the customer service journey begins

The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

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

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

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

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

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

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

1. Awareness

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

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

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

2. Consideration

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

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

3. Purchase

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

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

4. Retention

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

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

5. Advocacy

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

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

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

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

Customer journey touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create buyer personas

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

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

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

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

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

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

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

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

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

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started with customer journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog • Customer Experience

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

What Is the Customer Journey?

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

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

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

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

Let’s dive in.

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

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

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

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

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

The Stages of a Customer Journey

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

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

Allocate Resources Effectively

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

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

Personalized Customer Experience

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

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

• contact properties
• company properties

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

Build Longer-Term Relationships

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

1. Create a Customer Profile

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Make a List of Customer Touchpoints

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

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

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

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

3. Identify the Pain Points

Pain points are reliable predictors of behavior.

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

Not sure where to start?

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

4. Create a Customer Journey Map

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

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

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

5. Determine the Course of Action

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

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

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

1. Establish a Good First Impression

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

2. Understand What the Customer Is Getting and Why

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

3. Demonstrate Value

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

4. Stay in Contact with Customers After-Sale

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

5. Measure Your Success

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

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

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

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

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Create a seamless customer experience that will increase satisfaction and loyalty

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

Luca Micheli

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

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What is customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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

Free Course: Customer journey management & improvement

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

It enables you to assess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When exploring and visualizing the customer journey we are assessing:

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

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

Customer journey vs process flow

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

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

Getting started with customer journey map templates

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

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

Download our free journey mapping template here

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

Step 1 – Create a customer persona to test

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

What do you include? Start with these characteristics.

• Family status
• Professional goals
• Personal goals

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

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

Create a diverse team

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

Step 2 – Choose a customer journey for mapping

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

Step 3 – Work through the mapping process

Ask yourself the following:

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

Step 4 – Innovate

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

Then, test it.

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

Step 5 – Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Use solicited data to understand the voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

Unsolicited data

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

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

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

Why using solicited and unsolicited data is important data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So when should you use customer journey mapping?

There are four main uses:

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

Take stock and take action

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

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

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

Orchestrate your customer journey

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

Improve your employee experience

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

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

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

With Qualtrics CustomerXM , you’ll:

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

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

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

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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.

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mapping The Customer Service Journey to Improve Customer Experience

Mapping the Customer Service Journey to Improve Customer Experience

In the days before Google Maps, finding directions to a new location, especially if it was in an unfamiliar city, took careful planning and attention. Routes had to be determined long before leaving, and an extra time cushion was absolutely necessary to accommodate for any wrong turns. In worst-case scenarios, gas station attendants could always be counted on to help guide a lost traveller. With the advent of smartphones, determining directions to a completely unknown locale is now a fairly painless process. Audio turn-by-turn directions make for safer navigation and quicker arrivals, although there may be fewer opportunities for human interactions. Now, a similar revolution is happening on another important route: the customer service journey.

Defining the Customer Service Journey

A customer service journey is the accumulated experiences a customer undergoes when they decide to interact with a brand, or purchase a service or product. Every single touchpoint they have with a brand makes up their journey, and the emotions they experience at each touchpoint have a huge effect on their decision to make a purchase or recommend the brand to a friend. On a recent episode of the Verizon Insights podcas t, Cary Cusumano, Customer Experience Designer, noted that in 17 out of 18 industries, the emotions that a customer experiences predict the level of their loyalty to a brand. (Even above their satisfaction with a product or service.) It is essential for companies to optimize the customer journey whenever possible to build loyal brand advocates and to show empathy to their customers.

Steps on the Customer Service Journey

The best way to show customers empathy is to understand the interactions they have with a brand over the course of their relationship. During the discovery phase, potential customers may interact with a brand through reviews, internet research, advertisements, or talking to acquaintances or friends.  Once someone becomes a customer, companies must invest in meeting their customers where they are. That means making sure that customers can reach out and engage with the brand through a variety of touchpoints, depending on their preferences. The four primary ways customers interact with brands after purchasing a product or service is through phone calls, e-mails, social media interactions, and live chat options. Customers choose each of these options based on their age, location, and lifestyle. A college student at a university may prefer a chat-based option that’s available later in the evening, while a parent may choose to call during a child’s naptime. No matter how customers decide to reach out, responsive companies have several options to best meet different communication styles and time constraints.  

The Need to Make the Customer Service Journey More Pleasant

In order to give customers what they want, brands must be willing to make an investment in each stop  along the customer journey to ensure it is a pleasant one. While money is funnelled into product development or marketing, customer experience is often pushed to the side as an unnecessary expense. However, it’s one of the most important factors to master in order to maintain a competitive advantage.With the advent of social media, interactivity between brands and customers has spiked, and companies don’t always known how to utilize these interactions to build positive impressions. Leadership at companies can feel overwhelmed by the bandwidth and expertise needed to ensure a smooth customer journey. Or, they’re unsure how to put customer service at the forefront of their company culture, even though they recognize that brands that do gain new leads and retain a strong customer base. As technology advances, many industry leaders predicted a de- emphasis on human interaction and empathy. Instead, the opposite is becoming more important. Understanding the routes customers take in relationship to brands, and investing in critical touch points is the only way to make the customer service journey a positive one.

If you’re looking for help implementing a culture of service to let your customers know they come first, our experts can help. For over twenty years, the team at Customer Direct have been leaders in creating positive customer experiences and managing voice, email, chat and social media interactions on behalf of prominent brands.  Delighting customers at every touchpoint on their journey is our passion and our business. Make your business more persona l by providing genuine customer service experiences each step of the way. Contact us today.

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The Essential Guide to The Customer Journey and Lifecycle

Customer lifecycles—like the lives of their customers—are messy.

Life in the modern world is messy. As consumers, we’re constantly bombarded with messaging from companies and brands, and our path to purchasing and using products and services is more complicated than ever. So, it should come as no surprise that in this day and age, there’s really no such thing as a neat and tidy sales funnel. Customer lifecycles—like the lives of their customers—are messy.

Still, while it would be impossible to present a single customer lifecycle model that applies to every single business out there, experts have settled on a handful of basic phases that are common to the majority of companies, as explained in  this American Express OPEN Forum article : reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty.

Phase 1: Reach

This phase (also commonly called “discovery” or “awareness”) is where the clock starts and the customer lifecycle officially begins. Well, sort of officially. After all, it’s tough to know exactly when a customer experiences his or her first contact with your business or your brand. In fact, it might be tough for the customer himself or herself to recognize that touch point.

Tracking Reach

Still, from a marketing perspective, it’s important to track those touch points as accurately as possible. That way, you can figure out which marketing and advertising efforts—both print and digital—are most effective in driving brand awareness and reach. By reviewing those metrics, you can get a good idea of the types of campaigns that give you the most bang for your buck—and thus, are worth your continued investment.

Here are a few ideas for measuring reach, adapted from  this article :

• Identify the most common search terms that are bringing people to your website for the first time.
• Monitor visitor data (i.e., new website visitors and returning website visitors).
• Keep a pulse on social analytics (especially new followers or other first-time user interactions) and online reviews.
• Poll trade show and event attendees (i.e., ask them if they had heard of you before).
• Analyze pay-per-click (PPC) and AdWords data.
• Survey both current customers and prospects on how they heard about you.

Phase 2: Acquisition

Once you’re on a prospect’s radar, it’s time to actually initiate contact. Your mission: to turn your marketing contacts into leads—which, as  this TechTarget page  explains, are potential sales contacts. More specifically, a lead is “an individual or organization that expresses an interest in your goods or services.”

So, how do you turn someone who is simply aware of your brand or product into a potential buyer? In the most basic sense, it’s about interaction and engagement. This can happen via phone call, email, or other targeted online messaging. But remember, it’s not just about making contact; rather, it’s about making the right kind of contact at the right frequency. Gone are the days of indiscriminate email blasting. Modern consumers have to fight their way through a constant barrage of marketing communication, and if your brand’s approach is too aggressive—or if you overwhelm your contacts with messaging—you run the risk that they’ll turn and run in the opposite direction.

On the other hand, if you neglect your potential customers during this stage—or if you provide them with messaging or other resources that don’t hold their attention—then you also could end up pushing them away. In other words, it’s a balancing act.

To overcome these challenges, it’s important to know your audience. Tailor your messaging to  specific buyer personas . Ask yourself:

• What interests them?
• What motivates them?
• What are their goals?
• What are their pain points?
• Where do they go for information?

Use these questions—and their answers—as the basis of your communications. After all, if you can deliver your audience something of value—before they even become your actual customers—then they’ll be more likely to continue engaging with your business.

Furthermore, by taking a more personalized, targeted approach to messaging, you’ll avoid wasting time and energy attracting customers who aren’t a good fit for your company or your product. Sure, it’s exciting to see your lead database grow—and the more potential buyers you have now, the more actual customers you’ll have later, right? Well, sort of. Here’s the catch, as explained in  this Sixteen Ventures article : “If you don’t attract, seek out, and acquire the right customers, not only will you have a harder time (they’ll be less profitable, harder to deal with or please, etc.), they’ll have a harder time.” In other words, while you might have a higher rate of lead generation, you’ll have a lower rate of customer success—and in the long run, that’ll cost you dearly.

Tracking Acquisition

This phase of the customer journey is a little more trackable in terms of concrete data, as it’s relatively easy to define the point at which a contact becomes a lead. It’s also the stage that often gets the most attention from marketers trying to quantify the success of their efforts. “Marketers have traditionally been focused on the front-end of the customer lifecycle, specifically, brand awareness and lead generation,” states  this CIO article . “Their job was to fill the funnel for sales people to convert into revenue.”

As  this KISSmetrics article  explains, there are two types of acquisition metrics you’ll want to consider: those that tell about the “what” and those that tell you about the “who.” More specifically:

• “What” analytics tools allow you to do things like “track traffic, view sources and referrals, set up event and goal tracking,” the article states. Perhaps the most common tool for tracking these data points: Google Analytics.
• “Who” analytics tools, on the other hand, help you answer questions like, “Who is viewing your website? What did they do before and after they signed up? How is your site being used?” the article continues.

Ideally, you’ll incorporate both types of metrics into your acquisition-tracking strategy. But, deciding on the specific data points you want to track is easier said than done. And, as KISSmetrics advises, “You…need to be sure you’re monitoring the right metrics because, rest assured, you can’t monitor them all.”

To figure out which metrics are right for you, start by clearly defining your goals. In this case, as KISSmetrics suggests, the goal is relatively simple: acquiring customers. From there, work backwards to build a funnel. “Maybe the top of the funnel is an email submission. From there, an email is sent about a free trial offer. Finally, the free trial users will convert to paying customers,” the article explains.

Now, come up with three core metrics for each of those three funnel stages. Two examples: the number of people who provide their email addresses and the percentage who convert to paying customers. “For each of your selected metrics, be sure you can demonstrate how that number impacts the goal at that stage of the funnel,” the article continues. That means you should steer clear of so-called “vanity” metrics like social fans and followers, as they don’t have any real value with respect to your defined funnel.

Furthermore, keep in mind that in this day and age, measuring marketing performance doesn’t stop at the point when a contact becomes a lead or a lead becomes a  qualified lead —at least not for those companies looking to rise above the competition in an increasingly crowded marketplace. As  CIO  goes on to point out, “…average performers spend more time and budget on front-end awareness and acquisition activities, such as volume of leads generated and the number of inquiries generated…In contrast, top performers and the companies they work for take a more holistic view of the customer. Their metrics for success are response rates, sales accepted leads and sales qualified leads, not merely lead generation.”

Phase 3: Conversion

This is where the rubber meets the road. In other words, you win the sale and the prospect becomes a customer. The key to success in this phase is focusing on selling the relationship—not just the product. Buyers—especially those interested in B2B SaaS solutions—are looking for companies that will act as their partners, not merely their suppliers.

Tracking Conversion

At the most basic level, conversion happens when a customer actually remits payment to begin using your product or service. On that note, as  Sixteen Ventures  points out, it’s important “that you have a way to collect payment from the customer, in a way that is congruent with their preferred method of payment.”

One of the most important sales conversion metrics is conversion rate, which tells you what percentage of leads actually ended up turning into customers. As illustrated  here , the basic formula for conversion rate is:

Conversion Rate = (Total Number of Sales ÷ Total Number of Leads) X 100

For example, if you made 30 sales last year out of the 100 leads you generated over the same time period, your conversion rate would be 30%.

You can also track your conversion rate with respect to other marketing metrics—website traffic, for example. If you wanted to find out the percentage of your web visitors who ended up purchasing your product, you could do so using the following equation:

Conversion Rate = (Total Number of Sales ÷ Total Number of Unique Visitors) X 100

Obviously, your conversion rate isn’t going to be 100%. You’re going to lose some sales. And at that point, the customer lifecycle for those prospects will come to an end. But that doesn’t mean you should immediately seal their files and lock them away forever. Instead, look at lost sales as learning opportunities. Ask:

• What ultimately caused the prospect to say “no” instead of “yes?”
• Was it a mistake at the sales level?
• Did you do something to alienate the buyer?
• Was your product poorly suited to the prospect?
• Was the prospect misinformed about the product?

These are all questions you should be asking—and answering—each time you miss a shot. Furthermore, you should be tracking and storing this information so you can use it to inform future sales and marketing efforts and strategies.

Phase 4: Retention

Okay, you’ve scored the touchdown (i.e., made the sale). But, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve won the game. After all, the customer truly holds the power; chances are, there are a lot of other options out there, and in the modern marketplace, it’s easier than ever for customers to jump ship or walk out your back door, never to return. That’s why, as mentioned in the section above, it’s so crucial that you form a strong partnership with each customer.

In reality, the retention phase includes several smaller phases, some of which are ongoing:

The onboarding process begins immediately after purchase. Your goal is to get your customers up and running as soon as possible. But that doesn’t mean handing them the keys and turning them loose right off the bat. After all, if they attempt to use your product with no guidance or training, they probably won’t be successful, and that will lead to frustration—which in turn, could lead them to regret their purchase down the road.

Instead, you should create a checklist of all the items (i.e., milestones) that your customers must complete in order to use your product successfully from the first time they put the key in the ignition. At minimum, that list should include:

• Migrating the customer from his or her previous system to your system (if applicable)
• Ensuring the customer’s technical setup meets your requirements
• Training the customer to use your product through self-guided learning systems, live and/or virtual training sessions, knowledge base materials, and/or consultative phone calls

While this checklist should help form the basis for your onboarding program, be careful not to let it completely dictate your approach. After all, successful onboarding isn’t just about crossing to-dos off of a list; you should be working toward an overarching goal (i.e., empowering the customer to use your product to its fullest potential).

To measure the effectiveness of your onboarding program—and identify opportunities for improvement—you should be collecting and tracking a few different data points. According to  this article , these may include:

• days to onboard a new client
• days to achieve key milestones
• number of customer interactions during onboarding process

Compare the averages for these metrics over time to determine whether you’re improving, highlight areas where adjustments may be necessary, and measure the effectiveness of any such adjustments.

Finally, don’t stop at merely collecting data. To really get a feel for how you’re doing, you’ve got to get real, live feedback from your audience. “Getting qualitative feedback from your customers can uncover holes in your program and help guide you to make better decisions that data points may not be able to uncover,” the above-cited article continues.

Remember, onboarding is your customers’ first real experience with your product and your company, and the impression you make during the onboarding process will stick with them—and influence their satisfaction level—for the rest of the customer lifecycle.

Once a customer has completed the onboarding process and has begun using your product, it’s absolutely critical that you keep the lines of communication open in case the customer has any problems, questions, or concerns. This is especially true during the first 90 days, because if the customer does not immediately begin to see value in your product, then he or she will be much more likely to ultimately leave you. “This is a critical phase of the customer lifecycle…either you engage them here (what that means is 100% dependent upon the customer in the context of what they’re trying to—or would like to—achieve with your product) or you lose them forever,”  Sixteen Ventures  explains.

This is where churn rate comes into the picture. Simply put, your churn rate tells you how many existing customers you’re losing—and how fast they’re leaving you. Companies that fall victim to the ill effects of churn often are those that put all of their focus and energy into closing new deals, and then disappearing the moment the customer hands over his or her money.

Unfortunately, support—even during the initial 90-day period—often is provided on a reactive, rather than proactive, basis. Instead, companies should shift to an introductory support model organized around known milestones that are clearly laid out for the customer. “Rather than waiting for your customers and users to get lost and feel anxious about what to do next—or how to do it—you should build a proactive approach to Functional Support into your lifecycle messaging (ideally pegged to activity),”  Sixteen Ventures  writes.

And that spirit of proactive support shouldn’t fade when a customer hits the 90-day mark. Instead, companies should monitor their data to look for patterns that might indicate a customer is having trouble—or could potentially have trouble at some point in the future. That way, you can intervene before those issues negatively impact customer experience.

Still, even with a proactive approach to customer support and customer success, it would be impossible to anticipate customer problems and needs 100% of the time. So, you must provide your customers with an easy means of obtaining on-demand support so you can correct problems promptly and get back to delivering value to those customers as quickly as possible. On that front, there are a  few items  you should be tracking to ensure you provide the best support experience possible:

• Total volume by channel. This will help you maintain appropriate staffing levels and determine a strategy for using various channels appropriately in order to optimize customer experience. For example,  Wistia  removed the phone number for its support line from its website because based on research the company conducted, customers obtained a better experience when they submitted support tickets via email rather than via phone.
• Response time. Most customers expect to hear back from a company’s support department within a few hours of submitting a request or ticket, but at the very least, you should be tracking your 24-hour response rate. Taking longer than a day to respond to a ticket will severely impact customer happiness.
• First contact resolution rate. The fewer interactions it takes to resolve a customer’s problem, the more satisfied that customer will be. You should be shooting to resolve a customer’s issue the first time he or she contacts your support department.
• Help delay and abandonment rates. Once a customer makes live contact with you (e.g., via online chat or phone), how long must that customer wait for assistance. If it’s longer than five minutes, you could be in  trouble . And if a large percentage of customers are abandoning those interactions before they’ve received the help they need, you could be in even bigger trouble.
• Moments of delight. It’s important to celebrate your triumphant moments. It’s even more important to dissect those moments in the interest of achieving even more of them. After all, satisfied customers are the building blocks of word-of-mouth referrals and positive reputation. So, each time one of your support representatives reports a “wow” moment, be sure to record the factors leading up to that success. Then, incorporate that information into continued employee training.

One of the reasons support is so crucial during the first 90 days after sale is that this is the period during which the customer should successfully adopt your product. What does that mean? It means the product becomes integral to the customer’s daily activities and operations.

Within 90 days—a full financial quarter—the customer should see clear value in your product. But if the customer doesn’t fully adopt the product, then he or she probably won’t see those results. And in the absence of results (i.e., return on investment), there’s no incentive for the customer to continue using your product (i.e., renew his or her subscription).

Thus, as explained in the section above, you should  monitor adoption  by tracking customer use, activity, and progress toward defined milestones. To get a feel for the specific data points you should be tracking, start by digging into your churn data. Pinpoint those customers who have left you because they didn’t get enough value from your product. Why weren’t they seeing value? Could you have done something to change that?

As for tracking usage for current customers, obviously the easiest place to start is capturing login information (if your customers must log in to use your product). After all, if a customer isn’t logging in very often, they aren’t even getting a chance to experience ROI.

Next, take a look at which product features the customer is using most often. Are they primarily basic features—which tend to deliver less value? Or are they the more in-depth, “sticky” features—the ones whose functions are much more difficult to replace? The answers to these questions should help define your customer success initiatives during the customer adoption phase.

When it comes to tracking usage, there are two main ways to capture this data:

• Feeding in-app usage data for users, companies, and time periods to a database or data warehouse.
• Using tracking codes on your web pages to track page views and actions (i.e., clicking certain links or buttons).

Remember, though, that isolated metrics aren’t super useful when it comes to formulating strategy. Rather, you should focus on usage trends. In other words, don’t just look at the usage data for a single week; also compare that data to that gathered over the last 30 weeks.

The only way to ensure your customers are happy and successful is to continually engage with them. This includes monitoring their satisfaction through:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys,
• customer health/happiness indices,
• customer advisory boards, and
• customer outreach initiatives.

Getting the most out of your engagement efforts means harnessing the combined power of technology and human interaction. After all, technology might be able to pinpoint areas of opportunity, but it alone cannot ensure your company continues to deliver value.

To do that—and thus, keep your customers—you have to continue nurturing them long after conversion and onboarding. Specifically, you must:

• build and maintain good relationships
• initiate contact at the right times
• anticipate issues before they affect your customers’ feelings toward you, and
• upsell and cross-sell when you see the potential for a particular feature or product to add even more value for a certain customer.

Your  customer engagement management  efforts should build off of those you initiated during the adoption phase. Even after the initial 90-day period, you should continue monitoring usage and behavior patterns and use that data to execute on the bullet points listed above. As  this article  explains, “…consolidating this information and identifying trends is crucial…to measure [customer] progress and take strategic action to help drive future revenue and reduce churn.” Furthermore, “Monitoring social networks using sentiment analysis to mine social networks, gives visibility to the company’s reputation at the macro level.”

Once you’ve collected and analyzed that data, you can use the results to create targeted messaging to users through in-app messages, live chat, emails, or phone calls. “In all cases, the company must prioritize efforts to provide excellent content so the messages are most valuable to the user,” the above-cited article continues.

You should be engaging with your customers across the entire spectrum of the customer lifecycle. However, keep in mind that the elements of engagement will change as the customer progresses through his or her lifecycle. In other words, you won’t—or at least, you shouldn’t—engage with your one-week-old customers the same way you engage with your one-year-old customers.

Many companies view upselling and cross-selling opportunities as a means of extracting as much revenue as possible from each customer. But that mode of operation isn’t sustainable in the long run. Why? Because if you upsell and cross-sell with reckless abandon, you can’t be sure you’re actually providing additional value to the customer. And if you’re not, your customers will catch on—and when they do, boom: all trust is lost. It won’t be long before those customers walk out the back door.

Instead, you should approach expansion with a goal of helping your customers extract as much value out of your product as possible. And as  Sixteen Ventures  explains, “The way that we do that is to create a customer experience that delivers increasing amounts of value over time, creating a natural growth in base-product use, a logical expansion into additional functionality, and where appropriate, adoption of adjacent products from your company.”

Again, as discussed in the previous section, this means using data to launch intelligent expansion efforts—ones that truly will deliver value.

Phase 5: Loyalty

In a perfect world, every single customer you acquire would make it to this stage. At this point, the customer is not only satisfied with your product, but also delighted. He or she is a brand ambassador: someone who sings your praises via online and in-person reviews, recommendations, or testimonials—all of which are extremely powerful when it comes to attracting more customers: “Social Proof is amazingly powerful…when your Ideal Customer prospects see others like them using and succeeding with your product, there’s a level of validation that trumps just about everything else you say or promise,”  Sixteen Ventures explains .

Tracking Loyalty

In addition to keeping an eye on customer reviews and ratings, you can track loyalty using retention measures such as churn rate and renewal. If you’ve done everything right, those renewals should really be non-events; in other words, you should continue getting the same revenue—or, if you’ve implemented a successful expansion strategy, even more revenue—as time goes on.

Additionally, you can get a pulse on customer loyalty by creating a referral program and tracking its use. For example, you could provide program participants with unique sign-up pages where they send their referrals. When done right, these types of programs can produce great results—especially if you offer some type of reward or incentive to one or both parties.

If you don’t yet have the resources to maintain such a program, you could simply include a field in your regular sign-up form where new customers can enter the name of their referral source. Finally, be sure to have your sales team record referral information in your CRM.

Whew—that was quite the epic saga. If this whole customer journey thing has you feeling a bit overwhelmed, don’t worry. In customer lifecycles—as in life—the best approach is to take it one day (and one phase) at a time. Plus, while it might be tough to take a data-driven approach to life—that is, of course, unless you track all of your daily activities as data points—customer lifecycles are ripe for data collection and analysis. So, let the data science be your guide. Implement systems and software to measure and track customer success, and watch your base of engaged, loyal customers grow.

More Related Content

How to manage your customer lifecycle from the customer's perspective, how to map the customer journey with engagement models, customer lifecycle management.

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

What is a Customer Journey? A Complete 2024 Guide

Understanding your customer's journey is critical for business success. In this guide, we cover the stages of a customer journey, the benefits of mapping it out, and the best tools and practices for optimization.

Understanding your customer's journey is critical for business success in 2024. A customer journey maps out every interaction a customer has with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement.

In this guide, we discuss the importance of the customer journey and how it can drive results. We'll cover the 5 stages of the customer journey, the benefits of mapping it out , and the best practices for optimisation.

Let's get stuck in.

What is a Customer Journey?

• A customer journey encompasses all interactions a customer has with a brand
• It starts from initial awareness and continues through post-purchase engagement
• Understanding the customer journey is crucial for optimizing the customer experience

A customer journey is the complete experience a customer has with a brand, from their first encounter to their most recent interaction. It includes every touchpoint across various channels and devices, such as websites, social media, email, phone calls, and in-person interactions. The journey spans from initial awareness to post-purchase support and ongoing engagement.

Example of a Customer Journey

To illustrate a typical customer journey, let's consider the following scenario:

• A customer discovers a brand through a targeted social media advertisement
• Intrigued, they visit the company's website to learn more about its products or services
• They compare prices, features, and benefits with competitors' offerings
• After careful consideration, they make a purchase decision and complete the transaction
• Following the purchase, they receive post-purchase support and engage with the brand through various channels

This example demonstrates how a customer moves through different stages of the journey, from awareness to consideration, decision-making, and ultimately, loyalty and advocacy.

Types of Customer Journeys

Customer journeys can vary significantly depending on the nature of the business and its target audience. Two main types of customer journeys are Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B).

B2C Customer Journey

B2C customer journeys focus on individual consumers and typically involve a shorter sales cycle. The emphasis is on creating an emotional connection with the brand and fostering long-term loyalty. Key characteristics of B2C customer journeys include:

• Personalized experiences tailored to individual preferences
• Emphasis on brand storytelling and value proposition
• Shorter decision-making process, often influenced by impulse or emotion
• Importance of social proof and user-generated content

B2B Customer Journey

In contrast, B2B customer journeys focus on business clients and often involve a longer, more complex sales cycle with multiple decision-makers. The emphasis is on demonstrating return on investment (ROI) and building long-term relationships. Key characteristics of B2B customer journeys include:

• Longer sales cycles with multiple touchpoints and decision-makers
• Emphasis on product or service functionality, reliability, and support
• Importance of thought leadership and educational content
• Focus on building trust and demonstrating expertise

Understanding the differences between B2C and B2B customer journeys is crucial for developing effective strategies to engage and convert potential customers. By tailoring the approach to the specific needs and preferences of each audience, brands can create more meaningful and impactful experiences throughout the customer journey.

The 5 Stages of the Customer Journey

• Understanding the customer journey is crucial for creating effective marketing strategies
• The 5 stages of the customer journey are: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy
• By mapping out the customer journey , businesses can identify opportunities to improve the customer experience

In the awareness stage, the customer becomes aware of a need or problem they want to solve. They may not be actively searching for a solution yet, but they are open to learning more about potential options. This is where the customer first discovers your brand through various channels such as search engines, social media, advertisements, or word-of-mouth referrals.

To effectively reach customers in the awareness stage, businesses should focus on creating content that educates and informs. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, or social media posts that address common pain points and provide valuable information related to the customer's needs.

Key Strategies for the Awareness Stage

• Optimize your website for search engines to improve visibility
• Create valuable content that addresses customer pain points
• Leverage social media to reach a wider audience and engage with potential customers

Consideration

Once a customer is aware of their problem and potential solutions, they enter the consideration stage. In this stage, the customer actively researches and compares different options to determine which one best meets their needs. They may visit your website, read reviews, or seek recommendations from friends and family.

To engage customers in the consideration stage, businesses should provide detailed information about their products or services. This can include product descriptions, case studies, testimonials, and comparison guides that help customers make an informed decision.

Key Strategies for the Consideration Stage

• Provide detailed product or service information on your website
• Offer case studies and testimonials to build trust and credibility
• Create comparison guides to help customers evaluate their options

In the decision stage, the customer evaluates their options and makes a purchase decision. They have narrowed down their choices and are ready to select the brand that best meets their needs and preferences. This is a critical stage where businesses need to make it easy for customers to complete their purchase.

To convert customers in the decision stage, businesses should focus on creating a seamless and user-friendly purchase process. This can include offering multiple payment options, providing clear pricing information, and ensuring a smooth checkout experience.

Key Strategies for the Decision Stage

• Offer a user-friendly purchase process with multiple payment options
• Provide clear pricing information and any applicable discounts or promotions
• Ensure a smooth and secure checkout experience to reduce cart abandonment

After a customer makes a purchase, they enter the retention stage. In this stage, the customer uses the product or service and engages with the brand for support and additional purchases. The goal is to keep the customer satisfied and encourage them to make repeat purchases.

To retain customers, businesses should focus on providing excellent customer service and support. This can include offering helpful resources, responding promptly to customer inquiries, and regularly communicating with customers to ensure their satisfaction.

Key Strategies for the Retention Stage

• Provide excellent customer service and support
• Offer helpful resources and tutorials to ensure customer success
• Regularly communicate with customers to gather feedback and address any concerns

In the advocacy stage, a satisfied customer becomes a loyal advocate for your brand. They are likely to recommend your products or services to others and leave positive reviews. This stage is crucial for driving growth and acquiring new customers through word-of-mouth referrals.

To encourage customer advocacy, businesses should focus on creating exceptional customer experiences that exceed expectations. This can include going above and beyond to solve customer problems, offering personalized recommendations, and rewarding loyal customers with exclusive perks or discounts.

Key Strategies for the Advocacy Stage

• Create exceptional customer experiences that exceed expectations
• Offer personalized recommendations and exclusive perks for loyal customers
• Encourage customers to leave reviews and refer others to your brand

Benefits of Understanding the Customer Journey

• Improve customer experience by identifying pain points and creating personalized experiences
• Develop targeted marketing strategies for each stage of the journey to maximize ROI
• Increase customer loyalty and retention by meeting customer needs and fostering long-term relationships

Improved Customer Experience

Understanding the customer journey allows businesses to identify and address pain points that customers may encounter along the way. By mapping out the entire journey , from initial awareness to post-purchase support, companies can pinpoint areas where customers may experience frustration, confusion, or dissatisfaction. This insight enables businesses to proactively address these issues and streamline the customer experience.

For example, if a company discovers that customers often struggle to find relevant product information on their website, they can take steps to improve the site's navigation and search functionality. By providing clear, easily accessible information, businesses can reduce customer friction and enhance the overall user experience.

Additionally, understanding the customer journey enables businesses to create a seamless and personalized experience across all touchpoints. By leveraging customer data and insights, companies can tailor their interactions to individual preferences and needs. This personalization can include targeted content, product recommendations, and customized support, all of which contribute to a more engaging and satisfying customer experience.

Enhanced Marketing Strategies

Mapping the customer journey provides valuable insights that can inform and optimize marketing strategies. By understanding the unique needs, challenges, and motivations of customers at each stage of the journey, businesses can develop targeted campaigns that resonate with their audience.

For instance, a company may discover that potential customers in the awareness stage respond well to educational content that addresses their pain points. Armed with this knowledge, the marketing team can create blog posts, whitepapers, or webinars that provide valuable information and establish the company as a thought leader in their industry.

Similarly, understanding the customer journey allows businesses to allocate their marketing resources more effectively. By identifying the most critical touchpoints and channels for each stage of the journey, companies can focus their efforts on the areas that have the greatest impact on customer decision-making. This targeted approach helps maximize return on investment (ROI) and ensures that marketing budgets are spent wisely.

Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention

A deep understanding of the customer journey is crucial for fostering long-term relationships and increasing customer loyalty and retention. By consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations at every stage of the journey, businesses can build trust and establish a strong emotional connection with their audience.

When companies demonstrate a genuine understanding of their customers' needs and preferences, they are better equipped to provide the right support and solutions at the right time. This proactive approach helps customers feel valued and appreciated, which in turn encourages repeat purchases and brand advocacy.

Moreover, by identifying potential churn points in the customer journey, businesses can take proactive measures to prevent customer attrition. For example, if a company notices that customers often cancel their subscriptions after a certain period, they can reach out with personalized offers, incentives, or support to address any concerns and retain their business.

The Role of Customer Feedback in Retention

Actively seeking and incorporating customer feedback is another essential aspect of increasing loyalty and retention. By providing multiple channels for customers to share their experiences and opinions, such as surveys, reviews, or social media, businesses can gain valuable insights into areas for improvement.

According to a study by Microsoft, 77% of consumers view brands more favorably if they proactively invite and accept customer feedback . By demonstrating a willingness to listen and adapt based on customer input, companies can strengthen relationships and foster a sense of loyalty among their audience.

Improved Product Development and Innovation

Understanding the customer journey can also drive product development and innovation. By gaining deep insights into customer needs, preferences, and behaviors, businesses can identify opportunities for new products or features that address unmet demands in the market.

For example, if a company discovers that customers often struggle with a particular aspect of their product, they can use this feedback to guide improvements in future iterations. This customer-centric approach to product development ensures that businesses are creating solutions that genuinely resonate with their target audience.

Additionally, by monitoring customer interactions and analyzing data across the entire journey, companies can spot emerging trends and anticipate future needs. This proactive approach to innovation allows businesses to stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge in their industry.

The Importance of Customer Journey Analytics

To fully leverage the benefits of understanding the customer journey, businesses must invest in robust analytics and data management systems. By collecting and analyzing data from various touchpoints, such as website interactions, social media engagement, and customer support interactions, companies can gain a holistic view of the customer experience.

Customer journey analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, can help businesses track and visualize customer behavior across multiple channels. These insights can then be used to identify areas for improvement, optimize marketing strategies, and inform product development decisions.

Enhanced Customer Service and Support

A deep understanding of the customer journey is essential for providing exceptional customer service and support. By mapping out the post-purchase experience, businesses can identify potential pain points and proactively address customer concerns.

For instance, if a company discovers that customers often have questions about product setup or installation, they can create detailed guides, video tutorials, or FAQs to provide the necessary support. By anticipating customer needs and offering timely, relevant assistance, businesses can reduce frustration and improve overall satisfaction.

Moreover, understanding the customer journey enables support teams to provide more personalized and empathetic service. By having access to a customer's history, preferences, and previous interactions, support representatives can tailor their approach and offer solutions that are specific to each individual's unique situation. This level of personalization can greatly enhance the customer experience and foster long-term loyalty.

The Power of Proactive Support

Proactive support is another key benefit of understanding the customer journey. By identifying potential issues before they arise, businesses can reach out to customers with helpful information, resources, or solutions. This proactive approach demonstrates a commitment to customer success and can help prevent minor concerns from escalating into major problems.

For example, if a company knows that a customer's subscription is about to expire, they can send a reminder email with renewal instructions or special offers. By proactively addressing this potential churn point, businesses can increase retention and show customers that they value their continued business.

By understanding the customer journey, businesses can create a seamless, personalized, and supportive experience that drives customer loyalty, retention, and ultimately, revenue growth.

Analyzing the Customer Journey for Optimization

• Identify friction points and areas for improvement
• Measure key metrics to track progress and inform decisions
• Gain insights into customer behavior and preferences

Customer journey analysis is the process of evaluating how customers interact with your brand at each touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. By analyzing the customer journey, businesses can identify areas for improvement, optimize the customer experience, and ultimately drive growth.

Identify Friction Points

To optimize the customer journey, it's essential to pinpoint areas where customers experience difficulties or frustrations. These friction points can occur at any stage of the journey, from a confusing website navigation to a lengthy checkout process.

Start by reviewing customer feedback, support tickets, and user behavior data to identify common pain points. Look for patterns in customer complaints, high bounce rates on specific pages, or low conversion rates at certain stages of the journey.

Conduct User Testing

User testing is a valuable tool for identifying friction points. Observe how users interact with your website, product, or service, and note any areas where they struggle or express frustration. This can be done through in-person testing, remote user testing, or even heat mapping tools that track user behavior on your site.

Prioritize Improvements

Once you've identified friction points, prioritize them based on their impact on the customer experience and your business goals. Focus on addressing the most critical issues first, such as simplifying a complex checkout process or improving the mobile user experience.

Measure Key Metrics

To track the success of your optimization efforts, it's crucial to measure key metrics throughout the customer journey. These metrics can help you understand how customers are interacting with your brand and identify areas for further improvement.

Track Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are a critical metric to track at each stage of the customer journey. This can include the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter. By monitoring conversion rates, you can identify potential roadblocks and optimize the journey to improve results.

Monitor Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a key indicator of the overall success of your customer journey. Use surveys, feedback forms, and net promoter scores (NPS) to gauge customer sentiment at various touchpoints. This can help you identify areas where customers are particularly happy or dissatisfied, allowing you to make targeted improvements.

Analyze Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with your business over the course of their relationship. By analyzing CLV, you can identify customer segments that are most valuable to your business and focus on optimizing their journey to maximize retention and revenue.

By continuously analyzing and optimizing the customer journey, businesses can improve the overall customer experience, increase loyalty, and drive long-term growth. This iterative process requires a data-driven approach, a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences, and a commitment to continuous improvement.

References: https://www.source.com https://www.usertesting.com https://www.smashingmagazine.com https://www.optimizely.com https://www.medallia.com https://www.hubspot.com

Leveraging Customer Journey Touchpoints for Success

• Identify and optimize high-impact touchpoints to influence customer decisions
• Ensure consistency across all channels for a cohesive brand experience
• Personalize interactions using customer data to improve engagement and loyalty

Customer touchpoints are the various points of interaction between a customer and a business throughout the customer journey. These interactions can occur through various channels, such as websites, social media, email, phone calls, or in-person encounters. By leveraging these touchpoints effectively, businesses can drive customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Prioritize High-Impact Touchpoints

According to a study by McKinsey & Company, "companies that excel in delivering journeys tend to win in the market. They achieve higher revenue growth and customer satisfaction, and lower costs to serve, all while creating a more engaged and loyal customer base".

To prioritize high-impact touchpoints, businesses should:

Identify the touchpoints that have the greatest influence on customer decisions and emotions. These may include initial product discovery, the purchase process, and post-purchase support.

Allocate resources to optimize these critical interactions, ensuring that customers have a positive experience at each stage.

As Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc., states, "Touchpoints are important, but they are not the journey. The journey is the entire experience, from the customer's perspective, and touchpoints are just one part of that journey".

Ensure Consistency Across Touchpoints

Delivering a cohesive brand experience across all channels is crucial for building trust and loyalty with customers. Inconsistent messaging, visuals, or tone can lead to confusion and erode customer confidence in a brand.

To ensure consistency:

Develop a clear brand voice and visual guidelines that are applied consistently across all touchpoints.

Train employees to understand and embody the brand's values and communication style when interacting with customers.

"Consistency is the key to building a strong brand identity and fostering customer trust," says Shep Hyken, customer service and experience expert. "When customers know what to expect from your brand at every interaction, they feel more confident in their relationship with you."

Personalize Interactions

Personalizing customer interactions based on their preferences, behaviors, and history can significantly improve engagement and loyalty. By using customer data to tailor experiences, businesses can demonstrate that they value and understand their customers' needs.

To personalize interactions:

Collect and analyze customer data from various sources, such as website analytics, CRM systems, and social media.

Use this data to segment customers and deliver targeted content, recommendations, and support.

"Personalization is not about first/last name. It's about relevant content and interaction that let customers know you value them and understand their needs," notes Kristin Smaby, customer experience expert and author of "Being Human is Good Business".

By prioritizing high-impact touchpoints, ensuring consistency across channels, and personalizing interactions, businesses can effectively leverage customer journey touchpoints to drive success. These strategies help build stronger customer relationships, increase loyalty, and ultimately contribute to business growth.

References: McKinsey & Company. (n.d.). The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/the-three-cs-of-customer-satisfaction-consistency-consistency-consistency CX Journey Inc. (n.d.). About Annette Franz. https://www.cx-journey.com/about-annette-franz Hyken, S. (n.d.). Customer Service and Experience Expert. https://hyken.com Smaby, K. (n.d.). Being Human is Good Business. https://www.kristinsmaby.com

Customer Journey Mapping Tools and Software

Customer journey mapping tools help teams visualize the customer experience. They provide a shared view of the customer's interactions with your brand.

In our testing, we found two leading tools: Smaply and UXPressia. Both offer drag-and-drop interfaces to map journeys across touchpoints.

Overview of Popular Customer Journey Mapping Tools

Smaply is a web-based tool for collaboratively mapping customer experiences. Key features include:

• Persona templates to define target customers
• Journey map editor with customizable touchpoints
• Ability to add notes, images, and files to maps
• Team collaboration and commenting

UXPressia is another leading journey mapping platform. Its main features are:

• Premade journey map templates
• Drag-and-drop touchpoint editor
• Impact score to prioritize touchpoints
• Integrations with analytics tools

| Feature | Smaply | UXPressia | |---------|--------|-----------| | Persona templates | _ | _ | | Touchpoint editor | _ | _ | | Collaboration | _ | _ | | Analytics integration | | _ | | Impact scores | | _ |

Comparison of Features and Pricing

Both Smaply and UXPressia offer tiered pricing based on features and team size.

Smaply's plans start at $25/month for a single user . The Team plan at $75/month includes 3 users and additional collaboration features.

UXPressia offers a free plan with limited maps . Paid plans start at $24/month per user , with enterprise pricing available.

In our assessment, UXPressia comes out ahead for its additional analytics and prioritization features. The impact score helps teams focus on the most critical touchpoints.

However, Smaply may be sufficient for smaller teams just getting started with journey mapping. Its simple interface and affordable entry price make it accessible.

The right tool depends on your team's specific needs and maturity level. Consider your requirements for collaboration, integration, and analysis in making a selection.

Best Practices for Customer Journey Management

• Regularly updating journey maps keeps them relevant
• Cross-functional collaboration ensures a holistic view
• Customer feedback drives continuous improvement

Regularly Review and Update the Customer Journey Map

Customer journeys are not static - they evolve as customer behaviors, preferences, and market conditions change. Forrester Research recommends revisiting journey maps at least quarterly to ensure they accurately reflect the current customer experience.

David Truog, VP & Research Director at Forrester, emphasizes the importance of keeping journey maps up to date: "Journey maps are not one-and-done exercises. They need to be living documents that are regularly reviewed and updated as the business and customer needs change".

Outdated journey maps can lead to misaligned priorities and wasted resources. By treating journey mapping as an ongoing process, companies can stay attuned to shifts in customer expectations and quickly adapt their strategies.

Best Practices for Maintaining Journey Maps

• Schedule quarterly reviews with key stakeholders
• Assign ownership for keeping maps updated
• Establish a process for incorporating changes based on customer feedback and analytics insights

Involve Cross-Functional Teams in Journey Mapping and Optimization

Creating and optimizing customer journeys requires input and collaboration from across the organization. Marketing, sales, customer service, product, and operations teams all play a role in shaping the end-to-end customer experience.

According to McKinsey & Company, organizations with tightly aligned cross-functional teams achieve 17% faster revenue growth and 14% higher customer satisfaction scores. By involving diverse perspectives in journey mapping, companies can uncover opportunities and pain points that might be missed with a siloed approach.

Tips for Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Assemble a core journey mapping team with representatives from each department
• Hold regular workshops to align on customer needs and brainstorm improvements
• Establish shared KPIs and incentives tied to customer experience outcomes

Continuously Gather and Act on Customer Feedback

The most successful companies put the customer at the center of every decision. They continuously gather feedback through surveys, interviews, social listening, and behavioral analytics to understand what's working and where there's room for improvement.

"You have to be listening to your customers constantly and taking their feedback to heart," says Shep Hyken, customer service expert and bestselling author. "The companies that win are the ones that are always asking, 'How can we make this better for our customers?'"

Acting on customer feedback demonstrates that you value their input and are committed to meeting their needs. It's not enough to simply collect feedback - there must be processes in place to analyze the data, prioritize improvements, and close the loop with customers.

Ways to Operationalize Customer Feedback

• Set up automated surveys at key touchpoints like post-purchase and customer service interactions
• Monitor social media and review sites for unsolicited feedback
• Create a centralized system for aggregating and sharing feedback insights across teams
• Close the loop with customers to let them know their feedback was heard and acted upon

By making customer journey management a continuous, collaborative process powered by customer insights, companies can deliver the seamless, personalized experiences that drive loyalty and growth.

Mastering the Customer Journey in 2024

The customer journey is the backbone of your business's success. By understanding and optimizing each stage, from awareness to advocacy, you can create a seamless experience that delights customers and drives growth.

Mapping the journey helps you identify pain points, personalize interactions, and allocate resources effectively. With the right tools and best practices, you can continuously improve the customer experience and foster long-term relationships.

So, where do you go from here? Start by gathering your team and mapping out your customer journey. Analyze the data, prioritize high-impact touchpoints, and develop targeted strategies for each stage. Most importantly, listen to your customers and act on their feedback.

Are you ready to take your customer experience to the next level in 2024?

Schedule a strategy call and avoid the guesswork

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Marketing tips

Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

When I was a kid, I remember watching my parents switch between different credit cards to get the best rewards for a particular purchase. They almost always pulled out the American Express first because (as they explained to me) the base reward rate was higher than even the sector-specific perks offered by other cards. Twenty years later, when I decided to get a high-end credit card, Amex was the first one that came to mind.

Customer journey mapping is the process of planning out people's awareness of and relationship to your brand, starting with their very first impression—even if, as in my case, that impression is made a full decade before they can actually use your product.

Table of contents: 

What is a customer journey map?

Think back to any recent purchase of your own, and try to trace your own customer journey:

When and where was your first contact with the product or service?

How many channels of communication with the company did you have available?

How was the contact you had, if any? Was it personal or formulaic?

Were your problems, if any, solved? If so, were they solved in a timely manner?

What do you now know about the brand besides the product or service itself?

The customer journey vs. the user journey vs. the buyer journey

What's the difference between the customer, user, and buyer journeys?

The customer journey is split up into two parts: the buyer journey and the user journey. The buyer journey covers everything up to the point of purchase. After that point, the customer becomes a user, and all of their experiences are part of the user journey. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Here are the main benefits of the customer journey mapping process:

Touchpoint optimization: With a clear understanding of what your touchpoints are and where they occur, you can track and adjust them based on how they perform.

Enhanced customer experience insights: Through customer profiling and a better overview of all the touchpoints that make a journey, you can acquire more precise and actionable customer experience insights.

Improved product development: Thoughtful and intentional journey planning creates more opportunities for meaningful customer feedback, which gives businesses better information to improve their product.

Customer journey map template

The customer journey map includes additional details within each phase (which I'll discuss in more detail later) to help you strategically plan your customers' touchpoints and move them closer to a purchase.

Below, we'll walk through each part of the customer journey map and how to use it. 

Parts of a journey map

If you're already familiar with journey mapping, you can start filling in the template right away. Otherwise, here's a quick walkthrough of what goes in each section.

What is the customer doing?

In this section, you'll jot down the main things that the prospect, lead, or customer is doing during this stage. For example, if you're a personal trainer, an awareness stage key step might include something like "Prospect wants to get in shape." Or if you offer an email newsletter app, an expansion and advocacy stage key step might be "Customer upgrades their plan." 

Each stage will likely have more than one key step or milestone—that's good. You should be specific enough to be able to create touchpoints, content, and marketing campaigns geared toward each milestone.

What is the customer thinking?

Next, put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what questions they might have at each stage. In the awareness stage, it might be things like "How can I do X better?" or "What is [your product name]?" In the consideration phase, questions like "Is this worth my time/money?" or "Will this help me solve my problem?" will come to the forefront. 

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

After you've outlined what your customer is thinking at each stage, align each question with the relevant touchpoint that could address each concern.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

When you have a question or milestone that doesn't have a corresponding touchpoint, you've found a gap in your customer journey. That means customers at this stage are going to be left with unmet needs and unanswered questions, and may look more seriously at competitor products as a result. It's essential to develop touchpoints to fill this gap and prevent losing potential customers at a key milestone.

Stages of the customer journey

The customer journey map can be split into five phases: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, and brand loyalty.

Customers can't decide whether or not they want your product if they don't know that it exists. In the earliest phase of the customer journey, a business's goal is to reach the individual and, ultimately, attract them to the brand.

Consideration

Once potential customers are aware of your brand, the next phase they enter is called "consideration" or "research." This is when the customer's perspective shifts from simple awareness of your brand's existence to an understanding of the value that you have to offer them. 

Some businesses also include a mini-stage called "Intent" or "Onboarding," when the customer has decided they're interested in the product and is testing it out. The company's goal in this stage is simply to provide an exceptional user experience—they want to make sure the product works as intended and the customer's questions and requests are handled well.

A business can identify customers that are primed for conversion based on behavior in the consideration stage. Someone who signs up for a newsletter isn't a hot sales prospect quite yet, but when they start opening more emails and spending more time on the site, that's when brands know they're ready for a conversion push.

An abandoned cart email pushing a browsing shopper to complete a purchase

A physical mail offer pushing a potential customer to open an account

A seasonal campaign highlighting why a product is perfect for a particular holiday, celebration, or event

When a conversion is successful, a potential buyer becomes an actual customer. The goal in the retention stage is to demonstrate to the customer why they were right to make their purchase, and set them up to make more purchases or renew services in the future.

The retention stage is also where the user experience or user journey begins. The company's job in this phase, then, is to provide the best possible user experience. Easy installation, frictionless customer service, and—this part should be obvious—a product or service that works well and provides the user what they need are all key components to improved customer retention.

Brand loyalty

In the final customer journey phase, users go from run-of-the-mill satisfied customers to active advocates for your business. 

Keep in mind: a customer doesn't need to be a zealot for your company to be an unintentional brand advocate. One of the biggest reasons I made the decision to apply for Amex's high-end card is because my best friend has it. She didn't specifically recommend it to me, but I became interested after experiencing a lot of the card benefits vicariously through her. 

Advanced customer journey mapping tips

Everything we've covered up to this point will only get you as far as a basic customer journey map. That doesn't mean, however, that your customer journey map will be good . Once you have the basic journey mapping structure down, you'll want to take steps to continually improve your map's effectiveness.

Survey your customers and customer teams

Talk to your customer-facing employees, too. The people who work directly with customers day-to-day will have more accurate information about how to interact with them.

Automate customer data collection

Tweak for b2b, b2c, and saas industries.

The nature of the customer journey is different for SaaS, B2B, and B2C companies. A B2B company's interactions with prospects might include in-person conferences, while a SaaS company's touchpoints will be mostly digital. Companies that sell to consumers will need to think through individual people's experiences in a way that B2B companies don't. A company whose products are designed for emergencies will need to think through crisis scenarios instead of day-to-day customer experiences.

Tweak your customer journey categories to fit your company, product, and industry. Using a generalized or poorly-fitting customer journey map will result in vague and unhelpful interactions with your brand.

Create multiple maps for different journeys

When people refer to the customer journey, they're typically talking about the overarching journey from awareness to brand loyalty that we outlined above. However, you can map any part of the customer journey and experience. 

Do you target college students? Replace the five stages with four academic quarters and map their experience over the course of a year. 

Is your product designed to be used in the car? Map the customer journey through each hour of a long road trip. 

Zooming in to create detailed maps of different aspects of the customer journey will help you create even more specifically tailored customer experiences.

Types of journey maps

The template above follows the standard stages of the customer journey, but it's not the only way to do your customer journey mapping.

Two other commonly-used journey maps are the "Day in a life" journey map and the customer support journey map. We've provided the key elements of both below, as well as customer journey map templates for each.

Day/week/month in the life map

This map includes space for you to record the buyer persona's name, occupation, and motto, but these are really just shorthand for key persona characteristics. If you're selling baby diapers, for instance, your persona's occupation would be "parent," even if the person in question is also an accountant. 

The "motto" should be a condensed version of your persona's primary mindset with regard to their wants, needs, and pain points. The motto for an expecting first-time parent might be, "I'm excited but nervous—I have to make sure I'm prepared for anything."

Use the column headers to set your time frame. If you're marketing to expecting parents, the time frame might be the nine months of a pregnancy, or you might map an expectant mother's experiences through a single day in her third trimester. At each stage, ask yourself the same questions:

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand? Alternatively: how could our brand provide value at each stage?

A day in the life customer journey map will not only help you zoom in to develop more tailored experiences, but it will also give you insights into what might be useful to add or improve in your product or service.

Support experience map

This journey map is a bit different in that it doesn't just map touchpoints; it maps functional interactions between the customer and customer service representatives as well as the behind-the-scenes activities necessary to support the customer-facing team.

This map starts when the support ticket is opened and ends when the customer's issue is resolved. The top row of the map is simple: what is the customer doing at each stage in the support process?

​​Next, you'll record the corresponding actions of your customer-facing, or "frontstage" team. This includes both employees' actions and the systems engaged in the support process. For example, if the first step of your customer support process is handled by a chatbot or automatic phone system, these will go in the technology row. If the customer moves forward to request to speak with a representative, then the second stage is where your "employee actions" row will come into play.

Finally, the bottom row is for behind-the-scenes activity performed by employees who don't interact with the customer at all. For example, if the customer representative needs to get information from another department to answer the customer's questions, the other department's involvement will be recorded in the "backstage actions" section of the map.

Customer journey mapping example

To put it all together, here's an example customer journey map for a gym. 

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

"I can't go up a flight of stairs without getting winded; I need to get my health and fitness on track."

"I wish I knew someone who could recommend this gym." 

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

Success stories on social media in a front-and-center location, like a saved Instagram Stories collection or a pinned post 

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

"This gym looks clean and modern from the photos."

"I hate calling the gym, but I'd like to learn more about personal training or class options."

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

A live chat box on the gym's website for prospective customers to ask questions about the facility or membership options before visiting 

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

"The staff was friendly and it was easy to sign up."

"I wish I could see what classes they offer and weekly schedules without having to visit the gym."

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

A mobile app where members can track their progress, access class schedules, book personal trainer sessions, and receive personalized workout recommendations

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

"I wish I knew someone who could work out with me."

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

Community-building events like workshops or challenges to foster a sense of community and support among members and staff

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

"My coworker would love this gym since it's so close to work." 

"I love that teacher. I'm going to try some of her other classes."

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

A loyalty rewards program for members' continued commitment and engagement that offers exclusive discounts, merchandise, or access to premium services 

Related reading:

This article was originally published in May 2021 by Nick Djurovic. The most recent update was in August 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Sales & business development
• Small business

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• Customer service

1. Discover Stage

Also known as the Awareness Stage in the more popular buyer journey models such as Hubspot’s, this is when customers are starting to define their problems, needs, and desires. At  Dashly , we see this as the stage in the user journey when startup CEOs are beginning to feel the need for integrated customer support and customer experience system.

You want to be the one who helps your target customers clearly understand their needs. There are different forms of support that you can provide at this stage, including:

• Providing great content that answers the most common questions your customers have
• Enabling comments in your blog and answering questions readers are posting
• Using Facebook chatbots that lead customers to a selection of personalized and relevant content selection

2. Explore Stage

Now that your customers have clearly identified and defined what their needs are, they are moving on and exploring the available solutions and options to them.

This is a crucial stage in the user journey that we see many marketers neglect. There are two elements that are built in this stage: trust and likeability.

Providing customer support at this stage can increase your likeability and could come in several forms:

• Creating an email nurture sequence that provides valuable information and encouraging customers to reply to those emails if they have questions
• Providing premium content such as whitepapers and front-loading the content with tactics such as pop-ups. We found some  great pop-up examples  for your inspiration.

Read also: Customer engagement strategy template to create omnichannel campaigns 10 conversion rate optimization tools to enhance your funnel and boost revenue 17 Zendesk alternative services and 13 live chat alternatives to try this year

3. Buy Stage

One of the primary goals of customer support at this stage is to minimize cart abandonment — don’t let your prospects change their minds.

In reality, there will always be reasons why customers leave on this step. It’s up to us to make sure that we are there for them at this crucial stage, provide five-star customer support, and prevent from leaving with the best of our abilities. This is probably why many businesses invest a lot to boost customer support at this point. However, it wouldn’t work without providing a great customer experience in the previous stages of the user journey. Some of the most efficient action plans for the whole customer journey map are collected in the  SaaS Marketing Automation Playbook .

Extending a Helping Hand Every Step of the Way

The path of the user journey from point A to the point of purchase is riddled with questions, hesitations, and objections. The way to your customers’ hearts (and then wallets), so to speak, is not with hard-sell sales pitches, but with timely, relevant, and useful customer support to usher them through your conversion funnel. Be there every step of the way and you will be rewarded (a.k.a. get the sale) in the end.

Dashly helps grow businesses by collecting more leads, increasing conversions, and providing stellar customer support. We’re a team of developers, marketers, and sales professionals who are experts in marketing automation, data-driven conversions, customer support, and customer relations management. Take us for a spin risk-free.  Sign up for a 7-days free trial .

👉 Live Chat Best Practices : 20 Hacks to Make Customer Service Better 👉7 Best Live Chat for eCommerce : Boost Conversion on your Website 👉 Top 5 live chat mobile app : find the best fit for your business 👉 Live Chat: How Online Chat Tool Can Help Your Business 👉 20 Best Live Chat Software for your website chat service 👉 How to implement user tracking on website : guide, tactics, and tools 👉 Top 10 user activity monitoring tools : tracking features, price, cons and pros 👉 Top 20 best website tracking tools for effective work with visitors

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Sales CRM Terms

What is the Customer Journey? (Explained With Examples)

Oct 11, 2023

The customer journey is a concept that refers to the process that a customer goes through when interacting with a company or brand. It encompasses all the touchpoints and interactions that a customer has, from the moment they become aware of a product or service, to the point of making a purchase and beyond

1°) What is the Customer Journey?

1.1 - definition of the customer journey.

The customer journey can be defined as the series of steps or stages that a customer goes through during their engagement with a company. It typically starts with the initial awareness of a product or service, followed by consideration, evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase experiences.

The customer journey is not always linear and can vary depending on the individual and the specific product or service. It can involve multiple touchpoints, such as online research, social media interactions, in-store visits, customer service interactions, and more.

Let's dive deeper into each stage of the customer journey to understand the significance and impact of each step.

1.2 - Advantages of the Customer Journey

Understanding the customer journey can provide several benefits for a company. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can gain insights into the different stages and touchpoints that customers go through. This knowledge can help identify areas for improvement, optimize marketing efforts, and enhance the overall customer experience.

For example, during the initial awareness stage, companies can focus on creating impactful marketing campaigns to generate interest and capture the attention of potential customers. By understanding the specific touchpoints that lead to consideration and evaluation, businesses can tailor their messaging and content to address customer pain points and showcase the unique value proposition of their products or services.

By understanding how customers move through each stage of the journey, companies can tailor their strategies and communications to provide relevant and personalized experiences. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, higher conversions and revenue.

Let's explore some real-life examples of how companies have leveraged the customer journey to their advantage.

1.3 - Disadvantages of the Customer Journey

While the customer journey concept can be valuable, it also has some limitations. One limitation is that it is difficult to accurately capture every touchpoint and step that a customer goes through. Customer journeys can be complex and unique to each individual, making it challenging to create a one-size-fits-all model.

However, companies can overcome this limitation by conducting thorough customer research and utilizing data analytics to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. By continuously monitoring and analyzing customer interactions, companies can refine their understanding of the customer journey and adapt their strategies accordingly.

Additionally, customer journeys can change over time, influenced by factors such as changing consumer preferences, advancements in technology, or shifts in industry trends. This means that companies need to regularly review and update their understanding of the customer journey to stay relevant and effectively meet customers' evolving needs.

By staying agile and responsive to changing customer behaviors, companies can ensure that their customer journey remains effective and aligned with customer expectations.

Now that we have explored the advantages and disadvantages of the customer journey, let's move on to the next section to understand how companies can effectively map and analyze the customer journey.

2°) Examples of the Customer Journey

2.1 - example in a startup context.

Let's consider a hypothetical startup that has developed a new mobile productivity app. In this example, the customer journey begins with the app appearing on the user's radar, perhaps through an advertisement or a recommendation from a friend. The customer then explores the app's website and reads reviews to gather more information.

As they delve deeper into their research, the customer discovers the unique features and benefits of the app. They learn about how it can help them streamline their daily tasks, increase their productivity, and stay organized. The customer also comes across testimonials from other users who have experienced positive results after using the app.

After considering their options, the customer decides to download and install the app. Excitement builds as they anticipate the potential impact it can have on their work and personal life. They eagerly open the app for the first time and begin exploring its functionalities.

As the customer starts using the app, they quickly realize its value. They find themselves effortlessly managing their tasks, setting reminders, and accessing important information on the go. The app becomes an indispensable tool in their daily routine, helping them stay on top of their responsibilities and achieve their goals.

However, no product is perfect, and the customer may encounter some issues or have questions along the way. In such situations, they reach out to the app's support team for assistance. The support team promptly responds, providing helpful guidance and resolving any concerns the customer may have.

Over time, the customer becomes a loyal user of the app. They appreciate the continuous updates and improvements made by the startup, which further enhance their experience. The customer becomes an advocate for the brand, recommending the app to friends, family, and colleagues who may benefit from its features.

2.2 - Example in a Consulting Context

In the consulting industry, the customer journey can be more complex. A potential client might first become aware of a consulting firm through a referral or by reading thought leadership content online. Intrigued by the firm's expertise and reputation, they decide to explore further.

Upon visiting the firm's website, the potential client is greeted with a wealth of information about the services offered. They discover case studies showcasing successful client engagements, demonstrating the firm's ability to deliver results. The client also comes across testimonials from satisfied clients, reinforcing the firm's credibility.

Impressed by what they have seen, the client decides to take the next step and contact the firm to schedule an initial consultation. The firm's consultant, well-versed in understanding client needs, conducts a thorough discussion to gather information about the client's pain points and challenges.

Based on the information gathered during the consultation, the consultant develops a customized proposal tailored to address the client's specific needs. The proposal outlines the recommended approach, the expected outcomes, and the timeline for the engagement.

Excitement builds as the client reviews the proposal. They see the potential for positive change and growth that the consulting firm can bring to their organization. After careful consideration, the client decides to move forward with the engagement, signaling the start of a collaborative partnership.

The consulting engagement involves regular meetings between the client and the consultant. Progress updates are shared, and any adjustments to the strategy are discussed and implemented as needed. The consultant provides guidance, expertise, and support throughout the journey, ensuring the client's objectives are met.

Finally, the consulting engagement reaches its conclusion with the successful delivery of the agreed-upon solutions. The client experiences the desired outcomes, witnessing the positive impact on their organization. They express their satisfaction with the consulting firm's services and may choose to engage them again in the future for additional projects or recommend them to other businesses in need of similar expertise.

2.3 - Example in a Digital Marketing Agency Context

A digital marketing agency's customer journey often starts with the client expressing interest in improving their online presence. The agency may offer a range of services, such as search engine optimization, social media management, and content marketing.

Upon expressing interest, the agency's team conducts a thorough analysis of the client's current digital presence. They examine the client's website, social media accounts, and online reputation. Through this analysis, they identify areas for improvement and opportunities for growth.

Based on the findings of the analysis, the agency develops a tailored strategy to address the client's specific goals and objectives. The strategy may include recommendations for optimizing the client's website, creating engaging content, and implementing targeted advertising campaigns.

The agency presents the strategy to the client, explaining the rationale behind each recommendation and the expected outcomes. The client reviews the strategy and provides feedback, ensuring that it aligns with their vision and objectives.

Once the strategy is agreed upon, the agency begins implementing various tactics to execute the plan. They optimize the client's website for search engines, create compelling content to engage the target audience, and launch targeted advertising campaigns to increase brand visibility.

Throughout the implementation phase, the agency monitors the performance of the various tactics. They analyze data, measure key performance indicators, and make adjustments as needed to ensure optimal results. Regular reports and updates are provided to the client, keeping them informed of the progress being made.

The final stage of the customer journey involves evaluating the results achieved through the agency's efforts. The agency and the client review the impact of the implemented strategies and tactics, examining key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement.

Based on the evaluation, the agency and the client collaborate to make any necessary adjustments to the strategy. This iterative process ensures that the client's online presence continues to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape, maximizing their return on investment.

2.4 - Example with Analogies

To help illustrate the concept further, let's consider some analogies for the customer journey. Imagine you are planning a vacation. The journey begins with the initial inspiration and research for destinations and accommodations.

You spend hours browsing travel websites, reading reviews, and comparing prices. You envision yourself relaxing on a pristine beach or exploring a vibrant city. The anticipation builds as you imagine the experiences that await you.

Once you've chosen a destination, you move into the consideration stage. You carefully weigh the pros and cons of different accommodations, comparing amenities, locations, and prices. You read more reviews, seeking reassurance that you are making the right choice.

Finally, you make your purchase, book your flights and accommodations, and embark on your trip. The excitement is palpable as you board the plane and begin your journey to your chosen destination.

During your vacation, you have experiences that can impact your overall satisfaction and potentially influence your future travel decisions. The quality of service at your hotel, the local attractions you visit, and the interactions with locals all contribute to your experience.

Upon returning home, you reflect on your trip, share your experiences with friends and family, and may decide to visit the same destination again or choose a different one for your next vacation. This process mirrors the stages and interactions of the customer journey.

The customer journey is a vital concept for businesses to understand and optimize. By mapping out the different stages and touchpoints, companies can gain insights into their customers' experiences and tailor their strategies and communications accordingly.

While the customer journey may have some limitations and variations, it provides a valuable framework for companies to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately drive business growth.

About the author

Arnaud Belinga

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Customer Journey Mapping

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

USE THIS PLAY TO...

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

Running the play

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

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

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

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

Set the stage (5 min)

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

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

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

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

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

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

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

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

• E.g., "Provide structure"

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

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

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

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

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

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

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

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

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

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

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

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

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

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

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

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

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAP A FUTURE STATE

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

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

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

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

KEEP IT REAL

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

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

Want even more Playbook?

Drop your email below to be notified when we add new Health Monitors and plays.

Thanks! Now get back to work.

Got feedback?

Drop a question or comment on the Atlassian Community site.

Shared understanding

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

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

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

Proof of concept

Project teams.

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

Customer centricity

Service teams.

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

• Share this article

Customer Journey

• Posted by by Nedim Mehic
• February 27, 2024

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey refers to the complete experience a customer has with a brand or company across multiple touchpoints and stages, from initial awareness through to post-purchase interactions and beyond. It encompasses every interaction, whether direct or indirect, that contributes to the customer’s perception and relationship with the brand. Understanding the customer journey is crucial for businesses aiming to optimize customer experiences, enhance satisfaction, and ultimately drive loyalty and advocacy.

Stages of the Customer Journey

The customer journey can be divided into several key stages, each representing a different part of the experience:

• Awareness: The potential customer becomes aware of a problem or need and discovers the brand as a possible solution.
• Consideration: The customer evaluates the brand’s offerings, comparing them with competitors, to determine if it meets their needs.
• Decision: The customer decides to purchase a product or service from the brand.
• Retention: Post-purchase, the brand seeks to engage the customer further, encouraging repeat purchases and loyalty.
• Advocacy: Satisfied customers become brand advocates, recommending the brand to others.

Importance of Understanding the Customer Journey

• Personalized Marketing: Tailoring marketing strategies to meet customers at each stage of their journey with relevant messaging and offers.
• Improved Customer Experience: Identifying and addressing pain points or gaps in the journey to enhance overall satisfaction.
• Increased Customer Retention: Fostering positive post-purchase experiences that lead to repeat business and loyalty.
• Data-Driven Insights: Collecting and analyzing data from various touchpoints to better understand customer behavior and preferences.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Customer Journey Mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the customer journey. This map outlines all the touchpoints where customers interact with the brand, highlighting opportunities for improvement and innovation. Effective maps are created from the customer’s perspective and include qualitative and quantitative data to provide a comprehensive overview of the customer experience.

Examples of Touchpoints in the Customer Journey

• Website Visits: The customer’s interactions with the brand’s website, including information search and navigation ease.
• Social Media: Engagement with the brand through social media platforms, including ads, posts, and customer service inquiries.
• In-store Experiences: For brick-and-mortar retailers, the in-store experience, including staff interactions, ambiance, and product availability.
• Customer Support: The quality and effectiveness of customer service interactions, including response time and issue resolution.

Strategies for Enhancing the Customer Journey

• Customer Feedback: Regularly collect and analyze customer feedback to identify areas for improvement.
• Personalization: Use customer data to personalize interactions and communications, making each touchpoint more relevant and engaging.
• Cross-Channel Consistency: Ensure a consistent brand experience across all channels, from digital to physical.
• Continuous Improvement: Treat the customer journey as an evolving process, continually seeking ways to refine and enhance the experience.

The Customer Journey is a comprehensive concept that requires ongoing attention and adaptation by businesses to meet changing customer needs and expectations. By understanding and optimizing each stage of the journey, companies can create more meaningful interactions, build stronger relationships, and drive sustainable growth through enhanced customer loyalty and advocacy.

Nedim Mehic

Nedim is a senior technical SEO specialist, and the co-founder of Beki AI. On the Beki AI blog, we share new and innovative strategies to SEO and content marketing.

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What is a customer journey?

A customer journey is the set of steps and interactions from the customer’s point of view needed to achieve an outcome with your company.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of the customer journey. A journey map takes a customer’s needs, processes, and perceptions through the entirety of their interaction with an organisation, and then diagrams that journey into a visual map. The more touch points a customer has along their way, the more complex the journey map becomes. What the customer encounters and feels as they progress between touchpoints on this journey forms the overall customer experience. Customer journey mapping can shorten and personalise the journey, resulting in a more positive experience.

A detailed customer journey map allows you to identify:

• Opportunities

To do this, the customer journey focuses on accessing four different factors:

• What is the customer doing/how is the customer behaving?
• What is the customer feeling?
• What/whom is the customer interacting with?
• What behind-the-scenes processes need to be taking place?

Benefits of customer journey mapping

It’s been said that you’ll never really understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Customer journey mapping allows you to do just that: placing yourself in your customers’ position and gaining a clearer understanding of their perspective. In addition to more clearly defining the realities of your customers’ experiences, journey mapping provides other advantages as well.

Provides an inbound perspective

Inbound marketing depends on your ability to create interesting and useful content to help generate interest and draw in prospective customers. Customer mapping gives you clever insight into your customers’ interests, as well as how they feel about individual aspects and touchpoints as they interact with your business. With this information, you can tailor your content offering to better attract and retain qualified leads.

Encourages proactive service

By mapping out the customer journey, you are able identify potential points of friction well in advance. You can then adjust your customer service strategy accordingly, intervening where necessary to increase your brand value and help cement a positive customer relationship. Being proactive makes your brand more reliable and helps you provide better support options for parts of the journey that may become difficult.

Identifies and refines target audiences

Locating and guiding prospective customers through their journey can be expensive, and when your leads fail to become customers, then all of that cost goes to waste. A detailed customer journey map can help you more clearly identify the demographics and traits of those who would be most interested in your services. By understanding their needs, pain points, and goals, you will be better positioned to market to the right audiences.

Improve customer retention rates

The customer journey isn’t designed only for new customers; a complete view of the customer journey provides opportunities to improve any areas that stand out as possibly problematic for returning customers as well. Customer journey mapping can help you identify those who might be considering leaving. By comparing journeys between churned customers, you may be able to identify common issues, which you can then address to help ensure that future customers keep coming back again and again.

Creates a concise representation of the user experience for your entire organisation

It can be difficult to coordinate all departments as your company grows. Sometimes, sales and marketing goals may not be aligned, or might not actually be relevant to your customers wants or needs. Your customer journey map supports a shared vision across departments. When adopted throughout your business, it can become the basis for decision-making, informing goals, supporting strategy, and aligning teams towards creating a better experience for your customers.

Understanding the customer journey

The journey that a customer takes is married to each instance that a customer comes in contact with your company. These instances include pre-purchase, mid- purchase, and post-purchase. When you break these three instances down into their constituent parts, there are seven phases of the customer journey to be aware of.

Out-of-market

This is the phase where a customer is looking to improve their business, and they want the company to be productive and efficient. At this point, they may not have a solution to achieve their goals, but they are open to inspiration and ideas.

A customer uncovers the opportunity to grow and improve their business at this phase—they have identified an issue that could be resolved.

Initial consideration

After customers have identified a solution to their problem, they will begin to research. Stakeholders and a project group work to identify the top brands in the market they need, scope out a project, and review the key functionalities and requirements.

Active evaluation

Customers then take their long list of possible solutions and narrow it down to a short list of brands. Customers contact the vendors on the short list and invite them to a meeting or demo, at which point they will review the solutions based on their trust, expertise, and scalability.

Purchase decision

This is when the customer decides on a vendor, agrees on the solution, and works out a purchase contract. Implementation begins, and customers start to roll out a team. The solution provider supports the customer as they outline KPIs, success criteria, and a timeline.

Once the customer has found the solution and teamed up with a company, they want to get the solution up and running as quickly as possible, and they want a smooth launch process. It is important to ensure that all users are trained and have proper access to consultants or account managers for support.

Once the solution has been rolled out, the customer wants to see fast results. The provider of the solution follows up, implements the solutions, and continues to help the customer fulfil their goals. This phase is where customers become loyal as results are being delivered.

How to create an effective user journey map

Understanding the importance of the customer journey map is only the first step. Before you can enjoy the advantages it offers, you first have to build it. Here, we break down the essential steps you’ll need to consider to create an effective journey map for your customers.

Define the scope for the map

• Take the time to identify the persona that you are mapping, and provide a single point of view per map to build out a strong and clear narrative.
• Choose the process that you’ll be mapping and ensure that it has a clear beginning, middle, and end point, and that it relates to the business insights you are seeking.
• Conduct research using resources such as call centre logs, field studies, usability results, and user feedback.
• Include the goal of your personas and what their expectations are, as well as quantifiable expectations, such as time to completion.

Identify the journey phases

• Think of the phases of the map as stages along the journey. If you’re mapping the user experience for onboarding, it’s possible that the journey may include setting up training, facilities access, benefits, and more.
• Choose simplicity and craft a journey map that tells a simple story. That said, be sure to include all relevant information and touch points.

Map the user’s action steps and experiences for each phase

• Document action steps for each phase of the journey, encompassing the actions that need to be taken. Most often you will have from four to twelve action steps, which may include learning about options, resolving questions, comparing choices, selecting services, etc.
• For each step, clearly document customer emotions, pain points, and challenges.

Use your journey map to build a shared vision of the user experience

• Create a journey map visualisation and gather feedback from key users.
• Use the journey map to identify potential opportunities to improve the customer experience and process.
• Continuously socialise and evolve the customer journey map to improve its effectiveness over time.

Measure your success

The success of your customer journey map relates directly to how positive and successful the overall customer experience is that you are offering. With this in mind, you can use many of the same success metrics as those used to measure and evaluate CX. These metrics include the following:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS)

Who should be involved in developing a user journey?

• Process owners
• Technology owners
• Upper management
• UX or UI representatives, such as an experience architect

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A guide to mastering the SaaS customer journey

Last updated

29 February 2024

Reviewed by

High churn rates don’t have to be the norm for your SaaS business. You can start lowering churn rates and increasing customer retention by better understanding the customer journey. The key to this is a SaaS customer journey map .

A customer journey map visually represents how potential customers become loyal users and brand advocates. Visualizing the process can help you enhance the customer’s experience , removing roadblocks and reducing friction to keep customers engaged with your SaaS brand. Creating exceptional customer experiences enables you to retain more customers in your sales funnel, lowering the acquisition cost and boosting your bottom line.

But how do you create and use a SaaS customer journey map?

This guide will show you how to master the SaaS customer journey. You’ll learn how to create a visual representation of the customer journey, identify opportunities and friction points, and use your map to create incredible customer experiences.

• What is SaaS customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping visualizes the path your customers take, from learning about your product to becoming loyal advocates. The map charts their experience with your company, including every interaction they have with your brand.

Brand owners in any industry can utilize a customer journey map. However, the process is pretty unique for the SaaS industry.

The most significant difference is that the customer journey in the SaaS industry is relatively predictable. Most customers take a fairly linear journey with your brand, making it easy to predict their pathways and easier to control their experiences. This means that the changes you make to the customer journey should impact most of the customers on it—good news if you’re trying to reduce churn and enhance the customer experience.

The SaaS customer journey also primarily occurs within your ecosystem. Unlike other industries, your customers will most likely interact with your brand on channels you control, such as your website or app, making their journey much easier to track. The data you get from these interactions can help you make every interaction more impactful.

The SaaS customer journey map will also focus on user adoption. You’ll want to identify conversion points and any barriers preventing potential customers from becoming avid users.

• Why is customer journey mapping important for SaaS companies?

Customer journey mapping can be tremendously valuable for SaaS companies, especially in such a competitive industry.

Here’s an overview of the value it provides:

Identifies friction points. Friction points are things that make it difficult for the customer to adopt your product. Being aware of friction points allows you to take proactive steps to ease or remove that friction, reducing churn and boosting retention rates .

Strengthens customer relationships. Mapping the customer journey can help you understand what your customers need and what motivates them at every stage. With that understanding, you can tailor your messaging and give them more specific support to make their journey with your brand more engaging and personal.

Uncovers onboarding roadblocks. Onboarding is a big part of the SaaS customer journey, and mapping can show you where customers struggle to use your product effectively. You can help remove those roadblocks with better support, clearer documentation, and improved user interfaces .

Increases engagement. Are you missing key opportunities to engage with your customers? Are there touchpoints that you could strengthen or better utilize? By analyzing their SaaS journey, you can ensure customers stay engaged with your product and get value from their subscriptions.

Improves customer lifetime value. Customer renewals are a critical factor in the success of a SaaS service. Mapping can help you identify why customers do (or don’t) renew their subscriptions and help you implement strategies to keep them returning for more. This is a key factor in increasing customer lifetime value and your overall success.

• 6 stages of SaaS customer journey maps

When you create a SaaS customer journey map, you’ll want to categorize touchpoints within the six customer journey stages. Understanding these stages can help you build a better customer journey and foster more loyalty among users.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the first stage of the customer journey, laying the foundation for everything that will come next.

During the awareness stage, customers acknowledge a problem or need that your product can solve. They might be actively searching for a solution or browsing industry content like articles and webinars. Or, they could simply stumble upon your brand through social media engagement.

The goal at this stage is to build awareness and position your product or service as the natural answer to the customer’s question or problem. You’ll want to craft targeted messaging addressing their pain points and highlighting how you can help.

Touchpoints

Social media posts

Online searches

Industry reports

Competitor comparisons

2. Acquisition and onboarding

At this stage, customers move from awareness to consideration. They explore your product and consider what it offers, comparing it to any alternatives that may be available to them.

In the SaaS industry, this stage often focuses on touchpoints like free trials and demonstrations, allowing customers to experience the product first-hand.

This stage in the customer journey also includes onboarding, which is fairly unique to the SaaS industry and crucial for converting customers into paying users. Good onboarding is essential to reducing churn and converting new users into long-term happy customers.

More than just introducing the customer to the product, good onboarding needs to deliver value to the user as quickly as possible. You need to help them understand how to use your SaaS product, find and use the features they need, and see the value you offer.

Landing pages

Product demonstrations

Free trials

Freemium features (basic features of a product or service at no cost)

Marketing emails

Sales calls

Onboarding tutorials

Welcome emails

Knowledge-based articles

3. Adoption

You can pause to celebrate in the adoption stage because you’ve acquired a new customer! But don’t pause for long because their journey doesn’t end here.

This stage focuses on helping customers use your SaaS product effectively and get maximum value from it.

You’ll want to ensure they know and can use all the features. They should also be able to navigate the user interface efficiently and access the benefits of your product as quickly as possible. It will be your job to give new users plenty of guidance and support as they move through the adoption stage.

In-app guides

Product tours

Feature updates

Personalized recommendations

User communities

Customer support interactions

The renewal stage is critical for a SaaS product’s long-term, sustainable growth. This is the stage where existing customers decide whether or not to renew their subscriptions. They will base this decision on their experiences and how much value they think they are getting from your product.

This stage is your opportunity to highlight how your product solved their problem, show off any new features you have added, and address their concerns about continuing to pay for your SaaS. Your aim is to prove they are getting value and encourage them to renew.

Reminder emails

Renewal offers

Exclusive renewal benefits

Customer satisfaction surveys

Churn prevention campaigns

5. Expansion

Customers who are happy with your product may expand their usage. That’s good news for your business. Expansion might look like upgrading their plan, purchasing additional features, or adding more users.

You’ll want to spend time in this stage encouraging expansion by giving them incentives or personalized recommendations. Social proof about the benefits of expansion can be helpful, too.

For some SaaS products, expansion can be the make-or-break of long-term business growth. If a small department loves your product and recommends it for company-wide usage, you could move from a few dozen new users to hundreds or even thousands.

Personalized upsell offers

Targeted product recommendations

Case studies

Limited-time upgrade offers

6. Advocacy

When customers love your SaaS product, they will recommend it to others. This is the sweet spot for sustainable growth because the cost of acquisition plummets when recommendations come from real users.

Use this stage to create more brand loyalty, organic growth, and social proof. You should recognize and reward your brand advocates and use their love for your product to build a thriving community of fans.

Good advocacy can lead to significant organic growth, which is great for your marketing budget and even better for your long-term financial goals.

Customer loyalty programs

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Community forums

Customer success stories

• 10 steps for creating a SaaS customer journey map

Ready to create your own SaaS customer journey map? This step-by-step guide will help you make one that delivers helpful insight into the customer experience .

Step 1: Define your goals

Before you start creating your SaaS customer journey map, you need to think about the goals you are trying to achieve. Do you want to reduce churn? Increase adoption? Boost specific touchpoints?

You can have multiple maps for multiple goals, but start with your most significant objective. Having a clear target can help you focus your map and get more actionable insights from it.

Step 2: Determine your customer personas

Your customers might have a lot in common, but no two are identical. Customers from various demographics and job titles will have different goals and pain points.

Create different customer personas for each customer segment. Each persona will have a unique path through your SaaS ecosystem, and understanding those differences can help you craft better messaging to target them.

Step 3: Identify customer touchpoints

Touchpoints—which include website visits, ad views, trial sign-ups, and more—are all the interactions the customer has with your brand, from when they learn about your brand or product to when they become an advocate for it.

Take time to map all these touchpoints. Understanding them and how they relate to the customer journey is key to enhancing their experience.

Step 4: Map the journey

Put your touchpoints into the six stages of the customer journey:

Acquisition

Step 5: Add emotion

Much of the customer journey hinges on emotions, and gaining insight into those emotions can be game-changing for your marketing efforts.

Think about how your customers feel during every touchpoint, then add emotions, thoughts, and pain points that go with that touchpoint.

You should gather real-life data for this from customer feedback forms and interviews. That will help you capture authentic emotions instead of relying on guesswork. You might be surprised about what your customers reveal.

Step 6: Determine how the touchpoints occur

The customer journey doesn’t always happen in a straight line, and you will want to know more about the path your customers take. What channels are customers using to come across a touchpoint? Are they on your website, communicating with you via email, or using your app? Are they on their desktop or mobile device?

Knowing how and when these interactions happen can help you tailor your messaging and how you approach the customer.

Step 7: Identify roadblocks and friction points

For each touchpoint, consider what’s preventing the customer from moving forward. Does the onboarding process need to be more straightforward? Does it take too long to get a quote from your sales team? Use real-world data and customer interviews to uncover these pain points.

Step 8: Make a plan for improvements

How can you remove roadblocks? How can you make the customer journey more frictionless?

Make actionable plans to enhance the customer experience , starting with areas with the most impact. Your goal is to make the customer journey as easy and enjoyable as possible.

Step 9: Monitor your metrics

Keep an eye on your customer data to see how your improvement plans are paying off. Look at metrics like churn, adoption, and renewal. How are your improvements impacting your key performance indicators (KPIs)?

Compare your KPIs to historical data to get a clear picture of how things are changing and where your efforts are paying off.

Step 10: Keep updating your map

The customer journey is dynamic. Your goals, roadblocks, and friction points will change over time.

Continuously review your SaaS customer journey map and update it frequently. Doing so will ensure it continues to be a valuable tool for your brand.

• Types of SaaS customer journey maps

The steps above will help you create a basic current state map of the customer journey. It captures the “as-is” experience of your customers. These maps are excellent for uncovering pain points and identifying areas requiring improvement. However, there are other maps available to you, like the following:

Future state maps. These customer journey maps create a visual representation of the ideal customer journey. Creating one alongside your current state journey can clarify where you need to improve the customer journey and indicate how you might accomplish your goals.

Persona-specific maps. Creating different customer journey maps for different buyer personas can be incredibly useful. People with other demographics, job titles, and budgets will have different journeys with your brand. This map can help you understand your customer segments and tailor your messaging to their journey more accurately.

Specific stage maps. If your customers struggle at a particular stage in their journey, creating a more detailed map of that stage can be helpful. For example, deep diving into their onboarding experience can help you uncover pain points and deliver a more impactful experience.

You can combine different SaaS customer journey maps based on your goals. Trying different maps can produce new and exciting insights into the customer journey and how you might improve the experience.

• How to track customer journeys for SaaS products

Your company in the SaaS industry has a unique advantage when tracking customer journeys: most of the journey takes place on channels you control.

Customers are most likely to come to you through your website, social media channels, and app. This means you’ll have direct access to customer data that informs your journey map and helps you enhance the customer experience. Leverage the data to track key metrics like: 

Conversion rates

Feature usage

User engagement

Renewal rate

Customer lifetime value

Social media mentions

Referral rates

Net promoter scores

Track how these key metrics change over time as you refine the customer journey experience. They are good indicators of how your efforts are (or aren’t) working and can help you determine the best strategies to use with your customer base .

Get feedback directly from your customers to complement your quantitative data . Surveys, in-app feedback tools, and customer interviews can give you qualitative data about the customer journey. You’ll learn more about the emotions fueling their decisions, along with motivations, challenges, and expectations for the customer journey. All of this data can inform how you shape the customer journey in the future.

The customer journey is constantly changing, so your data should change along with it. Continuously gather data from your analytics tools and customer feedback so you can adapt the customer journey as needed. Doing this can foster better data-driven decision-making and help you continuously improve the customer experience. You’ll deliver more value to your SaaS customers and create long-lasting relationships.

What is the customer journey lifecycle?

The customer journey lifecycle is a framework for understanding different phases of the customer journey. The customer journey includes all the experiences a customer has with a brand, from awareness to post-purchase interactions, and includes all the touchpoints they have on all the brand’s channels.

The customer journey lifecycle is part of that and refers to the stages a customer goes through, including awareness, acquisition, renewal, and advocacy.

What is CX vs CRM?

CX stands for customer experience, while CRM stands for customer relationship management.

CX is the customer’s perception of their interactions with your brand. It focuses on the customer’s emotions, feelings, and satisfaction.

CRM is a way to manage customer interactions along with the data that comes from them. It can be used to track interactions and improve customer service efficiency.

Using quantitative data from CRM and qualitative data from CX can be an excellent way to inform how you deliver better customer service.

What is customer onboarding in SaaS?

Customer onboarding in SaaS is helping new users start utilizing your product and achieve a desired outcome as quickly as possible.

Successful onboarding can turn new users into loyal returning subscribers and, ultimately, into brand champions. Effective onboarding involves personalized guidance and helps the user achieve early wins, showing them your SaaS product has value and can help them solve a problem they are experiencing.

Good onboarding can also help reduce churn, boost engagement, and be the key to long-term sustainable growth.

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Why care about customer service, what is service cloud, benefits of the service console, track customer issues in salesforce.

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Begin Your Customer Service Journey

• Describe what Service Cloud is.
• Describe key benefits of the Lightning Service Console.
• Create and update a customer case.

Like most companies, Ursa Major Solar is only as good as its customer service. This Southwest-based supplier of solar energy components is growing from a local player to a regional one, and they recently opened a second distribution center in a neighboring state. But solar energy customers have options. And if they don’t get the service they want, they can go elsewhere. Not only that, they can also influence their circle of friends, family, coworkers, and even social media followers to go elsewhere.

The CEO of Ursa Major Solar, Sita Nagappan-Alvarez, has heard that her company is putting customers through a frustrating service circus:

• Alicia emailed support three times, but never received a response.
• Greg phoned the company with a quick question, but he was put on hold for 50 minutes.
• Colleen contacted Ursa Major Solar on social media, but her post was ignored and it made her feel alone, unliked, and unimportant.

Sita is worried that if her company gets a reputation as a service circus, company growth will vanish. She doesn’t want any customers to walk away, thinking Ursa Major Solar is a bunch of clowns.

To make matters worse, Sita recently read that 91% of customers say they’re more likely to make another purchase when service is good.

Sita sees how service can have the largest impact on Ursa Major Solar’s brand. Today’s hyper-connected world has put new expectations on service. Customers want positive, personal experiences wherever they’re engaged: in-store, online, from email, mobile devices, and more. Sita envisions a new service model for her company. One where customers can contact her team from any device or communications channel and receive helpful interactions that build loyal relationships and drive future sales.

To help you with your service journey, we follow Ursa Major Solar through their service adventure. We watch this fast-growing renewable energy company of 200 employees figure out what they can do with Service Cloud to make their customers loyal and support agents happy.

Sita and her COO, co-founder, and husband, Roberto, have spent the last 20 years of their lives creating Ursa Major Solar. They know they need to improve the company’s customer service, but they don’t have time to research or experiment with new technology. Roberto knows a little about Salesforce since his sales teams use it. He asks, “What is Service Cloud?”

Service Cloud is an easy-to-use customer service application that can help you provide and track excellent service. It keeps your customers happy and your support team sane, whether your customers contact you by email, phone, social media, or other channels from desktops, mobile devices, or apps.

You can get started with Service Cloud quickly—with clicks, not code.

Here’s how it works.

Note : If you don’t see the Service Console app in Lightning Experience in your Trailhead Playground (TP), create a new TP .

Sita likes how Service Cloud matches her vision of supporting customers from any device or channel to build loyal relationships. Roberto likes how a single app on the Salesforce platform they already use keeps customer information in one place. Service Cloud looks like it can put an end to their service circus.

Roberto likes the idea of a help desk. No more random customer emails lost in an inbox. No more sticky notes about customer calls misplaced on monitors. Roberto asks, “So what does this console actually do for me?” Let’s look at the console and how it makes Service Cloud simple.

Everything you need to quickly respond to customers is preconfigured for you in the console. And with Service Cloud, you can expand your service tools and customizations as your team or company grows.

Tip : To increase user productivity in your console, consider installing In-App Guidance: Boost Service User Productivity in Lightning Experience . To learn more about this AppExchange package from Salesforce Labs, visit the User Engagement module on Trailhead.

Sita and Roberto like what they’ve seen of Service Cloud. As decision makers, they want more than a demo. They want to track a customer issue, which is called a case in Salesforce, and test the console. Let’s join them in seeing how easy it is to create a case.

Jon Amos called to say: “Hey, I never got my solar panels.” Now let’s walk through the process of creating a case in the console for Jon’s issue. If you have a Trailhead Playground, follow along and enable Lightning Experience.

• Search for Jon Amos as an existing contact. If you don’t see him, select  New Contact to add Jon Amos, and save your changes.
• In Status, leave the value as New because it’s a brand-new case.
• In Subject, type  Missing solar panels .

• Save your changes. That’s it! Now you or anyone on your team can work together to resolve the case quickly.

To update the case, or see who has commented on it, click the Cases tab and select the case.

You can also add your own comment to the case’s feed. Select Post , type what you want to say, then click Share .

Based on what Sita and Roberto have seen, they think Service Cloud is a good customer support option for Ursa Major Solar. But they want another opinion. They’re interested in hearing what their rock star systems admin, Maria Jimenez, thinks.

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The Journey to Generative AI in Customer Service

Salesforce’s approach to leveraging generative AI represents a paradigm shift in the realm of customer service platforms. At the core of this approach lies the recognition of the evolving needs and expectations of modern consumers, who increasingly demand personalized and engaging interactions with brands. By harnessing the power of generative AI, Salesforce aims to meet these demands head-on, revolutionizing the way businesses engage with their customers.

The journey begins with an exploration of the evolution of AI technologies within the customer service landscape. Traditional rule-based systems, while effective to some extent, often fall short in providing the level of personalization and contextual understanding necessary for truly enriching customer interactions. As customer expectations continued to rise, there emerged a need for more sophisticated solutions capable of comprehending natural language and generating responses that resonate with the nuances of each individual interaction.

Enter generative AI – a game-changer in the field of customer service. Unlike its predecessors, generative models possess the ability to understand the subtleties of human language and context, enabling them to craft responses that feel authentic and tailored to each unique customer query or concern. This shift from static, rule-based approaches to dynamic, context-aware interactions represents a significant leap forward in the quest to deliver truly personalized customer experiences.

Salesforce’s approach builds upon this foundation of generative AI, seamlessly integrating these advanced capabilities into its customer service platforms. Through innovative technologies and strategic partnerships, Salesforce empowers businesses to leverage generative AI to its fullest potential, unlocking new possibilities for creating meaningful connections with customers.

Abstract: Join ET Edge Insights and Salesforce for the webinar “ The Journey to Generative AI in Customer Service” to delve into Salesforce’s approach to leveraging generative AI to empower customer service platforms, emphasizing its potential to create personalized and engaging customer interactions. It discusses the evolution of AI technologies, from rule-based systems to generative models capable of understanding natural language and generating contextually relevant responses.

Key takeaways: Deliver great customer service at scale while driving cost savings Insights into how Einstein Trust layer helps enhance data security and privacy. Key use cases delivered by Gen AI for Customer Service

  Ashish Kumar DVP – Retail Banking Customer Experience & Journey HDFC Bank

Himanshu Rajpal Regional Sales Director Cloud Specialist Team  Salesforce

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Concord begins citywide property measure — first in more than 30 years

Concord City Hall

If you own property in Concord, someone in a neon vest will come to your house at some point over the next year and a half.

With a Monday start, Concord is beginning both a citywide revaluation and a full measure and list of all of its properties ahead of the 2026 tax year. 

The city is legally required to reappraise properties at least every five years. But those updates, called statistical revaluations, have in large part been based on existing information about a property that’s kept in the assessor’s office, such as its size, number of bedrooms, and heating system.

The data gets updated periodically — like when a home is sold, gets a permit for a renovation, or requests an abatement — but now, for the first time since 1990, assessors will be going to every property in the city to do internal and external physical inspections, hence the neon-vested visitors. 

That process called a full measure and list, means that property values will be determined using an in-person inspection rather than an estimate based on the sales of surrounding and similar properties. It also means changes to a property that may have affected its value that the city wasn’t aware of — for example, if a homeowner finished their basement without a permit — will be included in the assessment. The information collected about properties now will be used to estimate new values for years to come.

The Monitor reached out a week ago to City Hall to learn more about how these inspections will unfold, what might play into a new assessment, what the city’s goals are for doing a full measure at this time, and what taxpayers should expect from the process. Despite repeated voicemails, emails, and other communication, the city did not make a staff member in the assessment office or the city manager’s office available for an interview. However, according to the city website for this process, assessing office personnel “will be well informed and a solid resource for taxpayer questions.”

Concord’s revaluation website describes the process as a way to ensure the city has accurate property records and “fair and equitable” assessments and distribution of the tax burden.

“It makes sure everyone’s property is appropriately and properly valued so some aren’t paying more in taxes — or less in taxes — than they should,” Mayor Byron Champlin said.

Article continues after...

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Working for the rest of this year — no announcement has been made yet about where in Concord the process is starting — through the end of 2025, someone from a contracted assessor will visit each property in the city for an inspection.

The city has hired Vision Government Solutions, a Massachusetts-based firm that works with municipalities across New England and also provides Concord’s assessment software .

Just under half of Concord’s nearly 15,000 properties will be inspected by the end of this year, and the rest will take place next year. The new property values based on these assessments won’t take effect until the 2026 tax year.

Catherine McLaughlin can be contacted at [email protected].

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