one? Here are a few reasons why CJMs should be an essential part of your business toolkit.

Build better experiences

Customer journey mapping gives you a big-picture experience of your customer’s interaction with your brand. Think of a CJM as a map of a physical location like a city or a town. Once you have a map spread out in front of you, it’s easier to understand where you might run into roadblocks. It helps you plan ahead, and make adjustments to help customers overcome those obstacles.

Once you can visualize all phases of your customer’s journey, you can see where you’re not meeting their expectations. Armed with that knowledge, you can build a customer experience that’s seamless and satisfying. That translates into improved products and processes, more sales, faster sales cycles, and greater customer retention.

Enable customer success

For your business to succeed, your customer must also succeed. Customer journey mapping helps you see what is and isn’t working for your customer so you can set them up for success. Even a stylized picture of your customer’s journey can empower you to create, monitor, adjust, and enhance touch points.

Work better as a team

Even if your objectives are different, everyone in your organization is working toward the same goal: satisfying your customers. But it’s easy to lose focus. Engineering teams are busy coding, marketing teams are writing ad copy, sales teams are trying to sell to their prospects.… How do you all stay aligned?

Customer journey mapping is powerful because it keeps everyone focused on the customer. By creating a CJM, you can gain deep insight into what your customers want and need. For the marketing team, that means building better campaigns. For the sales team, that means deeper engagement with customers and prospects. For engineering, that means a holistic understanding of what programs are meant to achieve. Customer journey mapping makes it easy to equip every team member with a sophisticated understanding of your customers.

Set yourself apart from the competition

A  recent report  shows that 90% of the organizations that use customer journey mapping saw a decrease in churn and customer complaints. Customers and prospects respond positively when they feel like a brand understands their desires and pain points. The data is clear: customer journey mapping can set you apart from your competition.

5 customer journey stages

The customer journey map can be split into five important stages, as seen in this customer journey mapping template pack . Each customer will go through these stages as they interact with your company during their journey.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the moment when a buyer first becomes aware of your company, product, or brand. This can happen through a variety of mediums, from social media advertising to a word-of-mouth referral from another customer. Your brand can increase awareness and attract more customers through marketing practices and brand advertising. Paying attention to how your target audience grows their awareness of your brand enables you to optimize your marketing approach, budget, and channel prioritization.

2. Consideration

After your customer has become aware of your brand, they move into the consideration stage. This is a stage of ideation in which the customer considers whether they need the product or service your business is offering. They may also consider other companies that offer the same product. This stage proves the importance of good advertising at the awareness stage. If your company markets itself well, the customer will likely consider your product even more closely at this stage.

3. Purchase/Decision

After the customer has considered all of their options, it’s time to decide on the product or service they are going to purchase — or whether they’re going to make a purchase at all. Should they decide against buying, that will be the end of their personal customer journey. If that is the case, your company should focus on improving the awareness and consideration stages by working on its customer service or trying out new advertising or personalized promotional techniques.

4. Retention

Remember: the customer journey doesn’t end once they’ve made a purchase. Every company wants a loyal base of customers who return time and time again, which is why your team should analyze what needs to be done to stop customers from leaving. Fostering brand loyalty is a great way to improve your business’s general income. You can aim to retain customers by providing things like incentives, better customer support, and reminders about new products through digital marketing.

5. Advocacy

The last stage in the customer journey is advocacy — letting other people know about your brand or the service that you offer. Customers are more likely to advocate for your company if they are completely satisfied throughout each stage of the customer journey. This shows the interconnectedness of every step and how the journey is a circular pattern, even if it focuses on different personas.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Throughout the five customer journey stages, there are different customer touchpoints . These are the moments in the customer journey when the customer interacts or engages with the business. Let’s take a closer look at the three types of touchpoints.

1. Pre-purchase touchpoints

A pre-purchase touchpoint includes any time when the customer interacts with your business before making a purchase decision. Pre-purchase touchpoints can occur in the awareness and consideration stages. They can also happen when another customer that has already gone through the entire customer journey refers your business. Pre-purchase touchpoints can happen if a buyer comes into contact with your business by visiting your website, seeing a post about you on social media, or hearing about your product from a friend. This point of the customer journey is all about persuasion and explanation. You need to make sure that when the customer discovers your business for the first time, you demonstrate that you can fulfill their buying needs.

2. Purchase touchpoints

Purchase touchpoints take place during the decision/purchasing stage of the buyer’s journey. This can happen in-store or online. You should optimize this stage to be as efficient and streamlined as possible so that the customer doesn’t change their mind during the purchase. For example, having a slow website that isn’t mobile optimized or forcing the customer to jump through hoops with a sales assistant to make a purchase will affect the buying process. Optimizing this touchpoint is essential to retaining customers, as a quick and easy purchase process could compel them to return in the future.

3. Post-purchase touchpoints

Post-purchase touchpoints include the journey’s advocacy and retention phases. The success of these touchpoints depends on how well-optimized the previous stages in the journey were. If the entire journey up until this point was enjoyable for the customer, they are more likely to refer your product or service to their friends and family. You should try to stay in regular contact with the customer to remind them about the journey and your company, as this will encourage them to return in the future.

What’s the difference between a customer journey map and a user story map?

Although customer journey maps and user story maps resemble each other, their functions are slightly different.

User stories are used to plan out features or functionalities, typically in an Agile model. In a user story, you describe a feature or functionality from user perspectives. That way, you can understand what the user wants to do and how that feature can help them accomplish it. Use a customer problem statement template to help you craft these perspectives.

Typically, a user story takes this form: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a UX designer, I want to sketch on an online whiteboard, so I don’t have to be in the same location as my collaborators.”

You can then visualize that user story with a user story map. For example, if you wanted to visualize the user story above, you would start by detailing the various steps the user will take when using that functionality. In this case:

Sketch on the whiteboard

Share with teammates

See teammates sketch in real time

Then, you would document the features required to take each step. Once you’ve done that, you would write these features on sticky notes and rearrange them based on their corresponding functionalities.

In short, user story maps allow you to plan and implement changes to the customer journey. Customer journey maps allow you to discover and understand what those changes might look like.

How to create a customer journey map

Creating a great customer journey map can be challenging. You need to get into the mind of a specific customer persona and understand not only their needs but also the different ways in which they interact with your company. With Miro’s customer journey mapping tool , you can streamline the process of creating one of these maps for your specific needs. Or, if you'd rather not start from scratch, follow these steps when filling out Miro’s customer journey map template :

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Before diving into the creation of your customer journey map, ask yourself why you need to know this information. Are you looking to optimize certain touchpoints? Are you looking to see why customer retention is low? Do you want to determine why customers decide against your product? Figuring out why you’re building the map is essential to the success of the exercise.

2. Identify profiles and personas

As previously mentioned, you need to focus on a specific persona when examining the customer journey. It’s important to remember that the customer journey map should focus on one specific audience at a time. This will help you figure out exactly who your target customer base is and gain an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s needs that your company is attempting to fulfill.

3. List the customer journey touchpoints

Next, you need to understand what happens each time the customer comes into contact with your company. These points in the process will tell you which areas of the journey you need to streamline and optimize to improve the customer experience.

4. Take the customer journey yourself

For the customer journey map exercise to be productive, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and be honest with the experience that you have. This is the best way to see if your customer journey mapping is accurate and identify areas for improvement in the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping example

Here are some customer journey mapping examples for you to draw inspiration from and better understand what goes into a customer journey model.

Alex Gilev’s Practical Customer Journey Map

Alex Gilev is a certified UX expert and product leader experienced in creating highly usable and intuitive web applications. His practical customer journey map example created in Miro is based on the idea that you want to create an irreplaceable product for your customers. This customer journey map is divided into four phases: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame.

This take on a customer journey map allows you to figure out practical fixes that will increase your competitive advantage over other businesses in the same industry. It helps you identify the value metrics that make your product desirable to the specified persona so that they’ll want to use your product frequently and repeatedly.

Build a customer journey map suited to your needs 

As we’ve shown, creating a customer journey map with your team has many benefits. This exercise can help you create the ideal experience for anyone who may come into contact with your company. It could be invaluable to the future of your business and help you build a loyal customer base.

Are you ready to get started with customer journey mapping? Try the Customer Journey Map Template , the ideal foundation on which to begin. This template is tailored to help your company identify touchpoints so that you can meet your customers’ needs.

How to make a customer journey map?

Benefits of a customer journey map

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Service blueprint vs. journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

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Customer Journey Map: Definition with Examples

Improved customer service, customer loyalty, and increased ROI; 3 things that every organization wishes they could achieve overnight. It’s possible, although not overnight, but with the right tools and the effort.

One such tool is the customer journey map and it’s there at the top with the other powerful tools that help drive customer-focused change effectively.  

In this guide, we’ll explain the steps you need to take to create a customer journey map that drives the expected results while avoiding the common mistakes others make. Scroll down to learn:

• What is a Customer Journey Map?
• What Are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

Factors to Consider Before Creating a Customer Journey Map

What are the components of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map in 6 steps, tips and best practices when creating a customer journey map, common mistakes to avoid when creating your customer journey map, customer journey map definition.

A customer journey map, also known as a customer experience map, is a visual representation that outlines the various steps and touchpoints a customer goes through when interacting with a company, product, or service. It chronologically represents each step of interaction the customer takes with your business. A customer journey map usually starts with the initial step of when the customer discovers your product/ service and depending on your goal it can extend as long as you want to.

Customer journey map is a tool used to understand and analyze the customer’s experience, from the initial awareness or consideration of a product or service through the purchase and post-purchase stages. It reveals customer actions, emotions, pain points and expectations along the customer journey. And it helps the business see things from the customer’s perspective which in turn helps the business gain a deep understanding of the needs of the customer.

At a glance, a customer journey map may look easy to make. But there are many details you need to pay attention to when creating one. In the following steps, we have simplified the process of creating a customer journey map.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that customer journey maps may differ from company to company based on the product/ service they offer and audience behavior.

It’s also important to have the right kind of people who know about your customer’s experience in the room when you are mapping the journey.

Here are 6 six easy steps that you can follow when creating a customer journey map.

• Build your buyer persona
• Map out the customer lifecycle stages and touchpoints
• Understand the goals of the customers
• Identify obstacles and customer pain points
• Identify the elements you want to focus on
• Fix the roadblocks

Let’s look at each step in more detail.

Step 1: Build Your Buyer Persona

Creating a customer journey map begins with defining your buyer persona, which profiles your target customer based on extensive research.

The buyer persona usually consists of demographic data such as age, gender, career, etc. in addition to other behavioral and psychographic details like customer goals, interests, lifestyle, challenges, etc.

Your business can have one or many buyer personas depending on how many audience segments you are targeting. And to avoid creating a customer journey map that is too generic, you need to create separate customer journey maps for each of the segments you identify.

You need to also be careful to rely on real data rather than assumptions to avoid creating an erroneous customer profile that won’t do much for you.

You can gather as much data as you want from online research, questionnaires, surveys, direct customer feedback, interviews and with tools like Google Analytics.

Here’s our guide on creating a buyer persona . Refer to it to create your own buyer persona in 4 simple steps. Start with a template to save time.

Creating the buyer persona will also shed light on the goals of the buyer, which is another thing you need to pay attention to when mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 2: Map Out the Customer LIfecycle Stages and Touchpoints

What are the stages your customer goes through to come into contact with your product/ service? Breaking down your customer journey map into various stages will make it easier to understand and refer to.

Now, these stages may vary depending on your business situation, sales funnel design, marketing strategies, etc. but usually, it would contain – Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention.

Map out the touchpoints to clarify the customer lifecycle stages even better. A touchpoint refers to any moment in their journey when a customer comes into contact with your brand (i.e. website, social media, testimonials, advertisements, point of sale, billing, etc.).

The data you collected during your buyer persona research will give you a pretty good idea about the customer touchpoints along the lifecycle stages; these include the steps they take when they first discover your brand to purchasing your product and subsequent interactions.

Identifying all potential touchpoints may sound overwhelming, but you can always rely on tools like Google Analytics which will generate behavioral reports (which show the user path throughout your website)  and goal flow reports (display the path a user takes to complete a goal conversion) for you to work with.

Or you can follow the traditional method and put yourself in the shoes of your customers and take yourself through the journey to identify the actions.

At the same time try to determine the emotional state (delighted/ frustrated) of the customer as they take each action. Knowing how they feel will help you understand whether they would go from one stage to the other in the journey.

Step 3: Understand the Goals of the Customers

This is where you need to focus your attention on understanding the goals your customers are trying to achieve at each stage. When it comes to optimizing your customer’s journey, it will help immensely if you know what your customers are trying to achieve.

Some methods you can use here include survey answers, interview transcripts, customer support emails, user testing, etc.

Once you know the goals your customers are trying to gain at each phase of the journey, you can align them with the touchpoints.

Step 4: Identify Obstacles and Customer Pain Points

By now you know what your customer is trying to achieve at each stage of the customer lifecycle, and each of the steps they take to get it done.

If your customer journey is perfect, then you won’t have your customers abandoning their purchases, leaving your landing pages without filling the forms, clicking the CTA only to close the tab, etc. If your journey didn’t have any roadblocks at all, then you wouldn’t be needing this user journey map in the first place.

But that’s not the case here, is it?

There might be many things that you are doing right to make your customer experience a smooth one, but there can still be many roadblocks that frustrate your users. In this step, you need to work on identifying what these roadblocks and pain points of customers are.

Maybe the product price is too high, or the shipping rates are unreasonable, or maybe the registration form is a few pages too long. Identifying such roadblocks will help you apply suitable solutions to improve your customer experience.

You can rely on the research data you gathered to create your buyer personas here as well.

Step 5: Identify the Elements You Want to Focus on

There are several types of customer journey maps and each focuses on a variety of elements. Based on your purpose, you can select one of them.

Current state: These maps show how your customers are interacting with your brand currently.

Future state: This type of map visualizes the actions that you assume or believe will be taken by your customers.

Day in the life: This type of map tries to capture what your current customers or prospects do in a day in their life. They will reveal more information about your customers, including pain points in real life.

Step 6: Fix the Roadblocks

Now that you know the issues/ roadblocks your customers come across as they interact with your brand, focus on prioritizing and fixing them to improve each touchpoint to retain customers at all stages of the journey.

Customers are constantly changing, and so should your customer journey maps. Test and update your customer journey maps as often as necessary to reflect the changes in your customers as well as in your products/ services.

Here are some templates you can start with right away.

What are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

There are many benefits to customer journey mapping. The customer journey map helps

• To enhance the customer experience. It helps businesses gain insights into customers' various touchpoints and interactions with the product or service.
• To reduce costs by identifying the areas the business should prioritize investing in and spending effort on. Customer journey mapping can help businesses identify and eliminate unnecessary touchpoints or processes that may not add value to the customer journey. Get valuable insight into what the customer is expecting from your brand, their internal motivations, and needs which will, in turn, help you improve your customer experience.
• To innovate and differentiate by discovering the gaps between customer expectations and current customer experience, unmet customer needs, pain points, and opportunities.
• To improve customer satisfaction by identifying severe customer experience issues and eliminating them effectively.
• To increase customer loyalty by helping to build strong customer relationships by understanding their needs, preferences, and emotions.
• To align teams by facilitating collaboration within organizations. This helps to provide a shared understanding of the customer’s journey, enabling different teams to align their efforts toward a common goal.
• Data-driven decision-making based on gathered insights from customer research, feedback, and analytics.

Before you delve into creating a customer journey map, it is important to consider several factors to ensure that the final outcome is accurate, effective and actionable.

• What is your team trying to achieve? Make sure to define your objective and purpose of creating the customer journey map, clearly.
• Identify the target customer segment as different customer segments may have different touchpoints, pain points and requirements leading to different journeys.
• Carry out a thorough research by gathering data and insights via customer research, feedback and analytics. Conduct customer interviews, surveys, feedback forms, social media and website analytics among others.
• Make the customer journey mapping a collaborative effort by involving cross-functional teams. Invite the marketing, sales, customer service, product, and design teams to work together to understand and align efforts.
• Consider including the emotional aspects of the customer journey such as feelings, motivations and perceptions at each touchpoint.

A customer journey map typically includes the following components:

• Touchpoints: All of the interactions and experiences a customer has with a company, including in-person, online, and mobile interactions.
• Customer personas: Representations of the target customer segments, including their demographics, behaviors, motivations, and pain points.
• Emotions: A visual representation of how the customer feels at different touchpoints during their journey.
• Channels: The ways in which a customer interacts with the company, such as website, phone, or in-person interactions.
• Data and insights: Customer behavior data and insights from surveys, analytics, or other sources.
• Pain points and opportunities: Identifications of areas where the customer experience can be improved, as well as opportunities for innovation and differentiation.
• Recommended actions: Specific recommendations for improving the customer experience, based on the journey map analysis.
• Alignment with company goals: A visual representation of how the customer journey aligns with the overall goals and strategy of the company.

Here are a few additional tips and best practices to ensure your customer journey map is accurate and effective.

• Use or create personas to better understand your customer and tailor your journey to specific customer segments. For example, if your business is fashion retail, you can develop personas such as ‘working professional,’ ‘fashionable mom,’ ‘teenage fashionista,’ etc.
• Use data and metrics to support your map and make it data-driven. Include data on customer satisfaction scores, conversion rates, or customer retention rates to identify areas for improvement. This can also help to prioritize actions and allocate resources effectively.
• Use multiple channels, both online and offline, to interact with customers. For example, a customer may discover your product or service on social media, then research more on your website, visit the store for a demo, and then make the final purchase.
• Go beyond existing touchpoints to include anticipated future customer needs as well. For example, if you are in the hospitality industry, you could include potential pain points and opportunities for pre-arrival, check-in, stay, check-out, and post-stay.
• Always keep the customer at the center of your customer journey map. Consider the customer’s emotions, preferences, and motivations at each touchpoint to create a more customer-centric experience. For example, a customer journey map for a subscription-based meal delivery service can include touchpoints for menu options, selecting meals, placing an order, receiving, and providing feedback.
• Customer journeys are dynamic and can evolve due to customer behavior, market trends, and business strategies. Therefore, continuously review and update by monitoring customer behavior, trends, and business strategies. Keep the customer journey map flexible and adaptable to changes.
• Create and present the journey map in a visually appealing and accessible format so stakeholders can easily understand it. Use visuals, diagrams, and infographics as required.
• A customer journey map is not a one-time exercise but a continuous process: test and iterate. Validate the map with real customers to ensure accuracy and relevance. Gather feedback, and conduct usability testing to gather additional insights to refine and make the map accurate.
• Keep it simple and accessible. Use clear and straightforward language and visual elements while avoiding jargon and cluttering. Make sure the customer journey map is easy to understand and accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

Creating a customer journey map can be a complex process. Here are a few mistakes you should be aware of and avoid at any cost.

Making assumptions without data

A common mistake is relying on assumptions without proper data or research. It would be best to put time into gathering data and insights from various sources. Make sure to carry out thorough research. Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Focusing on one touchpoint

Another mistake is focusing only on one touchpoint or a single interaction rather than considering the entire end-to-end journey. This can result in an incomplete or biased customer journey map. To avoid this, take a comprehensive approach and consider the whole customer journey from initial awareness to post-purchase stages. Include all relevant online and offline touchpoints, channels, and interactions.

Not involving cross-functional teams

Involve cross-functional teams in customer journey mapping to get diverse insights and a holistic view. Not involving different teams can result in biased views and missing valuable insights from different perspectives. Encourage team collaboration and communication to align the customer journey map and gather input from different stakeholders. This can help uncover blind spots and identify opportunities for improvements.

Failing to validate with real customers

Not validating the customer journey map with real customers can lead to inaccurate assumptions. Also, relying on internal assumptions or team perspectives will lead to skewed views and away from the reality of customer interactions. To avoid such a dilemma, validate the map through feedback loops, usability testing, and customer interviews. Gather input from actual customer experiences, preferences, and pain points.

Ready to Map Your Customer’s Journey?

Customer journey maps are a great way to gain deeper insight into your customers and their experience with your organization. Taking the time to understand how your customers interact with you, what they feel and what they want to achieve can go a long way toward retaining them.

Follow these 6 steps to get your customer journey map right. Use a template to save time.

And don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

FAQs About Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps can improve customer experiences by providing companies with a clear understanding of their customers' experiences with their products, and services. This information can be used to identify pain points and areas for improvement, allowing companies to better meet the needs and expectations of their customers. By using customer journey maps to optimize the customer experience, companies can:

• Align resources and efforts to meet customer needs better.
• Create a more personalized experience for customers.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Reduce customer churn.
• Increase customer lifetime value.
• Enhance the overall customer experience.
• Improve operational efficiency.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to improve the customer experience.
• Stay ahead of the competition by offering a differentiated and superior customer experience.

The tools needed to create a customer journey map vary depending on the complexity of the map and the size of the company, but some common tools include:

• Customer feedback: Surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups can be used to gather customer feedback and understand their experiences.
• Analytics tools: Data analytics tools, such as website analytics, customer behavior tracking, and customer relationship management systems, can provide insight into customer behavior and preferences.
• Customer journey map software: Tools like Creately that can be used to create visually appealing customer journey maps.
• Project management software: Tools like to manage the journey mapping process and keep track of progress.
• Collaboration tools: Tools like Creately, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace can be used to collaborate with team members and stakeholders.
• Identifying and resolving pain points in the customer journey
• Improving customer onboarding and retention
• Optimizing marketing and sales efforts
• Designing a customer-centric website or app
• Aligning cross-functional teams to deliver a cohesive customer experience
• You can use customer journey maps to drive customer-centric strategies in your organization by Identifying pain points or gaps in the customer experience and developing targeted solutions
• Aligning cross-functional teams and processes to meet customer needs
• Optimizing touchpoints to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience
• Utilizing insights from the customer journey map to inform marketing, sales, and customer service strategies

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Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

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.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

• Case studies
• Expert advice

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

Benefits of client journey mapping

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

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

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

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

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

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

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

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

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

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

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

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

How to build a customer journey map

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

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

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

Step 1: Define your persona

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

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

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

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

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

💡 Expert tips: 

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

Step 3: Define journey map sections

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Set customer goals

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

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

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

Step 5: Define touchpoints

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Processes and channels

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

Step 7: Problems and ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Step 8: Emotional graph

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

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

Step ?: Be Creative!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer journey map examples

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

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

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

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

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

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

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

A customer journey mapping checklist

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

• Do research

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

• Define your customer persona(s)

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

• Specify journey map stages

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

• Decide on the map sections

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

• Set customer goals for each stage

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

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

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

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

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

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

• Add details about the emotional experience

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

• Use more sections

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

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

The free guide to download

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

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

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

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

Hello, Karim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The differences come from the names.

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

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

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

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

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

Good luck and happy customers!

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

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

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

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

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

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

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

When and how to create customer journey maps.

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

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

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

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

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

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

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

1. Awareness

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

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

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

2. Consideration

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

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

3. Purchase

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

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

4. Retention

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

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

5. Advocacy

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

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

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

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

Customer journey touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create buyer personas

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

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

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

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

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

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

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

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

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

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started with customer journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer journey map

Key Takeaways:

• A customer journey map visualizes the entire lifecycle of a potential customer, from the first touchpoint to post-purchase interactions.
• Different types of customer journey maps include current state map, future state map, day-in-the-life map, and service blueprint map.
• Customer journey maps identify and measure areas of improvement, leading to happier customers, and increased revenue and profits.

Table of Contents

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a flowchart or similar visualization that shows the full lifecycle of a potential customer’s “journey.” The map covers the point when the prospect learns about a company to them becoming a customer and through extended customer support. These maps are a visual representation of interactions across all channels a customer may interact with, including social media, in-store, website, or email.

A customer’s first touchpoint with your brand may be a social media ad, which is the starting point on their customer journey map. The map then charts all of that user’s interactions and may have branching points for choices they could make. For example:

• Begin at the social media ad touchpoint.
• The next node on the map indicates the customer going to your website.
• A branch on the map may describe the customer deciding whether to make a purchase: If they buy, their journey may include an email invitation to a mailing list. If they don’t buy, the next step in their journey could be an individual discount code by email.
• The map for purchasing customers then charts any of the customer’s post-purchase interactions, such as: Sending a customer satisfaction evaluation, receiving customer support , or renewing a contract or making another purchase
• The map for customers who did not purchase shows the steps to re-engage them.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

What goes onto your customer journey maps will depend on customer types, the services or products you offer, and the goals of your mapping exercise. Maps for companies that offer business-to-business (B2B) products or services will also differ from maps for business-to-customer (B2C) brands. You may end up with multiple maps; some may show the current state of your customer journeys and others may show a desired future state.

Ultimately, the customer journey map should be a tool that helps you and your marketing team identify areas for growth and make decisions. The following examples are good places to start:

Current state map

A current state map is often the first customer journey map a team creates. This is a map that shows how an average customer interacts with your brand today. For these maps, you will look at internal data, like website traffic sources or data showing how they move through your online storefront. This mapping process can show current pain points or customer service gaps that you can work on now. It can also highlight points of high conversions that you will want to emphasize in the future state.

Future state map

For future state maps, gather a wishlist of improvements and your team’s strategic goals and use these to plan the ideal state of customer journeys with your brand. These maps work best when compared to current state maps — the current state maps help identify areas for improvement and what is working to inform future state maps.

Day-in-the-life map

Mapping a day in the life of a customer can help marketers and customer-facing teams understand what the customer is thinking, and how best to help them. These kinds of maps rely heavily on customer profiles or personas, because different customers will interact with different touchpoints. Where other customer journey maps will center the customer interacting with your brand, the day-in-the-life style imagines what your customers might do from when they get up to when they go to bed, and what problems or questions they may face during the day. You can use these maps to identify customer needs and create new marketing strategies.

Service blueprint map

A service blueprint map focuses on how teams deliver services. You can expand a customer journey map to identify which teams are responsible for each part of the customer experience, and specific roles, technologies, processes, or policies that each step requires.

Where a customer journey map begins with the customer looking at products on your company website before going to a store, the service blueprint map includes that, and also labels which technology powers the chat, who answers questions, and which teams handle the customer in-store. These maps may depict current state, and help identify pain points for current customers, or they may show future state, helping plan how a service will ideally operate.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

The practice of customer journey mapping gives you a clear picture of a customer’s experience with your brand, which will help:

• Improve communication across teams - If you understand how a customer passes from team to team, you can identify and close interdepartmental gaps, and ensure that the right information reaches the right people in time.
• Improve customer experience (CX) - Mapping the entire customer journey means understanding what your brand looks like to a prospective customer, and finding ways to improve that perspective. You can also identify ineffective touchpoints and understand customer expectations.
• Increase customer loyalty and engagement - If you understand the customer’s experiences, you can improve customer engagement with more targeted ads and emails to help them make informed decisions.
• Identify and measure areas of improvement - A clear picture of your customer’s interactions will help you gather better data about specific “moment of truth” touchpoints (decision points where you may keep or lose customers), and measure the efficacy of new CX initiatives.
• Boost revenue or sales - All these benefits will create happier and better-informed customers. According to Invesp , it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one, and keeping just 5% of your customers can increase profits between 25% and 95%.

Components of a customer journey map

A customer journey map is a kind of infographic that shows different stages and key touchpoints a customer may experience with your brand, meaning it will have components that record and show different types of data.

Remember that a customer journey map is a tool for you and your team. It doesn’t need to follow a specific template or pattern as much as it needs to be something that meets your needs. With that in mind, not all customer journey maps will use all of these components.

Visual components of a customer journey map

A customer journey map will use certain visual elements to depict the journey through the map, these include:

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are any interaction a prospective customer has with your organization during the buying process. Customer touchpoints can occur on marketing channels (including social media platforms), web or TV ads, radio or podcast promos, posters on a bus bench, or in-store flyers. They may also include messaging a chatbot, downloading an ebook, taking a survey, or going into a physical store.

One challenge of mapping customer behavior is predicting what the customer may do. While touchpoints map direct engagement with a brand, actions include indirect engagement. For example, when a customer tries to decide between pet food products, they browse review websites or ask friends with similar pets for personal recommendations.

These are different from touchpoints because your ability to control them is limited. However, for the journey map, work from the assumption that the customer will perform that action to progress to the next touchpoint.

Customer journey stages

Many customer journey map types begin before the customer knows they will be a customer. Every customer journey has multiple touchpoints and customer actions that fall into one of the five customer journey stages :

• Awareness : The customer has heard of your brand
• Consideration : Your brand is an option the customer will consider
• Decision : The customer has decided to choose your brand
• Retention : Your brand is trying to keep the customer loyal ‍
• Advocacy : The customer will recommend your brand to others

Some maps separate the stages using different background colors for each, so that the customer touchpoints remain in focus, with a color-coded system indicating which touchpoints fall into which stage.

Customer persona

Marketers create customer personas to describe different groups of customers. The customer persona depicts a fictional person who represents a swath of your customer base, as an archetype of those customers. The persona describes the customer type’s needs, preferences, emotions, habits, and motivations. The information a persona includes varies across businesses, but will include data from marketing tools and focus groups.

For example, a pet food brand may have a persona for Alex:

Alex is a 35-year-old who lives in an urban apartment with two cats.

• They work in sales for a tech company.
• They are single.
• They are tech-savvy.
• They will splurge for the cats.
• They live in the city and do not have a car.

What they’re looking for in a pet food brand:

• They are concerned about giving their cats natural products with health benefits.
• They like the convenience of having food delivered (instead of using the bus).

Media and social media habits:

• They watch a lot of shows on Netflix and other streaming services.
• They tend to surf social media on weekday evenings, before bed.
• They prefer Instagram, but have Tumblr and Facebook accounts.

And a second persona for Frank:

Frank is 68 years old, and lives in a suburban house with 1 cat and 1 dog.

• He is retired.
• He is married.
• He can use a computer, but is not tech savvy.
• He has a limited budget but has enough to treat the pets well.

What he’s looking for in a pet food brand:

• Good value for money.
• A brand he can trust for both pets.
• Available in stores he visits regularly.
• He listens to the radio in his truck every day.
• He is on Facebook, but checks it about once a week.
• He usually speaks to friends on the phone, but is learning to text.

Alex’s customer journey would be markedly different from Frank's. Alex’s journey should include Instagram ads, and perhaps some on Tumblr and Facebook. Frank’s journey would likely start with a radio ad. While Alex would appreciate a “free delivery” offer by email, Frank would prefer a manufacturer’s coupon to use in-store. These personas help determine what the pet food brand can do to attract more customers like Alex or Frank.

Emotions and pain points

Some maps consider the customer’s emotions at various points along their journey. How would a customer anxious about their pet’s health interact with a pet food brand differently than one who is overwhelmed, or someone who’s content? The customer’s feelings will influence the actions they take.

For example, a customer feeling overwhelmed with too many options might appreciate a brand that’s endorsed by a personality they respect, such as a TV host with pets. A content customer may stick with their current brand. A customer who has had positive interactions with your brand may consider it the next time they need your service.

A customer who has seen the same ad too many times or has to contact the customer service team multiple times about the same problem may become frustrated. This can lead to people stepping off the customer journey and considering other options. Using a map to identify pain points or interactions where customers consider leaving the customer journey can help your team improve the user experience.

Solutions or opportunities

At various stages of the buying process, when the customer needs to take an action to remain on your customer journey, there are things your organization could do to keep their attention. Any of the customer journey map types, but especially the future state maps can be a useful tool for brainstorming solutions to pain points and opportunities to keep customers coming back.

Identifying pain points could also indicate solutions, and implementing those solutions may be part of your service blueprint. Any customer emotions you’ve identified could present opportunities to surprise, delight, or help the customer. Once you’ve built a customer journey map with the other things in mind, you can start to list ways to improve the buying process, and ensure that customers encounter fewer pain points as they journey.

How to create a customer journey map

The following steps will help you create maps your teams can use, but if one of these stages doesn’t fit — or doesn’t fit right now — you can skip or return to it later.

Establish goals

Determine the goal for your journey mapping process and choose a map that best fits that goal. Do you want to know what your current customers experience? Do you want to plan a future service? Do you want a sense of the customer’s life?

Note : If this is your first mapping exercise, a current state map may be the best place to start. It gives you experience with making a map, and is based on information you can get right now.

Gather key stakeholders

Customer journey maps represent a holistic view of your customers’ interactions with your company, so it’s important to gather stakeholders from any teams that power those interactions. This may include teams that don’t directly interact with customers, as the customer journey map covers all channels and all stages of the customer lifecycle. Gathering stakeholders early can help you clear roadblocks and get time with the right people to answer your questions.

Research your customers

Pulling customer data from internal systems (like a data warehouse or CRM tool) is crucial to journey mapping, but you also need customer research to help create and refine your map. This data may include feedback questionnaires asking why customers picked your product over others and user testing data. This information can help you identify customer pain points and define customer personas.

Remember that journey maps for business-to-business (B2B) companies will differ from maps for business-to-customer (B2C) brands.

Develop customer personas

Customer personas will help you create more specific maps. To start, develop one to three customer personas that capture most of your existing customers. Then, look at your data for ways to tailor the customer maps to those personas. Ask these questions:

• What emotions are they feeling? (needs they are trying to meet or problems they are concerned about)
• What questions do they have? (about your product or about how to begin your service)
• Which touchpoints are they going to use or skip? (such as social media or an email newsletter)

Part of the customer journey is about problem-solving, which means part of the mapping process is understanding what problems need to be solved. Using target customer personas lets you narrow the scope of those problems.

Remember that a B2B organization may have customer personas that include the decision-makers at the target company, rather than an individual consumer as in a B2C company.

List touchpoints

With all the data in hand, it’s time to start listing any touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. This includes your company website, email marketing, customer service emails, app push notifications, paid ads, storefronts, social channels, and many others.

This step is closer to a brainstorming exercise. Start with the common touchpoints identified by Google Analytics or other tools, and then move out to more uncommon examples, like in-store returns. You may also start to notice trends during this process, such as some customer types having a lot more touchpoints than others.

Create the map (use a template)

First define the scope of the map you are using by identifying the beginning and end of your customer journey. Then, using the list of touchpoints, the customer personas, and your analytics data, start putting the maps together with these steps:

• Choose one persona.
• List the first interactions those types of customers have with your brand.
• Determine their next most likely interaction, and add that to the map.
• Repeat, following that persona through all of their actions and touchpoints from your list. Make note of which touchpoints from your list do and don’t get used, as that can help you identify areas where your organization is wasting effort.
• Repeat for any other personas you have.

Customer journey map templates can help streamline this process. You can always begin with an existing template and expand it later to meet your needs, rather than trying to start from scratch.

Note : There are customer journey map templates available at the bottom of this article.

Establish resources and ownership

You can now use the maps to identify the resources available to your customers and your teams and determine ownership of those resources. A comprehensive list should include the tools that your teams can use to interact with customers, customer service documentation, email newsletters, knowledgebase articles, and data repositories.

The team or individual owners of those resources will be the teams responsible for using and maintaining them. Identifying that ownership gives your teams a clearer division of responsibilities, and allows you to keep those resources up-to-date better. Keeping this information on the customer journey maps can help you set priorities and goals for those resources.

Take a test drive

In addition to verifying whether your map is accurate, walking through the customer journey map yourself helps you test assumptions, such as whether your website is easy to navigate. You can do this at any point of the process, but having a fully built map allows you to experiment with different touchpoints and experiences.

List gaps and recommendations

Throughout the mapping process, you may notice trends or patterns in the customer experience. Use the customer journey map to explore those trends and identify gaps. For example, a trend may show more customer escalations after a hand-off from the sales team to a customer support team. The map may show that the customer has to repeat themselves because the teams are using different tools that don’t interact.

After identifying gaps, you can suggest changes to your processes, such as finding a way to make the sales and customer support tools share information, or getting a tool that works for both teams.

Update the map regularly

As your business evolves, your maps should keep up. Periodically revisit the data that you used to create your maps to make sure that they reflect the latest trends. When you do, revisit the maps and make sure that all touchpoint, resource, and ownership information they include is still accurate. Try taking the customer journey again after updating the maps, to see if the experience has changed significantly.

Remember that these maps are not set in stone. You can update them at any point that the information seems outdated or irrelevant. However, setting a regular cadence to test and verify your maps ensures it gets done.

What data points do I need to build a customer journey map?

During the customer journey map process outlined above, you’ll need data including:

• Customer survey data
• Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
• Customer feedback
• Website usage statistics
• Data from your modern data stack
• Focus group data (if applicable)
• Customer personas (existing or created during the process)

Some of this data is considered solicited data, meaning you had to ask your customers to provide it. Unsolicited data includes information they are not directly telling you, but that you gather from chat transcripts, social media interactions, frontline employee contact, or other operational sources. Both types of customer-centric data will provide useful insights into the customer experience.

Do I need a customer journey map tool?

There are multiple customer journey mapping tools that you can consider to help you streamline the process, such as LucidChart, Totango, and Smaply. You could also use any tool for making visual flowcharts, such as Figma, Microsoft Visio, or Miro. However, these tools are not required, and you can instead use a template to help guide your customer journey mapping process.

A hands-on demo is one of the best ways to determine which of those tools is best for you. If you find it easier to use one tool over another, or in place of a template, then that tool may be worth investing in.

Customer journey mapping templates

We've created four customer journey map templates you can download and use for free. The templates include:

• Current state customer journey map template
• Future state customer journey map template
• Day-in-the-life customer journey map template
• Service blueprint customer journey map tempalte

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What is Customer Journey Map?

You want to create memorable first impressions and deliver differentiated buying experiences to your customer? You want to find out how your customers shop in today's digital world? What are the most influential channels and touch points in their customer journey and how can you impact these? How does this work for the new product category you wish to enter?

Customer Journey Map is a powerful technique for understanding what motivates your customers - what their needs are, their hesitations, and concerns. Although most organizations are reasonably good at gathering data about their customers, data alone fails to communicate the frustrations and experiences the customer experienced. A story can do that, and one of the best storytelling tools in business is the customer journey map.

Customer journey map uses storytelling and visuals to illustrate the relationship a customer has with a business over a period of time. The story is being told from the perspective of customer, which provides insight into the total experience of the customer. It helps your team better understand and address customer needs and pain points as they experience your product or service. In other words, mapping out the customer journey offers your business the chance to see how your brand first engages a potential customer, and then moves through the touchpoints of the entire sales process.

Why Customer Journey Map?

The purpose of customer journey mapping is to understand what customers go through and improve the quality of your customer experience, ensuring consistency and a seamless experience at all touchpoints and across all channels. There is no substitution for listening to your customers about how the steps in the journey are working out for them. Having built an understanding of the customer journeys with your business you are now in a position to improve the customer experience enables:

• Provides a bird's eye view of the entire customer journey
• Bring teams together to resolve specific customer hurdles for understanding core customer journey paths, where additional development will provide biggest impact.
• Build faster and higher customer conversion rates by minimizing negative customer experiences, through identification of key steps and decision points.
• Improved customer retention, through understanding how they transit through, say, each stage of a procurement cycle to ensure the correct information is available and accessible to all stakeholders.
• Allows a business to zoom-in a single customer journey in a specific channel.
• Understanding of required metrics to identify customer's progress and fall out points, providing opportunities to bring customers back on board.
• Allows businesses to prioritize actions in their customer experience strategy
• Reveals the gaps between various channels and departments

Basic Concepts of CJM

Customer journey is a journey of a potential customer about different points of contact with a product, a brand or (touchpoints) of a company via all available channels until he performs a desired target action. A customer journey can extend over several hours or days.

• Major target actions are purchases, orders or inquiries.
• Touchpoints are any kind of contact points between customer and your business, from classical advertising (ads, TV or radio spot, etc.) through online marketing activities through to the opinion of a friend or information on review sites.
• Available channels such as telephone, web, branch, marketing communications and service interactions.

Creating Customer Journey Map

Journey maps can take a wide variety of forms. The end goal, however, is always the same: find and resolve the pain points of your customers.

Step 1. Define your persona

Personas and journey maps are both important strategic tools that help provide an in-depth understanding of who your customers are, what they need, and how they interact with your business across all touch points. But more importantly, for sharing customer insights across the organization. Much of the information for creating a journey map comes from your personas (e.g., their goals, motivations, key tasks they want to accomplish, and current pain points), which is why it's best to create the personas first.

The first thing you need to decide is whose journey you are going to map such as, a specific customer type (persona), a potential (target) customer, or a segment of customers, depending on the purpose of your journey mapping initiative. Once you've created distinct personas, you can use them to create customer journey maps that describe each persona's experience at various touch points during their lifecycle with your company.

Step 2. Define your customer phases

Journey maps are typically organized by customer stages (sometimes referred to as phases). Each stage represents a major goal your customer is trying to achieve in their overall journey. You should build a customer journey map with stages that represent your customer's goal-oriented journey, not your internal process steps.

So once you've defined your persona, you have to identify the stages of the customer's journey. What process does it take to start from consideration all the way through buying your product or services? Based on the persona define the stages that your customer experiences with you over time. Define how, when and where they: discover your company, research your products or services, choose you over competitors, purchase from you, and maintain a relationship with you.

Step 3. Describe the Touchpoints Your Customer Uses to Interact with Your Organization

Customer touchpoints are your brand's points of customer contact, from start to finish. For example, customers may find your business online or in an ad, see ratings and reviews, visit your website, shop at your retail store or contact your customer service. This seems like a long list, but these are just a few of your touchpoints! Identifying your touchpoints is an important step towards creating a customer journey map and making sure your customers are satisfied every step of the way.

Step 4. Conduct research

While you may need to offer some incentives for participation, most people are happy to help if they believe you are genuinely interested in their experience and will use their feedback to improve things for others.

For each stage of the journey, try to identify:

• What were their goals, what did they want to achieve
• What did they expect the process would be like
• The steps and touchpoints they used to complete the stage
• How did they feel emotionally during each touchpoint experience and why
• Other thoughts they had during the stage
• How long did it take to complete

Step 5. Determine points of friction

Once you have understood your persona's goals and written down their touchpoints, it's time to look at the big picture - the totality of their experience with your company. Every business will look through the lens of their customer personas differently. Walking through each of the journey map stages with your team will help you identify any points of friction within the customer experience.

Of course, every business is different and YOU will know your customers best. There are a few example questions below to get you started:

• Where could friction appear in this particular touchpoint?
• Are people abandoning purchases because of this?
• Are customers not aware of this solution that you've already provided? If so, why not?

Step 6. Resolve

Journey maps aren't meant to be purely illustrative. A typical exercise should identify a few quick fixes, including opportunities to boost enjoyment and improve the journey. And, of course, most firms discover the process helps drive broader customer experience improvements as customer needs are better understood and met. In brief, mapping the journey should help lead to specific actions that improve the experience and drive the ROI. Treat your map as a living document to be revisited regularly and updated as required and remember to share it with any relevant stakeholders

Other Techniques for applying a CJM

Improvement and innovation using customer journey map.

Identifying opportunities to drive growth through investing in customer experience improvements is a key objective of many journey mapping initiatives. You should build a customer journey map as a tool to use in your action planning. This will show where you identify opportunities, assess their impact, cost, etc. and eventually set investment priorities for your organization.

Some maps explicitly list out the key opportunities on the map itself. This can be helpful as a communication tool, especially if the key opportunities are added after opportunities have been prioritized. In this way, the journey map becomes an ongoing communication and governance document.

Visualize Frontstage and Backstage In Journey Map

Up until now, I've focused on the frontstage or outside-in view of the journey. The backstage refers to the internal systems, processes, and people that are involved in delivering that journey. This is the inside-out view of the journey. When combined in a single journey map, these two views are often referred to as a Frontstage/Backstage Map or an Eco-System Map.

Mapping the frontstage and backstage on one map creates visibility to the internal resources and processes that are responsible for delivering the customer experience-visibility that can help your organization understand what is involved in delivering and ultimately improving the customer experience.

A checklist for Developing Customer Journey Map

Here are the questions you will ask yourself while creating a customer journey map:

• How are your customers finding you and how do they solve (or cope with) the problem before using your solution?
• What is the customer problem you are trying to solve? Or in other words, what are the common problems and pain points customers experience that your product can help alleviate?
• How easy is it for customers to gain access to customer service for support?
• How are you trying to improve customer engagement across channels?
• Is it easy for the customer to pay for your product or service?

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Customer Journey Map

What is a customer journey map.

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

Why Are Customer Journey Maps Important?

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

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

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

What Can Product Managers Learn from a Customer Journey Map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Can I Create a Customer Journey Map?

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

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

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

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

Step 2: Figure out your personas’ goals.

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

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

Step 3: Identify all touchpoints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 5: Take the customer journey yourself.

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

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

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

Step 6: Adjust your journey map as needed.

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

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

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

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Customer journey map

A customer journey map shows the steps and touchpoints on the ‘path-to-purchase’ from when a customer first gains awareness of a product and service through to product comparison, selection and purchase.

They are often used as part of customer persona analysis, in order to summarize the buying process of a persona. They can be useful for communicating the vision of digital transformation for a business to show how the online value proposition (OVP) can support the customer across different touchpoints across the customer lifecycle .

Examples of customer journey maps

Retail example of a non-linear omnichannel purchasing journey.

This Boston consulting group example of selling a dress shows physical store ad digital out-of-store touchpoints. It focuses on different digital interactions in the buying process. Other customer journey maps have more detail on options for TOFU vs MOFU vs BOFU content interactions as part of content mapping .

Financial services

This analysis from McKinsey is an example of a multichannel customer journey map summarizing the behaviour betwee online and offline channels. It shows the importance of digital media in green which are particularly important at the start of the journey. The call-centre and in-store become more important later in the journey.

Car insurance

This  financial services customer journey mapping example  from research analysts GfK shows the complexity of today’s customer journeys across multiple devices and through time, particularly for high involvement or high-value purchases.

Health insurance journey map

Like other journey maps this has stages from Awareness, through Research, Choice reduction and purchase. This  example is interesting since it is a research-based map with an evaluation of satisfaction with each stage.

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

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

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

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

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

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

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

1. Define your purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Create user personas

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

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

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

4. Understand your user goals

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

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

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

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

5. Identify customer touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

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

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

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

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

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

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

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

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

7. Test the customer journey

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

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

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

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

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

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

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

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

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

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

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

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

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

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

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

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

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

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

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

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

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

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

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

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

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What is customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

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

It enables you to assess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When exploring and visualising the customer journey we are assessing:

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

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

Customer journey vs process flow

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

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

Getting started with customer journey map templates

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

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

Download our free journey mapping template here

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

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

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

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

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

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

Create a diverse team

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

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

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

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

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

Step 4 – Innovate

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

Then, test it.

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

Step 5 – Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

Unsolicited data

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

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

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

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maximising satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also lift revenue up by 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

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

Take stock and take action

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

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

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

Orchestrate your customer journey

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

Improve your employee experience

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

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

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

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

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

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

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Customer journey touchpoints 9 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 24 min read, customer journey mapping tools 14 min read, request demo.

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What Is Customer Experience Design? Definition, Examples, & Tips 

• 15 minute read

Businesses struggle to meet customer expectations, leading to unhappy customers and struggling businesses. With rising demands and competition, how can companies break the problem and create positive, valuable, and memorable experiences that delight and inspire?

The solution is Customer Experience (CX) Design , which intentionally crafts and optimizes every customer interaction and touchpoint to create positive, valuable, and memorable experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations.🚀 

By focusing on every step of the customer’s experience, CX Design helps companies stop the problem of unhappy customers and struggling businesses. It helps them build strong relationships with customers, make them happy and loyal, and grow their business.

In this blog, we will explain how Customer Experience Design can help businesses achieve long-term success by creating loyal customers and driving revenue growth. We will also delve into the benefits of customer experience design, explore real-life examples of successful CX Design, and explain how it differs from UX design. 

🔑 KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Customer experience design is about creating and improving the way customers interact with a company to make their experiences happy, helpful, and unforgettable.
• Customer experience design focuses on the entire customer journey, from start to finish, to build strong relationships with customers and drive business growth.
• Benefits of CX design include increased customer loyalty and retention, enhanced brand reputation, improved internal alignment and efficiency, and increased revenue and growth.
• Real-life examples of CX design include Amazon’s 1-Click ordering, Apple Store’s personalized experience, and Uber’s real-time tracking.

Table of Contents

What is Customer Experience Design? 

Customer Experience Design is the intentional design and optimization of customer interactions and touchpoints. The goal is to create positive, valuable, and memorable experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. This process focuses on the entire customer journey, from start to finish. 

CX design has four main parts: knowing what customers want, making interactions easy, getting teams to work together, and tracking progress. By focusing on the customer, it helps companies build strong connections with their customers, keep them happy and loyal, and ultimately grow their business. 

Benefits of Customer Experience Design

Customer experience design offers a wide range of benefits for businesses, both in terms of customer satisfaction and the company’s bottom line. 

Here are the key benefits of Customer Experience Design:

• Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention: Customer experience design plays a vital role in crafting positive, memorable experiences that foster long-term customer relationships and minimize loss. By ensuring customer satisfaction, businesses can encourage repeat purchases and generate referrals, ultimately driving growth and loyalty.
• Enhanced Brand Reputation and Differentiation: By providing unique, tailored experiences that meet individual customer needs, CX design helps companies differentiate themselves from the competition and build a stronger brand reputation.
• Improved Internal Alignment and Efficiency: Customer experience design sets clear roles, guidelines, and standards for delivering a seamless customer experience across all interactions and teams, resulting in better coordination and more efficient operations.
• Increased Revenue and Growth: Creating happy and loyal customers who have positive brand associations are more likely to spend more and refer new business. By fostering satisfied, loyal customers with strong brand love, CX design can unlock increased revenue potential through higher customer retention, increased spending, and positive recommendations.
• Competitive Advantage: Good CX can enhance customer loyalty, reduce churn rates, and improve customer retention while streamlining customer interactions to reduce the time and effort required to resolve customer issues.

Customer Experience (CX) Design vs User Experience (UX) Design: What is the Difference?

Customer experience design and user experience design are related but distinct disciplines. The main differences lie in their scope, focus, and target audiences .

Customer experience design focuses on optimizing all interactions and touchpoints a customer has with a brand throughout their entire journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It considers both customers and end users, including those who may be purchasing on behalf of others.

In contrast, UX design primarily targets end users who interact with a specific digital product, such as a website, app, or software. It focuses on enhancing the usability and efficiency of these products to help users complete tasks easily. 

UX is a crucial part of CX; CX design as a whole has a broader scope, covering more interactions, audiences, and business objectives. It also adopts a more comprehensive, customer-focused strategy to drive sustainable growth for the organization.

However, as customer journey optimization is becoming increasingly complex and technology-driven, UX and CX are merging.

Customer Experience Design Examples   

With CX design, companies can design customer experiences that are easy, personalized, and seamless, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, business growth.

Here is the list of real-life examples of customer experience design:

• Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering: Amazon’s 1-Click ordering feature allows customers to quickly and easily purchase products without having to re-enter their payment and shipping information. This design simplifies the checkout process, reducing friction and increasing customer satisfaction.
• Apple Store’s Personalized Experience: Apple Stores offer a personalized experience to customers, where they can schedule appointments with experts, receive tailored product recommendations, and enjoy a seamless purchase process. This design focuses on building relationships and providing a premium experience.
• Uber’s Real-Time Tracking: Uber’s real-time tracking feature allows customers to track their rides in real-time, providing transparency and reducing anxiety. This design improves the overall experience, making customers feel more in control and informed.
• Starbucks’ Mobile Ordering: Starbucks’ mobile ordering feature allows customers to order and pay for their coffee ahead of time, skipping the line and reducing wait times. This design streamlines the customer journey, increasing convenience and satisfaction.
• Domino’s Pizza Tracker: Domino’s Pizza Tracker allows customers to track the status of their pizza orders in real-time, from preparation to delivery. This design provides transparency and reduces anxiety, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Disney’s MagicBand: Disney’s MagicBand is a wearable device that allows customers to access their hotel room, purchase food and merchandise, and reserve attractions, all with a simple tap. This design simplifies the customer journey, reducing wait times and increasing convenience.
• Zappos’ Free Returns: Zappos’ free returns policy allows customers to return shoes that don’t fit or meet their expectations, reducing the risk of purchasing online. This design builds trust and increases customer satisfaction, leading to loyalty and repeat business.

Customer Experience Design Process

The following overview breaks down the customer experience design process into its essential stages, guiding companies to craft customer-centric experiences that foster loyalty, retention, and sustainable growth.

1. Knowing the Customer’s Perspective

This stage is all about understanding the customer’s perspective. It’s about putting yourself in their daily experiences and gathering insights into their needs, wants, and pain points. This involves conducting research, surveys, and interviews to collect data and identify patterns and trends.

By doing so, you can develop a deep understanding of your customers’ motivations, behaviors, and emotions. The goal of this is to develop sympathy for your customers, which is essential for designing a customer experience that meets their needs. This stage sets the foundation for the rest of the design process, ensuring that your solutions are customer-centric and relevant.

2. Analyze and Define the Problem

The define stage involves analyzing the data collected during understanding and identifying the key challenges that need to be addressed. This stage involves integrating the data, identifying patterns and themes, and creating a concise problem statement that outlines the key challenges and opportunities.

The goal of defining is to create a clear and concise problem statement that guides the rest of the design process. This stage ensures that everyone involved in the design process is aligned and working towards a common goal, which is to create a customer experience that meets the needs of your target audience.

3. Brainstorm Your Ideas and Solution

The brainstorming stage is all about generating ideas and solutions to the problem statement. It’s a brainstorming phase where you encourage wild and creative ideas without worrying about their feasibility. This stage involves bringing together a diverse group of people, including customers, stakeholders, and designers, to generate as many ideas as possible.

Brainstorming is all about creating options and solutions that address the problem statement. By fueling imagination, you can tap into the group’s collective creativity and come up with innovative solutions that might not have been possible otherwise. This stage is all about quantity over quality, with the goal of generating as many ideas as possible. 

4. Designing the Prototype    

The Prototype stage involves creating a physical model of your idea, such as a wireframe, mockup, or functional prototype. This helps to visualize and test the solution and identify any potential issues or areas for improvement. Prototyping can be done using a variety of tools and techniques, from rough sketches to detailed digital prototypes.

The Prototype stage turns an idea into something you can see and touch. You can make a prototype to test your idea, get feedback from others, and find ways to make it better. You try it, fix it, and make it better again. This helps you create a solution that works well for the people you’re making it for.  

5. Testing the Prototype

The test stage involves testing the prototype with real customers to gather feedback and iterate on the solution. This stage involves putting the prototype in front of customers and gathering feedback through usability testing, surveys, and interviews. The goal is to validate the design and identify any areas for improvement. 

Refining the design and creating a solution that meets the target audience’s needs is what testing is all about. By testing the prototype with real customers, you gather feedback, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary changes. This stage is all about iteration and refinement, creating a customer experience that is intuitive, personalized, and seamless. 

How to Build Your CX Design Strategy? 5 Tips 

 Here are 5 tips for building an effective customer experience design strategy:

Tips 1: Understand Your Customers

Gathering insights about your customers is crucial to designing an effective customer experience. This involves conducting surveys, interviews, and usability testing to deeply understand their needs, pain points, behaviors, and expectations. By doing so, you’ll be able to identify patterns and trends that can inform your design decisions. Developing personas is a key outcome of this research. Personas are detailed, fictional representations of your key customer segments based on the research data. They help teams empathize with and design for the target audience. By creating personas, you’ll be able to better understand your customers’ goals, motivations, and behaviors and design experiences that meet their needs. 

Tips 2: Map the End-to-End Customer Journey

Mapping the end-to-end customer journey is essential to understanding how customers interact with your brand. This involves identifying all the touchpoints customers have with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. This could include interactions with your website, social media, customer service, and physical stores. 

Understanding the customer journey helps you find problems and opportunities to improve their experience. By mapping their journey, you can create personalized experiences that meet their needs and make them happy. You’ll identify areas to make things easier and more enjoyable for customers. This helps you design a smooth customer journey that keeps them coming back. 

Tips 3: Align Internal Teams and Processes

To deliver great customer experiences, it’s essential to assign clear roles and responsibilities. This means making sure everyone knows their part in making customers happy. By doing so, you’ll ensure that customer experience is a top priority and everyone is accountable. This helps create a team effort to deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

Fostering a customer-centric culture throughout the organization is essential to delivering exceptional customer experiences. This involves encouraging a customer-centric culture throughout the organization, where everyone is working towards the same goal of delivering exceptional customer experiences. 

Tips 4: Design Seamless, Personalized Experiences

Designing seamless, personalized experiences involves using customer insights to intentionally design smooth, personalized interactions that address customer needs and pain points at each stage of the journey. This could involve using data and analytics to personalize interactions or using design thinking to create experiences that are intuitive and easy to use.

Ensure consistency and continuity across touchpoints, which is essential to building trust and loyalty. This involves ensuring that the experience is consistent across all touchpoints, from the website to customer service to physical stores. By doing so, you’ll be able to create a smooth, seamless experience that meets customers’ needs and exceeds their expectations.  

Tips 5: Measure and Continuously Optimize 

Tracking key CX metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score , Customer Effort Score, and Net Promoter Score is essential to quantifying performance and identifying areas for improvement. By tracking these metrics, you’ll be able to see how customers are responding to your experiences and identify areas where you need to make improvements. 

Continuously gathering feedback, testing new initiatives, and making data-driven improvements to the experience are essential to delivering exceptional customer experiences. This involves creating a culture of continuous improvement, where everyone is empowered to make decisions that benefit the customer.   

How to Use Customer Experience Design to Optimize the Customer Journey 

Here are the ways to use customer experience design to optimize the customer journey:

• Identify Pain Points : Identifying pain points can enhance customer lifecycle management by pinpointing areas of struggle. It allows for targeted improvements, reducing friction and drop-off points. By addressing pain points, you can create a seamless and enjoyable customer experience. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business success.
• Map The Customer Journey: Mapping the customer journey is a crucial step in understanding the customer’s perspective and identifying areas for improvement. By creating a visual representation of all touchpoints and interactions with the brand, businesses can gain valuable insights into the customer’s thoughts, feelings, and pain points throughout their journey. 
• Develop Customer Personas: Understanding your ideal customers is key to delivering great experiences. By creating profiles of your ideal customers, you can gain a deep understanding of their needs and preferences. This insight enables you to design experiences that meet their expectations, ultimately optimizing customer journeys.
• Design Intuitive Interfaces: Designing intuitive interfaces is crucial in optimizing the customer journey. When an interface is intuitive, it allows customers to quickly and efficiently interact with a product, making it easier for them to find what they need and complete their goals. This, in turn, enhances user satisfaction and engagement.
• Personalize Experiences: Providing personalized experiences engages audiences by building trust, increasing relevance, and fostering loyalty, ultimately driving conversions. By showing customers they’re seen and understood, businesses create an emotional connection that turns them into loyal supporters. 
• Provide Omnichannel Experiences: Providing omnichannel experiences enhances the customer journey by creating a seamless and integrated experience across all touchpoints and channels, including online, offline, and mobile. This allows customers to interact with a brand in a way that is most convenient for them without having to repeat information or start over from the beginning.
• Continuously Iterate: Continuous iteration refines the customer journey through data-driven insights. It helps brands identify pain points, friction, and opportunities to delight. By analyzing customer feedback and behavior, brands can make targeted improvements. This leads to a more seamless, personalized, and satisfying customer experience.

Customer Experience Design is a crucial aspect of any business strategy, as it helps companies create positive, valuable, and memorable experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. By understanding customers’ needs and making things easy for them, businesses can make them happy and loyal. This leads to more customers and business growth.

Additionally, by following the customer experience design process and tips, companies can gain a competitive advantage and ensure long-term success. By focusing on customer experience, businesses can build strong customer relationships, boost revenue, and stay ahead of competitors. This leads to happy customers, increased loyalty, and a stronger market position.

Why is customer experience design important?

Customer experience design is important as it helps brands develop meaningful relationships with customers, secure repeat purchases, maintain a positive reputation, and improve internal processes. It increases customer retention, aligns internal teams, and drives business growth.

How can businesses measure the effectiveness of their customer experience design?

Businesses can measure the effectiveness of their customer experience (CX) design using several key metrics and strategies like:

• Tracking customer experience metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Churn Rate, Retention Rate, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
• Using customer journey analytics tools to measure customer experience.
• Creating customer journey maps.

Is CRM the same as customer experience?

No, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and customer experience (CX) are related but distinct concepts. CRM focuses on managing the company’s interactions with customers to increase sales and revenue. In contrast, CX encompasses the entire customer journey and their perceptions of the brand across all touchpoints.

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Dinesh Silwal

Dinesh Silwal is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of KrispCall. For the past few years, he has been advancing and innovating in the cloud telephony industry, using AI to enhance and improve telephony solutions, and driving KrispCall to the forefront of the field.

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[ 1 ] Results are over three years for a composite organization based on customers interviewed for a commissioned study delivered by Forrester Consulting, The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, April 2024.

[ 2 ] Unified People refers to a uniquely identified individual that is created through a collection of defined data source sets from multiple systems, represented by a profile.

[ 3 ] Interacted People refers to any Dataverse entity (such as a contact, lead, account or an Insights profile) that is interacted with. A person is considered interacted when they are interacted with via either an outbound interaction or an inbound one such as filling out a form via a marketing website. The interaction can be sent through the channels available in Customer Insights (such as emails, text messages, or push notifications), other Microsoft channels (such as Azure Communication Services), or external systems (such as other text-messaging providers).

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