customer journey mapping emotions

The stages may not be the same for you — in fact, your brand will likely come up with a set of unique stages of the customer journey. But where do you start? Let's take a look.

Generally, there are 5 phases that customers go through when interacting with a brand or a product: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.

1. Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands should deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. Your aim should be to help customers alleviate their pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Some educational content that I've created in the past are:

• How-to articles and guides
• General whitepapers
• General ebooks
• Free courses

Educational content may also be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.

During this stage, brands should deliver product marketing content to help customers compare different offerings and, eventually, choose their product or service. The aim is to help customers navigate a crowded marketplace and move them toward a purchase decision.

Product marketing content may include:

• Product listicles
• Product comparison guides and charts
• Product-focused white papers
• Customer success stories or case studies

Product marketing content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.

During this stage, your brand should deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying products as easy as possible. I wouldn't recommend any more educational or product content at this stage — it's all about getting customers to make a purchase. That means you can be more direct about wanting customers to buy from you.

Decision-stage content may include:

• Free consultations
• Product sign-up pages
• Pricing pages
• Product promotions (i.e "Sign up now and save 30%")

Decision-stage content may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

4. Retention Stage

In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider.

During this stage, brands provide an excellent onboarding experience and ongoing customer service to ensure that customers don't churn.

Retention-stage strategies may include:

• Providing a dedicated customer success manager
• Making your customer service team easily accessible
• Creating a knowledge base in case customers ever run into a roadblock

Retention-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

5. Loyalty Stage

In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands should focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience. This should span from your website content to your sales reps all the way to your social media team and your product's UX.

Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they're more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

• Having an easy-to-navigate website
• Investing in your product team to ensure your product exceeds customer expectations
• Making it easy to share your brand with others via a loyalty or referral program
• Providing perks to continued customers, such as discounts

Loyalty-stage strategies may be delivered via customer touchpoints such as:

• Your products

To find out whether your customers have reached the loyalty stage, try a Net Promoter Score survey , which asks one simple question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" To deliver this survey, you can use customer feedback software like Service Hub .

Now, let's get to the good stuff. Let's talk about creating your customer journey map.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's experience with a company. It also provides insight into the needs of potential customers at every stage of this journey and the factors that directly or indirectly motivate or inhibit their progress.

The business can then use this information to improve the customer's experience, increase conversions, and boost customer retention.

Now, the customer journey map is not to be confused with a UX journey map. But, for clarity, let's distinguish these two below.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how a customer experiences their journey toward achieving a specific goal or completing a particular action.

For example, the term "UX journey mapping" can be used interchangeably with the term "customer journey mapping" if the goal being tracked is the user's journey toward purchasing a product or service.

However, UX journey mapping can also be used to map the journey (i.e., actions taken) towards other goals, such as using a specific product feature.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

While the customer journey might seem straightforward — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it's a complex journey that begins when the customer becomes problem-aware (which might be long before they become product-aware) and then moves through an intricate process of further awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

The customer is also exposed to multiple external factors (competitor ads, reviews, etc.) and touchpoints with the company (conversations with sales reps, interacting with content, viewing product demos, etc.).

Keep in mind that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

By mapping this journey, your marketing, sales, and service teams can understand, visualize, and gain insight into each stage of the process.

You can then decrease any friction along the way and make the journey as helpful and delightful as possible for your leads and customers.

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map — the visual representation of a company's customer experience. It compiles a customer's experience as they interact with a business and combines the information into a visual map.

The goal of this process is to draw insights that help you understand how your customers experience their journeys and identify the potential bottlenecks along the way.

It's also important to note that most customer journeys aren't linear. Instead, buyers often experience a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages that you should include in any customer journey.

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

To determine your customers' buying process, you'll want to pull data from all relevant sources (prospecting tools, CMS, behavior analytics tools, etc.) to accurately chart your customer's path from first to last contact.

However, you can keep it simple by creating broad categories using the typical buying journey process stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — and mapping them horizontally.

2. Emotions

Whether the goal is big or small, remember your customers are solving a problem. That means they're probably feeling some emotion — whether that's relief, happiness, excitement, or worry.

Adding these emotions to the journey map will help you identify and mitigate negative emotions and the pain points that cause them.

On HubSpot's journey map , we use emojis to represent potential emotions at different stages of the customer journey. 

3. User Actions

This element details what a customer does in each stage of the buying process. For example, during the problem-awareness stage, customers might download ebooks or join educational webinars.

Essentially, you're exploring how your customers move through and behave at each stage of their journey.

4. User Research

Similar to the last section, this element describes what or where the buyer researches when they are taking action.

More than likely, the buyer will turn to search engines, like Google, to research solutions during the awareness stage. However, it's important to pay attention to what they're researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. Not only will this lead to improvements to your product, but also a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback are questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. It saved me some time organizing and outlining my customer experience and it made it clear how a website could impact my user's lives. 

The customer journey map template can also help you discover areas of improvement in your product, marketing, and support processes.

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

There are four types of customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Pick the one that makes the most sense for your company.

Current State

These customer journey maps are the most widely used type. They visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience while interacting with your company. They're best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Image Source

Day in the Life

These customer journey maps visualize the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers currently experience in their daily activities, whether or not that includes your company.

This type gives a broader lens into your customers' lives and what their pain points are in real life.

Day-in-the-life maps are best used for addressing unmet customer needs before customers even know they exist. Your company may use this type of customer journey map when exploring new market development strategies .

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions that your customers will experience in future interactions with your company. Based on their current interaction with your company, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in later down the road.

These maps are best for illustrating your vision and setting clear, strategic goals.

Service Blueprint

These customer journey maps begin with a simplified version of one of the above map styles. Then, they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, including people, policies, technologies, and processes.

Service blueprints are best used to identify the root causes of current customer journeys or the steps needed to attain desired future customer journeys.

If you want a look at a real customer journey map that HubSpot has used recently, check out this interview we conducted with Sarah Flint, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. We asked her how her team put together their map (below) as well as what advice she would give to businesses starting from scratch. 

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Set a goal for the journey map.
• Survey customers to understand their buying journey.
• Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.
• Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.
• Review and update each journey map after every major product release.
• Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

Determine whether you aim to improve the buying experience or launch a new product. Knowing what the journey map needs to tell you can prevent scope creep on a large project like this.

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

What you think you know about the customer experience and what they actually experience can be very different. Speak to your customers directly, so you have an accurate snapshot of the customer's journey.

3. Ask customer service reps about the questions they receive most frequently.

Sometimes, customers aren't aware of their specific pain points, and that's where your customer service reps come in.

They can help fill in the gaps and translate customer pain points into business terms you and your team can understand and act on.

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

It's easy to assume each customer operates the same way, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Demographics, psychographics, and even how long someone has been a customer can determine how a person interacts with your business and makes purchasing decisions.

Group overarching themes into buyer personas and create a UX journey map for each.

5. Review and update each journey map after every major product release.

Every time your product or service changes, the customer's buying process changes. Even slight tweaks, like adding an extra field to a form, can become a significant roadblock.

So, reviewing the customer journey map before and after implementing changes is essential.

6. Make the customer journey map accessible to cross-functional teams.

Customer journey maps aren't very valuable in a silo. However, creating a journey map is a convenient way for cross-functional teams to provide feedback.

Afterward, make a copy of the map accessible to each team, so they always keep the customer top of mind.

Breaking down the customer journey, phase by phase, aligning each step with a goal, and restructuring your touchpoints accordingly are essential steps for maximizing customer success .

Here are a few more benefits to gain from customer journey mapping.

1. You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective.

Rather than discovering customers through outbound marketing, you can have your customers find you with the help of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing involves tactics targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences and seeks to interrupt the customers' daily lives. Outbound marketing is costly and inefficient. It annoys and deters customers and prospects.

Inbound marketing involves creating helpful content that customers are already looking for. You grab their attention first and focus on the sales later.

By mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what's interesting and helpful to your customers and what's turning them away.

2. You can create a new target customer base.

You need to understand the customer journey properly to understand your customers' demographics and psychographics.

It's a waste of time and money to repeatedly target too broad of an audience rather than people who are actually interested in your offering.

Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone your marketing to that specific audience.

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customer's experience.

It highlights moments where people experience delight and situations where they might face friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy and intervene at ideal times.

Proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable. For example, when I worked in customer support, we would anticipate a surge in tickets around the holidays. To be proactive, we'd send out a message to customers letting them know about our team's adjusted holiday hours. We would aalso tell them about additional support options if we were unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needed immediate attention.

With expectations set, customers won't feel surprised if they're waiting on hold a little longer than usual. They'll even have alternative options to choose from — like a chatbot or knowledge base — if they need to find a faster solution.

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it's easier to pick out areas where you can improve it. When you do, customers experience fewer pain points, leading to fewer people leaving your brand for competitors.

After all, 33% of customers will consider switching brands after just one poor experience.

UX journey mapping can point out individuals on the path to churn. If you log the common behaviors of these customers, you can start to spot them before they leave your business.

While you might not save them all, it's worth the try. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25%-95%.

5. You can create a customer-focused mentality throughout the company.

As your company grows, it can be tricky to coordinate all your departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are. That's because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not be prioritizing customer needs -- they might focusing on website traffic, leads, product signups, etc.

One way to overcome this data silo is to share a clear customer journey map with your entire organization. The great thing about these maps is that they map out every single step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service. 

For more examples of customer journey maps, read on to the next section for a few templates you can use as a baseline for your company's map. 

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

To help guide your business in its direction, here are examples to draw inspiration from for building out your customer journey map.

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

HubSpot's free Customer Journey Map Templates provide an outline for companies to understand their customers' experiences.

The offer includes the following:

• Current State Template
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template
• A Day in the Customer's Life Template
• Customer Churn Mapping Template
• Customer Support Blueprint Template

Each of these templates helps organizations gain new insights into their customer base and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

Download them today to start working on your customer journey map.

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map clearly outlines the five steps Dapper Apps believes customers go through when interacting with them.

As you can see, it goes beyond the actual purchasing phase by incorporating initial research and post-purchase needs.

This map is effective because it helps employees get into the customers' minds by understanding the typical questions they have and the emotions they're feeling.

There are incremental action steps that Dapper Apps can take in response to these questions and feelings that will help it solve all the current problems customers are having.

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

This fictitious customer journey map is a clear example of a day-in-the-life map.

Rather than just focusing on the actions and emotions involved in the customer's interaction with the company, this map outlines all the actions and emotions the customer experiences on a typical day.

This map is helpful because it measures a customer's state of mind based on the level of freedom they get from certain stimuli.

This is helpful for a company that wants to understand what its target customers are stressed about and what problems may need solving.

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map, designed for Carnegie Mellon University, exemplifies the usefulness of a future state customer journey map. It outlines the thoughts, feelings, and actions the university wants its students to have.

Based on these goals, CMU chose specific proposed changes for each phase and even wrote out example scenarios for each phase.

This clear diagram can visualize the company vision and help any department understand where they will fit into building a better user experience.

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

This customer journey map shows an in-depth customer journey map of a customer interacting with a fictitious restaurant.

It's clear that this style of map is more comprehensive than the others. It includes the front-of-stage (direct) and back-of-stage (non-direct or invisible) interactions a customer has with the company, as well as the support processes.

This map lays out every action involved in the customer experience, including those of the customer, employees directly serving diners, and employees working behind the scenes.

By analyzing how each of these factors influences the customer journey, a company can find the root cause of mishaps and problem-solve this for the future.

To get your business from point A — deciding to focus on customer journeys — to point B — having a journey map — a critical step to the process is selecting which customer mindset your business will focus on.

This mindset will determine which of the following templates you'll use.

1. Current State Template

If you're using this template for a B2B product, the phases may reflect the search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

For instance, in our Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

2. Day in the Life Template

Since this template reflects all the thoughts, feelings, actions, needs, and pain points a customer has in their entire daily routine — whether or not that includes your company — you'll want to map out this template in a chronological structure.

This way, you can highlight the times of day at which you can offer the best support.

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

Similar to the current state template, these phases may also reflect the predicted or desired search, awareness, consideration of options, purchasing decision, and post-purchase support processes.

Since this takes place in the future, you can tailor these phases based on what you'd like the customer journey to look like rather than what it currently looks like.

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

Since this template is more in-depth, it doesn't follow certain phases in the customer journey.

Instead, it's based on physical evidence — the tangible factors that can create impressions about the quality and prices of the service — that often come in sets of multiple people, places, or objects at a time.

For instance, with our fictitious restaurant example above, the physical evidence includes all the staff, tables, decorations, cutlery, menus, food, and anything else a customer comes into contact with.

You would then list the appropriate customer actions and employee interactions to correspond with each physical evidence.

For example, when the physical evidence is plates, cutlery, napkins, and pans, the customer gives their order, the front-of-stage employee (waiter) takes the order, the back-of-stage employee (receptionist) processes the order, and the support processes (chefs) prepare the food.

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

You can also use the classic buyer's journey — awareness, consideration, and decision — to design your customer journey map.

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage of their buying journey. Remember, many factors can affect this journey, including customer pain points, emotions, and your company's touchpoints and processes.

A customer journey map is the most effective way to visualize this information, whether you're optimizing the customer experience or exploring a new business opportunity to serve a customer's unrecognized needs.

Use the free templates in this article to start mapping the future of customer success at your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

How AI Image Misuse Made a World of Miscommunication [Willy's Chocolate Experience]

7 Ways to Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season

14 Customer Experience Fails that Companies Can Learn From

How Customer Experience Has Evolved Over the Last Decade [+ 2024 Trends]

Memorable Examples of AR in Customer Experience [+Tips for Implementing the Technology]

How to Create an Effective Customer Journey Map [Examples + Template]

Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

User Flows: 8 Tips For Creating A Super Smooth User Experience

11 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

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

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

Jira Software

Project and issue tracking

Content collaboration

Jira Service Management

High-velocity ITSM

Visual project management

• View all products

Marketplace

Connect thousands of apps and integrations for all your Atlassian products

Developer Experience Platform

Jira Product Discovery

Prioritization and roadmapping

You might find helpful

Cloud Product Roadmap

Atlassian Migration Program

Work Management

Manage projects and align goals across all teams to achieve deliverables

IT Service Management

Enable dev, IT ops, and business teams to deliver great service at high velocity

Agile & DevOps

Run a world-class agile software organization from discovery to delivery and operations

BY TEAM SIZE

Small Business

BY TEAM FUNCTION

Software Development

BY INDUSTRY

Telecommunications

Professional Services

What's new

Atlassian together.

Get Atlassian work management products in one convenient package for enterprise teams.

Atlassian Trust & Security

Customer Case Studies

Atlassian University

Atlassian Playbook

Product Documentation

Developer Resources

Atlassian Community

Atlassian Support

Enterprise Services

Partner Support

Purchasing & Licensing

Work Life Blog

Support for Server products ends February 15, 2024

With end of support for our Server products fast approaching, create a winning plan for your Cloud migration with the Atlassian Migration Program.

Assess my options

Atlassian Presents: Unleash

Product updates, hands-on training, and technical demos – catch all that and more at our biggest agile & DevOps event.

• Atlassian.com

Customer Journey Mapping

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

USE THIS PLAY TO...

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

Running the play

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

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

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

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

Set the stage (5 min)

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

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

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

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

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

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

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

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

• E.g., "Provide structure"

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

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

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

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

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

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

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

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

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

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

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

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

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

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

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

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

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAP A FUTURE STATE

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

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

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

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

KEEP IT REAL

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

Related Plays

     Customer Interview

     Project Poster

Want even more Playbook?

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

Thanks! Now get back to work.

Got feedback?

Drop a question or comment on the Atlassian Community site.

Shared understanding

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

LEADERSHIP TEAMS

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

Proof of concept

Project teams.

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

Customer centricity

Service teams.

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

Journey Architecture

How to map the emotional journey of your customer experience.

By Martin Powton

MAY 20, 2019 | ASCEND CURATED ARTICLE

Chief Research and Product Officer at Forrester, Cliff Cordon, said: “If brands want to break away from the pack and become CX leaders, they must focus on emotion.”

Measuring the customer’s emotional journey is challenging but not impossible. There are a number of ways you can tackle this, the most popular place to start is by using Robert Plutchik’s ‘Wheel of Emotion’, but “no matter how you approach this, it is essential you start to track customer emotions” as they can provide a much deeper insight than a rating ever will.

In this article, Martin Powton discusses how to measure emotion in customer experience and how to map the emotional journey.

RELATED STORIES

Ascend Marketing 07.10.2019

It’s All About the Journey

These are exciting times for journey marketing. Not just an intriguing, ambiguous idea to most marketers anymore, journey marketing today is real-world strategy being deployed by many organizations across a diverse industry landscape.

Ascend Marketing 06.7.2019

5 Tips for Creating Customer Journey Maps from Buyer Personas

An essential tool in customer journey mapping is the creation of a customer persona. And while it’s common to include some demographic data in a persona, it’s important to understand that the person itself is not simply a demographic representation.

• Reviews / Why join our community?
• For companies
• Frequently asked questions

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. 

• Copyright holder: Unsplash. Copyright terms and license: CCO Public Domain. Link: https://pixabay.com/en/clay-hands-sculpting-art-69...
• Copyright holder: Unsplash. Copyright terms and license: CCO Public Domain. Link: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-black-shirt-an...
• Copyright holder: Indecent Proposer. Copyright terms and license: CC BY-NC 2.0 Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/indecent_proposal/14...
• Copyright holder: Anna Langova. Copyright terms and license: CC0 1.0 Link: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php...
• Copyright holder: Conmongt. Copyright terms and license: CC0 Public Domain Link: https://pixabay.com/en/hourglass-time-time-lapse-clock-1623517/

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

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.

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.

• 1.2k shares

What are Customer Touchpoints & Why Do They Matter?

• 3 years ago

How to Visualize Your Qualitative User Research Results for Maximum Impact

• 2 years ago

How to Resolve Conflicts Between Design Thinking and Marketing

How to Create a Perspective Grid

• 10 mths ago

4 Takeaways from the IxDF Journey Mapping Course

The Power of Mapping

User Story Mapping in Design

Open Access—Link to us!

We believe in Open Access and the  democratization of knowledge . Unfortunately, world-class educational materials such as this page are normally hidden behind paywalls or in expensive textbooks.

If you want this to change , cite this page , link to us, or join us to help us democratize design knowledge !

Privacy Settings

Our digital services use necessary tracking technologies, including third-party cookies, for security, functionality, and to uphold user rights. Optional cookies offer enhanced features, and analytics.

Experience the full potential of our site that remembers your preferences and supports secure sign-in.

Governs the storage of data necessary for maintaining website security, user authentication, and fraud prevention mechanisms.

Enhanced Functionality

Saves your settings and preferences, like your location, for a more personalized experience.

Referral Program

We use cookies to enable our referral program, giving you and your friends discounts.

Error Reporting

We share user ID with Bugsnag and NewRelic to help us track errors and fix issues.

Optimize your experience by allowing us to monitor site usage. You’ll enjoy a smoother, more personalized journey without compromising your privacy.

Analytics Storage

Collects anonymous data on how you navigate and interact, helping us make informed improvements.

Differentiates real visitors from automated bots, ensuring accurate usage data and improving your website experience.

Lets us tailor your digital ads to match your interests, making them more relevant and useful to you.

Advertising Storage

Stores information for better-targeted advertising, enhancing your online ad experience.

Personalization Storage

Permits storing data to personalize content and ads across Google services based on user behavior, enhancing overall user experience.

Advertising Personalization

Allows for content and ad personalization across Google services based on user behavior. This consent enhances user experiences.

Enables personalizing ads based on user data and interactions, allowing for more relevant advertising experiences across Google services.

Receive more relevant advertisements by sharing your interests and behavior with our trusted advertising partners.

Enables better ad targeting and measurement on Meta platforms, making ads you see more relevant.

Allows for improved ad effectiveness and measurement through Meta’s Conversions API, ensuring privacy-compliant data sharing.

LinkedIn Insights

Tracks conversions, retargeting, and web analytics for LinkedIn ad campaigns, enhancing ad relevance and performance.

LinkedIn CAPI

Enhances LinkedIn advertising through server-side event tracking, offering more accurate measurement and personalization.

Google Ads Tag

Tracks ad performance and user engagement, helping deliver ads that are most useful to you.

Share the knowledge!

Share this content on:

or copy link

Cite according to academic standards

Simply copy and paste the text below into your bibliographic reference list, onto your blog, or anywhere else. You can also just hyperlink to this page.

New to UX Design? We’re Giving You a Free ebook!

Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Design to learn about core concepts of UX design.

In 9 chapters, we’ll cover: conducting user interviews, design thinking, interaction design, mobile UX design, usability, UX research, and many more!

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

• 14 min read
• 14 Dec, 2023
• No comments Share

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 (CJM)

People expect some benefit when they use the products and services an organization provides. They want to get some job done, solve a problem, or experience a particular emotion.

It is only when they perceive this benefit as valuable they’ll give something in return – money, time, or attention.

To survive, organizations need to capture some value from their offerings. And value creation lies at the intersection of human interaction with the provider of a service.

What is a Customer Journey Map

A Customer Journey Map (CJM) belongs to a class of diagrams called Alignment Diagrams [2] that help visualize the story of interaction between individuals and an organization.

They visually illustrate an individual customer’s needs, the series of interactions that are necessary to fulfill those needs, and the resulting emotional states a customer experiences throughout the process.

CJM shows the steps customers go through in engaging with a company, whether it be a product, an online experience, a retail experience, a service, or any combination.

CJMs are also called “cradle-to-grave maps” as they look at the entire arc of engagement. The more touchpoints a company has, the more complicated and necessary they become.

While the exact origin of the term customer journey map (CJM) is unclear, the basic idea of looking across touchpoints has its roots in Jan Carlzon’s concept of moments of truth. [3]

Importance of customer journey map

When most companies focus on customer experience, they think about individual touchpoints – the transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business.

While this is a logical approach and is relatively easy to build into operations, its siloed nature misses the bigger and more important picture – the customer’s end-to-end experience. [4]

A customer’s journey includes many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. This journey can be long, stretching across multiple channels and touchpoints, and often lasts days or weeks.

Consider an example of a smartphone purchase, the CJM of which is as shown below.

Touchpoints that left negative emotions are depicted on the bottom of the vertical axis while positive ones are shown above. Each phase of the customer journey is indicated along the horizontal axis and moves from awareness to after-sale:

Notice how the customer’s journey involves interactions across multiple touchpoints such as adverts, physical stores, websites, emails, and (sometimes) sales/post-sales support.

A great sales process with a timely delivered smartphone could still lead to a bitter experience if the post-sales support (in case of a defect, for example) is not effective.

Likewise, a poorly designed advert may discourage a customer from considering the purchase in the first place.

Thus, only by looking at the customer’s experience through their own eyes along the entire journey taken can companies begin to understand how to meaningfully improve the overall performance.

Shown below is another, more complex CJM which details the process of installing a broadband and internet service:

It focuses on the emotional aspects while highlighting the thoughts and feelings a customer typically goes through.

Since creating great experiences is not about individual touchpoint optimization but rather how touchpoints come together into a unified whole, CJMs play a crucial role as a strategic tool to visualize touchpoints and manage them more effectively.

What makes them much more powerful than simply delivering personas and scenarios is their ability to highlight the flow of the customer experience from the ups and downs along the way to those critical pain points where an organization’s attention and focus are most essential.

CJMs help better understand customer loyalty and improve customers’ experiences by answering questions such as:

• How can an organization better engage customers?
• How can it provide value so that customers keep coming back?
• How can it make services more relevant?

Components of a customer journey map

CJMs can range from very simple to complex illustrations that include personas, motivations, emotions, and key activities. To be effective, a CJM must be visually appealing, comprehensive, and understandable.

A CJM consists of the following key elements:

• Customer stages (or timeline) : identifies the stages in the customer journey. At a minimum, there are four stages: enquiry, comparison, purchase, and usage. Alternatively, this could also be a finite timeline (e.g., A week, month, year).
• Persona(s) : archetypal representations of existing subsets of the customer base who share similar goals, needs, expectations, behaviors, and motivation factors.
• Touchpoints : These are points of contact or interaction between a business and its customers. Information exchange at a touch point could be both unidirectional (e.g.: a banner advert) or bidirectional (physical store). To align the customer experience and identify pain points between channels and touchpoints, the map should also specify which channels are in focus.
• Emotions : CJMs must predict and specify customers’ emotions and feelings. This makes them useful for pinpointing potential pain points and successes.
• Channels : These are means by which interaction takes place. e.g. website, native app, call centre, in-store etc. This is where customers interact.

Optionally, they could also include:

• Barriers and pinpoints : These are areas where a customer is experiencing difficulties or issues with the product or service. This is more relevant when a CJM is developed for “as-is” conditions.
• Customer goals : a customer goal may not always remain constant throughout the journey. Identifying changing goals offers opportunities for improvements in the service.
• Positive experiences : Highlighting what is done well helps stakeholders understand which activities create a positive customer experience and add value.

Creating a customer journey map

While organizations use creative ways to develop customer journey maps, broadly the process includes the following steps:

1. Set objectives

Having a clear goal is a prerequisite to customer journey mapping. A company needs to first decide what it hopes to accomplish through the map, which customers to target (customer segmentation), and which types of experiences it expects the maps to highlight.

Objectives of the map are driven by the company’s strategic goal (e.g., increased revenue or improved customer retention).

For example, if the strategic goal is to improve customer experience, then the objective for the map could highlight key touchpoints, such as website interactions, customer support interactions, and post-purchase experiences, to identify areas for improvement and ultimately improve customer retention.

It is also important to decide on relevant metrics that can be tracked once the customer journey map is created and put to use. Without proper tracking, setting goals doesn’t mean much.

2. Collect customer data and insights

Firms should start the process by taking inventory of the customer knowledge they already have. Data must be gathered from every customer interaction. A marketing automation solution is a great way to collect this information.

For companies that do not have sufficient customer data, Voice of Customer (VoC) is an effective method to gain insights. [7]

Other methods could include mining databases and gathering reports, but the most significant insights will come from the stakeholders themselves. Valuable insights emerge when cross-functional groups are brought together to offer different perspectives on observations and ideas about customers and their experiences.

Data collected at this stage could be both qualitative and quantitative.

3. Distill customer segments into personas and define their goals

With internal and external research in hand, journey mapping leaders need to distill their findings about how customers interact with the company, their expectations from each interaction, and how they feel about each interaction.

Developing a customer persona helps capture the needs, goals, and value a customer brings to a company. Depending on the number of customer segments identified, more than one persona (and by extension, more than one customer map) might be developed.

This helps a company to successfully design experiences that support the specific needs of behaviorally distinct customers.

The benefits of a customer persona over typical customer models are as shown:

The more accurate a persona is, the more effective the CJM will be.

4. Identify touchpoints

Identifying touchpoints involves generating a list of customer touchpoints and the channels on which those touchpoints currently occur.

For example, the touchpoint could be “pay a bill”, and the channels associated with it could be “pay online”, “pay via mail” or “pay in person”.

Additionally, touchpoints could also be indirect, for example, reviews of a brand that customers read on third-party sites. As each touchpoint can drive customer conversion, it is critical to represent all possibilities.

5. Construct an empathy map

An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what is known about a particular type of customer/user.

It externalizes knowledge about them to create a shared understanding of their needs, thereby aiding in decision-making.

Shown below is an example of an empathy map for a customer looking to purchase a television:

Empathy maps provide a foundation of material to fuel CJMs. They give a well-rounded sense of how it feels to be a particular persona in their experience, specifically focusing on what customers are thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, saying, and doing.

6. Map the customer journey

This involves putting together all the pieces: timeline, touchpoints, channels, emotions, and even new ideas on how to improve the future customer journey.

The goal is to translate the analysis into a simple visual representation of customer processes, needs, and perceptions. With each interaction, the map should also define customer needs and identify how well the company currently meets those needs.

There are no standard rules or layouts to create a CJM. Even the timeline need not be a standard left-to-right. It could be circular or helical.

The below example shows the LEGO Group’s “experience wheel” which is a CJM built around the three basic stages of an executive’s visit to LEGO offices and the individual experiences that make up each stage.

Notice how it starts with the description of a customer persona in the center (Richard, a senior executive in this case). It recognizes the timeline spread across three stages – before, during, and after the flight. It is easy to use and simple to understand.

Also at each interaction, the map defines customer needs and identifies how well the company currently meets those needs (in the form of smileys)

In terms of format, CJMs can be presented as either a comprehensive visual map in print/image form or an interactive digital form featuring clickable elements and embedded videos.

Steps to extract maximum value from CJMs

Developing CJMs won’t automatically realign an organization or improve customer experiences. Most lose momentum and are forgotten along with other research outputs.

To extract value, companies need to follow three practices: [8]

1. Share widely

To set the stage for broad customer experience improvements, the insights from CJMs must be shared with stakeholders across the company. This involves the following steps:

Involve internal stakeholders throughout the CJM process

Executives are more likely to buy into projects that they’re personally involved with. Hence, companies should actively engage decision-makers in the effort.

Those involved in the process early on are also more receptive to final conclusions (even if they are unpleasant) while those who stay out ultimately ignore recommendations.

Highlight key strengths

By design, CJMs are meant to identify problem areas where companies can make improvements. However, too many negatives can leave stakeholders choking.

Hence, to keep executives receptive, and not discourage efforts, a CJM should highlight both strengths as well as weaknesses.

Over time, as companies make improvements in their experiences, they can enjoy watching positive indicators overtake negative ones on their journey maps.

Use the organization’s native language

Companies aren’t accustomed to evaluating themselves from customers’ perspectives. To avoid resistance, it is necessary to tie CJMs to important elements of the existing corporate culture.

For example, explaining to stakeholders how new personas complement rather than replace existing segments.

Bring customer data to life

Engaging presentation techniques can bring CJMs to life.

This could include directly presenting the voice of the customer, showing videos of customers interacting with products or talking about their relationships with the company or audio recordings of customer service calls.

Some companies and consulting firms have used strategies like bringing persona cutouts into review meetings, building up physical rooms with customer research and even getting customers to participate in company meetings.

2. Act on insights

Since customer experience executives don’t manage all the organizational functions affected by the improvements identified in a CJM, this should be driven by leadership.

This calls for methodical identification and prioritization of opportunities while drawing on executive support and past successes. The following steps are important:

Exercise and expand executive support

Leadership should mandate that managers spend time interacting with customers and adopt

customer-focused metrics to measure performance. Without this level of support, customer experience leaders often face resistance from territorial channel and line-of-business leaders.

Another way of gaining executive buy-in is by competing pilot projects that demonstrate the process’s value.

Identify broken moments of truth

CJMs inevitably show companies the areas where they fail to meet their customers’ needs. But having a long list of poor experiences doesn’t tell what’s worth improving.

Companies need to focus on key moments of truth for customers – the interactions that they see as most important.

One way to prioritize is to plot interactions on a simple matrix, showing how important the quality of interactions is for customers:

The importance of interaction can be decided through customer research or from simple surveys asking customers to rate experiences in terms of importance and quality.

Companies can also use the Kano Model [11] , which is an insightful way of understanding, categorizing, and prioritizing customer requirements.

The model shows the relationship between customer satisfaction and the attributes of products or services being (or to be) offered. It categorizes these attributes into five types:

• Threshold attributes (must-be qualities) : These attributes are taken for granted when fulfilled but result in dissatisfaction when not fulfilled. Customers expect these attributes and view them as basic; it is unlikely that they are going to tell the company about them when asked about quality attributes. For example, brakes in a car are a basic requirement which goes without saying.
• Performance attributes (one-dimensional qualities) : These attributes result in satisfaction when fulfilled and dissatisfaction when not fulfilled. These are attributes that are spoken about and the ones in which companies compete. A good suspension in a car that leads to a comfortable ride is such an attribute.
• Excitement attributes (attractive qualities) : These attributes provide satisfaction when achieved but do not cause dissatisfaction when not fulfilled. They are not normally expected and thus often unspoken. Offering a broader choice of colors for a car can potentially delight certain customers, but its absence may not necessarily dissuade them from making a purchase.
• Indifferent attributes : These aspects are neither good nor bad and have no effect, positive or negative, on customer satisfaction. For instance, a car equipped with heated seats in a region with a predominantly hot climate.
• Reverse qualities : If these aspects exist, they lead to dissatisfaction; if they do not exist, they do not lead to satisfaction.
• For example, in the case of customers primarily seeking a car for commuting on well-maintained roads, the presence of a four-wheel drive feature can lead to reduced fuel efficiency and discourage them from making a purchase.

With time, attributes that customers see as excitement (threshold attributes) move down and convert to performance or basic attributes.

For example, a decade ago, a smartphone battery that could last 12 hours was seen as a great feature, but as battery tech improved across generations, that attribute has shifted from delighter to less than a basic need.

This also highlights the fact that what may not be a broken moment of truth today could possibly be one in the future.

Prioritize opportunities based on value to the company

Even after filtering out low-value opportunities based on customer preference, most companies still face long lists of initiatives.

This can be narrowed down further by balancing their value to customers with elements of business value such as increased revenue, reduced service costs, and differentiation from competitors.

Potential improvements can then be plotted on a simple matrix to highlight improvements with high potential impact.

3. Sustain learnings over time

Companies derive maximum value when they treat the journey mapping process as an ongoing strategic initiative rather than a finite project. The following practices provide discipline to keep journey maps alive over time:

Assign long-term ownership

CJMs need to be linked to the overall strategic planning process of a company with well-defined ownership. Only then, will they remain live and relevant.

Monitor customer feedback and organizational progress over time

CJMs need to be refreshed periodically to remain valid. One way to implement this is by using the maps as the foundation of customer experience data.

Instead of updating findings periodically, fresh customer feedback and performance metrics can be directly fed into the journey maps.

As pointed out by the Kano Model, customer expectations change over time and an updated CJM helps companies sense these shifts early on and take action.

1. “Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams”. James Kalbach, https://www.amazon.com/dp/1491923539 . Accessed 27 Sep 2023

2. “Alignment Diagrams”. Jim Kalbach, https://boxesandarrows.com/alignment-diagrams/ . Accessed 27 Sep 2023

3. “Moments of Truth”. Jan Carlzon, https://www.amazon.com/Moments-Truth-Jan-Carlzon/dp/0060915803 . Accessed 25 Sep 2023

4. “From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do”. McKinsey & Company, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do . Accessed 27 Sep 2023

5. “Mobile Ordering Customer Journey Map Template”. Edrawsoft, https://www.edrawsoft.com/template-mobile-ordering-customer-journey-map.html . Accessed 27 Sep 2023

6. “The Value of Customer Journey Maps: A UX Designer’s Personal Journey”. UX matters (Joel Flom), https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/09/the-value-of-customer-journey-maps-a-ux-designers-personal-journey.php . Accessed 27 Sep 2023

7. “Voice of the customer”. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_the_customer . Accessed 26 Sep 2023

8. “Mapping The Customer Journey”. Forrester (Bruce Temkin), https://www.forrester.com/blogs/10-02-10-mapping_the_customer_journey/ . Accessed 26 Sep 2023

9. “Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking”. Nielsen Norman Group, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/ . Accessed 26 Sep 2023

10. “LEGO’s Building Block For Good Experiences”. Bruce Temkin, https://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/legos-building-block-for-good-experiences/ . Accessed 26 Sep 2023

11. “What is the Kano Model?”. KanoModel, https://kanomodel.com/ . Accessed 27 Sep 2023

• Strategy Map: All You Need to Know
• Perceptual Map Explained

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment.

Skip navigation

• Log in to UX Certification

World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Journey mapping 101.

December 9, 2018 2018-12-09

• Email article
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Twitter

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

Free Downloads

Related courses, journey mapping to understand customer needs.

Capture and communicate UX insights across complex interactions

Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience

Create a usable and cohesive cross-channel experience by following guidelines to resolve common user pain points in a multi-channel landscape

Interaction

Generating Big Ideas with Design Thinking

Unearthing user pain points to drive breakthrough design concepts

Related Topics

• Customer Journeys Customer Journeys
• Design Process

Learn More:

Please accept marketing cookies to view the embedded video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W13ext26kQ

Customer Journey Mapping 101

UX Design Critiques: 3 Tips for Effective Feedback

Megan Brown · 4 min

Journey Mapping: 2 Decisions to Make Before You Begin

Kate Kaplan · 3 min

Scenario Mapping for Design Exploration

Kim Salazar · 3 min

Related Articles:

The 5 Steps of Successful Customer Journey Mapping

Kate Kaplan · 6 min

Parking Lots in UX Meetings and Workshops

Sarah Gibbons · 5 min

When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps

User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s The Difference?

Kim Salazar · 5 min

Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

Alita Joyce and Kate Kaplan · 7 min

Luxury Shopping User Groups and Journeys

Kate Moran · 14 min

• +1 (813) 330-0282
• [email protected]

Explore our Services

• Total Management
• Content Marketing

Graphic Design

Logo design.

• Social Media Marketing
• Subscription

News & Updates

Leaders leading, work with us, get to know lead nicely, client portfolio, lead outload, website design.

• We Are Hiring

Customer Journey Map: A Visual Odyssey through Customer Experience

Embark on a visual journey that unveils the intricate path of customer experiences. This customer journey map presents a comprehensive overview of a customer’s interactions with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement.

Each stage represents a significant phase in the customer’s voyage, with touchpoints highlighting moments of connection and engagement.

Stage 1: Discovery Social Media Ad Online Article

Stage 2: Research and Consideration Visiting the Website Watching Product Demo Video

Stage 3: Decision Making Reading Reviews and Ratings Engaging with Live Chat Support

Stage 4: Purchase Adding to Cart Completing the Purchase

Stage 5: Post-Purchase Engagement Welcome Email with Order Details Personalized Thank-You Message

Stage 6: Customer Support Contacting Support for Assistance Resolving Issues via Phone Support

Stage 7: Loyalty and Advocacy Participating in a Loyalty Program Sharing Positive Feedback on Social Media

Stage 8: Continuous Engagement Receiving Product Recommendations Participating in Webinars for Product Updates

Stage 9: Referral and Growth Referring Friends through a Referral Program Attending Exclusive Customer Events

This customer journey map serves as a guiding light, illuminating the intricate web of interactions that shape customer relationships. Each point is a chance to create lasting impressions, foster loyalty, and nurture advocacy.

As you navigate this map, remember that understanding the nuances of each stage empowers you to craft meaningful experiences that resonate with your customers’ needs, emotions, and aspirations.

Your journey toward customer-centric excellence begins here. 🗺️✨

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping:

The benefits of CJM are far-reaching.

It enables businesses to gain profound insights into customer behavior, needs, and preferences. By pinpointing pain points and opportunities, businesses can make informed decisions to enhance the overall customer experience.

CJM also facilitates aligning business strategies with customer expectations, ensuring a seamless and satisfying journey.

Learn how to kickstart your CJM journey with a step-by-step guide. Download our free CJM implementation checklist!

Crafting an Effective Customer Journey Map:

Creating a customer journey map is a meticulous process. It involves collecting customer data, identifying key touchpoints, and analyzing the journey’s stages.

Through this, businesses gain a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior, enabling them to tailor experiences that resonate with customers.

How To: Crafting an Effective Customer Journey Map

Navigating the Digital Landscape:

In an era defined by digital transformation, customer journey mapping transcends traditional boundaries. The integration of AI and automation optimizes the customer journey, offering personalized experiences and predicting customer needs.

CJM also addresses the challenge of omnichannel journeys, where customers interact with brands through various channels seamlessly.

Reflect and Respond

Have you incorporated CJM in your business strategy? Cast your vote and see how others are leveraging this approach for better customer experiences.

Case Studies and Expert Insights:

Real-world success stories underscore the transformative power of CJM. Businesses across industries have leveraged CJM to drive enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Expert insights highlight the role of data analytics, alignment with business objectives, and the iterative nature of customer journey mapping for continuous improvement.

➡️ Quick Tip: Harnessing Data for Success

When delving into case studies and expert insights, pay special attention to how data analytics played a pivotal role in their success.

Gathering and analyzing customer data provides the foundation for accurate customer journey mapping.

This data-driven approach allows you to pinpoint exact pain points, tailor experiences, and drive meaningful results.

Remember, the insights you glean from data can be the key to unlocking your business’s journey towards customer-centric excellence.

The Future of Customer Journey Mapping:

As AI gains prominence, CJM is poised for an even greater impact. 

AI-driven personalization will enable brands to anticipate customer preferences, enhancing engagement. 

Predictive customer insights will allow businesses to proactively address customer needs. Amid automation, preserving the human touch remains paramount.

Implementing Customer Journey Mapping:

Executing an effective CJM strategy requires meticulous planning. 

From defining clear steps to utilizing tools and technologies that facilitate a customer journey map, businesses can optimize the journey. 

Measuring CJM’s success through metrics such as customer satisfaction and retention validates its impact.

📈 Imagine the Impact:

Picture this: Business A embraced CJM and saw a 20% increase in customer satisfaction. Explore how CJM could revolutionize your customer interactions.

Unveiling the Power of Customer Journey Mapping and CRM Integration

In the dynamic landscape of modern business, the synergy between Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems is a game-changer.

As businesses strive to create seamless and personalized customer experiences, the integration of CJM and CRM emerges as a strategic approach to elevating customer engagement and loyalty.

Understanding Customer Journey Mapping with CRM Integration

CRM holds the key to customer data, preferences, and behavior, while CJM sheds light on the emotional landscape of each interaction.”

Imagine a tapestry that weaves together every customer interaction, touchpoint, and engagement.

This is where CJM comes into play. CJM is more than a visual representation; it’s a compass that guides businesses to understand the intricacies of a customer’s experience throughout their entire journey.

Integrating CJM with a robust CRM system adds depth to this understanding.

CRM holds the key to customer data, preferences, and behavior, while CJM sheds light on the emotional landscape of each interaction. 

Merging these insights empowers businesses to deliver not just personalized experiences, but emotionally resonant ones.

Crafting Seamless Experiences at Every Touchpoint

With CJM and CRM integration, businesses gain the ability to craft seamless experiences at every touchpoint.

Imagine a customer who had a positive interaction with a support agent; their subsequent interactions can reflect this history.

CRM data enables personalization that acknowledges the individual’s journey, while CJM ensures that the emotional context is considered.

Have you ever experienced a seamless customer journey across different touchpoints?

Elevating customer engagement and loyalty.

In the age of empowered customers, engagement is the currency of loyalty.

CJM and CRM integration allow businesses to predict needs, preempt challenges, and exceed expectations.

When a customer feels understood and valued, loyalty follows suit.

From Insights to Action: Navigating the Path Ahead

As businesses navigate the path ahead, CJM and CRM integration guide decision-making. 

The insights gained from CJM help refine CRM strategies, while CRM data informs CJM refinements.

This cyclical synergy transforms customer experiences from transactional to transformational .

💡Pro Tips for Pro Results:

Uncover expert strategies to amplify CJM’s impact. Learn how to integrate AI analytics and harness CJM insights for hyper-targeted marketing.

The journey concludes with a deeper understanding of CJM’s significance.

The fusion of Customer Journey Mapping and CRM holds transformative potential. 

By recognizing CJM as a strategic tool, businesses can elevate customer experiences, foster loyalty, and drive sustainable growth.

It’s the ability to create not just customers, but advocates; not just interactions, but meaningful connections.

As your business forges ahead, remember that the journey toward customer-centricity is enriched by the harmonious convergence of CJM and CRM. 

This integration isn’t just a strategy; it’s a testament to your commitment to delivering experiences that resonate and endure. 🛤️ #LeadNicely

Crafting a customer journey map is a strategic endeavor that allows businesses to visualize and optimize customer interactions. Follow these steps to create a comprehensive and effective customer journey map:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

Clearly outline your goals for creating a customer journey map. Are you seeking to enhance customer satisfaction, identify pain points, or improve specific touchpoints? Understanding your objectives will guide your mapping process.

Step 2: Gather Customer Data

Collect relevant data about customer interactions, behaviors, preferences, and feedback. Utilize sources such as surveys, customer reviews, and analytics tools to gain insights into their journey.

Step 3: Identify Customer Personas

Create detailed customer personas that represent different segments of your target audience. Each persona should encompass demographic information, goals, challenges, and preferences.

Step 4: Map the Journey Stages

Divide the customer journey into distinct stages, such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, and Post-Purchase. Define the key actions and touchpoints within each stage.

Step 5: Identify Touchpoints

List all touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, both online and offline. This could include website visits, social media interactions, customer service calls, and more.

Step 6: Analyze Emotions and Pain Points

At each touchpoint, consider the emotions and sentiments customers might experience. Identify pain points where customers encounter challenges or frustrations.

Step 7: Connect Touchpoints and Stages

Connect touchpoints to form a seamless journey across stages. This helps in understanding the flow of interactions and potential drop-off points.

Step 8: Prioritize Key Touchpoints

Identify touch points that significantly impact consumer decisions and perceptions. These touchpoints are pivotal in shaping the overall experience.

Step 9: Gather Insights from Data

Analyze the collected data to gain insights into customer behavior. What motivates them to take action? What obstacles do they face? These insights guide the optimization process.

Step 10: Create Visual Representations

Craft a visual representation of the customer journey map. This could be a diagram, flowchart, or interactive visualization, depending on your preferences.

Step 11: Walk in the Customer’s Shoes

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and simulate the journey from their perspective. This helps in identifying gaps and areas for improvement.

Step 12: Define Actionable Improvements

Based on the insights gathered, define actionable improvements for each touchpoint. Determine how you can enhance positive experiences and address pain points.

Step 13: Align with CRM and Marketing

Integrate the customer journey map with your CRM and marketing strategies. Use the insights to personalize interactions and communications.

Step 14: Test and Refine

Implement the proposed improvements and monitor their impact. Collect feedback from customers and iterate on the journey map as needed.

Creating an effective customer journey map requires careful consideration, data analysis, and a commitment to enhancing customer experiences. By understanding their journey, you can tailor interactions that resonate, drive conversions, and foster lasting relationships.

Latest Posts

A Simplified Guide to Online Reputation Management

CRM Trends: The Key to Business Growth in 2024

How to Measure and Improve Your Online Presence (The Metrics that Matter)

The CRM Revolution: How Nonprofits Can Maximize Fundraising Efforts

Making Your Mark: The Power of Branding for Online Presence

• Mon - Thurs | 7AM - 6PM
• Tampa Bay Area, Florida
• Website Design/Development
• Search Engine Optimization

OTHER SERVICES

• Email Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click

QUICK LINKS

Copyright © 2024 Lead Nicely Inc.

• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure

Do You Want Your Brand to Be More Visible and Accessible to Your Customers?

Answer these 5 Simple Questions , and we will set you up for an elevated online presence with exact focus platforms and brand messaging.

We help brands take more online territory by extending their digital footprint.

What is a Customer Journey Map and How to Make One: A Step-by-Step Guide

A journey map, often referred to as a customer journey map or user journey map, is a visual representation that outlines the various steps and interactions a person or a customer goes through when engaging with a product, service, or organization. These maps are designed to provide a comprehensive view of the entire journey from the user’s or customer’s perspective, allowing businesses and organizations to better understand the experiences, emotions, and pain points of their users or customers.

How to Gain Valuable Insights from Your Customers with a Customer Journey Map

How to create a customer journey map, the customer journey mapping process, an example of a customer journey map, final thought.

Key components of a journey map typically include:

• Stages: The journey is divided into distinct stages or phases, which can vary depending on the context but often include stages like awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.
• Touchpoints: These are the specific points of interaction between the user or customer and the product, service, or organization. Touchpoints can be both digital (e.g., website, app) and physical (e.g., in-store visit, phone call).
• Actions: The actions or activities that the user or customer takes at each touchpoint are documented. This may include researching products, making a purchase, seeking customer support, and more.
• Emotions: Emotions experienced by the user or customer are often included to provide insight into their feelings and reactions at different points along the journey. Understanding these emotions can help businesses tailor their interactions to create more positive experiences.
• Pain Points: Any difficulties, frustrations, or challenges that users or customers encounter during their journey are noted as pain points. Identifying these pain points is crucial for making improvements and enhancing the overall experience.
• Opportunities: Opportunities for improvement, innovation, or enhancement are also highlighted. These are areas where organizations can make changes to create better experiences or provide additional value.
• User or Customer Persona: In some journey maps, a user or customer persona is included to represent the typical characteristics and needs of the individuals going through the journey. This helps in personalizing the journey map.
• Data and Insights: Relevant data, research findings, and customer feedback may be incorporated to support the observations and conclusions made in the journey map.

Journey maps are valuable tools for businesses and organizations in several ways:

• Understanding the Customer: They help in gaining a deeper understanding of how customers engage with products and services, their needs, and their pain points.
• Improving Customer Experience: By identifying pain points and opportunities, organizations can make strategic improvements to enhance the overall customer experience.
• Alignment: Journey maps can be used to align various teams and departments within an organization to ensure a consistent and customer-centric approach.
• Innovation: They can inspire innovation by highlighting areas where new features, services, or strategies could be implemented to better meet customer needs.
• Decision Making: Journey maps provide valuable insights that can inform decision-making processes related to marketing, product development, and customer support.

Overall, journey maps are a powerful tool for businesses and organizations to empathize with their users or customers and make data-driven decisions to optimize the customer experience.

Customer journey maps are invaluable tools for businesses and organizations because they offer numerous benefits and insights that help improve the overall customer experience and drive business success. Here are some of the key reasons why customer journey maps are important:

• Understanding the Customer Perspective: Customer journey maps provide a detailed view of the customer’s perspective, helping organizations empathize with their customers. This understanding is crucial for tailoring products, services, and interactions to meet customer needs and expectations.
• Identifying Pain Points: Journey maps highlight pain points and challenges that customers face during their interactions with a brand. Recognizing these pain points allows organizations to address and resolve issues, ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction.
• Optimizing Touchpoints: By analyzing the touchpoints where customers engage with a brand, organizations can identify opportunities for improvement. This may involve streamlining processes, enhancing digital interfaces, or providing better training to customer-facing teams.
• Enhancing Customer Satisfaction: When organizations use journey maps to identify pain points and make improvements, it often results in a better overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal, repeat customers and advocates for the brand.
• Personalization and Segmentation: Journey maps help in creating personalized experiences for different customer segments or personas. By tailoring interactions to specific needs and preferences, organizations can increase engagement and conversion rates.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Customer journey maps are collaborative tools that involve various departments within an organization, including marketing, sales, customer support, product development, and more. This alignment ensures a consistent and coordinated approach to customer interactions.
• Innovation and Product Development: Insights from journey maps can drive innovation by highlighting areas where new products or services can be developed to better meet customer needs. It guides product development efforts toward customer-centric solutions.
• Reducing Customer Churn: By identifying pain points and addressing them proactively, organizations can reduce customer churn. When customers have a positive and frictionless experience, they are less likely to switch to competitors.
• Measuring and Tracking Progress: Journey maps provide a baseline for measuring and tracking improvements over time. Organizations can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the impact of changes and make data-driven decisions.
• Competitive Advantage: Businesses that prioritize the customer experience and use journey maps to continually refine it gain a competitive advantage. Exceptional customer experiences can set a brand apart in a crowded market.
• Enhanced Employee Engagement: Engaged employees who understand the customer journey and their role in it are more motivated to deliver exceptional service. Journey maps help employees see the bigger picture and their contribution to it.
• Adaptation to Changing Market Conditions: As market dynamics evolve, customer journey maps can be updated to reflect changing customer behaviors and preferences. This adaptability ensures that organizations stay relevant and responsive to customer needs.

In summary, customer journey maps serve as powerful tools for enhancing the customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, and driving business growth. By putting the customer at the center of their operations and decision-making processes, organizations can build lasting relationships and succeed in today’s competitive landscape.

Gaining valuable insights from your customers through a customer journey map involves a combination of research, analysis, and empathy. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to start the process by conducting user research:

1. Define Your Objectives: Begin by clearly defining your objectives for creating the customer journey map. What specific insights are you seeking? Are you looking to identify pain points, improve satisfaction, or optimize specific touchpoints?

2. Identify Your Target Audience: Determine which customer segments or personas you want to focus on. Your insights may vary depending on the characteristics and needs of different customer groups.

3. Gather Data: Collect relevant data from various sources to inform your journey map. This data can include:

• Surveys: Create surveys to collect quantitative data on customer preferences, satisfaction, and behaviors.
• Interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews with customers to gain qualitative insights into their experiences and emotions.
• Observation: Observe how customers interact with your product or service in real-life situations to understand their behaviors.
• Analytics: Analyze data from your website, app, or other digital platforms to uncover user behavior patterns.
• Customer Support Data: Review customer support tickets and inquiries to identify common issues and challenges.
• Feedback Forms: Analyze feedback forms, comments, and reviews from customers to identify recurring themes.

4. Create User Personas (If Applicable): Develop detailed user personas representing different customer segments. These personas should include demographic information, motivations, goals, and pain points.

5. Map the Customer Journey: Create a visual representation of the customer journey, including stages and touchpoints. Map out the customer’s interactions and experiences from initial awareness through post-purchase and beyond.

6. Document Insights: At each touchpoint, document key insights, observations, and data points. Include both quantitative data (e.g., satisfaction ratings) and qualitative data (e.g., customer comments and emotions).

7. Identify Pain Points: Pay special attention to pain points where customers encounter difficulties, frustrations, or obstacles. These are areas where immediate improvement can enhance the customer experience.

8. Highlight Opportunities: Identify opportunities where you can enhance the customer journey. These may involve introducing new features, communication channels, or support options to improve the overall experience.

9. Analyze Emotions: Consider the emotions customers experience at each touchpoint. Emotional data can provide insights into how customers feel during their interactions with your brand.

10. Prioritize Insights: Prioritize your insights based on their impact on the customer experience and alignment with your objectives. Focus on actionable insights that can drive meaningful improvements.

11. Share Insights and Collaborate: Share the customer journey map and insights with relevant teams and stakeholders within your organization. Collaborate with these teams to develop action plans for improvement.

12. Implement Changes: Execute the planned improvements and changes to address identified pain points and capitalize on opportunities. Monitor the impact of these changes on customer satisfaction and other relevant metrics.

13. Continuously Iterate: Customer journey mapping is an ongoing process. Regularly revisit the map and update it to reflect changing customer behaviors, preferences, and market conditions. Continuously gather new data and feedback to refine your insights.

Starting with user research is a critical first step in creating an effective customer journey map. By understanding your customers’ needs and experiences, you can develop a map that guides improvements and optimizations to enhance the overall customer experience.

The customer journey mapping process is a systematic approach to understanding and improving the customer experience. It involves several key steps to create a visual representation of the customer’s interactions with your product, service, or brand. Here’s a detailed overview of the customer journey mapping process:

• Define Objectives and Scope: Start by clearly defining the objectives you want to achieve with the customer journey map. Identify the specific aspects of the customer experience you want to explore and improve. Decide on the scope, which could be a specific user persona, product, service, or an end-to-end journey.
• Gather Data: Collect relevant data from various sources to inform your customer journey mapping process. This data may include customer feedback, surveys, interviews, analytics, support tickets, and any other sources of customer information. Ensure that your data reflects the chosen scope and objectives.
• Create User Personas (If Applicable): If you’re focusing on specific user personas, develop detailed personas that represent your target customers. Include demographic information, motivations, goals, pain points, and preferred communication channels.
• Identify Touchpoints: Determine the various touchpoints where customers interact with your brand, product, or service. These can include website visits, social media engagement, emails, phone calls, in-store visits, and more.
• Define Customer Journey Stages: Break down the customer journey into distinct stages or phases. Common stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase. Customize these stages to match your specific context and objectives.
• Map the Journey: Start creating the visual representation of the customer journey map. For each stage, map out the touchpoints, actions, emotions, and pain points that customers experience. Consider using a visual format, such as a timeline, flowchart, or infographic.
• Document Insights: As you map the journey, document key insights, observations, and data points at each touchpoint. This should include both quantitative and qualitative information, such as customer behavior, feedback, and emotional responses.
• Analyze Pain Points and Opportunities: Identify pain points where customers face challenges or frustrations, as well as opportunities where you can enhance the customer experience. Use the insights you’ve gathered to pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Prioritize and Plan Improvements: Prioritize the pain points and opportunities based on their impact on the customer experience and alignment with your objectives. Develop an action plan to address these areas, which may involve changes to processes, products, or communication strategies.
• Share and Collaborate: Share the customer journey map with relevant teams and stakeholders within your organization. Collaborate with these teams to ensure alignment and a unified approach to improving the customer experience.
• Implement and Test Changes: Execute the planned improvements and changes to the customer journey. Monitor the impact of these changes and gather feedback from customers to ensure they are effective.
• Iterate and Update: The customer journey map is not a one-time effort. Continuously revisit and update it to reflect changes in customer behavior, market dynamics, and your business offerings. Regularly gather new data and feedback to refine the map and make ongoing improvements.

Throughout the customer journey mapping process, the goal is to gain a deep understanding of your customers, identify pain points, and create a more customer-centric approach to your business. By following this systematic process, you can enhance the overall customer experience and drive business growth.

Creating a full customer journey map typically involves various stages, from initial awareness to post-purchase experiences. Below, I’ll provide a simplified example of a customer journey map for a hypothetical e-commerce business. Please note that real customer journey maps can be much more detailed and complex, tailored to the specific needs and objectives of the organization. This example serves as a basic illustration:

Customer Persona: Sarah, a tech-savvy millennial looking to purchase a new smartphone online.

Stage 1: Awareness

• Action: Click on the ad to learn more.
• Emotion: Curious and interested.
• Action: Reads reviews and watches YouTube videos.
• Emotion: Informed and engaged.

Stage 2: Consideration

• Action: Browse product listings, read specifications, and compare prices.
• Emotion: Evaluative and selective.
• Action: Asks questions about camera quality and delivery options.
• Emotion: Inquisitive and eager for assistance.

Stage 3: Purchase

• Action: Fill in shipping and payment details.
• Emotion: Anxious but ready to buy.
• Action: Check her email for the confirmation and delivery date.
• Emotion: Relieved and anticipatory.

Stage 4: Post-Purchase

• Action: Tracks the package as it’s in transit.
• Emotion: Excited and informed.
• Action: Inspect the product, set it up, and explore features.
• Emotion: Satisfied and delighted.
• Action: Write a positive review on the e-commerce website.
• Emotion: Engaged and appreciative.
• Action: Clicks on links to explore recommended accessories.
• Emotion: Interested in enhancing the product.

This is a simplified example of a customer journey map. In reality, customer journey maps can be much more detailed, including additional stages, touchpoints, and layers of data such as user emotions, pain points, and metrics. The level of complexity and the specific touchpoints you include depends on the nature of your business and your research findings. The goal is to provide a comprehensive view of the customer’s interactions and emotions throughout their journey.

Explore the extensive collection of over 150 carefully crafted Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples and this Customer Journey Map Template .

In the dynamic landscape of modern business, understanding and optimizing the customer journey is paramount. As we conclude this step-by-step guide to crafting effective customer journey maps, remember that these maps are not just diagrams; they are invaluable tools that bridge the gap between your brand’s vision and your customers’ expectations.

By empathizing with your customers, conducting thorough research, and following a structured approach, you can create journey maps that drive meaningful change. These maps pave the way for enhanced customer experiences, improved satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.

In a world where customers hold the key to success, crafting exceptional journeys isn’t just an option—it’s a strategic imperative. So, embark on this journey of understanding, adaptability, and customer-centricity, and watch your business flourish in an age where the customer is truly king.

#CustomerJourneyMap #CXStrategy #CustomerExperience #JourneyMapping #UserResearch #CustomerEmpathy #CustomerInsights #StepByStepGuide #BusinessStrategy #CustomerCentric #UXDesign #DigitalMarketing #CustomerEngagement #MarketingStrategy #CustomerSuccess #UserExperience #CustomerFeedback #CustomerUnderstanding #CustomerSatisfaction #DataDrivenDecisions

Related Post

The top 5 ui ux design mistakes you must avoid, how to lead ux teams like a pro: top 7 strategies for building high-performance and collaboration, unleash the power of ui/ux to create captivating user experiences, leave a reply cancel reply, trending post, scrum 101: what is agile methodology and how to use it for business success, how to master time management for project leadership, unleashing the power of scrum: how agile methodology is revolutionizing business, how to achieve project management success with this proven formula.