sales journey mapping

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Map Guide: Your Mapping is Missing One Key Element

August 26, 2024

John Abbasi

Customer journey mapping is an essential process for marketers to deliver a great experience that converts. But the modern customer journey map needs to consider what happens when visitors go off the rails of the curated path and beyond.

Redefining How to Build an Effective Customer Journey Map

Customer journey maps give organizations a chance to understand and improve the key touchpoints, channels and digital pathways their customers take to conversion. Learning how to map the customer journey is a great first step, but going beyond the basic mapping process is essential to staying agile and on top of your customers’ needs.

Consider a typical customer. No matter how well your brand is established, and no matter how you present your website content, will the customer take your ideal path to conversion every time?

Almost never.

Most often, they’ll jump right to your search bar to find exactly what they need.

The solution is to build a customer journey that fits their needs and is optimized to deliver an exceptional website experience even when visitors stray from the planned path to your search bar. We want to help you see your journey differently and give your mapping an edge over the competition.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey is the series of steps and engagements a person experiences before, during and after becoming a customer of a service, brand or product. The customer journey encompasses the entirety of a customer’s interactions with an organization, be it through a digital ad, exposure on social media, reading a guest blog or otherwise. The variations of touchpoints are virtually endless.

A customer journey map is a complete overview of all the interactions the customer experiences in their journey. The journey map provides important insight into the efficacy of a company’s marketing touchpoints and highlights moments when a visitor moved closer or further from becoming a customer.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping so Important?

Creating a customer journey map, when done correctly, can completely change the way you interact with customers. Here are some of the most common benefits that come from mapping:

• Provides organizational insight about customer lifecycles. Mapping offers connectivity within a company/organization, bringing interdepartmental adherence as each team understands the steps of their typical customer journey – including pain points, areas for improvement and more.
• Results in higher quality leads. It’s crucial to target the right types of people with your marketing campaigns, those more likely to become leads and then customers. Because mapping shows customer behaviors, it gives marketers a way to address the needs of their customers at specific points in the funnel, producing more qualified leads.
• Reduces churn rate. The best mapping process illuminates patterns of current and previous customers, including the patterns that occur right before or at the moment of the customer switching to a different company’s product/service. This informs strategy to reduce churn.

Understanding the Customer Journey

The traditional customer journey isn’t a mystery at this point; it has well-defined key stages and necessary elements for success that marketers should consider when mapping their journey.

At this point, you’re likely familiar with the 5 stages of the journey : Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy. Rather than focusing on those well-defined stages, we want to zoom in on the tactical elements for how to build the base of your customer journey map and then discuss the layers that can elevate the experience.

Key Elements of a Customer Journey Map

Before we consider the optimal way to build a customer journey map, let’s look at some of the most important elements that make it up:

• Touchpoints. Touchpoints are interactions between customers and your organization. These can range from communications on social media, offline event interactions, website visits and more.
• Customer emotions. Though not the most concrete element, there are methods to gain insight into a customer’s emotions that arise as a result of their experiences with your brand. For example, a questionnaire could help reveal the ways customers are enjoying the overall experience.
• Pain points. Pain points drive customers toward or away from a company; your customer journey map should identify and correct them as soon as possible.
• Access considerations. Part of any good mapping will consider the types of access customers have, including things like the devices on which they access your company websites, products or services. There may be drastic differences between customers who exclusively use mobile devices, for example, compared to those who don’t.
• Customer personalities and demographics. Customer journey maps should highlight the different customer types your organization will encounter, giving a better understanding of how to connect with customers.

Creating a Customer Journey Map

The best process for creating a customer journey map includes 5 steps:

• Gathering materials
• Defining goals
• Highlighting touchpoints
• Including pain points
• Testing and iterating

1. Gather all Prerequisite Materials

Before starting the mapping process, you’ll want to gather all necessary information and materials and put them in order.

Gather customer data/analytics

First, take account of your current customer data situation: what types of data would be important, what information do you already have and what data would be helpful to collect? Make sure you have a process or tool in place to easily analyze and segment your customer data.

Identify customer personas

Part of a successful map is the ability to narrow customers down into different categories. That way, you’re able to see the paths they take and what works best for them on a more personalized level. To kick off this process, you’ll want a clear understanding of the many different customer personas and demographics in your customer base.

Take into account their specific goals in using your product or service. What are they trying to achieve or solve? 

2. Define Detailed Mapping Goals

The mapping process can be a nebulous process without clearly defined goals. Before starting one, record the most important reasons a customer journey map would be beneficial for your company.

What would a highly successful map look like and what types of decisions would it ultimately open up to you? How would the customer experience improve as a result of your new mapping?

3. Highlight Touchpoints and Channels

Your customers are each unique, so identifying the different touchpoints they encountered along their journey is crucial to map and learn from. It’s also important to know the channels and devices your customers use to connect with your brand. The more this is recorded, the better you’ll be able to improve customer experience.

4. Include Pain Points

It’s not always easy finding pain points without direct communication between customer and organization. But there are other ways to go about pinpointing patterns where customers may struggle within your systems. During your planning stage, you can ask team members to test out the proposed follow to see where they experience friction.

Once you’ve implemented your customer journey, look for places where customers experience bottlenecks or roadblocks in achieving the goals you identified above. The pain points you hypothesize will often not be what your customers experience when moving through the funnel; it’s important to stay agile and to keep up with your customers’ pain points.

5. Test and Analyze Results for Iteration

Your customer journey map isn’t finished once you complete the first iteration. If you don’t test and analyze it, you’ll leave a lot of potential improvement on the table. Be sure to periodically evaluate your customer journey maps to ensure they’re up to date with your current data and strategy in mind.

Also remember that a map usually applies to a specific customer type. There will be different maps for different customer profiles.

Map-Building Best Practices

Though you’ll have different customer journey mapping processes based on your ideal customer, there are some universal best practices to follow.

Leverage Internal Collaboration

This is something that often goes overlooked in a mapping process, as it can be easy to get caught up in your own team’s construction and application of a customer journey map.

It’s important to:

• Request and implement insights from cross-functional teams.
• Ensure extensive collaboration with customer-facing teams.

Conduct Data Analysis

A customer journey map without comprehensive data analysis is bound to fall flat. Incorporate high-quality customer data into each mapping process to ensure your map points to the right issues to correct. When including data, remember to use both qualitative and quantitative data, as well as incorporate customer feedback and analytics.

Build Mapping Visuals

A strong visual representation helps teams get a better feel for the overall structure of the map, which helps them better address any issues it uncovers.

Here are a couple examples of visuals that helped simplify complex customer journeys.

As you can see in this example journey map, a higher education institution would want to carefully map out the most important touchpoints and phases of a prospective student’s journey to attending their school.

The map is easy to follow and helps with planning thoughtful follow ups and personalized communication at each stage of the journey.

It’s great to start with a flow of the main touchpoints and moments for a customer (or student in this example).

Additional mapping layers could include:

• Pain points that prospective students may encounter
• Types of devices they may be accessing information on for each stage
• Forms of communication between the institution and the student along the way

Next we have a journey map for a typical patient who is on the road from content discovery to becoming an ongoing patient with a healthcare provider. This maps out all critical touch points and moments in the journey when the healthcare provider would need to optimize to deliver an exceptional experience.

Some of those moments may seem like smaller, expected processes but have a major impact on the patient’s experience and perception of the healthcare company.

For example, receiving and filling prescriptions in a digital format needs to be optimized for the smoothest process possible. Not only is it essential for people’s healthcare needs, but it’s also critical to optimize the digital experience so that people know they can rely on the company’s website or app. It’s a worthy touchpoint to note on a customer journey map like the example above.

Update Journey Maps Regularly

Lastly, no customer journey map will be relevant forever. Ensure your mapping is a dynamic process that adapts to changes in product, service, website and customers.

The Missing Link for Customer Journey Maps: Site Search

Customer journey mapping involves planning and curating for the ideal pathways to content and pages people need to navigate in order to convert to customers. But that’s just it; it’s an ideal scenario that you optimize for, but can’t guarantee your visitors will follow.

One of the most common ways visitors break the expected customer journey path is by searching exactly what they need to find on the organization’s website.

When a customer uses your website’s search bar, you want to be confident that they won’t exit the site out of frustration with the search results. Additionally, site search should be an asset to your customer journey, bringing them a better experience, even when they deviate from your original curated path.

Prioritizing site search means equipping your marketing team with the ability to understand common search queries, the means to identify content gaps and the agility to make changes to search outcomes to best fit your visitors’ behaviors.

From a mapping perspective, site search gives companies the power to analyze detailed data and optimize for this commonly overlooked aspect of the customer journey. Many visitors will inevitably use your search bar; it’s up to you to connect them with the content they need through a great search experience.

If you’re looking for a site search solution to improve search outcomes and performance on your site, check out our Site Search solution .

How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

If you’ve taken the time to build extensive customer journey maps, your team will get to know your customers on a deeper level and be able to personalize the journey. You’ll be able to better identify pain points and bottlenecks in the journey and fine-tune the experience.

It’s almost like a superpower for organizations, and it starts with understanding stages of the customer journey, building out a map, including analysis from site search and putting it all together to deliver an elevated experience.

By John Abbasi

Editorial and content manager, "if you’ve taken the time to build extensive customer journey maps, your team will get to know your customers on a deeper level and be able to personalize the journey.", you might also like:, what is site search a marketer’s guide to better website search, site search data unveiled: 7 key insights into your website visitors’ behavior, how to improve your website click-through rate, get the latest content first.

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How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

• Conduct persona research
• Define customer touchpoints
• Map current states
• Map future states

Steve Jobs, the genius behind Apple’s one-of-a-kind customer experience, said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”

Nowadays, a clear vision and strategy for customer interactions is no longer an optional “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. As you refine your customer experience, a customer journey map is one of the most powerful ways to understand your current state and future state.

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the process your customers go through in interacting with your business, such as an experience on the website, a brick and mortar experience, a service, a product, or a mix of those things.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. These visuals tell a story about how a customer moves through each phase of interaction and experiences each phase. Your customer journey map should include touchpoints and moments of truth, but also potential customer feelings, such as frustration or confusion, and any actions you want the customer to take.

Customer journey maps are often based on a timeline of events, such as a customer’s first visit on your website and the way they progress towards their first in-product experience, then purchase, onboarding emails, cancellation, etc. 

Your customer journey maps may need to be tailored to your business or product, but the best way to identify and refine these phases is to actually talk to your customers. Research your target audiences to understand how they make decisions, decide to purchase, etc. Without an essential understanding of your customers and their needs, a customer map will not lead you to success. But, a well-constructed and researched customer journey map can give you the insights to drastically improve your business’s customer experience.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for uncovering insights into your customer experience, driving business goals, and building resilience in a changing market. In a 2022 report, Hanover Research found that 94% of businesses said their customer journey maps help them develop new products and services to match customer needs. Another 91% said their maps drove sales. 

But understanding a customer’s journey across your entire organization does so much more than increase your revenue. It enables you to discover how to be consistent when it comes to providing a positive customer experience and retaining customer loyalty. 

This was especially evident in recent years as top of improving marketing, customer journey maps emerged as a valuable way to understand evolving buyer behavior. In fact, 1 in 3 businesses used customer journey maps to help them navigate the changing landscape during the pandemic.

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

• Increase customer engagement through channel optimization.
• Identify and optimize moments of truth in the CX.
• Eliminate ineffective touchpoints.
• Shift from a company to a customer-focused perspective.
• Break down silos between departments and close interdepartmental gaps.
• Target specific customer personas with marketing campaigns relevant to their identity.
• Understand the circumstances that may have produced irregularities in existing quantitative data.
• Assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
• Make it possible to assess the ROI of future UX/CX investments.

Following the process outlined above, customer mapping can put your organization on a new trajectory of success. Yet, according to Hanover Research, only 47% of companies currently have a process in place for mapping customer journeys. Making the investment to map your customer journey and solidify that process as part of your company’s DNA can result in significant advantages in your competitive landscape, making your solution the go-to option that customers love.

Customer journey maps can become complicated unless you keep them focused. Although you may target multiple personas, choose just one persona and one customer scenario to research and visualize at a time. If you aren’t sure what your personas or scenarios might be, gather some colleagues and try an  affinity diagram in Lucidchart to generate ideas.

1. Set goals

Without a goal, it will be difficult to determine whether your customer journey map will translate to a tangible impact on your customers and your business. You will likely need to identify existing—and future—buyers so you can set goals specifically for those audiences at each stage of their experience.

Consider gathering the key stakeholders within your company—many of whom likely touch different points of the customer experience. To set a logical and attainable goal, cross-functional teamwork is essential. Gather unique perspectives and insights about each part of the existing customer journey and where improvements are needed, and how those improvements will be measured.

Pro Tip : If you don’t already have them in place, create buyer personas to help you focus your customer journey map on the specific types of buyers you’re optimizing for.

2. Conduct persona research

Flesh out as much information as possible about the persona your customer journey map is based on. Depending on the maturity of your business, you may only have a handful of records, reports, or other pre-existing data about the target persona. You can compile your preliminary findings to draft what you think the customer journey may look like. However, the most insightful data you can collect is from real customers or prospective customers—those who have actually interacted with your brand. Gather meaningful customer data in any of the following ways:

• Conduct interviews.
• Talk to employees who regularly interact with customers.
• Email a survey to existing users.
• Scour customer support and complaint logs.
• Pull clips from recorded call center conversations.
• Monitor discussions about your company that occur on social media.
• Leverage web analytics.
• Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data.

Look for information that references:

• How customers initially found your brand
• When/if customers purchase or cancel
• How easy or difficult they found your website to use
• What problems your brand did or didn’t solve

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative information throughout your research process ensures your business makes data-driven decisions based on the voice of real customers. To assist when conducting persona research, use one of our user persona templates .

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints make up the majority of your customer journey map. They are how and where customers interact with and experience your brand. As you research and plot your touchpoints, be sure to include information addressing elements of action, emotion, and potential challenges. 

The number and type of touchpoints on your customer journey map will depend on the type of business. For example, a customer’s journey with a SaaS company will be inherently different than that of a coffee shop experience. Simply choose the touchpoints which accurately reflect a customer’s journey with your brand.

After you define your touchpoints, you can then start arranging them on your customer journey map.

4. Map the current state

Create what you believe is your as-is state of the customer journey, the current customer experience. Use a visual workspace like Lucidchart, and start organizing your data and touchpoints. Prioritize the right content over aesthetics. Invite input from the stakeholders and build your customer journey map collaboratively to ensure accuracy. 

Again, there is no “correct” way to format your customer journey map, but for each phase along the journey timeline, include the touchpoints, actions, channels, and assigned ownership of a touchpoint (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.). Then, customize your diagram design with images, color, and shape variation to better visualize the different actions, emotions, transitions, etc. at a glance.

Mapping your current state will also help you start to identify gaps or red flags in the experience. Collaborators can comment directly on different parts of your diagram in Lucidchart, so it’s clear exactly where there’s room for improvement.

5. Map future states

Now that you’ve visualized the current state of the customer journey, your map will probably show some gaps in your CX, information overlap, poor transitions between stages, and significant pain points or obstacles for customers.

Use hotspots and layers in Lucidchart to easily map out potential solutions and quickly compare the current state of the customer journey with the ideal future state. Present your findings company-wide to bring everyone up to speed on the areas that need to be improved, with a clear roadmap for expected change and how their roles will play a part in improving the customer journey.

Customer journey map templates

You have all the right information for a customer journey map, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to start arranging the information in a digestible, visually appealing way. These customer journey mapping examples can help you get started and gain some inspiration about what—and how much—to include and where.

Don’t let the possibility of a bad customer journey keep you up at night. Know the current state of the customer journey with you business, and make the changes you need to attract and keep customers happy.

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

About Lucidchart

Lucidchart, a cloud-based intelligent diagramming application, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This intuitive, cloud-based solution empowers teams to collaborate in real-time to build flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, customer journey maps, and more. Lucidchart propels teams forward to build the future faster. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidchart.com.

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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How 5 businesses successfully mapped out the customer journey

Creating a customer journey map puts you in your customers’ shoes to help you understand the user experience—what your users think, feel, and do at each stage of their buying journey.

Last updated

Reading time.

We’ve put together a list of five brilliant customer journey mapping (CJM) examples to show you how it’s done, so you can learn how to improve the user experience (UX) for your customers. 

Want to know how customers really interact with your product?

Hotjar’s product experience insights tools let you see things through their eyes. 

5 great examples of customer journey mapping 

A good customer journey map identifies buyers’ actions, desires, and experiences at every key touchpoint—from when a customer lands on your webpage all the way to conversion, onboarding, and beyond.

Our list of customer journey examples breaks down the best B2B, B2C, ecommerce, and SaaS journey maps—and shows you how to understand your customers better to build your own.

1. Hotjar’s B2B customer journey map 

At Hotjar (👋), we make product experience (PX) insights tools to help businesses understand how their customers interact with their websites and digital products. And, of course, we’ve done some B2B customer journey mapping of our own to understand what our customers want, by tracking their interactions across key touchpoints. 

The result was the digital customer journey example shown above that maps our customers' experience when they use Hotjar tools for product testing. We visualized the key actions, questions, technical limitations, and opportunities of customers using our tools to get granular data to validate our product ideas and experiments. 

We started by identifying one specific customer journey, then used Google Analytics, Hotjar tools, and data from customer interactions with our brand to understand user actions, thoughts, and feelings. Then, we got UX, dev, engineering, and customer success teams to fill out empathy maps before mapping the journey. 

To increase empathy with our customers, we included two rows dedicated to pain points and happy moments—like the pain of finding patterns in complex customer data, and the ‘a-ha moment' when our users first realize value.  

We made our map flexible enough to be updated as customer needs change and new information becomes available, so we continually validate our assumptions against customers’ real-world experiences.

The benefits of customer journey mapping included helping us visualize customer motivations, drivers, and pain points, align cross-functional teams , eliminate silos, and clarify who owns each part of the buyer journey. 

How B2B companies selling self-serve digital products can create a similar map: 

1. Define the goal and scope of your customer journey map. We recommend starting with a narrow scope and only a few people involved. Focus on a specific problem you can break down into a few steps—like identifying where you’re losing users, and mapping out the pains, desires, and experiences of customers who exit your site.

Ask yourself: 

What do you want to achieve? 

Which customer journey touchpoints do you want to focus on? 

What KPIs do you want to measure? 

Where can you get the data you need? 

Which teams need to be involved?   

2. Use Google Analytics and Hotjar's Observe tools to collect user insights about online interactions:

Create Hotjar Heatmaps on key product pages to see where users are clicking and which parts of your page aren’t engaging users or working as intended. Then, improve UX and optimize the placement of on-page elements to boost conversions. 

Use Session Recordings to see how users scroll, click, and move around your site across an entire session. Focus on spotting bugs and blockers that cause them to bounce. 

3. Add qualitative user data from service chat logs, emails, or by asking customer support teams. 

4. Get key product and customer service teams to fill in an empathy map detailing what your buyers do, say, see, hear, think, and feel. Feel free to steal our free template below!

5. Map the journey with Post-its and pens before digitizing it and sharing it across the company. 

2. Rail Europe’s B2C journey map 

B2C ecommerce travel provider Rail Europe gives customers an easy way to book rail tickets online. Their on-site user interface (UI) is strong, but the company wanted to go deeper to understand the customer journey across all touchpoints. 

Mapping the customer journey produced a full spectrum customer experience map that illustrates the buyer's journey before, during, and after a purchase. It reminded their team that the buyer journey starts long before a customer lands on the website to book a ticket—and continues after the trip, through touchpoints like post-trip refunds, sharing recommendations, or publishing photos on social media. 

Rail Europe’s customer journey map also shows the transition between stages or channels to accurately visualize what is often a non-linear journey . For example, in the initial research, planning, and shopping phases, customers often move back and forth between comparison pages, checking timetables, and website chat and planning features.  

Mapping the journey like this helps Rail Europe understand different customers’ channel preferences, see which touchpoints aren’t working as they should, and which aspects of the user experience need more attention from design teams, marketing, and customer support. They visualized actions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences and rated the customer satisfaction of each stage, as well as the relevance and helpfulness of Rail Europe, to home in on areas for improvement.

The map doubles down on customer empathy by identifying travelers’ overall concerns and frustrations while on the trip, even those unrelated to their rail journey—the overall travel experience is still connected with the company brand in customers’ minds. 

This stand-alone map can be understood across teams without supporting materials, and there’s a focus on actionable insights—like the need to address customer frustrations over snail mail ticket delivery. 

Ecommerce website analysis like this is valuable for any company selling experiential products or services, like concert tickets, vacations, or tours. If that’s you, follow Rail Europe’s example and conduct customer journey map research by surveying current and potential customers to uncover exactly what they’re hoping for, thinking, and feeling as they engage with your brand.

Tips to map out the ecommerce customer journey:

1. Ask yourself: 

How can we access users who aren’t yet customers? 

What happens before the customer gets to our web page? How do they do research for a trip? What kinds of search keywords do they use online?  

Is the buyer journey non-linear? If not, how can we represent this? 

2. If your buyer journey has multiple touchpoints, group them into categories like 'research and planning', 'shopping', 'booking', etc. 

3. Match survey insights to touchpoints and map out the journey visually, adding qualitative insights about what the customer is thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage. 

💡 Pro tip: use Hotjar Surveys to collect real-time suggestions about your website or app from users to make data-driven decisions and validate assumptions that inform and elevate your customer journey map. 

Hotjar’s no-code UI makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys  

3. Rewind’s SaaS customer journey map 

Rewind makes backup & restoration software for SaaS platforms. Their team decided to map out the B2B SaaS customer journey when revenue fell short of expectations after the acquisition of a similar product. It also became clear that marketing efforts weren’t attracting the ideal customer.

Like many SaaS companies, Rewind relied on sales calls and customer relationship management (CRM) data to understand their users. But they were missing key insights about what happens before the customer lands on their website. 

To map the journey, the Rewind team defined their ideal customer profile (ICP) before conducting customer interviews to deeply understand buyer motivations and the decision-making process. They also used Google Analytics, Hubspot , and PX insights tools to understand users’ online behavior and how they were interacting with marketing materials. 

This showed them a short, high-intent, back-and-forth customer journey that happens almost exclusively online—since Rewind is installed in SaaS platforms, a lot of traffic is referred from their app marketplaces. 

The map showed event triggers and the customer’s thoughts and feelings as they moved through becoming aware of their problem (loss of important data), understanding the need for a solution, and doing online research—before arriving at Rewind.  

By mapping the full journey, the Rewind team discovered that customers often use professional forums or communities as part of solution research, and discovered a new buyer motivation and market segment: data compliance. 

According to Content Lift Founder Ryan Paul Gibson , who helped Rewind conduct customer interviews, the company also realized “potential buyers don’t want to speak with sales or ‘get a demo'. They want to research the product themselves and evaluate it. They also don’t want to enter a credit card to test it; they want to try it first and pay if it’s a good fit.” 

Rewind updated their go-to-market strategy, personas, product positioning , and marketing to complete these missing steps in the customer journey map.

The result? A two-fold increase in product installations, and better internal alignment on their ICP—which has improved their efficiency and helped them maximize resources. 

To create a great SaaS customer journey map: 

Set your research objectives

Create a list of topics that align with your ideal buyer journey. For example, in Rewind’s case, they were customers’ reasons for buying, details about their company and role, and what caused them to start searching for a solution. 

Create questions to ask customers during interviews, but leave flexibility for discussion.

Run in-depth customer interviews to capture the exact order of events in the buyer journey and make sure you understand every customer action and touchpoint—from users identifying a problem to making a purchase.

Bucket interview insights into user priorities, pains, and anxieties—what happened to trigger a search; which research channels the customer uses; how they evaluate solutions.

4. Spotify’s B2C customer journey map 

When music streaming app Spotify mapped the user journey, their team focused on tracking touchpoints for one specific feature: sharing playlists via third-party apps.  

Their map zeroes in on clearly defined user personas and identifies key areas of customer engagement with a focus on users’ emotions and thoughts at each stage.

The team’s journey mapping research revealed a key customer pain point—fear of being judged for their music taste—that can hold users back from sharing music. They also identified an awareness gap to address: some users didn’t know the feature existed. 

By mapping the user journey, Spotify improved their UI and in-app flows to streamline the customer experience and make every touchpoint relevant to how real customers use the product.  

Mapping user flows is key for digital B2C brands with a product that lives and dies by good usability—and a business model that relies on customer loyalty. 

To map the user journey before improving or launching a feature:  

Conduct market research based on direct and indirect competitors to understand how people use similar features, and what they expect from yours. 

In user interviews , focus on the specific feature or stage of the journey. Why aren’t customers using it as you’d like? What are the barriers to product adoption? Dig deep into what motivates users to complete a specific action—and what blocks them.  

Using interview data, create a buyer persona and include their key needs and motivations. What can you do to bring this feature to their attention and boost adoption? 

Create a customer journey map combining stages in the user’s interaction with the feature, and break down the actions they take and the thoughts and emotions they have at each stage. 

Use these insights to remove friction and improve user flows, validating your design with real users. 

Pro tip : use Hotjar's Observe tools to study Session Recordings and Heatmaps and get insights into the product experience of real or test users at every point in the customer journey.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

5. Emirates Airline’s multi-channel customer journey map 

To reflect their customers’ multi-channel journey, flag carrier Emirates created a CJM that covers reservations, check-in, and onboarding experiences. 

As well as digital channels, the map includes call center interactions, which provide context for interactive voice response (IRV) technology and human service agents. It also sheds light on customer desires, broken down into categories like ‘comfort’, ‘safety’, ‘confidence’, and ‘freedom & control’, shown in the corners of the map.

With a global brand like Emirates, customers expect the same experience at all touchpoints, in all countries. This exercise helped the Emirates team understand customers’ main interactions and expectations to better coordinate service touchpoints and provide a consistent, high-quality experience across each one.  

For example, they set up a single, virtual contact center platform to increase efficiency and ensure consistent interactions across every channel. It’s not just the customer who benefits: the Emirates team now better understands exactly how to meet user needs across several channels and countries.

This map is ideal for businesses whose customer journey combines online and offline touchpoints, especially companies looking to differentiate themselves through the quality of their service. 

How to implement a multi-channel customer journey map: 

Define your key goals for producing the map.

Conduct thorough market research and customer interviews to reduce your assumptions and understand every single interaction and channel customers experience.

Interview customer experience and support staff members at all touchpoints and in all regions.

Use analytics tools and product experience insights software to understand how buyers interact with your digital marketing, website, and chat functions across channels and locations.  

Use AI to analyze customer call recordings for tone and sentiment.

Pro tip: use Hotjar Feedback widgets to get in-context insights about what users really think about your app or website. You can filter feedback by region or channel to better understand your global customer touchpoints.

Hotjar's non-invasive Feedback widgets allow customers to give their opinions of your website or product as they experience it.

You’ve reached your destination: a truly valuable customer journey map  

Customers interact with your brand over a variety of channels and touchpoints, and their journeys aren’t always linear. But understanding their journey is key to improving your product and boosting customer acquisition, adoption, and retention. 

Follow these customer journey mapping examples to experience key touchpoints from your users’ point of view and grasp their pains, needs, and frustrations so you can build a journey your customers will love.

Want to know how customers really interact with your brand?

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping, what are the stages of the customer's journey.

Buyer journeys can typically be broken down into three steps or stages: 

Awareness of a problem or pain

Consideration (researching and evaluating solutions)

Making a decision

What does a strong customer journey map look like?

A good customer journey map includes all the touchpoints where a customer interacts with your brand. It should include the various stages of the marketing and sales cycle, customer touchpoints across your product and website, and map out customers’ actions, thoughts, and feelings at each stage, as well as KPIs.

For example, Rail Europe’s customer journey map tracks all the stages of research, planning, and shopping, through to booking, travel, and post-travel. At each stage, it maps out customer questions, concerns, and feelings, as well as the helpfulness and relevance of Rail Europe.

What are the stages of customer journey mapping?

Customer journey map stages are: 

Collecting data and conducting customer interviews or surveys 

Mapping the customer journey in a workshop

Extracting insights and producing a report

CJM tools: features and how to choose

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CJM research

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Why Customer Journey Mapping Should Start With Your Sales Team

‍The term customer journey reflects the reality that your customer’s relationship with your product is rarely love at first sight. The buyer travels a long and winding road –their personal sales journey– to adoption, which includes recognizing a problem, researching a solution, discovering that your product exists, sizing up its attributes, overcoming doubt, calming the naysayers who may have a stake in the decision, securing the funds, and ultimately getting to “yes.”

Because of this, companies are looking for ways to establish authentic, long-term relationships with customers .

One technique that can help accomplish this is using customer sales journey mapping to visualize how your customers develop relationships with your company. This practice helps your team understand and build customer relationships that generate recurring revenue—follow-on sales, maintenance fees, upgrades, and repeat purchases—beyond the original sale.

In flat organizations , customer journey mapping may draw in senior executives and involve direct input from customers. But salespeople, right down to the individual reps, are crucially important players in capturing the customer’s journey for analysis since sales are the customer’s closest and most frequent touchpoint in your organization.

Keep reading to learn more about customer journey mapping and the roles of sales teams in mapping and enhancing your customers’ journeys.

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Table of Contents

What is the customer journey, what is customer journey mapping.

• Common stages in the customer journey
• 6 steps to mapping your customer journey

The role of sales in customer journey mapping

Improve your customer journey with the help of nutshell crm.

The customer sales journey – or customer journey for short – is the stages someone goes through as they develop their relationship with a company through their interactions with it, from first hearing about a company to becoming a customer and beyond.

The ideal customer sales journey is smooth. Companies aim to predict where and when prospects encounter bumps on the road to closing. This ensures that they have a solution ready to help customers overcome these bumps as quickly as possible.

That’s where customer journey mapping comes in.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the customer journey, including the interactions, thought processes, and decisions involved.

The goal of customer journey mapping is to empower sales and marketing teams with a reference map that lets them know what to do and how to react to customer actions at specific points in the sales journey to ensure it continues as planned.

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Common stages in the customer sales journey

While the exact stages and what’s included in them differ from company to company, the customer journey is typically broken down into five key stages—awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and loyalty. Let’s take a quick look at each stage.

1. Awareness

At the initial stage of the customer journey, your potential customers become aware of your brand’s existence. This is often the result of marketing efforts, advertising, or word-of-mouth. Your goal here is to make a memorable first impression. 

Examples of activities in this stage include:

• Content marketing: Sharing informative blog posts, videos, or social media content to showcase your expertise.
• Search engine optimization : Ensuring your website ranks high on search engine results pages.
• Online advertising : Running targeted ads to reach a wider audience.

2. Consideration

Once your audience is aware of your brand, they start evaluating their options. They consider your products or services alongside those of your competitors. Your role here is to provide valuable information that helps them make informed decisions. 

Activities in this stage include:

• Product comparisons: Creating detailed product comparisons that highlight your strengths.
• Customer reviews: Encouraging satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and ratings.
• Educational webinars: Hosting webinars that showcase your product’s features and benefits.

3. Decision

This is the make-or-break moment. Your potential customers are now ready to make a purchase decision. Your job is to ensure that the process is as smooth and compelling as possible. 

• Calls to action (CTAs): Providing a straightforward path to purchase through your website, emails, or other channels.
• Special offers: Offering exclusive discounts or promotions to incentivize a decision.
• Personalized recommendations: Recommending products or services based on browsing and buying history.

4. Retention

Congratulations! You’ve acquired a new customer. Now, it’s time to ensure they have a positive experience and keep them coming back. A major benefit of customer retention (besides recurring revenue) is the social proof they provide through reviews or testimonials that allow you to leverage the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

• Customer support: Offering exceptional post-purchase support for questions or issues.
• Follow-up emails: Sending thank-you emails and asking for feedback.
• Loyalty programs: Rewarding repeat customers with discounts or exclusive perks.

At this stage, you’ve cultivated a loyal customer base who not only continues to purchase but also becomes brand advocates. This stage involves keeping customers engaged and satisfied with your brand.

• Exclusive events: Inviting loyal customers to special events or product launches.
• Referral programs : Encouraging customers to refer friends and family in exchange for rewards.
• Continuous engagement: Keeping your loyal customers engaged through newsletters, loyalty rewards, or personalized offers.

6 steps to mapping your customer sales journey

Here’s a look at how to get started with mapping out your customer journey and how sales teams can play an essential role in doing so.

1. Define your buyer personas

Sales’ first and most fundamental contribution to the customer journey mapping process is in helping define buyer personas —descriptions of your customers that are fictional but based on data. These descriptions include various demographic and psychographic characteristics, and your business may have several personas to represent different types of customers.

The premise behind personas is that there are a finite number of well-worn paths by which people arrive at the realization that they have a need and that your product is an effective solution for it. The premise assumes that among customers who fit a given persona, people are reasonably consistent in how they approach the problem and solve it.

In fact, there is enough consistency to allow you to draw a fairly reliable map of their process of deciding to buy your product or service—recognizing that along the way, most of them will have predictable moments of truth when they need a specific kind of information from you. Each of those moments of truth is an opportunity to deepen your relationship with that customer.

Depending on how different each of your personas is, you may need to create different customer journey maps for them. When first creating your map, focus on the persona that best matches your ideal customer profile.

2. Identify customer pain points

The customer will experience an array of emotions along the buyer journey. Salespeople typically talk about “pain points,” and discomfort certainly gives rise to need. You hope to create elation at the discovery of your solution, but commitment to it will be punctuated by moments of skepticism, conflict, and fear of making an expensive error, all of which must be anticipated and dealt with.

Part of creating a customer journey map is identifying the pain points customers encounter at each stage. ‍The customer journey map charts these emotional ups and downs, associating them with events in the sales cycle—some you can control and some you can’t.

3. Identify customer touchpoints

Another essential element to define is your organization’s customer touchpoints —the interactions customers have with your business throughout their journey. 

Over a sales cycle that may be months or even years long, there may be many touch points—your advertising, social media posts, sales meetings, support chats, and many others.

Having a customer journey map allows your product management and sales organizations to analyze how their touchpoints handle each of these predictable moments. You can clearly see the points when and where the customer is going to lose her way and grasp for expert help.

Your content marketing team will have provided materials that help prospects recognize the problem your product solves, understand the range of possible solutions available, and frame your offering as the best possible position among competing alternatives.

4. Identify customer actions

Another important element to include in your customer journey map is the actions that customers take during each stage. Including these actions in your map helps you to optimize your touchpoints for conversion to the next stage.

For example, in the awareness stage, someone might read your blog posts or follow you on social media. In the decision stage, they might request a quote or start a free trial.

5. Map out the process

Once you’ve defined these elements and any others you want to include in your map, you can start mapping out the customer journey. 

At each stage of the journey, list the pain points customers experience, the touchpoints they might have with your company, and the actions they can take to move to the next stage.

At the end of this step, you’ll have a visual representation of your customer journey.

In your sales journey mapping process, there are two crucial roadmaps that would be best to create alongside your customer journey:

• Your sales process : Knowing the journey your customer takes is half the battle. It’s equally important to map out what the salesperson’s journey will look like, too. For example, as you map out the journey a customer takes in the consideration stage, you can also map out the actions that your customer-facing teams can take proactively to help your prospect see why your business is a better fit for them than the alternatives.
• Your sales tool roadmap: Using the right sales tools at crucial moments in the customer journey makes your work much easier, and can increase the effectiveness of your sales process. When you create a rough map of which tools to use at which stage and how to use them, you make your work that much easier, and the sales journey that much smoother.

6. Monitor results and make improvements

Once you’ve mapped out your customer journey, you may spot opportunities for improvement. For example, maybe there’s a common question or pain point you could address with your website content. Or you might need to add to your sales team or provide additional tools to enable your team to reach out to prospective customers more quickly.

Of course, improving your customer journey isn’t a one-time thing. Continuously monitor your process and test adjustments as you go to improve your results over time.

One of the best tools for tracking and improving your customer journey is a customer relationship management (CRM) system . With a CRM, you can define your sales process, automate sales tasks, and track your sales results.

Is your business ready for a CRM?

Find out here.

It should be obvious that salespeople should be guiding and enriching the organization’s understanding of the customer personas, as these personas inspire the actions that drive revenue. But what specifically is your role in this process?

‍Gather intelligence

Are attitudes and concerns shifting among your marquee customers? Are they influencing other buyers in a way that will affect future revenue? Are there shifts going on that affect entire market segments or that call for changes in the way your company views an important customer persona? As a salesperson, you generally will be the first to discover such shifts.

How this helps:

With knowledge of the emerging trends among your customer base, you can shift the sales journey map as needed. Preemptively knowing what pain points your customers experience helps you to solve them for prospects further up the sales pipeline , cementing trust and developing a good client relationship much sooner in the process.

‍Guide marketing content development

What really works is buyer-centric content, i.e., sales enablement resources that convey value, matched to the needs of specific customer personas. Buyers need you to help them understand how to solve a practical business problem or exploit an opportunity—not just explain features. If your content marketing team isn’t giving you these buyer-centric tools, you need to ask for it.

Not only can you encourage retention of your current customers, but the insights you gain into their problems can help the marketing team map out the best content strategy – what content to promote and when – within the customer journey to bolster the sales process, engage prospects, and foster business growth.

‍Meet with marketing

Insist on wide open channels of communication. Invite your marketing team to send a representative to your regular sales meetings to share campaigns and content that is under development or newly updated. Use those meetings to show marketing how you are personalizing the content they provide—the content itself and how you are delivering it.

Many companies have undergone a customer experience or customer journey mapping process and, ideally, are continuously updating and revising their maps. It doesn’t automatically follow that your sales team participated. You may not even know your company has such a map, but it’s worth your while to find out.

The first place to look is within your product marketing or product management teams. If those departments haven’t yet invested the time in creating a customer journey map, take the initiative and start organizing the customer journey mapping process for your company. From increased revenue to happier customers, your efforts will have a profound impact.

Open communication and alignment between sales and marketing teams ensure that at any point of the customer journey, every member knows what to do, and there’s a drastically reduced risk of the prospect getting mixed messages, making a steadier sales journey.

Want to improve your customer journey and sales process? Having the right CRM is essential. With an easy-to-use interface and powerful features like pipeline management, sales automation , and email marketing, Nutshell is the perfect tool for taking your customer journey to the next level.

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map: A Step-By-Step Breakdown

There are often a lot of twists and turns in the customer journey, with each individual experience being unique.

That said, there is a predictable sequence of touchpoints throughout the sales funnel.

Mapping each customer touchpoint out effectively helps enhance the user experience and increases the chances of customer success.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Simply put, a customer journey map is a visualization of the process someone undertakes as they move through the various touchpoints of the customer journey.

It typically starts with the initial interaction they have, like visiting your website for the first time when gaining brand awareness, and then moves through the subsequent stages of consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

Here’s an example of what a typical customer journey map may look like.

Notice how it concisely outlines the touchpoints customers take as they move throughout the customer journey.

It starts in the awareness stage with touchpoints like search results or paid content, moves on to the consideration stage with social media or email, then to the purchase stage, and so on.

There are four main purposes of customer journey mapping.

• Flesh out the step-by-step process someone takes from being a potential customer to a lead to an actual customer and ideally, a loyal advocate
• Understand the customer’s perspective
• Identify friction points that are causing issues with customer engagement
• Discover opportunities to reduce pain points and improve the overall customer experience

By doing so, you set the stage for better product design, more effective customer journey marketing, increased customer satisfaction, better customer retention, and ultimately, greater customer success.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

1. define business goals.

Before doing anything else, you’ll want to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking to accomplish with customer journey mapping.

Some common examples include:

• Optimizing each touchpoint in the customer experience
• Identifying areas with higher than average dropoff
• Resolving issues that are leading to excessive dropoff
• Improving the overall customer experience both during the buyer journey and post-purchase

Clearly articulating what you’re trying to achieve is essential because it will direct the path you take for subsequent steps of customer journey mapping.

Note that a big part of effectively defining business goals is getting input from multiple key stakeholders in your company who are responsible for different aspects of the customer experience.

For instance, you may want to get input from your marketing leaders when developing the awareness and consideration stages of your customer journey map, input from your sales leaders when ironing out the purchase stage, and input from your customer service leaders when constructing the retention and advocacy stages.

It’s also smart to perform extensive user research and incorporate customer feedback to ensure you address the right pain points and tackle the issues that are most pressing for creating a positive user experience and long-term customer loyalty.

This should make for cohesive CX journey mapping where touch points flow smoothly from one to the next.

2. Identify Key Stages in the Customer Journey

Next, you’ll want to pinpoint the exact sales funnel stages involved with the customer journey.

The sales funnel stages can vary slightly from company to company, but as we mentioned earlier, some common ones include:

• Consideration

Fleshing the key stages out like this will show you the path users take as they go from being a prospect to a lead to a customer to an advocate.

By visualizing the key stages like this, you’ll see how each stage flows into the next — something that’s vital for making the customer journey as seamless as possible, meeting customer needs, and improving overall customer experience quality.

This is also what the next step in constructing customer journey maps is built on, which brings us to our next point.

3. Define Customer Touchpoints

You can think of the key stages in the customer journey on the macro level and the next step in the process — defining customer touchpoints — on the micro level.

These are the smaller interactions that customers take as they move from stage to stage in the user journey.

This can include digital touchpoints like becoming aware of your brand through an online ad, a search engine, paid content, and so on.

It can also include physical touchpoints like word-of-mouth.

Customer touchpoints will account for the majority of your customer journey map and help you visualize how people interact with your brand.

The exact number of touchpoints can vary considerably, so defining them is highly individualistic.

When identifying them, you’ll want to carefully consider the typical customer journey and write down every step involved. Then, arrange each touchpoint sequentially so you can see the big picture.

4. Design a Visual Representation of the Customer Journey

After defining business goals, identifying key stages in the customer journey, and defining customer touchpoints, it’s time to actually create your customer journey map.

Here, you’ll create a visual representation of what your business’s specific customer journey looks like for a bird’s-eye view.

To do this effectively, it’s helpful to use strong visual elements like different colors, symbols, bullets, and emojis so you can easily see everything at a glance.

Here’s an example of what an online shopping customer journey map could look like.

When it comes to customer journey mapping tools, there are several options available.

If you’re looking for something bare-bones and simple, you can use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

If you want something a bit more advanced, you can use HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Template , which includes seven free templates (more on this later).

Or, if you want software with extensive features that are specifically designed for creating customer journey maps, you can find a list of the top 10 products here .

Note that most companies have more than one customer persona. Therefore, you may need to create multiple customer journey maps while targeting each individual buyer persona.

Customer Journey Map Templates

When most people think of customer journey mapping, they think of the classic buyer’s journey.

And they wouldn’t be wrong.

Generally, that’s the most commonly used customer journey map and the type of mapping we used in the customer journey map examples above.

But it’s certainly not the only type of mapping you can use.

As we’ll learn in a moment, there are also customer journey maps that target specific segments of the buyer’s journey and customer journey maps that focus on what you want your ideal journey to be like.

For the rest of this post, we’ll cover four of the most popular customer journey map templates you can use for different situations.

That way you can cover all the angles and increase the chances of customer success every step of the way.

Buyer’s Journey

As we just mentioned, this is widely considered the most classic type of customer journey mapping.

When mapping the buyer’s journey, you follow the key stages in the customer journey (awareness, consideration, purchase, etc.) like we outlined above, along with customer touchpoints.

Here’s a simple template journey map example for the buyer’s journey from HubSpot, which you can find for free here .

The default starting point is extremely simple. It includes just three stages and a handful of questions to understand customer interaction.

However, you can easily add more stages, questions, and additional information to fully customize the buyer’s journey so that it’s specific to your business.

This template, admittedly, won’t provide the same depth as some of the more advanced tools for creating customer journey maps, but it should be adequate for many business owners.

If you don’t need anything fancy and are testing out customer journey maps for the first time, HubSpot should be more than sufficient.

Whatever template you use, buyer’s journey mapping tends to be a good starting point as it helps you visualize the entire process from someone entering your sales funnel to converting to becoming a loyal customer.

This is integral for optimizing every aspect of the customer experience end-to-end, and from a product standpoint, is essential for achieving UX mastery.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re looking to improve your UX design skills, The Interaction Design Foundation is an excellent resource for doing so. They offer a wide variety of courses from the beginner to expert level and only charge a flat monthly fee for access to all courses.

Now that we’ve tackled buyer journey mapping, let’s look at three other popular types of customer journey map template options that are also available.

Future State

In most cases, the buyer’s journey is the current journey customers are taking.

While there will likely be several areas you’re satisfied with, your existing customer journey probably won’t be ideal and likely isn’t meeting customer expectations 100%.

For example, there may be friction points along the way where customers are attempting to accomplish a goal. Or, there may be higher than acceptable dropoff in a particular area like using core features or becoming a paid customer after using a free product version.

By the way, if you want to holistically understand the customer journey and generate objective customer data, you can use a customer journey analytics platform like Woopra . This enables you to analyze essential customer journey metrics so you can see what it looks like end-to-end.

With future state customer journey mapping, you design a new map with new touchpoints and engagements based on your ideal vision.

That way, you’ll know what needs to be done to create the optimal customer journey.

If you’ve already experimented with creating customer journey maps and are looking to take the next step to refine the customer experience, you’ll likely be interested in future state mapping.

HubSpot offers a free future state template as well, which allows you to outline the series of steps that need to be taken to make the customer journey as perfect as possible. And it’s completely customizable.

You simply list the steps you want to take to create an amazing customer experience and ask key questions regarding customer behavior.

It’s nothing over the top, but it should get the job done for many business owners.

Lead Nurturing

Although technically part of the buyer’s journey, some marketers choose to create a lead nurturing customer journey map because of the extreme importance of lead nurturing.

After all, any major holes in the lead nurturing process can disrupt sales as a whole. And no matter how good your marketing team is at generating leads, the impact will be negated if you can’t successfully nurture them.

To optimize this area of sales, you can create a lead nurturing map using a template like this one.

Here, the default starts with someone being a stranger, then moves on to them being a subscriber/lead, then a marketing qualified lead (MQL), a sales opportunity/demo, then a deal closed/handoff.

Again, everything is customizable, so you can adjust the lead nurturing customer journey to your exact specifications. And, it too, is available for free from HubSpot .

Customer Service and Support

Once again, a truly rewarding user experience goes beyond the purchase and ensures a customer is satisfied well after they’ve bought a product.

Like lead nurturing, customer service and support are also technically part of the buyer’s customer journey map.

However, it dives deeper into this area of the sales funnel with the intention of increasing customer retention and advocacy.

And I think we can all agree that this is incredibly important given that “Happy and satisfied customers are 87% more likely to purchase upgrades and new services.”

Here’s yet another free customer journey map template you can get from HubSpot that focuses specifically on customer service and support.

With it, you can follow how a customer goes from engaging in the normal use of a product to noticing an issue/having a complaint to asking for help/contacting customer support to speaking with support to conflict resolution.

Having a clear overview of the touchpoints involved with this process should help you fully understand the flow so you can 1) see things from a customer’s point of view and 2) identify issues that may be detrimental to customer support.

For inspiration from real-life major brands like Spotify, TurboTax, and Amazon, here’s a list of customer journey map examples you can learn from.

Crafting an Exceptional User Experience with Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping is a simple yet effective way to visualize each touchpoint in the user journey holistically for each buyer persona.

From the initial moment someone becomes aware of your brand to the time of purchase and beyond, customer journey maps allow you to see how users move throughout the entire lifecycle.

And as we’ve learned, this serves several important purposes, including seeing the buying process from a customer’s point of view, identifying customer pain points, and unearthing opportunities to improve the customer experience end-to-end.

It’s just a matter of following the correct customer journey mapping guidelines and using the appropriate template to outline the buying process.

Then, tracking key customer journey metrics like engagement, churn rate, and customer satisfaction with an analytics platform like Woopra or Google Analytics should help you refine your customer journey mapping to fully optimize the customer experience.

Full insight into the customer journey. No SQL required.

Get started with Woopra for free to see who your customers are, what they do and what keeps them coming back.

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• Understand Customer Journey Mapping

With customers interacting with companies through more and more channels, keeping track of everything and delivering the best experience has become complicated.

That’s where  customer journey mapping  comes in. It helps brands understand the customer journey, stay on top of their expectations and optimize the customer experience .

Read on to find out what customer journey mapping is, why it is so important, and how to create a customer journey map.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of how customers interact with your brand. It tells you where and how customers communicate with your business. With a clear understanding of how a customer journey looks like, and by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can define a strategy to improve the customer experience.

Believe it or not, customers nowadays use up to 10 channels to communicate with businesses. It is no longer about putting out a product and having someone buy it. Things have become much more complex. That is why a visual representation of customer interactions across all touchpoints (offline and online) helps connect the dots and deliver a consistent experience.

A visual representation of how customers interact with your brand

Today, brands use email marketing, social media, live chat , customer satisfaction surveys , and more to interact with customers.

Every interaction a customer has with your brand, regardless of the channel, is called a customer touchpoint. Ideally, you should not only know them but be able to “read” these points with all the others.

The solution for keeping track of these touchpoints and transforming them into valuable information is called customer journey mapping.

Types of Customer Journey Maps

Always choose your customer journey map type based on your needs and possibly even marketing attribution . We’ll get into more detail on that in the subsequent section. For now, here are the four types of customer journey maps you can choose from:

1. Current State

This type of customer journey mapping is ideal for streamlining the customer journey. It shows you the actions taken by your customers, along with their thoughts and emotions, while going through the customer journey.

2. Day in the Life

As the name suggests, this customer journey map gives you an overview of a day in your customer’s life. It also shows you the actions, as well as the thoughts and emotions experienced by your customers. However, it reveals this information not only for your brand but for everything else as well.

You can use this map to identify the needs that you can address with your products or services.

3. Future State

This type of customer journey map works best for setting future goals for your brand. You can use it to identify where your customer experience is now and where you visualize taking it in the future.

4. Service Blueprint

Service Blueprint maps illustrate how you intend to improve the customer journey. It includes pain points, the steps required to achieve the intended goals, and who is responsible for achieving those goals.

It is ideal for streamlining the customer journey as it shows you the actions taken by your customers, their thoughts, and emotions throughout their journey with your brand.

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

The key to a better and bigger business is to understand the customer. Once you know them, you can optimize and personalize their journey and experience. The result? Better customer retention and more new customers.

Customer journey mapping will help you do just that: understand your customer.

By visualizing how a customer interacts with your business, you understand their first-hand experience. You can clearly see their perspective and motivation. In doing so, you’ll also identify pain points, weak spots, or areas where the customer journey can benefit from improvement and tailor your call to action accordingly.

Customer journey mapping is essential to get the customer’s perspective. The insights gained from this exercise can help you better organize and optimize your processes, resulting in better business.

This strategic approach can help you:

• understand customer expectations
• identify pain points
• personalize your offers
• customize multi-channel marketing strategies
• streamline the customer experience
• retain more customers
• acquire more customers
• surpass your competitors

Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

Customer journey mapping has a multitude of benefits. You can use it to set up and improve all the steps of a customer’s journey starting from the very beginning.

Because customer journey mapping is all about understanding the customer, it can help streamline everything from the customer onboarding process to the check-out process.

1. Improve Your Customer Service

No matter how good your customer service is, it can always be better. And with customers now expecting superior customer support, you cannot afford not delivering it. Customer support is one of the main factors that determine whether a customer will return or not.

Customer journey mapping is a great way to identify the gaps in your customer service. Use it to map out each touchpoint a customer goes through. Then, take the journey yourself.

It will help you determine:

• what needs to change
• how to implement the required changes
• who will do it?

2. Increase Customer Retention Rates

Better customer service alone can help improve retention rates. However, customer journey mapping does even more.

You can use it to understand the customer’s point of view. And with this info, you can optimize their journey and personalize it.

First, it helps you identify common issues that can cause your customers to leave. This way, you can implement the necessary changes to avoid the same and persuade customers to stay.

Second, with customer journey mapping, you better understand the thoughts and emotions of your customers. It can translate into better marketing strategies focused on personalized experiences that ensure increased retention rates.

3. Attract More New Customers

Following the same logic, you can also acquire new customers.

Once you know what customers want and their expectations, you technically have everything you need for efficient marketing strategies. You can tailor your marketing efforts to their needs, desires, and emotions and attract a larger audience for your products/services.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map?

The customer journey map will tell you how your customers go through each process, what kind of needs drive them to you and what steps they need to meet that need.

This visual representation of their journey is a valuable resource for your entire organization. Any startup can create a customer journey map by following the steps described below or in this friendly workshop.

1. Start with Clear Objectives and Goals

First, start by understanding what it is you want to achieve by creating a customer journey map. Ask yourself what specific stage of the customer journey you want to tackle. Or what is your main goal for the information you will get.

Once you have a clear direction, dive into creating the map.

List all the touchpoints a customer will pass through. It could be your website, your social media pages, their interactions with customer support.

Next, create different buyer personas. A buyer persona is an imaginary customer who encompasses the main characteristics of your typical customer. It will help you understand each step of the customer journey from their perspective.

Then take these buyer personas through every touchpoint.

For example, if the buyer is in their 30s, they’ll likely learn about you on social media. Then they will use the mobile version of your website to find out more. Finally, they will make a purchase from their laptop.

Your goal should be to identify:

• what attracts people to your brand
• what specific needs your product can meet
• where customers interact the most with your brand
• how much time they spend interacting with your brand
• what drives them to make a purchase
• what prompts them to refuse a purchase
• How valuable your customer support service is and how you can improve it

2. Create a Specific Target

While having multiple buyer personas can be helpful, avoid focusing on too many.

Pick a few primary target personas for your customer journey map. This way, you won’t get lost in too many details, and you can focus on your goals. It is essential to focus on a single perspective to understand the client’s thoughts and emotions and their specific needs.

Plus, once you master customer journey mapping, you can always use it for more customer personas.

3. Identify all the Touchpoints

Next, you need to list all the touchpoints that the customer has to go through.

Touchpoints can include:

• Social media pages
• Email marketing
• Review websites

Go into as much detail as possible. Don’t just list the website, for example, but list all the ways a customer can interact with you through one channel. It can be via a contact form, a live chat, a chatbot, and more.

Also, map out all the actions that a customer will take during their journey. For example, a Google search or a click on an ad on social media.

It will help you understand what steps your customers are taking. Then, you can identify what works and what does not at individual steps.

The number of steps is also important. You might find that while you offer many touchpoints, your customers only use a few.

This may indicate that something along the way is causing them to bail. Or it could mean that they can easily find what they are looking for and don’t need much else. Your conversion rates will give you the answer.

Likewise, you might find that customers go through more touchpoints than they need. In this case, try to identify how you can streamline their journey.

4. Understand What Triggers Customer Actions

Perhaps the most critical part of the customer journey map is understanding the “why”.

It is not enough to list the touchpoints. You will also need to understand your client’s perspective on each of them. What motivates a customer to go through each touchpoint is as important as the emotions they feel.

Ask yourself what thoughts and emotions drive the customer at each touchpoint. Each step of the buyer’s journey is different, and so are the emotions.

Then, ask yourself:

• Do your touchpoints match the customer’s needs and motivation?
• What about their emotions?
• Is the customer well-tended to at each touchpoint?
• Is the information provided to them is sufficient?
• What about the support?
• Does something trigger negative emotions?

Just as a problem brought them to your product/service, a problem can drive customers away.

For example, they may visit your website because they need a new backpack. Their motivation is clear. They want to buy a new one.

However, by browsing your pages, they don’t find all the information they need. Now they are frustrated. They want to contact customer support, so they’re figuring out how to do it. If they cannot find this information or reach your support and get through, they will become frustrated and might go to the competition.

Creating a clear roadmap of each point the customer goes through and considering each one’s emotional triggers will help avoid common mistakes and optimize the customer journey.

5. Define Your Future Needs

Your customer journey map should reveal where you need to implement the changes required.

In this case, you also need to define the steps and processes necessary to improve your customer’s journey.

So, determine what resources you already have and what resources you will need.

It could be just a few simple steps to a better customer experience. For example, highlighting certain information on your website or making it more obvious to potential customers how to purchase.

In other cases, you will need additional resources. For example, if your customer journey map reveals that many customers decide not to buy because of poor customer support. In this case, you may need to invest in more customer service training or hire more staff. However, add more support options like a chatbot on your website.

Finally, your customer service card will also help you influence decision-makers, as you can show how implementing the required changes can improve the customer experience.

Jan Kuzel is the Head of Growth at SatisMeter – a platform that helps you get customer feedback and grow your business.

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The 5 Steps of Successful Customer Journey Mapping

May 28, 2017 2017-05-28

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

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

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

In This Article:

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

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

A. Establish a cross disciplinary team of allies

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

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

B. Determine the scope

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

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

A. Send out a search party

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

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

B. Perform stakeholder interviews

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

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

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

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

A. Synthesize the internal research

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

B. Create a hypothesis map as a team

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

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

A. Use the hypothesis map to shape your user research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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B2B Customer Journey Mapping: How to Do it and Why You Should

Read on to see how you can create a better B2B customer experience – and why it’s more important than ever.

Salesforce uk, share article.

The B2B customer journey is evolving, as traditional B2B players are following the same customer-centric strategies as their B2C counterparts. No longer are superior products or lower prices automatically a winning hand: buyer experience is becoming a differentiator.

In many ways, this makes perfect sense. Buyers are trending younger. They’re digital-first. They expect the same seamless journey across touchpoints that they receive outside the office, do more research on products and services, and have more outlets for that research. They may engage with an organisation far later in the buying process than previous generations of buyers. This means that the linear consumer funnel that was once at the heart of the buying process is in a transformative moment.

For B2B operators, this offers a tremendous opportunity to re-imagine their customer journey and deliver more personal and profitable experiences . It’s a chance to drive customer loyalty and build winning long-term relationships while reducing costs and improving efficiencies.

But in order to craft a B2B customer journey that not only meets new expectations but exceeds them, you’ll need to have a vision of what your ideal customer journey looks like – then create a map of how you can make it a reality.

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The importance of creating an exceptional B2B customer experience

Many buyers have to juggle a huge number of suppliers and buying teams with different needs and competing concerns, which can lead to a chaotic environment. Creating a good customer journey can help keep the buyer on ‘rails’, or a logical track towards purchase.

The customer journey has become especially important for B2B organisations, who have to deal with more complicated journeys with more people involved, higher-value transactions and longer relationships than B2C players. Perhaps, then, the reason why it took so long for the B2C customer journey to become a priority is the exact reason it needs to become one now: complexity. By creating a good customer journey, B2B players can lower costs, improve ROI and simplify the sales cycle.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is an illustration showing all the steps a customer has to take when engaging with your business. It’s a useful tool for tracking a purchase from the consumer’s POV, identifying pain points and looking for where additional value can be added. A customer journey map can help businesses create frictionless purchasing experiences while ensuring that any ‘moments of truth’ – points on the journey where customer impressions are most likely to be formed – are positive ones.

How to map your B2B customer journey in 10 steps

1. Create your buyer personas. Creating a buyer persona enables you to look at your journey through the eyes of your buyer. You can create different personas for different types of buyers from different types of organisations, and see how efficient your customer journey is for each persona. You’ll want to create personas that consider different demographics, pain points, technology preferences and overall needs.

2. Nail down your buyer’s goals. Buyers often have differing concerns and priorities. Some will be concerned most with price. Others with features or quality. Some buyers will want to be able to research products, while others will already know what they want and just want the buying process to be as quick and efficient as possible. Assign different goals to each persona, and see how well your customer journey accommodates them.

3. Create a flowchart showing the path of the buyer’s journey. By creating a flowchart, you’ll get a visual representation of the steps the customer needs to take to reach their ultimate goal. Your flowchart will likely include: 1) Awareness. 2) Consideration. 3) Purchase. 4) Onboarding. 5) Advocacy. Look at the resources and content you’re offering at each step of the journey. Is it working as well as it could be?

4. Evaluate the touchpoints on the journey (web, social media, chat, call centre, email, etc). Once you’ve created a flowchart of the journey, you can examine the touchpoints that different personas might use to complete those steps. Are all your touchpoints aligned? Are they all optimised to deliver an easy B2B customer experience? Have you created an omnichannel strategy ?

5. Identify any bottlenecks and pain points you encounter. If your answer to any of the above questions is ‘no’, then you’ll want to note the issues you’ve found. Some of the most common bottlenecks include catering the wrong content to the wrong buyer, using the wrong tools for the wrong persona, and over-complicating buying processes. For instance, if the buyer just wants to set up simple recurring orders for a product, but they’re forced to go through sales or support rather than being able to use a self-serve portal.

6. Look at points where value can be added, i.e. chatbots, self-service options or upselling/cross-selling opportunities. Once your pain points and bottlenecks have been noted, set about fixing them. You can leverage AI to better personalize the buyer journey and introduce chatbots to provide more efficient service. But don’t just look at problems; look at what can be done better, as well. Are there opportunities to add value for your business and the customer through cross-selling? Are there places where you can simply provide moments that build better relationship and drive loyalty ?

7. Solicit feedback about the customer journey from the workforce. Your workforce is dealing with buyers every day, so they should have some helpful insights into what’s working and what’s not. Ask them to identify any recurring issues that they see. Do they have suggestions for how the buyer experience can be improved? How about the employee experience ? Do they have all the tools and training they need to deliver exceptional service ?

8. Look at qualitative data from surveys and buyer feedback. Sometimes the most effective way to understand the B2B journey is to simply ask your buyers for feedback. You can deploy automatic surveys, or have your reps and agents follow up manually after interactions. These surveys can provide deeper feedback, with more granular insights. When looking at analytics, it can be easy to forget the ‘human’ behind the numbers. Feedback can help tell the whole story.

9. Review quantitative data from company analytics. Look at all the data you have about buyers’ patterns and the buyer’s journey. Are buyers often dropping out of the journey in the same place? Where are they disengaging or getting stuck? Look at the data from different channels. Do some channels appear to be a problem? What medium is best driving engagement? Is your marketing aligned with the length of your sales cycle?

10. Fix any roadblocks between your current B2B journey and your ideal B2B journey. You now have a good idea of the buyer’s journey, from the POV of your business, your buyer and your workforce. You have analytics that show you what’s working and what’s not. And you have a list of bottlenecks that can be fixed. After you’ve addressed any pain points, you can look at where you can add the personal moments that build better relationships and make your business stand out .

Ready to take a journey to a better place?

Creating a great B2B customer experience can increase customer retention and reduce inefficiencies. Introducing self-service options can lower service costs, CRM platforms can improve marketing activities and AI solutions like Einstein can help maximise ROI . In the end, you can create a customer journey that not only empowers the buyer, but empowers the business, as well.

To see more about how you can create extraordinary experiences to increase sales and drive efficiencies, check out our eBook, Thriving in the Experience Economy .

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