journey map phase

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

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

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

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

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

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

Conduct Research

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

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

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

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

Make an Empathy Map

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

Sketch the Journey

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

Iterate and Refine

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

Share with Stakeholders

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

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

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

Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

All customer interactions, pre and post-purchase.

Pre-purchase stages: awareness, consideration, conversion.

Subset of interactions in digital platforms.

Start/End Point

From marketing to end of customer relationship.

From awareness to conversion stages.

From user entry to exit on a digital platform.

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

Decision-making before a purchase

Primarily digital platform interactions.

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

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

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

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

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

Resource Intensity

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

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

Risk of Bias

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

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

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Customer Behaviors

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

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

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

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

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

Misalignment with Customer Needs

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

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

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

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

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

Over-Reliance on the Map

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

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

Data Privacy Concerns

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

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

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

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

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

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

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

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

Learn more from this insightful video:

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

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

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer a Short Quiz to Earn a Gift

Why do designers create customer journey maps?

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

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

What element is essential in a customer journey map?

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

Why are scenarios included in a customer journey map?

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

Why should designers iterate and refine customer journey maps?

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

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Literature on Customer Journey Maps

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

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

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

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

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

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

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

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

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What are Customer Touchpoints & Why Do They Matter?

• 4 years ago

How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

• 3 years ago

How to Resolve Conflicts Between Design Thinking and Marketing

How to Create a Perspective Grid

4 Takeaways from the IxDF Journey Mapping Course

• 2 years ago

The Power of Mapping

User Story Mapping in Design

Start Your UX Journey: Essential Insights for Success

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Journey Mapping 101

December 9, 2018 2018-12-09

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Journey maps are a common UX tool. They come in all shapes, sizes, and formats. Depending on the context, they can be used in a variety of ways. This article covers the basics: what a journey map is (and is not), related terminology, common variations, and how we can use journey maps.

In This Article:

Definition of a journey map, key components of a journey map, journey-map variations, why use journey maps.

Definition: A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.

In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. This narrative is condensed and polished, ultimately leading to a visualization.

The terms ‘user journey map’ and ‘customer journey map’ can be used interchangeably. Both reference a visualization of a person using your product or service.

While the argument can be made that the term ‘customer’ does a disservice to the method (because, especially for certain business-to-business products, not all of end users are technically customers, i.e., product buyers), alignment on what you call the map is far less important than alignment on the content within the map.

Journey maps come in all shapes and sizes. Regardless of how they look, journey maps have the following 5 key elements in common:

Scenario + Expectations

Journey phases, actions, mindsets, and emotions, opportunities.

The actor is the persona or user who experiences the journey. The actor is who the journey map is about — a point of view. Actors usually align with personas and their actions in the map are rooted in data.

Provide one point of view per map in order to build a strong, clear narrative. For example, a university might choose either a student or a faculty member as actor — each would result in different journeys. (To capture both viewpoints, the university will need to build two separate maps, one for each of the two user types.)

The scenario describes the situation that the journey map addresses and is associated with an actor’s goal or need and specific expectations. For example, one scenario could be switching mobile plans to save money, and expectations for it include to easily find all the information needed to make a decision.

Scenarios can be real (for existing products and services) or anticipated — for products that are yet in the design stage.

Journey maps are best for scenarios that involve a sequence of events (such as shopping or taking a trip), describe a process (thus involve a set of transitions over time), or might involve multiple channels .

Journey phases are the different high-level stages in the journey. They provide organization for the rest of the information in the journey map (actions, thoughts, and emotions). The stages will vary from scenario to scenario; each organization will usually have data to help it determine what these phases are for a given scenario.

Here are some examples:

• For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be discover, try, buy, use, seek support.
• For big (or luxury) purchases (like buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
• For a business-to-business scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.

These are behaviors, thoughts, and feelings the actor has throughout the journey and that are mapped within each of the journey phases.

Actions are the actual behaviors and steps taken by users. This component is not meant to be a granular step-by-step log of every discrete interaction. Rather, it is a narrative of the steps the actor takes during that phase.

Mindsets correspond to users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey. Ideally, these are customer verbatims from research.

Emotions are plotted as single line across the journey phases, literally signaling the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience. Think of this line as a contextual layer of emotion that tells us where the user is delighted versus frustrated.

Opportunities (along with additional context such as ownership and metrics) are insights gained from mapping; they speak to how the user experience can be optimized. Insights and opportunities help the team draw knowledge from the map:

• What needs to be done with this knowledge?
• Who owns what change?
• Where are the biggest opportunities?
• How are we going to measure improvements we implement?

There are several concepts closely related and thus easily confused with journey maps.

It is important to note that this section is only meant to help your personal understanding and clarification of these terms. It is not advised to debate or attempt to shift a whole organization’s language to abide by the definitions stated here. Instead, use these definitions to guide you towards aspects of another method that your team has not previously considered.

Journey Map vs. Experience Map

Think of an experience map as a parent to a journey map. A journey map has a specific actor (a singular customer or user of a product) and specific scenario (of a product or service), while an experience map is broader on both accounts — a generic human undergoing a general human experience.

The experience map is agnostic of a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding a general human behavior; in contrast, a customer journey map is specific and focused on a particular business or product.

For example, imagine the world before the ridesharing market existed (Uber, Lyft, Bird, or Limebike, to name a few). If we were to create an experience map of how a person gets from one place to another, the map would likely include walking, biking, driving, riding with a friend, public transportation, or calling a taxi. Using that experience map we could then isolate pain points: unknown fares, bad weather, unpredictable timing, paying in cash, and so on. Using these pain points, we would then create a future journey map for specific product: how does a particular type of user call a car using the Lyft app?

Journey Map vs. Service Blueprint

If journey maps are the children to experience maps, then service blueprints are the grandchildren. They visualize the relationships between different service components (such as people or processes) at various touchpoints in a specific customer journey.

Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps. They are extensions of journey maps, but instead of being focused on the user (and taking the user’s viewpoint), they are focused on the business (and take its perspective).

For the Lyft scenario above, we would take the journey map and expand it with what Lyft does internally to support that customer journey. The blueprint could include matching the user to a driver, contacting the driver, calculating fares, and so on.

Journey Map vs. User Story Map

User stories are used in Agile to plan features or functionalities. Each feature is condensed down to a deliberately brief description from a user’s point of view; the description focuses on what the user wants to do, and how that feature will help. The typical format of a user story is a single sentence: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”

A user story map is a visual version of a user story. For example, take the user story above (“As a checking account holder, I want to deposit checks with my mobile device, so that I don’t have to go to the bank.”) and imagine writing out the different steps that the team plans for the user to take when using that functionality. These steps could be: logging in, beginning deposit, taking picture of check, and entering transaction details. For each step, we can document required features: enabling camera access, scanning check and auto filling numbers, and authorizing signature. In a user story map, these features are written on sticky notes, then arranged based on the product release that each functionality will be added to.

While, at a glance, a user story map may look like a journey map, journey maps are meant for discovery and understanding (think big picture), while user story maps are for planning and implementation (think little picture).

Although a journey map and user story map may contain some of the same pieces, they are used at different points of the process. For example, imagine our journey map for Lyft indicated that a pain point appeared when the user was in a large group. To address it, the team may introduce a multicar-call option. We could create a user story map to break this feature (multicar call) into smaller pieces, so a product-development team could plan release cycles and corresponding tasks.

The benefits of journey maps (and most other UX mappings ) are two-fold. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model for the whole team. Fragmented understanding is a widespread problem in organizations because success metrics are siloed; it is no one’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint. This shared vision is a critical goal of journey mapping, because, without it, agreement on how to improve customer experience would never take place.

Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used to communicate an understanding of your user or service to all involved. Journey maps are effective mechanisms for conveying information in a way that is memorable, concise, and that creates a shared vision. The maps can also become the basis for decision making as the team moves forward.

Journey mapping is a process that provides a holistic view of the customer experience by uncovering moments of both frustration and delight throughout a series of interactions. Done successfully, it reveals opportunities to address customers’ pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.

Additional articles are available, discussing: 

• When to create customer journey maps
• The 5-step process
• Journey mapping in real life

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• Case studies
• Expert advice

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

Benefits of client journey mapping

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

• Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

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

• Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

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

• Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

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

• Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

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

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

• Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

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

How to build a customer journey map

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

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

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

Step 1: Define your persona

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

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

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

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

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

💡 Expert tips: 

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

Step 3: Define journey map sections

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Set customer goals

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

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

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

Step 5: Define touchpoints

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Processes and channels

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

Step 7: Problems and ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 8: Emotional graph

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

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

Step ?: Be Creative!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer journey map examples

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

• Example 1: a mobile user journey

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

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

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

• Example 3: a digital customer journey

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

A customer journey mapping checklist

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

• Do research

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

• Define your customer persona(s)

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

• Specify journey map stages

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

• Decide on the map sections

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

• Set customer goals for each stage

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

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

Consider both online and offline interactions.

• Map out processes and channels

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

• Highlight problems and look for opportunities

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

• Add details about the emotional experience

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

• Use more sections

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

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

The free guide to download

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

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

Rate this post

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

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

Hello, Karim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The differences come from the names.

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

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

Makes sense? 🙂

Thank you for this,

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

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

Good luck and happy customers!

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

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

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

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

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

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

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

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The definitive 8-step customer journey mapping process

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

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

Last updated

Reading time.

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

Learn how customers interact with your product and website

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

An 8-step process for effective customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

1. Define your purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Create user personas

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

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

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

4. Understand your user goals

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

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

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

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

5. Identify customer touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of an on-site Hotjar Survey

6. Map out the customer journey

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

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

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

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

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

Connect: how are buyers connecting with your brand?

Attract: how are you convincing them to convert?

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

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

7. Test the customer journey

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

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

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

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

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

8. Use continuous research to refine your map 

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

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

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

Pitfalls to avoid during the customer journey mapping stages

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

Don't map out the entire customer journey at once

Don't forget about the ‘hidden journeys’

Don't make assumptions about customer behavior

To sidestep these common pitfalls: 

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

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

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

Follow proven steps to successfully map out the customer journey 

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping stages

What is the purpose of customer journey mapping.

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

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

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

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

Building on tried-and-tested processes

Not missing any key steps

Considering all buyer personas

Keeping all relevant stakeholders involved

Creating a valuable customer journey map 

Improving user experience

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

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

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

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

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

Free course: Introduction to UX Design

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

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

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

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

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

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

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

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

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

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

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a closer look.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UI DESIGN]

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

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

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

2. Define your persona and scenario

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

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

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Identify opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

6. Define action points and next steps 

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

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

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

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

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

For more how-to guides, check out:

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

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

12 min read If you want to turn a potential customer into a lifetime one, you’ll need to get to know every step of the entire customer journey. Here’s why the secret to customer retention lies in knowing how to fine-tune your sales funnel…

What is the customer journey?

What do we actually mean when we talk about the customer journey? Well, the simplest way to think about it is by comparing it to any other journey: a destination in mind, a starting point, and steps to take along the way.

In this case, the destination is not only to make a purchase but to have a great experience with your product or service – sometimes by interacting with aftersale customer support channels – and become a loyal customer who buys again.

And, just like how you can’t arrive at your vacation resort before you’ve done you’ve found out about it, the customer journey starts with steps to do with discovery, research, understanding, and comparison, before moving on to the buying process.

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

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

In short, the customer journey is the path taken by your target audience toward becoming loyal customers. So it’s really important to understand – both in terms of what each step entails and how you can improve each one to provide a maximally impressive and enjoyable experience.

Every customer journey will be different, after all, so getting to grips with the nuances of each customer journey stage is key to removing obstacles from in front of your potential and existing customers’ feet.

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

While many companies will put their own spin on the exact naming of the customer journey stages, the most widely-recognized naming convention is as follows:

• Consideration

These steps are often then sub-categorized into three parts:

• Sale/Purchase

It’s important to understand every part of the puzzle, so let’s look at each sub-category and stage in turn, from the awareness and consideration stage, right through to advocacy:

Customer journey: Pre-sale

In the pre-sale phase, potential customers learn about products, evaluate their needs, make comparisons, and soak up information.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a company, product, or service. This might be passive – in that they’re served an ad online, on TV, or when out and about – or active in that they have a need and are searching for a solution. For example, if a customer needs car insurance, they’ll begin searching for providers.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, the customer has been made aware of several possible solutions for their particular need and starts doing research to compare them. That might mean looking at reviews or what others are saying on social media, as well as absorbing info on product specs and features on companies’ own channels. They’re receptive to information that can help them make the best decision.

Customer journey: Sale

The sale phase is short but pivotal: it’s when the crucial decision on which option to go with has been made.

Decision stage

The customer has all the information they need on the various options available to them, and they make a purchase. This can be something that’s taken a long time to decide upon, like buying a new computer, or it can be as quick as quickly scouring the different kinds of bread available in the supermarket before picking the one they want.

Customer journey: Post-sale

Post-sale is a really important part of the puzzle because it’s where loyal customers , who come back time and again, are won or lost.

Retention stage

The retention stage of the customer journey is where you do whatever you can to help leave a lasting, positive impression on the customer, and entice them to purchase more. That means offering best-in-class customer support if they have any issues, but it also means being proactive with follow-up communications that offer personalized offers, information on new products, and rewards for loyalty.

Advocacy stage

If you nail the retention phase, you’ll have yourself a customer who not only wants to keep buying from you but will also advocate on your behalf. Here, the customer will become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, in that they’ll actively recommend you to their friends, family, followers, and colleagues.

What’s the difference between the customer journey and the buyer’s journey?

Great question; the two are similar, but not exactly the same. The buyer’s journey is a shorter, three-step process that describes the steps taken to make a purchase. So that’s awareness , consideration, and decision . That’s where things stop, however. The buyer’s journey doesn’t take into account the strategies you’ll use to keep the customer after a purchase has been made.

Why are the customer journey stages important?

The short answer? The customer journey is what shapes your entire business. It’s the method by which you attract and inform customers, how you convince them to purchase from you, and what you do to ensure they’re left feeling positive about every interaction.

Why this matters is that the journey is, in a way, cyclical. Customers who’ve had a smooth ride all the way through their individual journeys are more likely to stay with you, and that can have a massive effect on your operational metrics.

It’s up to five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, but even besides that: satisfied customers become loyal customers , and customer loyalty reduces churn at the same time as increasing profits .

So companies looking to really make an impact on the market need to think beyond simply attracting potential customers with impressive marketing, and more about the journey as a whole – where the retention and advocacy stages are equally important.

After all, 81% of US and UK consumers trust product advice from friends and family over brand messaging, and 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.

Importantly, to understand the customer journey as a whole is to understand its individual stages, recognize what works, and find things that could be improved to make it a more seamless experience. Because when you do that, you’ll be improving every part of your business proposition that matters.

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

Ok, so this whole customer journey thing is pretty important. Understanding the customer journey phases and how they relate to the overall customer experience is how you encourage customers to stick around and spread the news via word of mouth.

But how do you ensure every part of the journey is performing as it should? Here are some practical strategies to help each customer journey stage sing…

1. Perform customer journey mapping

A customer journey map takes all of the established customer journey stages and attempts to plot how actual target audience personas might travel along them. That means using a mix of data and intuition to map out a range of journeys that utilize a range of touch points along the way.

One customer journey map, for example, might start with a TV ad, then utilize social media and third-party review sites during the consideration stage, before purchasing online and then contacting customer support about you your delivery service. And then, finally, that customer may be served a discount code for a future purchase. That’s just one example.

Customer journey mapping is really about building a myriad of those journeys that are informed by everything you know about how customers interact with you – and then using those maps to discover weaker areas of the journey.

2. Listen like you mean it

The key to building better customer journeys is listening to what customers are saying. Getting feedbac k from every stage of the journey allows you to build a strong, all-encompassing view of what’s happening from those that are experiencing it.

Maybe there’s an issue with the customer sign-up experience, for example. Or maybe the number advertised to contact for a demo doesn’t work. Or maybe you have a customer service agent in need of coaching, who only makes the issue worse. By listening, you’ll understand your customers’ issues and be able to fix them at the source. That customer service agent, for example, may just feel disempowered and unsupported, and in need of the right tools to help them perform better. Fixing that will help to optimize a key stage in the customer journey.

The key is to listen at every stage, and we can do that by employing the right technology at the right customer journey stages.

Customer surveys, for instance, can help you understand what went wrong from the people who’re willing to provide that feedback, but conversational analytics and AI solutions can automatically build insights out of all the structured and unstructured conversational data your customers are creating every time they reach out, or tweet, or leave a review on a third party website.

3. Get personal

The other side of the ‘listening’ equation is that it’s worth remembering that each and every customer’s journey is different – so treating them with a blanket approach won’t necessarily make anything better for them.

The trick instead is to use the tools available to you to build out a personalized view of every customer journey, customer journey stage, and customer engagemen t, and find common solutions.

Qualtrics Experience iD , for example, is an intelligent system that builds customer profiles that are unique to them and can identify through AI, natural language processing , and past interactions what’s not working – and what needs fixing.

On an individual basis, that will help turn each customer into an advocate. But as a whole, you’ll learn about experience gaps that are common to many journeys.

Listening to and understanding the customer experience at each customer journey stage is key to ensuring customers are satisfied and remain loyal on a huge scale.

It’s how you create 1:1 experiences, because, while an issue for one person might be an issue for many others, by fixing it quickly you can minimize the impact it might have on future customers who’re right at the start of their journey.

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Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 21 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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How to create a customer journey map

Lucid Content

Reading time: about 8 min

How to Make a Customer Journey Map

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

The benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

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

When done correctly, customer journey mapping helps to:

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

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

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

1. Set goals

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

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

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

2. Conduct persona research

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

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

Look for information that references:

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

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

Discover more ways to understand the Voice of the Customer

3. Define customer touchpoints

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

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

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

4. Map the current state

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

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

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

5. Map future states

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

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

Customer journey mapping is easy with Lucidchart.

About Lucidchart

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

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Everything you need to know before customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process of customer journey mapping

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

Step 1: Gathering information

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

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

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

Ben Holland-Arlen on how the Salesforce UX team is working remotely

Aloka Penmetcha, Pivotal: “Find mentors who can tell you what good looks like”

Customer Journey Stages: How to Map and Optimize Each Phase

Learn how to map and optimize each phase of the customer journey to drive better results. Understand key stages, enhance customer experience, and boost loyalty.

If you’re in charge of any go-to-market activity, trying to stay on top of what your customers are feeling and doing is a constant juggling act. You need great monitoring systems and great data to understand their journey and experience with your brand.

It’s a tall order, especially when the goal is to transform insights and observations into actionable strategies that drive real results for your organization. Understanding and meeting customer expectations is crucial in this process, as it helps in fostering customer loyalty and encouraging advocacy.

One of the top tools at your disposal? Getting clarity on your customer journey stages. Each stage holds valuable clues about your customers’ needs and pain points. But without a clear map, it’s easy to miss these insights, leaving gaps in the customer experience and missed opportunities for improvement.

This article outlines the common stages in a customer journey, offering up some tips to map your own workflow and optimize experiences as you go.

Table of Contents

What is a customer journey, what are the customer journey stages, how to optimize your customer journey stages.

A customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. It’s the roadmap of how they first become aware of your product or service, consider their options, make a decision, and eventually become loyal advocates. It’s the story of your customer’s relationship with your brand, from the first “hello” to the ongoing conversations that follow. Customer journey mapping is a crucial process for visualizing and understanding these experiences in detail.

Getting clear on your customer journey is essential. Why? Because every touchpoint, every interaction, every little moment your customer experiences with your brand contributes to their overall perception and satisfaction. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Understanding and optimizing this journey can directly impact your business success.

Key Aspects of a Customer Journey

A customer journey includes all the customer touchpoints and channels that a customer uses to engage with you over time. These touchpoints are critical interactions that shape the customer's journey. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of touchpoints!

Here are some of the key aspects you should consider when thinking about what makes up a customer journey:

Touchpoints: These are the various points of contact between a customer and a brand, including advertisements, website visits, social media interactions, in-store experiences, customer service calls, and product usage.

Channels: Customers interact with brands through multiple channels, including digital (websites, mobile apps, social media) and traditional (in-store, phone) channels. An effective customer journey strategy must account for seamless transitions between these channels.

Emotions: The customer’s emotional state plays a crucial role in their journey. Positive experiences can lead to brand loyalty, while negative ones may result in churn.

Let’s dive into the core stages of the customer journey. Understanding each customer journey stage is essential for enhancing customer experiences. These stages help you understand where your customers are at any given point and what you can do to enhance their experience at each step.

1) Awareness Stage

This is where it all begins. The awareness stage is when potential customers first learn about your brand. They might come across your company through social media, a blog post, an ad, or word of mouth. It's all about catching their attention and making that crucial first impression.

A prospective customer sees an Instagram ad about your innovative new product. They're intrigued and decide to visit your website to learn more.

Why It's Important:

This stage sets the foundation for the entire customer journey. It's the opportunity to make a strong first impression and capture the attention of potential customers.

During the awareness stage, businesses should focus on creating informative, engaging content that addresses the customer's pain points and introduces the brand as a potential solution. The goal is to educate and attract potential customers, not to hard-sell products or services

Key Channels To Focus On:

Social media platforms

Search engines (SEO and SEM)

Display advertising

Content marketing (blogs, videos, infographics)

Influencer partnerships

Key Metrics to Measure in this Stage:

Website traffic

Social media engagement

Brand awareness surveys

2) Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, potential customers are now more familiar with your brand and are actively considering whether your product or service meets their needs. They're researching, comparing, and evaluating their options.

The same prospective customer who saw your Instagram ad is now reading customer reviews, checking out product demos, and comparing your offerings with competitors.

This stage is critical for positioning your brand as the best solution. It's where you can differentiate yourself from competitors and build trust with potential customers.

During this stage, provide detailed information about your products or services, highlighting their unique benefits. Offer resources that help customers make informed decisions, such as comparison guides, product demos, or free trials.

Email marketing

Retargeting ads

Webinars and live events

Case studies and whitepapers

Product comparison pages

Customer reviews and testimonials

Time spent on the website

Number of returning visitors

Engagement with content (e.g., whitepapers, case studies)

3) Decision Stage

This is the moment of truth—the decision stage. Here, the customer decides whether to purchase from you or go with a competitor. Your goal is to make the decision-making process as smooth and convincing as possible.

After comparing options, the customer decides to purchase your product because of its superior features and excellent customer reviews.

Why It's Important

This is the make-or-break moment where you need to convince the customer that your offering is the best choice.

At this stage, focus on removing any final barriers to purchase. Offer clear pricing information, easy-to-understand terms and conditions, and excellent customer support. Consider providing incentives like free shipping, discounts for first-time buyers, or money-back guarantees to encourage the final decision

Sales team interactions

Live chat support

Personalized email campaigns

Retargeting ads with special offers

Clear and user-friendly website checkout process

Customer service channels

Key Metrics to Measure:

Conversion rate

Cart abandonment rate

Sales metrics

4) Retention Stage

The journey doesn’t end once a customer makes a purchase. The retention stage focuses on keeping customers engaged and satisfied, encouraging repeat business and long-term loyalty. Customer retention is crucial because it is generally more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. Practical strategies for boosting customer retention include ongoing customer support and engagement after the initial purchase.

After purchasing your product, the customer receives follow-up emails with helpful tips on how to use it effectively, along with exclusive offers for future purchases.

Why It’s Important

Retaining existing customers is generally more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Satisfied customers are also more likely to become brand advocates.

During this stage, focus on providing excellent post-purchase support, ensuring customers get the most value from your product or service. Regularly seek feedback and act on it to improve customer experience. Implement loyalty programs or exclusive offers to reward repeat customers.

Customer onboarding programs

Regular email communications

Customer support channels

Loyalty programs

Product usage analytics

Personalized offers and recommendations

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores

Net Promoter Score (NPS )

Repeat purchase rate

5) Advocacy Stage

When customers are delighted with their experience, they move into the advocacy stage. They become brand ambassadors, sharing their positive experiences with others and driving word-of-mouth referrals. This is a key aspect of customer loyalty, where satisfied customers evolve into brand advocates who actively promote the business.

The customer is so pleased with your product and customer service that they write a glowing review on a third-party review site and recommend your brand to friends and family.

Why It’s Important:

Customer advocates provide powerful word-of-mouth marketing, which can be more effective and trustworthy than traditional advertising.

Encourage and facilitate customer advocacy by making it easy for satisfied customers to share their experiences. Create referral programs that reward customers for bringing in new business. Showcase customer success stories and testimonials across your marketing channels

Customer referral programs

User-generated content platforms

Brand communities or forums

Customer success stories and case studies

Exclusive events or early access for top customers

Customer referrals

Social media mentions

Review ratings

By understanding and optimizing each stage of the customer journey, you can create a more seamless and satisfying experience for your customers. Over time, this leads to increased loyalty, higher customer lifetime value, and sustainable growth.

Remember that the customer journey is often non-linear, with customers moving back and forth between stages or skipping stages entirely. To make the most of every customer interaction, you need to continuously analyze and refine your approach based on customer feedback and behavior data.

Optimizing your customer journey stages is crucial for improving customer satisfaction, increasing conversions, and fostering long-term loyalty.

This section will walk through tips to enhance each stage of the customer journey, from awareness to advocacy.

Step 1: Map Your Current Customer Journey

Before you can optimize your customer journey, you need to understand what it currently looks like.

How to map your customer journey

Identify your customer personas: Create detailed profiles of your typical customers, including their demographics, goals, pain points, and behaviours.

List all touch points: Document every interaction a customer has with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support.

Gather data: Collect quantitative data (e.g., website analytics, conversion rates) and qualitative data (e.g., customer feedback, support tickets) for each touchpoint.

Create a visual representation: Use a flowchart or journey map tool to visualize the customer’s path through each stage. Customer journey maps are essential tools for visualizing customer interactions and improving their experiences.

Identify pain points and opportunities: Analyze your map to find areas where customers struggle or drop off, as well as moments of delight.

Step 2: Optimize the Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is your opportunity to make a strong first impression and capture potential customers' attention.

How to improve the awareness stage

Improve your SEO: Conduct keyword research and optimize your website content to rank higher in search results for relevant terms.

Create valuable content: Develop blog posts, videos, and infographics that address your target audience's pain points and questions.

Leverage social media: Share engaging content across platforms where your target audience is active. Use hashtags and engage with followers to increase visibility.

Implement targeted advertising: Use demographic and behavioural data to create highly targeted ads on platforms like Google Ads and social media.

Collaborate with influencers: Partner with industry influencers to reach a wider audience and build credibility.

Optimize for mobile: Ensure your website and content are mobile-friendly, as many first interactions happen on mobile devices.

Step 3: Enhance the Consideration Stage

During the consideration stage, potential customers are actively researching solutions. Your goal is to position your brand as the best option.

How to improve the consideration stage:

Develop comprehensive product pages: Create detailed, benefit-focused product descriptions with high-quality images and videos.

Offer comparison tools: Provide easy-to-use tools that allow customers to compare your products with competitors' offerings.

Showcase social proof: Display customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies prominently on your website and in marketing materials.

Create educational content: Develop whitepapers, webinars, and in-depth guides that demonstrate your expertise and the value of your solutions.

Implement retargeting: Use retargeting ads to stay top-of-mind with potential customers who have shown interest in your products.

Personalize the experience: Use data from the awareness stage to tailor content and recommendations to individual user preferences.

Offer free trials or demos: Allow potential customers to experience your product firsthand before making a commitment.

Step 4: Streamline the Decision Stage

The decision stage is critical for converting interested prospects into paying customers. Focus on removing barriers and providing the final push towards purchase.

How to streamline the decision stage

Simplify the checkout process: Reduce the number of steps required to complete a purchase and offer guest checkout options.

Provide multiple payment options: Offer various payment methods to accommodate different customer preferences.

Offer live chat support: Implement real-time chat to answer last-minute questions and address concerns quickly.

Create a sense of urgency: Use limited-time offers or low-stock notifications to encourage immediate action.

Address objections proactively: Anticipate common concerns and address them in your FAQs, product descriptions, or through targeted messaging.

Implement abandoned cart recovery: Set up email campaigns to remind customers of items left in their cart and encourage completion of the purchase.

Offer guarantees: Provide money-back guarantees or free returns to reduce perceived risk and increase confidence in the purchase decision.

Step 5: Enhance the Retention Stage

Retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Focus on providing ongoing value and support to encourage loyalty.

How to enhance the retention stage

Develop a robust onboarding process: Create a seamless onboarding experience that helps customers quickly realize value from your product or service.

Implement a customer feedback loop: Regularly solicit and act on customer feedback to continuously improve your offerings and address pain points.

Provide excellent customer support: Offer multiple support channels (e.g., phone, email, chat) and ensure quick response times to customer inquiries.

Create a loyalty program: Develop a program that rewards repeat purchases and long-term loyalty with exclusive benefits or discounts.

Personalize communications: Use customer data to send targeted, relevant communications that address individual needs and preferences.

Offer ongoing education: Provide resources, tutorials, and webinars to help customers get the most out of your product or service.

Anticipate and address churn risks: Use predictive analytics to identify customers at risk of churning and proactively engage them with retention offers.

Have a dedicated customer service team: Ensure you have a dedicated customer service team to promptly address customer issues and maintain a positive brand image. Proactive communication from this team is essential in ensuring customer satisfaction and retention.

Step 6: Cultivate the Advocacy Stage

Turn satisfied customers into brand advocates who actively promote your products or services to others.

How to cultivate the advocacy stage

Implement a referral program: Create a structured program that rewards customers for successfully referring new business.

Encourage user-generated content: Motivate customers to share their experiences with your brand on social media or review platforms.

Create a brand community: Develop online forums or groups where customers can connect, share tips, and engage with your brand.

Highlight customer success stories: Regularly feature customer testimonials and case studies across your marketing channels.

Offer exclusive experiences: Provide special events, early access to new products, or behind-the-scenes content to your most loyal customers.

Engage on social media: Actively respond to and share positive customer feedback on social platforms to amplify their voices.

Recognize and reward top advocates : Implement a VIP program or provide special recognition to your most active brand advocates.

Step 7: Implement Cross-Stage Optimization Strategies

Some optimization strategies can improve the customer experience across multiple stages of the journey.

Cross-stage optimization strategies

Ensure consistency across channels: Maintain a consistent brand voice, messaging, and visual identity across all touchpoints.

Implement omnichannel capabilities: Allow customers to seamlessly transition between channels (e.g., start a purchase on mobile and complete it on desktop).

Use data analytics: Leverage customer data and analytics tools to gain insights and make data-driven decisions across all stages.

Personalize the entire journey: Use customer data to tailor experiences, content, and offers throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Optimize for speed and performance: Ensure your website, apps, and other digital touchpoints load quickly and perform well on all devices.

Train your team: Educate all customer-facing staff on the importance of the customer's journey and how to provide exceptional experiences at each stage. Clearly defining and organizing the customer's journey enhances user experience by ensuring that businesses understand and engage with customers at every touchpoint.

Continuously test and iterate: Regularly conduct A/B tests and experiments to identify opportunities for improvement across all stages.

At Kapiche , we understand the power of well-mapped customer journeys. Our AI-powered platform helps insights teams analyze customer experience data with precision, providing the clarity you need to optimize every stage of the journey.

Ready to elevate your customer experience? Watch our on-demand demo today and see how Kapiche can transform your customer insights: Watch the on-demand demo of Kapiche .

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Customer Journey Mapping: How to Understand Your Buyers and Enhance Their Experience

• 14 min read
• Published: 14 Dec, 2023
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The recent State of the Connected Customer Report  by Salesforce revealed that for 80 percent of people, the experience a brand provides is as important as its product. With customer expectations at an all-time high, businesses must deliver the best service  possible to satisfy consumers and stay competitive. For that, it’s crucial to understand what customers want and anticipate their actions.

A customer journey map is vital in this context. It helps businesses understand and manage interactions with their clientele at every touchpoint, from the first encounter to the final transaction. So this post is all about the tool that guides you in creating exceptional customer experiences and how you can get the most out of it.

What is customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is creating a visual story of customers' interactions with the brand or product. It's like drawing a route people usually take from the moment they first become aware of your product or service all the way through to purchasing and even after-sales support.

A customer journey map includes all the touchpoints the customer can have with your brand, such as seeing a social media ad, visiting a store, calling customer support, and so on. Also, it should reflect the customers’ pain points , emotions, and reactions at every stage of the journey so that you understand them better and see how to improve their experience.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Before we delve into the details of customer journey mapping, let’s say a few words about why do it at all. Here are some of its benefits.

Understand your customers better . Customer journey mapping helps you see your business through your customers' eyes. You get to understand what they like, what bothers them, and what makes them happy.

Find problems . Sometimes, there are bumps in the road that can make your customers unhappy, like a confusing website or long wait times. Journey mapping helps you spot these problems so you can address them.

Adjust your strategy . As you get to understand your customers better, you might realize that you have to tailor your offerings, pricing range, marketing campaigns, support team workflows, etc.

Improve customer experience and foster loyalty . When you know what your customers go through, you can make their journey smoother and more enjoyable. This means increased conversion  and retention  rates. Happy buyers are likelier to keep returning and recommend your brand to others. Research states that 88 percent  of customers repeat the purchase if they like the customer service.

In essence, customer journey mapping is a tool that helps businesses empathize with their customers and improve their interaction journey, leading to better customer-brand relationships and business success.

Customer journey stages

As we start exploring a customer journey map, let’s first look at what a common customer journey looks like. Here are its main phases.

Awareness . This is the initial stage where potential customers realize they have  a need or a problem that requires solving and become aware  of a product or service.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: social media, industry events, online/offline ads, search results, etc.

Consideration . At this stage, customers look for solutions. They are considering  different products or services and are researching to find the best option.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: your website, blog, knowledge base , reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.

Decision . This is the point where the customer decides  on a solution that best fits their needs.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: email newsletter, pricing information, your website, physical store, sales reps, etc.

Purchase . The customer buys the product or service and starts using it.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: customer support (phone, messages, chatbots), help desk/FAQ sections, etc.

Retention . A fter the purchase, the focus shifts to keeping the customer happy and engaged with the product or service. This stage is about building loyalty and encouraging repeat purchases.

Potential touchpoints at this stage: email, newsletters, sales reps, etc.

Please note that this is the typical scenario but not the only one. The stages can vary across industries and product types, so you might want to include other phases in your customer journey map. Or else, you might need to map out only one part of the journey, for example, pre-purchase, to better understand how your marketing campaigns work.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

When creating a customer journey map, you’ll evaluate your buyer’s interactions with your brand and look for opportunities to enhance their experience. So here are the main elements of a customer journey map.

Elements of a customer journey map

Buyer/user/customer persona  – a prototype of your target audience.

Scenario  – a short description of the interaction story.

Customer’s goals/needs/expectations  – why people turn to your brand.

Stages  – the phases your customer goes through in the interaction scenario.

Actions and touchpoints – what customers do and where the interaction happens.

Emotions and experiences  – what customers feel and think as they interact with your brand.

Emotional curve  – the visual line of how the customer sentiment changes depending on their experience.

Opportunities  – how you can improve the customer experience at each touchpoint or stage.

You can also include other elements like KPIs to track, designated people responsible for implementing improvements, and so on. T he complexity and elements of a customer journey map can vary based on the nature of your business, the type of customers, and your goals.

A simple example of a traveler journey map that an OTA or a hotel could create

The components of the customer journey map also depend on its type. There are many different modifications you can create for various business goals, so let’s talk about some of them.

Customer journey map types

Each customer journey map has its own focus and purpose. The choice of which one to use depends on your specific objectives, the complexity of your customer experience, and the information you want to capture. Here are some of the main types.

Current state journey maps provide a detailed view of the existing customer experience (just like in the illustration above). It’s the most basic map that documents touchpoints, interactions, and emotions “as is.”

Future state journey maps  envision the ideal customer journey after implementing improvements or changes. They serve as a roadmap for designing and delivering a better customer experience and help teams set goals and prioritize initiatives to reach the desired state.

Day-in-the-life journey maps  focus on a specific persona or customer segment's daily activities and how they interact with a product or service throughout their day. These maps help businesses understand a customer's routines and identify opportunities to provide value.

Channel-specific journey maps  concentrate on a particular customer interaction channel, such as a website, mobile app, social media, or in-store experience. They help businesses optimize touchpoints within a specific channel.

Service blueprints  go beyond the customer perspective and provide a comprehensive view of the entire service ecosystem. They include the customer journey, frontstage interactions (visible to the customer), and backstage processes (invisible to the customer). Service blueprints help improve alignment and coordination within an organization.

An example of a service blueprint for visiting a restaurant. Source: Miro

Some other types are emotional journey maps, lifecycle journey maps, cross-channel journey maps, etc. You can focus on a specific category or use a combination of these maps to better understand your customer journey and drive improvements in the customer experience.

How do you create and use a customer journey map ?

There’s no single best format for a customer journey map. It can be a linear timeline, flowchart, or any other visual representation that best suits your needs. You can draw it on paper, put sticky notes on a whiteboard , or design it in specialized software (we’ll talk about digital tools further on).

Since customer journey mapping is part of market research, usually, it’s the marketing or sales department that’s responsible for creating it. However, it’s worth engaging different teams in this process.

Define objectives

First of all, you have to decide on your goals – or why you want to analyze your customer journey. For example, it can be something as specific as checking how a particular marketing project works, i.e., how effective ad retargeting is. Or it can be a strategic business objective like attracting more customers, increasing sales volume per customer, or improving retentio n.

Pro tip: Make a customer journey map for a specific interaction scenario for a certain customer segment. This way, it won’t be too generic, so you’ll be able to explore your buyers’ sentiments  more deeply at each stage of their way and get more concrete results to work with. 

Create a buyer persona

As we said, you must create a fictional representative of your target audience. To understand their needs and pain points, design a persona with a specific traits -- professional background, motivations, lifestyle, goals, and so on.

Pro tip : Add as many details as possible to make the most accurate representation of your customer. Later on, it will help you better understand their perspective.

Identify touchpoints and map the customer journey

As we said, you have to define the ways customers interact with your brand at each stage. Make a list of all the potential touchpoints and then map them out on the customer journey stages.

Use various data sources such as website analytics, customer feedback, social media interactions, and sales data to gather information about where and how customers interact with your brand. Also, engage teams from various departments (sales, customer support, marketing) and encourage their input.

Pro tip : Look at your competitors to see where they engage with customers. This can provide insights into touchpoints you haven’t considered.

Understand the customer's perspective

As you record your customers' actions at each stage, remember to make the  map from the customer's point of view. It must show what they think and feel  at each touchpoint, what they're trying to achieve, and any challenges they might face.

Watch our expert explain customer research in product discovery

Get feedback directly from your customers through surveys, interviews , or email questionnaires to understand their experience at different touchpoints. Ask about their motivations  and any difficulties they encountered.

Pro tip : Tools like website heat maps, open rates for emails, and engagement rates on social media can help you understand your customers’ behavior better.

Highlight emotions and experiences

A customer journey map goes beyond the actions customers take. It dives into their emotional experience, whether they're happy, frustrated, or confused at different stages.

It’s important to record both positive and negative emotions. The former exhibits opportunities to enhance the experience or exceed customer expectations, while the latter highlights pain points or bottlenecks where customers face challenges or frustrations.

Pro tip : Ask your customer support which questions they get most often. Also, pay attention to what customers say about your brand on social media, online review platforms, or other resources.

Identify opportunities for improvement

By mapping this journey, you can see where you're providing a great experience and where you fall short. This helps you find ways to enhance your strong sides and improve the weak ones. For example, some reasons for poor customer experience include long waiting times to get to customer service, unintuitive website interface, missing app functionality, high prices, and so on.

Pro tip : Conduct brainstorming sessions with different teams and encourage active cross-department collaboration. Also, try to go through the journey that you’ve depicted yourself to get first-hand experience.

Create a better customer experience

Ultimately, the goal is to use this map to make strategic decisions that enhance the customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty. Develop strategies and initiatives to address the pain points, optimize touchpoints, and leverage opportunities identified in the customer journey map.

Pro tip : Focus on your business goals when you analyze the impact of customer experience and prioritize your activities.

B2B customer journey map

If your company doesn’t work with individual customers but deals with other businesses, you can still take advantage of a customer journey map. A B2B customer journey map is a useful tool for managing client relationships. Just like the B2C analog, it visualizes the process they go through and experiences they have when interacting with your company. However, there are certain differences that impact the components of the customer journey map. 

The complexity of the decision-making process . In the B2B context, there’s a more complex decision-making process, often with multiple stakeholders. The journey may include stages like RFP (Request for Proposal) submission, detailed product evaluations, approvals from different departments, and a longer negotiation phase. In B2C, the decision-making process is usually simpler and quicker, often involving only the individual consumer or their immediate family.

Length of sales cycle . B2B sales cycles are typically longer, sometimes lasting months or even years, as they involve higher-value transactions and more deliberation. B2C sales cycles are shorter, often concluding within a few days or even instantly.

Touchpoints . B2B touchpoints include industry events, professional networks, detailed product demos, and extensive follow-up communications. B2C touchpoints often focus more  on mass marketing channels like social media, online ads, reviews, and retail environments.

Customer goals and expectations . Business customers often have specific, pragmatic goals like improving efficiency, increasing ROI, or integrating with existing systems. Meanwhile, individual consumer goals may be more diverse, including personal enjoyment, convenience, price, and brand alignment.

Relationship and engagement . B2B focuses more on building long-term relationships and ongoing engagement.   In the B2C model, while repeat business is also important, engagement is often more transactional and less personalized unless it’s a high-value product or a niche market.

Just like in a B2C context, delivering a positive experience to your business clients is important. Customer journey mapping helps you understand how you can enhance your relationships.

Customer journey mapping softwa re

As we said, you can certainly map your customer journey on a sheet of paper, but we recommend you use a specialized digital tool instead. The software helps automate this process, allows for convenient collaboration, and enables easy editing, sharing, and so on. Besides, most platforms offer several editable templates for different purposes.

There are multiple tools available to help you with customer journey mapping. A simple online search will give you a list of relevant platforms. Some are designed specifically to manage customer experience, while others are more general-purpose and can be used for different scenarios.

When choosing a tool, we recommend you consider the following factors:

• available templates,
• integration options,  
• interface intuitiveness,
• customization options,
• collaboration features, and
• customer support and training.

We’ll take a look at some of them to give you an idea of what’s out there. Please note that we don’t promote any of the tools; the choice was based on their popularity.

Customer journey mapping tools compared

Smaply  is a specialized, user-friendly tool for journey mapping. It allows businesses to create detailed customer personas, journey maps, and other related visuals. It’s particularly good for visualizing complex customer interactions over multiple channels.

Miro  is a multipurpose online collaborative whiteboarding platform. It offers numerous templates and tools for creating detailed customer journey maps, making it easier to visualize the customer experience.

UXPressia  is specifically designed for creating customer journey maps with 100+ templates and customization options. It offers a persona creation feature, impact mapping, and the ability to integrate real data into your maps. You can also connect it to Jira, Google Analytics, and other external apps to add information to your maps.

Lucidchart is a diagramming app that helps create flowcharts, organizational charts, customer journey maps, etc. Besides creating visuals, it offers integration options with popular business tools like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Slack.

Custellence  is another focused customer journey mapping app. It has numerous templates for different industries and an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface.

Customer journey map templates

As we’ve already mentioned, most software tools provide interactive templates for different scenarios. But if you don’t want to work on any focused platform, here are some downloadable templates for you:

• the most basic PDF template  from Nielsen Norman Group,
• a collection of PowerPoint templates  from HubSpot,
• an editable Google Docs template  from WordStream, and
• a set of colored templates  available in Google Slides or PowerPoint from Slidesgo.

We realize it might be confusing at the beginning when you don’t have a clear idea of how to approach customer journey mapping. For inspiration, check out some examples of how it might look.

Customer journey map examples

Companies create customer journey maps for a wide range of scenarios and with different purposes. While the objective isn’t always about getting more profit, it’s always about enhancing customer experience.

M ultiple use cases. UXPressia has a big section with customer journey map examples  for many industries, including banking, travel, entertainment, and so on. Within each industry subsection, they cover multiple scenarios, plus they provide different user persona examples.

A customer journey map for an airplane passenger. Source: UXPressia

Attending city tours . Mural, a visual planning and collaboration tool, has created a customer journey map  for travelers on guided city tours. The steps include browsing, booking, attending, and rating the tours.

Sharing music on Spotify . Meghana Bowen, a UX/UI designer, presented a customer journey map  of using the Spotify app and sharing music with others. The author has also defined a user persona and depicted the following process of creating the sharing feature design.

Spotify customer journey map. Source: Meghana Bowen

New students coming to the university campus . Iris Wu and Mei Xue created a service to facilitate traveling to Carnegie Mellon for incoming students. As part of their research, they’ve designed current and future  customer journey maps  to better understand the difficulties that international students encounter.

Best practices

We’ve already included some pieces of practical advice in the previous sections, but we still have a few more final tips.

Collaborate . We’ve mentioned it above but still want to emphasize the importance of cross-department collaboration when creating and working with the customer journey map. And, of course, involve your customers as well. Only in this case you’ll be able to have the most detailed information about your customer experience and improve it throughout all touchpoints.

Designate . As you implement changes, it’s crucial to assign responsibilities so that everyone knows their roles and tasks in these projects.

Track . It’s also important to develop KPIs so that you can track progress. The metrics you choose will depend on your objectives, but some examples are customer satisfaction score, net promoter score , conversion rate, or churn rate.

Update . Remember that the customer journey is dynamic and can change over time. Regularly revisit and update your customer journey map to reflect any changes in customer behavior or market conditions.

Customer Journey Map: Definition with Examples

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

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

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

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

Factors to Consider Before Creating a Customer Journey Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at each step in more detail.

Step 1: Build Your Buyer Persona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: Map Out the Customer LIfecycle Stages and Touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Understand the Goals of the Customers

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

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

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

Step 4: Identify Obstacles and Customer Pain Points

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

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

But that’s not the case here, is it?

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

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

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

Step 5: Identify the Elements You Want to Focus on

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

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

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

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

Step 6: Fix the Roadblocks

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

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

Here are some templates you can start with right away.

What are the Benefits of Using a Customer Journey Map?

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

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

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

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

A customer journey map typically includes the following components:

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

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

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

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

Making assumptions without data

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

Focusing on one touchpoint

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

Not involving cross-functional teams

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

Failing to validate with real customers

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

Ready to Map Your Customer’s Journey?

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

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

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

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FAQs About Customer Journey Maps

Why is customer journey mapping important, how can customer journey maps improve customer experiences.

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

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

What tools are needed to create customer journey maps?

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

• Customer feedback: Surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups can be used to gather customer feedback and understand their experiences.
• Analytics tools: Data analytics tools, such as website analytics, customer behavior tracking, and customer relationship management systems, can provide insight into customer behavior and preferences.
• Customer journey map software: Tools like Creately that can be used to create visually appealing customer journey maps.
• Project management software: Tools like to manage the journey mapping process and keep track of progress.
• Collaboration tools: Tools like Creately, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace can be used to collaborate with team members and stakeholders.

What are some common use cases for customer journey maps?

• Identifying and resolving pain points in the customer journey
• Improving customer onboarding and retention
• Optimizing marketing and sales efforts
• Designing a customer-centric website or app
• Aligning cross-functional teams to deliver a cohesive customer experience

Can customer journey maps be used for different types of businesses or industries?

How can i use customer journey maps to drive customer-centric strategies in my organization.

• You can use customer journey maps to drive customer-centric strategies in your organization by Identifying pain points or gaps in the customer experience and developing targeted solutions
• Aligning cross-functional teams and processes to meet customer needs
• Optimizing touchpoints to deliver a seamless and satisfying customer experience
• Utilizing insights from the customer journey map to inform marketing, sales, and customer service strategies

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

Journey Map

A journey map allows you to identify and strategize for key moments in the product, experience, or service you’re designing., suggested time.

30-60 Minutes

Level of Difficulty

Materials needed.

Pens, paper, Post-its, markers

Participants

Design team, key stakeholders, partners (optional)

Process Phase

This simple framework can help you think through key moments for your customer as they experience your solution. Consider how your customer first becomes aware of your solution, how they make a decision to try it, what their first interaction and engagement is like, how they might become a repeat user, and how the solution might ultimately impact their life. As a customer begins to benefit from your idea, how could they tell other people about it? A Journey Map should help you to visualize a customer’s experience from beginning to end.

• Start with a seed idea of what your solution could be—maybe one that you sketched on a Post-it during a Brainstorm or an idea that emerged from an early, rough prototype you're looking to explore further.
• Start by writing a simple 1-2 word headline of the most core moment(s) of engagement for your user on a Post-it. This doesn’t need to be a detailed representation—the way you might build out a Storyboard —but rather a snapshot. An example might be: First exposure to the product.
• Now, write down the name of any other key moments on separate Post-its. Think about other people or factors that have an influence on the user here. You identified a bunch of these in the Define Your Audience activity, when you mapped the ecosystem around the user. The number of touchpoints you identify may vary from concept to concept, but try to focus on no more than 3-5. Consider what might be most critical to the person you're designing for.
• Place the Post-its in an order you think your user would likely experience them, and evolve your original Journey Map as helpful by adding, removing, reordering, and revising the key moments.
• Later, you can use this Journey Map as a starting point to help Determine What to Prototype or inform a more descriptive Storyboard or start to build out a Role Play .

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