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Social media customer journey: from follower to brand advocate

On average, people spend two and a half hours a day scrolling through social networks and media. That’s way more than customers would ever devote to any brand’s website or company’s blog. And the chances of attracting someone's attention on social media are much greater than on the endless Internet. So, not surprisingly, businesses become increasingly interested in learning more about social media customer journeys, smoothing those, and ultimately driving sales. 

However, the competition between brands in the social media space is huge, and the Unfollow button is always at hand. Therefore, it’s crucial to grasp the needs of your audience, track their problems and solve them in time while delivering the best possible experience at different stages of their journey with your brand. And a magnifying glass through which you can consider the smallest flaws in customer experience and understand what to do about it can be customer journey mapping . 

• 1 Social media customer journey mapping initiative 
• 2 Social media customer journey persona
• 3.1 Awareness
• 3.2 First page view/ Checking out content
• 3.3 Following the page
• 3.4 Getting back to the page
• 3.5 Commenting/ Asking questions
• 3.6 Interacting with the Stories
• 3.7 Direct messaging/ Reporting an issue
• 3.8 Choosing a product
• 3.9 Making an order
• 3.10 Waiting for the order
• 3.11 Getting the order
• 3.12 Refund
• 3.13 Re-ordering
• 3.14 Leaving feedback
• 3.15 Recommending the brand
• 4 Putting everything together 
• 5 What to do next
• 6 Wrapping up

Social media customer journey mapping initiative 

Most likely, your business already has a social network page or even more than one. Perhaps you simply repost news from the official site into it, using the same pictures. Or maybe turn your social media page into a team live journal that lets customers look behind the scenes of their favorite brand. Or you have reversed your social media into delicious showcases and don’t require followers to go somewhere to make an order by accepting those right there. 

Another important thing is what kind of customer experience your audience gets and what goal you are pursuing. Any journey mapping initiative is all about finding a balance between the customer experience and business goal(s) by taking an up-close look at your customer's journey.

Let's start by setting a goal, which could be:

• Increasing the number of new subscribers (audience growth);
• Lengthening the time that followers spend in your account (retention);
• Boosting activity on the page (comments, likes, sharing, interaction with stories, etc.);
• Raising the number of orders;
• Doubling the number of repeat orders;
• Getting more positive reviews and marks in the subscribers’ stories ;
• You name it.

You can change your sales strategy the way you like, but it won’t work until the experience is lame. To understand exactly where it sags, after defining the goal of your mapping initiative, you need to decide on the persona whose experience affects your business most, learn what their journey looks like, and understand what needs to be improved.

Social media customer journey persona

At first glance, any audience seems fairly homogeneous, except that the demographic characteristics may vary. But let's approach it from a different angle, namely behavioral patterns. Why? Your customer may fall into one demographic pale, but their age or location doesn’t determine their shopping behavior, how they decide, or why they choose one product over another. That's why it's better to group customers according to similar behavior and its nuances (frustrations, goals, backgrounds, etc.), tailoring your service to them.

Let's say you have an indie cosmetics brand you promote on Instagram. You also have a landing page, but the social media page is where you get the most sales. But do you actually know why people buy your products? Some people look for a gift, others purchase rare items for a collection. There are customers who buy for daily use and customers who just can’t pass by a cute package.

In addition, your clients may share the same goal that is based on different motivations and frustrations. For instance, there’s Beth, who doesn’t care about product appearance. She’s all about its properties. She also hates when brands put a small thing into a huge box just to impress. There’s also Nina, who also values product properties more than other characteristics. Yet she loves her purchases to be wrapped up intricately, with ribbons and all that jazz. It doesn't look like one persona, does it?

To collect data that will help you segment the audience into personas::

• Communicate with customer-facing colleagues (sales managers, support agents, marketers, researchers, SMM managers, etc.). 
• Conduct research, polls, and surveys.
• Put together your observations and assumptions.
• Run interviews with the clients.
• Find out from leaving customers the reason behind their actions.

When analyzing the data you've obtained, pay attention to the behavioral attributes mentioned above. Most likely, you will end up with several personas. For instance:

• A young beauty influencer, a palette collector, a beginner in the makeup world, and a makeup artist. 
• Someone will have a conservative background of expensive brands with muted colors and light textures. 
• A bored student who’s fed up with the monotony of the mass market and wants to try something new. 
• A young teen who wants to try out their first makeup using your brand. 

For some, the abundance of colors and shades is a motivating factor; for others, it’s the other way around.

Even if you have multiple personas, this is okay. You don’t have to bend over backwards and cover all their journeys. You will need only those that affect your business here and now and correlate with the goal of the journey mapping initiative.

What goals are we talking about? For example, you want to understand why customers don’t come back after the first order on your Instagram account. Then we need to consider the journey of a new customer who buys cosmetics for personal use instead of a one-time gift. This way, you will cover all stages of the first purchase cycle and understand which of them contain difficulties that subsequently lead to a customer drop-off.

In order for a persona to become visual and evoke empathy in your team, you need to turn it into something like this:

As you see, it's  a real person-like profile, with a name, photo, and essential data. By looking at such a profile, you will be able to tell for sure who your persona is, what they need, where to contact them better, and what brands are best for co-promotion, among other things. You may also indicate their personality type to get even more insights into their behavioral patterns.

Once you’re done, the journey time starts. 

Social media customer journey map

Any social media customer journey map has a scope. For instance, if you want to analyze the journey of a persona who follows your IG account for months and likes your posts but never purchases from you, such a map doesn’t need Purchasing or Refund stages. 

Other cases may involve reviewing all the stages from Awareness to First Purchase and maybe some time after that. Especially when you want to find out why your customers unfollow you or don’t repeat their purchases. 

If you want to optimize the social media customer journey of a regular buyer, you would want to capture everything from choosing a product to buying and getting their order. If you are concerned about dropping retention, then you’d better focus on the stages that come before the actual purchase.

Here are some stages you might use for a social media customer journey of any scope:

• First page view;
• Checking out content;
• Following the page;
• Getting back to the page;
• Commenting;
• Asking questions;
• Interacting with the Stories;
• Direct messaging;
• Reporting an issue;
• Choosing a product;
• Making an order;
• Waiting for the order;
• Getting the order;
• Leaving feedback;
• Recommending the brand.

At this stage, your customer learns you exist. It may happen offline when chatting with friends, seeing a QR-code ad in the physical store, scrolling the recommendations on Instagram, checking out your promo Story, etc. 

Possible problems: 

• Not catchy advertising that people scroll through or swipe.
• You are mentioned by your potential client’s friends, but negatively.
• The QR code doesn’t work, so your persona can’t go to your account.
• Your advertising channels don’t match the persona’s favorite channels.
• You don't use your persona's vocab and don’t hit their pains.

Experience smoothers to consider:

• Put the name of your IG account under the QR code. Even if it doesn’t work, a person will have an opportunity to find you manually. 
• Find out other channels your persona uses and go there to present yourself and your main social media page.  

First page view/ Checking out content

At this stage(s), the persona visits your account for the first time. And as you know, you cannot create the first impression twice. Moreover, 88% of viewers don’t return to a page if they have a terrible experience. Potential clients may leave you right here and for a reason, or be immediately charmed into a subscription, or spend some time checking the page out and making sure you’re worthy of their time. 

• People came through misleading advertisements (e.g., your persona followed the link to see a wide choice of autumn palettes yet saw only two theme palettes on your page).
• You present the information chaotically.
• Header info doesn’t meet the persona’s needs (e.g., no shipping worldwide).
• Poor visual content: low-quality photos, dark videos, too many filters used, etc.
• Lots of spam in the comments, meaning the owners don’t really care about their page.
• Too many posts are published within a day, so your followers’ Feeds are flooded with your brand.
• Pin a welcome post with essential information to the top of your Feed. 
• Create Highlights with helpful Stories and Guides with topic-related content. 
• Add the link created with Taplink or a similar tool. So the recent visitor may find all the needed links to your landing page, download a presentation, go to your YouTube channel, etc. 
• Develop a unique brand concept that unites your content, products, and the way you interact with your followers. For example, you may be a brand inspired by astronomy. Your cosmetic products are stars that form constellations, a.k.a. collections. All the followers should choose their astrological house with personalized recommendations. Such a page will always arouse interest.

Following the page

Now the persona decides to click on the Follow button. That’s just a second of their social media customer journey with you, but you certainly can thank the new follower for subscribing to your page and prove that their subscription is totally worth it.

• Send a welcome digital gift (a makeup tutorial, one-time discount for purchase within a month, your presentation, or just a cheerful message). 

Getting back to the page

Once the persona follows your page, they visit it from time to time, see your content on the Feed or in the Stories. You may increase the followers’ engagement with interactive elements such as stickers, polls, question forms, etc. Suggest that they choose shades for new palettes and talk yourself with your audience in the comments. 

• New content appears too rarely, so the persona forgets about you in between.
• You publish only posts, while the persona prefers to watch Stories.
• You are using too much Photoshop and filters on your images.
• You are not making video content.
• Your account doesn’t have a concept or content plan.
• The items posted on your Feed don’t have a full description, including prices.
• Thank new followers for their likes in the Direct messages. You don’t have to do that every time, even a one-time “thank you” will be appreciated. 

Commenting/ Asking questions

Your persona starts interacting with your content. That is a good sign and a road to a higher engagement level, but the path can be bumpy. 

• You ignore or just miss the followers’ questions in the DM or under the posts. 
• The community keeps silent, and no one communicates in the comments.
• Make a FAQ and add it as a post or make a series of stories with them and collect them in a Highlight.
• Regularly suggest followers ask you questions in the Stories and publish answers to them both in Stories and separate posts.

Interacting with the Stories

Many Instagram users are more likely to watch Stories than scroll their Feeds. Actually, 1/3 of the most viewed IG Stories are made by businesses . So share your posts in Stories in case the audience missed those in the Feed. 

• Non-clickable links.
• Poorly chosen background or font, which makes your Stories hard to read.
• The text covers the picture that the persona wants to look closer at.
• The brand asks questions but doesn’t react to the answers.
• Too many stories are posted per day.
• You raffle a promo code among the first responders to stories when the persona is already or still asleep. 
• Come up with story topics that you will stick to day by day. Followers will know which day to expect new swatches, and when thematic collections or ruffles will take place.
• When you get reactions to your stories, acknowledge those with at least emojis. That will give your followers the feeling their actions matter and encourage you to do more. 

Direct messaging/ Reporting an issue

At some point, the follower will send you a direct message to ask for something or share their feedback. Regularly check the Requests tab so as not to keep your new followers waiting. This problem, by the way, can be solved at the Following stage with a welcoming message from you. Because if you communicate with a follower previously, messages from them will automatically go to the Primary folder.

• Instead of a direct answer, the person receives intrusive sales offers.
• Long wait for a response.
• Rudeness from a brand representative.
• An audio message is an answer to the textual one.
• Several brand employees are involved in the conversation and constantly ask to repeat the question instead of rereading the entire correspondence.
• Write a policy for communication with followers so that the messages from your team are empathic and not too salesy. Determine the frequency with which you will remind the potential client about yourself or ask for feedback on your page and your brand from them.
• Create a table available for anyone who needs it to list the followers you contact and on what issues. So colleagues can easily support any conversation started.

Choosing a product

The follower thinks about buying something from you and starts choosing an item. Or maybe something has already caught your persona’s eye, and they just got ready to finally order their precious . It will be great if your account has Highlights with items in stock (prices included), or separately grouped posts where one can find this information. Plus, there should be up-to-date data under the posts in case the product is out of stock.

• It’s not clear what items are in stock or when the restock will be.
• The persona has to ask for the prices in direct messages.
• Swatches are too polished or changed in a graphic editor, which sets unrealistic expectations and makes it difficult to understand whether the product suits a particular client.
• There are no texture details in the post description. The client doesn’t understand whether their brushes can work with your shadows, whether your foundation will suit their dry skin, or whether your blush requires a setting powder.
• Promo videos are filmed with models of only one type of appearance.
• No comparison swatches. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how two pink lipsticks differ if you don’t see their swatches on the same one hand. Or how similar the new chocolate shades are to last year's collection.
• When you present a product, show it on different skin types. Describe all its properties and what kind of user it may suit best. Repost in the Stories real swatches of your products, so the clients know what to expect in real life. 
• One day per week, encourage your followers to ask for your advice under a dedicated post or in the Stories. You may suggest shades that complement followers’ appearance or match their favorite music. It's a promotional opportunity for you and a fun game for your audience at the same time.  

Making an order

Your follower knows what they want and makes an order. How can they do it? There may be different ways: you will ask them to email your sales manager, redirect them to your landing page with a purchasing form, or accept an order in direct messages. The critical thing to remember is that the channel must be handy for your persona and lead the customer to purchase in the shortest way.

• The persona cannot pay the way you want.
• The chosen payment method doesn’t work for some reason.
• The sales manager doesn’t respond to the request for a long time, meanwhile the desired product goes out of stock.
• The persona doesn't receive a confirmation message or email stating that the payment went through.
• The final price is higher because of the packaging.
• No free shipping, even for expensive orders.
• When receiving an order, ask the customer for what purpose the client makes a purchase. If it’s for themselves, pick up samples suiting their appearance. If it’s a present, add a gift package and make sure there are no pricing stickers left.
• Use the product booking system so that the client doesn’t depend on the speed of the manager’s work and can get the desired product, no matter what. If during negotiations with the manager, the buyer decides not to cancel their order, it will return to stock again.

Waiting for the order

The order is on its way to the buyer. And here your persona would like to be informed of their purchase’s fate. For example, by following the package using the tracking app. Or by receiving messages from you at every delivery stage if the shipping company doesn’t share this information with third parties.

• Delivery is postponed because of the brand (many orders, few packers) or the delivery company (they embellished the deadlines).
• A long delivery because the client lives far away.
• Give the customer the opportunity to choose the express delivery option if they are willing to pay for it and reduce the waiting time. Or pay for the express shipping yourself if the client has placed an order for a certain amount of money.

Getting the order

The client receives a long-awaited parcel. Often, this is the brightest and most joyful moment of their journey. If everything is done right, a new purchase will happen soon. But we don’t live in a fairy tale. In the real world, anything may happen during delivery. 

• An error at the assembling stage may lead to the fact that not the entire order is in the package.
• The order got damaged.
• The person received someone else's order.
• Expectation vs. reality: a product in real life differs significantly from promotional photos and videos.
• There’s not a single sampler in the package. Modern buyers expect such little compliments from brands and get upset when they don't get any. 
• Print a refund/return policy with the contact details to ask for help in case of some issues and add it to the package. Your customers will highly appreciate this gesture of care, even if everything is okay with the order. Plus, not all buyers read the company's policy regarding such situations when ordering something via social media pages, so they may rashly write a negative review without even contacting the brand. 

If there's something wrong with the order, your client will probably want some compensation for the money spent, long waiting, and shattered hopes. You, in turn, may do a refund, send a new product, or offer a significant discount for the next purchase. It's good when clients have a choice in such situations, so they feel that you really care about them.

• You return the money for your products, but the client still has to pay for the transportation service. 
• The client lives far away and they have to wait several weeks for a package from you.
• Money is stuck in the system because of the bank’s fault.
• The client is charged with additional expenses (for example, customs clearance).
• The client wants the same product, but you don’t have it in stock anymore.
• When you send a new package, add a little present as your excuse. Check the client’s likes on your posts to identify what products they like most and choose your gift among these items. 
• Don’t hush up the situation. Instead, turn it into a case for stories that will highlight that you are taking your client’s side in unpleasant situations and meeting the client’s needs. When brands admit their failures and act on those, it makes a more powerful impact on their client's hearts when pure success.  

Re-ordering

The customer returns for another purchase. They already know the process, communicated with the sales manager, and adjusted their expectations to your service. But changes to the Instagram interface, your team, product lines, and pricing can turn repeat buying into a whole new experience.

• The new manager communicates completely differently. Your client is used to casual communication with jokes, while the new employee answers dryly and formally.
• The price of products or shipping has gone up, and you forgot to tell the client about it before the payment.
• For a long time, there has been no restock of the desired item.
• Launch a cumulative system of reward points for your clients to redeem for exclusive products that can’t be bought. So each next purchase of your client will bring them some kind of profit and encourage them to return.

Leaving feedback

Having formed their opinion, customers accumulate complaints and enthusiasm about your brand that they can share right on social media pages. However, not everyone is so open and not everyone may write reviews on cosmetics because of their blog’s concept. For instance, it will be weird to find a new concealer review on the page of a surgeon). 

Also, not every client will praise you, but having honest reviews from real people is a big deal that wins potential customers’ hearts. So repost even negative reviews and ask regular customers to share their honest opinion.

• A customer wants to share their feedback but doesn’t know how to do it. 
• No one knows what happens with feedback, or whether the brand cares. For example, someone reported a defective batch, and the brand, even if they discontinued the batch , didn’t let the client know about it.
• No one responds to feedback, even with an emoji reaction, although you see that someone read your message. 
• The brand doesn’t accept criticism and answers only to positive messages from the followers.
• A brand blocks a customer after they post a critical review in their IG account or the brand’s account.
• When using someone’s feedback to improve customer experience, let this person know what exactly you learned from their message and how you put this knowledge into action. For example, a follower suggested reorganizing the content on your page or prompted you to collect certain stories in a Highlight. Let them know you used their idea (DM or tag them in the Stories with this news). 
• Share your clients’ feedback in the Stories if they allow it. It will encourage others to share theirs. 

Recommending the brand

It’s when your customers promote or sink you down when communicating with family, friends, and even random people. Remember that a satisfied client is one of the best promotional channels, while even one dissatisfied client can ruin your reputation on review websites, local forums, and among their friends. 

• Your brand doesn’t have pages on theme review websites.
• Thank your customers, give them a discount or digital products made by your brand, starting a positive chain reaction around your company.

Putting everything together 

When backed up with actual data, a journey map is a tool to help you improve customer experience. And it’s a visual tool. 

So when building one, you would want to describe a persona's goals, expectations, actions, include some quotes from interviews or customer feedback to support what you have on the map, highlight where, when, and through which channels the interaction with you occurs, illustrate the emotional journey to better understand your persona’s experience at each stage, show interactions with other parties involved, and storyboards that will tell your persona’s story without words. In your map, you may also add screenshots, embed code, and anything else that seems right in your business case. Anything to make your map easy to comprehend and explain the real journey of your social media customer, as well as their experience with you. 

Here’s what you may have in the end:

What to do next

Customer journeys will be as long as you are running a business, changing over time, and requiring new solutions and approaches from you. So it makes sense to return to the maps again and again, updating those with recent data.

Ways to reap insights and benefits using the social media customer journey map:

• Run a journey mapping session where you and your team will enrich the existing map with new insights.
• Organize an ideation workshop to come up with ideas on customer experience improvement.
• Conduct a strategic session to form an action plan based on the journey map.
• Gather to turn the journey map into a service blueprint to review the backend processes needed for a better customer experience.
• Build a TO-BE social media customer journey map to visually capture a desired customer journey and go for it.
• Use your map to onboard new team members, introducing them to your personas and their journeys.

Wrapping up

Social networks have long been a part of our lives, and sometimes it’s easier to get someone’s attention online than offline, where everyone is still looking at the screens of their gadgets. 

The journeys of customers are becoming mixed, flowing from the digital to the physical world and back. And the competition intensifies because the Internet is conditionally endless, promotion algorithms change all the time, and all failures remain forever in the network, scaring off a new audience. In such conditions, one should keep abreast of customer experience, be empathic, and timely respond to customers’ issues and needs.

Ready to delve deeper into your followers’ social media customer journey with our ready-to-go template full of actionable tips?

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Never seen followers’ experience as a social media customer journey. Or as a journey at all, you know. I don’t sell through social media, but now I’m going to review what my followers go through while reading me.

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What is a customer journey map and how to make your own [examples included]

Written by by Kiran Shahid

Published on  November 2, 2023

Reading time  12 minutes

Do you know what your customers see and do before they purchase from you?

They see your ads, interact with you on social media and explore your website before they buy. All these interactions—from the first ad impression to every “Please help” DM customers send—define your customer journey. To keep up with it all and better inform your social media marketing strategy , create a customer journey map as a blueprint to help you understand your customers at each stage.

Let’s explore what customer journey mapping is and how it helps your brand.

Social Customer Care by Sprout Social

What is customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of each point of interaction your customers have with your company. You can style the map like a flowchart, timeline, table or even on sticky notes.

Creating the map is a great internal exercise. Along the way, you might find pain points or touchpoints you didn’t know existed. A basic customer journey map includes the buying stages (and support touchpoints) a customer goes through.

More detailed maps include:

• actions your customers take
• good and bad emotions your customers experienced
• departments involved in customer touchpoints
• content types you serve your customers
• solutions to pain points

What is a customer touchpoint?

A touchpoint on the customer journey map is the point of interaction a customer has with your brand. It doesn’t need to be a two-way interaction. Seeing a social media ad, getting a branded newsletter and asking a friend for a product recommendation are all touchpoints.

Customers may experience emotions and actions at touchpoints. When someone asks for product recommendations, people might mention your brand. You might not serve that recommendation to them directly but someone still introduces you to a potential customer.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

A customer journey map puts the customer first by giving you a deeper understanding of how your customers interact with your brand. This enable you to make better decisions and improve customer experiences.

When coupled with social media market research , they help brands:

• Provide an overview of the resources your customers use . This helps determine the ROI of customer-centric engagement and service. For example, if blogs are your highest traffic sources, investing more in those channels makes sense.
• Identify content gaps . Pain points without solutions are an excellent source for content ideation and development . If customers need help with a specific product issue, for example, but find limited guidance, create in-depth video tutorials to address this pain point.
• Identify inefficiencies . Maybe some processes are repetitive, or some solutions cause more friction. If your customers have trouble checking out due to a complicated form, for example, simplify it to reduce cart abandonment rates.
• Generate marketing campaign ideas . A clear understanding of customer motivations and journey stages creates targeted campaigns. You can provide them with relevant content and incentives to move them closer to a purchase.
• Guide multiple departments. Streamline content creation, social customer care strategy and messaging optimization across every touchpoint. Departments use the customer journey map as a central reference to ensure a consistent and customer-focused approach.
• Enhance customer communication . Customer journey maps reveal critical touchpoints, like social media interactions, for timely and meaningful engagement. In fact, The Sprout Social Index™ shows 51% of customers believe the most memorable brands on social respond to customers.

Every business and industry has its unique customer journey maps, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Recently, our social team talked about using social media for the customer journey in the auto industry. Watch the video below to hear their discussion on touchpoints, customer experience and how legacy brands are going beyond traditional tactics like targeted ads to tell their story.

It’s a great example of how industry-specific customer journey follows the fundamentals but also has touchpoints specific to them.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is like a detailed travel itinerary for your customer’s experience with your brand. It includes elements like:

1. The buying process

The buying process is the step-by-step path a customer follows to make a purchase decision. It tells you where customers drop off or face obstacles during making purchases.

Use prospecting tools, content management systems (CMS) and behavior analytics tools to gather data. Facebook Shops, Instagram Shopping and TikTok Shop data also provide valuable insights into how customers find products and engage with content via social commerce .

Pro tip : Categorize the journey into stages like awareness, consideration and decision to map these steps horizontally on the customer journey map.

Don’t forget to integrate feedback mechanisms, such as customer surveys or user testing. These offer qualitative insights into the buying process. Understanding the “why” behind customer behavior can be as important as knowing the “what.”

2. Emotions

Emotions show how customers feel at different touchpoints in their interaction with your brand. Emotions heavily influence purchase decisions and brand loyalty which is exactly why it’s so important to include them.

Think about it: When someone has a great experience with your brand and feels happy, they’re more likely to buy from you again. On the flip side, if they feel frustrated or unhappy, they’ll knock on your competitor’s door.

Use surveys or feedback forms to ask customers how they felt during their experience. You might have come across these smileys during your own shopping experience:

These scales are a convenient way to gauge how your customers feel at any point.

Pay attention to what they say on social media and in reviews. You can tell if they’re happy or upset by their tone.

Tools like Sprout Social use AI-driven sentiment analysis to dig into social listening data to give you insights on what people think about your brand.

These insights are handy when creating emotional marketing campaigns . When you know how customers feel, take actionable steps to solve any negative experiences and encourage positive ones.

3. User actions

User actions are the steps customers take when they interact with your brand. They include steps like visiting your website, clicking on a product, adding items to their cart or signing up for your newsletter.

Actions highlight what people do at each stage. Each of these actions tells you something about what customers are interested in and how close they are to making a purchase.

Analytics tools for your website or app are your best bet for such data. These tools show you which pages customers visit, what they click on and where they drop off.

Once you have this information, tailor your marketing efforts and content to align with the actions customers take at each stage.

4. User research

User research examines what customers search for or where they turn for information during the buying process. This part of the customer journey map helps you understand how customers gather information.

For example, in the awareness stage, buyers often rely on search engines like Google to research solutions to their problems. But it’s not just about where they go—it’s about what they’re looking for. Knowing their specific research topics allows you to address their pain points.

What’s the trick? Keep an eye on what customers search for online. Tracking keywords and phrases they use on search engines, as well as social media market research are good places to start.

Also, monitor discussions and conversations to get a deeper understanding of the questions, concerns and topics that are top-of-mind for your potential customers.

The key is to use this information to provide potential customers with what they need at each stage. Targeted content delivery positions your brand as a valuable source of information.

5. Solutions

This section outlines the actions and strategies your brand implements to address customer pain points and improve their overall experience.

It documents the specific solutions or improvements applied at each stage of the customer journey. These include steps like changes to website design that resolve issues and improve the customer experience.

It visualizes how your brand responds to customer needs and challenges at different touchpoints. Besides that, it’s a good reference to ensure your team implements the solutions and refines them to increase customer satisfaction.

What are the 7 steps to map the customer journey?

A strategic approach to building a map ensures you capture every touchpoint, anticipate customer desires and address potential pain points. Here are seven steps to build a journey map unique to your customers and business needs.

1. Set your goals

What do you want to get out of this process? And why does it matter to your business? Knowing your goals sets the stage for how you assemble your map.

Some examples of goals include:

• Identify the top three customer pain points. Use these pain points to create content.
• Understand customer interests and motivations to develop better products and services.
• Total the cost of customer interactions to set a better social media budget .

2. Decide on a customer journey map type

There are several different customer journey maps and each one has its advantages. When you decide which map to work with, you know which details to focus on.

These are four of the most common types of customer journey maps: current state, future state, day in the life and service blueprint. We’ll go further into detail on each one later on.

Understanding your goals and where your brand stands in its evolution will guide you in selecting the appropriate map type.

3. Create and define your customer personas

Which customers will you focus on? It’s difficult to map a customer journey if you don’t have a customer in mind. Customer personas are fictional characters that represent each of your target customer groups. They’re detailed with everything from demographics to interests to buying behavior.

If you’ve already created social media personas to understand your audience, you’re more than halfway there. But if you haven’t, then our buyer persona template  or Xtensio’s will be useful. To really get to know someone’s purchase decisions and shopping processes, interview existing customers.

Pro tip: If you have distinctively different personas—such as, if you serve both a B2C and B2B market—set up different customer journey maps.

4. Break it down: touchpoints and stages

The customer journey map is divided into stages that usually fit within the funnel illustrated above. List out the stages to begin. Next, list out the main customer touchpoints that exist for your company. When you’re done with both lists, place the touchpoints into the different stages.

To get even more detailed, assign department owners to each touchpoint. You can identify where certain social media channels fit into the mix. And, you can assign predicted customer sentiment or emotions to different stages of the journey. It’s up to you how detailed you want the map to be.

5. Gather data and customer feedback

You need rock-solid data on how customers interact with your brand to create an accurate customer journey map. Focus on these three aspects:

Analyze existing data

Jump into the data you already have—more specifically website performance, chats with customer support and sales records. This information can tell you loads about how customers act, what they like and what frustrates them.

This quantitative data offers a foundational perspective on how customers interact with your brand, helping you identify both strengths and areas of improvement.

Conduct customer interviews

Get personal with one-on-one chats with customers. Ask them about their experiences, what bugs them and what they expect when they deal with your brand. These talks reveal qualitative insights that numbers can’t, like understanding the emotional and psychological aspects of the customer journey.

Create surveys and questionnaires

Turn to surveys and questionnaires for a more structured and broader approach to gathering feedback. Send them out to a bunch of customers and get structured feedback. Ask questions about their journey with your brand, how happy they are and where they think things could get better.

A combination of these three aspects gives you a 360-degree view of what your customers really experience with your brand.

6. Test and identify pain points

To confirm your customer touchpoints, you probably checked in on various departments and spoke to customers. This is great work but you need to take another step further: test it yourself. Go through the customer journey from the viewpoint of the customer.

While you’re testing the journey, keep an eye out for challenges, confusion or any frustrating moments. For example, if the website takes forever to load, if instructions aren’t clear or if reaching customer support is a headache, make detailed notes of these issues.

It’s also a smart move to collect feedback from both colleagues and customers who’ve gone through the journey. This way, you double-check and confirm your findings for a more complete picture.

A hands-on approach ensures your customer journey map reflects the real-world experience and equips you to take targeted actions to improve the overall customer journey.

7. Make changes and find solutions

So your map is complete. What’s next? You need to find or create solutions to the pain points you identified in the previous step.

Now’s the time to check in on the goals you established in step one and make the moves to smooth out the journey. Give yourself time and space to implement some of the solutions, whether a quarter or six months, and check back on the map to update it.

As you put these changes into action, make sure to watch your customer journey map closely. Don’t forget to keep it up to date to show the improvements and how they affect the customer experience. This keeps your customer journey map fresh and super useful for steering your brand toward delivering an exceptional customer experience.

4 types of customer journey maps and examples

Let’s take a look at the four most common customer journey maps and examples of each.

1. Current state

Current state customer journey maps are like an audit. You document how your customers experience their buying and service paths in your company’s current state. These are especially helpful to establish a baseline for your customer service experience.

Take a look at this simplified current state customer journey map from Nielsen-Norman.

The map follows the journey of “Jumping Jamie” as they navigate the process of switching to a different mobile plan. The map defines the current journey into four stages. Apart from the journey, it also highlights opportunities and metrics to track.

Current state maps are fantastic for sharing user frustrations with all departments. This helps you get everyone on board with investing in solutions and brainstorming ways to address user pain points.

2. Future state

Future state customer journey maps follow the same format as current state maps except they represent the ideal journey. You can use them alongside your current state maps to identify painpoints and areas to improve.

Here’s an example of a future state journey map:

Why does this visual work? It covers different states, feelings and even touchpoints in a cohesive format.

The map visualizes the best-case scenario to create a north star vision for your brand. It aligns your efforts toward achieving the ideal customer journey.

3. Day-in-the-life

Day-in-the-life customer journey maps outline one of your persona’s schedules as they go about their day. The interactions may or may not involve your company. Creating one of these maps helps you identify the best times and areas to interact with your customer.

Here’s a “day-in-the-life” visual from Pipedrive.

The map doesn’t just highlight when the persona does something, but it also highlights different touchpoints and the different people they interact with throughout the day. And, notice those thumbs ups and downs? Those highlight how the child feels during different activities too.

4. Service blueprint

A service blueprint customer journey map focuses solely on when you provide customer service. It ignores components like ads that might exist in other maps.

Miro, a collaborative online whiteboard for teams, created the above map with a bank in mind. You’ll notice how this map is only about a customer’s visit to the bank. This type of map helps brands look at individual service areas and interactions. It’s a macro version of the current and future state maps.

Get started with customer journey map templates

Creating a customer journey map doesn’t have to be overwhelming. There are plenty of free and paid templates out there to help you create one. If you think you’ll need more guidance or many maps, some companies offer special software to design a custom map. Build your first journey map or improve your existing one with these options.

• Current state template , provided by Bright Vessel.

• Customer journey map template by Moqups, a design and collaboration tool.

• Service blueprint template by Miro

• Customer journey map template by Mural, a planning tool.

• UXPressia’s customer journey map online tool , made specifically to create presentation-ready customer journey maps.

Create a strong foundation with a well-integrated customer journey map

A customer journey map gives you the recipe for crafting personalized, impactful interactions that build customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When you know what they are and why they’re important, it’s time to make yours. Use data to create a solid customer journey map that exceeds customer expectations at every touchpoint.

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What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

Learn what the customer journey mapping process is and download a free template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey can give you a way to better understand your customers and their needs. As a tool, it allows you to visualize the different stages that a customer goes through when interacting with your business; their thoughts, feelings, and pain points.

And, it’s shown that the friction from those pain points costs big: in 2019, ecommerce friction totaled an estimated 213 billion in lost US revenue .

Customer journey maps can help you to identify any problems or areas where you could improve your customer experience . In this article, we’ll explain what the customer journey mapping process is and provide a free template that you can use to create your own map. Let’s get started!

Bonus: Get our free, fully customizable Customer Experience Strategy Template that will help you understand your customers and reach your business goals.

What is a customer journey map?

So, what is customer journey mapping? Essentially, customer journey maps are a tool that you can use to understand the customer experience. Customer journey maps are often visual representations showing you the customer’s journey from beginning to end. They include all the touchpoints along the way.

There are often four main stages in your sales funnel, and knowing these can help you create your customer journey maps:

• Inquiry or awareness
• Interest, comparison, or decision-making
• Purchase or preparation
• Installation, activation, or feedback

Customer journey maps are used to track customer behavior and pinpoint areas where the customer experiences pain points. With this information uncovered, you can improve the customer experience, giving your customers a positive experience with your company.

You can use customer journey mapping software like Excel or Google sheets, Google Decks, infographics, illustrations, or diagrams to create your maps. But you don’t actually need customer journey mapping tools. You can create these maps with a blank wall and a pack of sticky notes.

Though they can be scribbled on a sticky note, it’s often easier to create these journeys digitally. That way, you have a record of your journey map, and you can share it with colleagues. We’ve provided free customer journey mapping templates at the end of this article to make your life a little easier.

The benefits of using customer journey maps

The main benefit of customer journey mapping is a better understanding of how your customers feel and interact with your business touchpoints. With this knowledge, you can create strategies that better serve your customer at each touchpoint.

Give them what they want and make it easy to use, and they’ll keep coming back. But, there are a couple of other great knock-on benefits too.

Improved customer support

Your customer journey map will highlight moments where you can add some fun to a customer’s day. And it will also highlight the pain points of your customer’s experience. Knowing where these moments are will let you address them before your customer gets there. Then, watch your customer service metrics spike!

Effective marketing tactics

A greater understanding of who your customers are and what motivates them will help you to advertise to them.

Let’s say you sell a sleep aid product or service. A potential target market for your customer base is young, working mothers who are strapped for time.

The tone of your marketing material can empathize with their struggles, saying, “The last thing you need is someone asking if you’re tired. But we know that over half of working moms get less than 6 hours of sleep at night. While we can’t give you more time, we know how you can make the most of those 6 hours. Try our Sleep Aid today and sleep better tonight.”

Building out customer personas will show potential target audiences and their motivation, like working moms who want to make the most of their hours asleep.

Product advancements or service improvements

By mapping your customer’s journey, you’ll gain insights into what motivates them to make a purchase or prevents them from doing so. You’ll have clarity on when or why they return items and which items they buy next. With this information and more, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products.

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

Customer journey mapping will show you where customers get stuck and bounce off your site. You can work your way through the map, fixing any friction points as you go. The end result will be a smoothly-running, logical website or app.

A customer-focused mindset

Instead of operating with the motivation of business success, a customer journey map can shift your focus to the customer. Instead of asking yourself, “how can I increase profits?” ask yourself, “what would better serve my customer?” The profits will come when you put your customer first.

At the end of the day, customer journey maps help you to improve your customer experience and boost sales. They’re a useful tool in your customer experience strategy .

How to create a customer journey map

There are many different ways to create a customer journey map. But, there are a few steps you’ll want to take regardless of how you go about mapping your customer’s journey.

Step 1. Set your focus

Are you looking to drive the adoption of a new product? Or perhaps you’ve noticed issues with your customer experience. Maybe you’re looking for new areas of opportunity for your business. Whatever it is, be sure to set your goals before you begin mapping the customer journey.

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

To create a customer journey map, you’ll first need to identify your customers and understand their needs. To do this, you will want to access your buyer personas.

Buyer personas are caricatures or representations of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are created from real-world data and strategic goals.

If you don’t already have them, create your own buyer personas with our easy step-by-step guide and free template.

Choose one or two of your personas to be the focus of your customer journey map. You can always go back and create maps for your remaining personas.

Step 3. Perform user research

Interview prospective or past customers in your target market. You do not want to gamble your entire customer journey on assumptions you’ve made. Find out directly from the source what their pathways are like, where their pain points are, and what they love about your brand.

You can do this by sending out surveys, setting up interviews, and examining data from your business chatbot . Be sure to look at what the most frequently asked questions are. If you don’t have a FAQ chatbot like Heyday , that automates customer service and pulls data for you, you’re missing out!

Get a free Heyday demo

You will also want to speak with your sales team, your customer service team, and any other team member who may have insight into interacting with your customers.

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

Your next step is to track and list the customer’s interactions with the company, both online and offline.

A customer touchpoint means anywhere your customer interacts with your brand. This could be your social media posts , anywhere they might find themselves on your website, your brick-and-mortar store, ratings and reviews, or out-of-home advertising.

Write as many as you can down, then put on your customer shoes and go through the process yourself. Track the touchpoints, of course, but also write down how you felt at each juncture and why. This data will eventually serve as a guide for your map.

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

You’ve done your research and gathered as much information as possible, now it’s time for the fun stuff. Compile all of the information you’ve collected into one place. Then, start mapping out your customer journey! You can use the templates we’ve created below for an easy plug-and-play execution.

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

Once the customer journey has been mapped out, you will want to go through it yourself. You need to experience first-hand what your customers do to fully understand their experience.

As you journey through your sales funnel, look for ways to improve your customer experience. By analyzing your customer’s needs and pain points, you can see areas where they might bounce off your site or get frustrated with your app. Then, you can take action to improve it. List these out in your customer journey map as “Opportunities” and “Action plan items”.

Types of customer journey maps

There are many different types of customer journey maps. We’ll take you through four to get started: current state, future state, a day in the life, and empathy maps. We’ll break down each of them and explain what they can do for your business.

Current state

This customer journey map focuses on your business as it is today. With it, you will visualize the experience a customer has when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product. A current state customer journey uncovers and offers solutions for pain points.

Future state

This customer journey map focuses on how you want your business to be. This is an ideal future state. With it, you will visualize a customer’s best-case experience when attempting to accomplish their goal with your business or product.

Once you have your future state customer journey mapped out, you’ll be able to see where you want to go and how to get there.

Day-in-the-life

A day-in-the-life customer journey is a lot like the current state customer journey, but it aims to highlight aspects of a customer’s daily life outside of how they interact with your brand.

Day-in-the-life mapping looks at everything that the consumer does during their day. It shows what they think and feel within an area of focus with or without your company.

When you know how a consumer spends their day, you can more accurately strategize where your brand communication can meet them. Are they checking Instagram on their lunch break, feeling open and optimistic about finding new products? If so, you’ll want to target ads on that platform to them at that time.

Day-in-the-life customer journey examples can look vastly different depending on your target demographic.

Empathy maps

Empathy maps don’t follow a particular sequence of events along the user journey. Instead, these are divided into four sections and track what someone says about their experience with your product when it’s in use.

You should create empathy maps after user research and testing. You can think of them as an account of all that was observed during research or testing when you asked questions directly regarding how people feel while using products. Empathy maps can give you unexpected insights into your users’ needs and wants.

Customer journey map templates

Use these templates to inspire your own customer journey map creation.

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

A day-in-the-life customer journey map template:

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

It can be helpful to see customer journey mapping examples. To give you some perspective on what these look like executed, we’ve created a customer journey mapping example of the current state.

Buyer Persona:

Curious Colleen, a 32-year-old female, is in a double-income no-kids marriage. Colleen and her partner work for themselves; while they have research skills, they lack time. She is motivated by quality products and frustrated by having to sift through content to get the information she needs.

What are their key goals and needs? Colleen needs a new vacuum. Her key goal is to find one that will not break again.

What are their struggles?

She is frustrated that her old vacuum broke and that she has to spend time finding a new one. Colleen feels as though this problem occurred because the vacuum she bought previously was of poor quality.

What tasks do they have?

Colleen must research vacuums to find one that will not break. She must then purchase a vacuum and have it delivered to her house.

Opportunities:

Colleen wants to understand quickly and immediately the benefits our product offers; how can we make this easier? Colleen upholds social proof as a decision-making factor. How can we better show our happy customers? There is an opportunity here to restructure our website information hierarchy or implement customer service tools to give Colleen the information she needs faster. We can create comparison charts with competitors, have benefits immediately and clearly stated, and create social campaigns.

Action Plan:

• Implement a chatbot so customers like Colleen can get the answers they want quickly and easily.
• Create a comparison tool for competitors and us, showing benefits and costs.
• Implement benefit-forward statements on all landing pages.
• Create a social campaign dedicated to UGC to foster social proof.
• Send out surveys dedicated to gathering customer feedback. Pull out testimonial quotes from here when possible.

Now that you know what the customer journey mapping process is, you can take these tactics and apply them to your own business strategy. By tracking customer behavior and pinpointing areas where your customers experience pain points, you’ll be able to alleviate stress for customers and your team in no time.

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Colleen Christison is a freelance copywriter, copy editor, and brand communications specialist. She spent the first six years of her career in award-winning agencies like Major Tom, writing for social media and websites and developing branding campaigns. Following her agency career, Colleen built her own writing practice, working with brands like Mission Hill Winery, The Prevail Project, and AntiSocial Media.

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Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

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

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

Table of contents: 

Customer journey map template

Parts of a journey map, stages of the customer journey, advanced customer journey mapping tips, types of journey maps, customer journey mapping example, what is a customer journey map.

A customer journey is the path a person takes to move from general awareness to prospective customer to (in the ideal scenario) brand loyalist . A customer journey map is a visual document that traces this path through all of the interactions, or touchpoints, a person will have with a brand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, every customer is different. But you can't create a customer journey map for every individual—and you don't need to. Instead, you can segment your audience into customer personas and create a map for each. 

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

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

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

Benefits of customer journey mapping

In a world where there are multiple high-quality options for just about every product on the market, brands need to foster long-term relationships with their customers to prevent them from being poached by competitors who offer a better customer experience .

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

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

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

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

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

This customer journey map template is separated into five stages along the leftmost column, with guiding questions to help plan the customer's experience in each stage.

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

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

What is the customer doing?

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

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

What is the customer thinking?

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

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

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

Not all existing touchpoints will be a part of the planned customer journey . For example, I seriously doubt that American Express's customer journey map includes a milestone labeled "Customer gets a free ride because her friend has an Amex card and gets $15 in Uber cash each month." However, each question must have at least one touchpoint that directly and specifically addresses the customer's needs and questions at that point.

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

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

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

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

For a small- to medium-sized business, the work of this stage involves reaching out directly to consumers via channels like advertising , SEO , and social media . For a household name like American Express, this stage is dedicated to ensuring the impression their brand makes is a positive one. 

Consideration

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

During this phase, the brand's goal is to design touchpoints that demonstrate to the user why their product can solve a problem or improve an experience that's specific to that person. This can be done using guides and how-tos, partnerships with other brands , and ads that portray a customer problem being solved.

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

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

Types of conversions vary depending on the type of business and industry. Examples of conversion pushes include:

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

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

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

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

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

Brand loyalty

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

You can encourage brand loyalty by offering exceptional customer service, referral programs, and loyalty discounts and exclusives.

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

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

Survey your customers and customer teams

When designing touchpoints and determining where and how customers interact with your business, don't guess—your existing customer base is a valuable resource you can tap for a firsthand customer perspective. You can i ncentivize customers to participate in surveys and fill out feedback forms by offering discounts and perks in exchange.

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

Automate customer data collection

High-quality, premium experiences are defined by their high level of personalization, and that personalization is only possible if you have information about your customer. It's not possible to sit there and take notes on every person who interacts with your brand, but it is possible to automatically collect lead data from customer interactions and have them collated in your CRM tool . 

Set up your contact management platform to automatically tag contacts with information like gender, age, products they've bought, events they've attended, what types of emails they open consistently and what emails they regularly ignore, whether their purchases indicate that they have pets or children, and so on. The more information you have, the better your customer experiences will be.

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

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

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

Create multiple maps for different journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day/week/month in the life map

The best way to map mini-journeys within the larger customer experience lifecycle is with a "Day in a Life" journey map . This map plots the same things as the general customer journey map—key milestones, questions, touchpoints, and gaps—but over a particular period of time instead of over the course of the entire relationship. 

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

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

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

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

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

Support experience map

One of the most common, and most significant, customer/brand interactions is the customer support journey . A frustrating customer service experience can turn someone off of your brand and product entirely, while a particularly impressive experience can immediately convert a regular user into a brand advocate.

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

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

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

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

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

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

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

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

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

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

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

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

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

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

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

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

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

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

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

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

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

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

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

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

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

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

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

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

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

Your customers' spending habits, interests, challenges, and problems are always changing, and your customer journey maps should adapt along with them. But with so much data to track, it's a good idea to connect your insights to CRM software. Then you can automate your CRM to create specific, valuable experiences for your customers without breaking a sweat.

Related reading:

Beyond the sales pipeline: Using a CRM for customer success

A quick guide to contact management

B2B email marketing: Proven strategies + examples

4 tips for creating an inbound marketing strategy

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

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Amanda Pell

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

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

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How to map a social media customer journey

• June 5, 2023

Ever wondered what path your customers take before they finally make a purchase? No, we are not talking about spying or tailgating your customers. In marketing, the process is called mapping your customer journey. It is like following footprints in the sand, tracing their steps through the online world. In this article, we will share how you can map your social media customer journey and use it to improve your conversion rates. 

Let us begin by unraveling the mystery of customer journeys by looking at the basics first.

Understanding the customer journey. 

Before we start mapping your customer’s footsteps on social media, it is important to understand customer journey. 

Think of it like a pathway of all customer experiences, from the first time they discover your brand to interaction, from making a purchase online to interacting with you on social media and eventually becoming a loyal customer. 

The customer journey is the story of your customer’s experience regarding their behavior, emotions, perceptions, challenges, and actions while interacting with your brand. Each stage changes their opinion about your company or business. 

Now, going back to our discussion, how do you add social media to your customer journey mix? 

Social media is an important growth medium where brands interact with customers (and vice versa). Your potential customers spend hours daily on social media, discovering new products, interacting with their favorite brands, and sharing opinions about their experience with businesses as reviews. 

• 54% of consumers use social media to research products online; 
• 71% are more likely to purchase a product/service based on social media referrals or reviews; 
• 29% of social media users are likely to buy on the same day they discover a product on social media.

Components of a social media customer journey map. 

Social media is important for understanding the customers and even growing brand in 2023. But how do we utilize this information to succeed? 

First, we must break down the social media customer journey into smaller components. Think of it this way — the map will give you an understanding of who your customers are, what they are looking for, where they are most active, how they are influenced, their preferences, likes/dislikes, and other elements. Here is how it works: 

First up, we have customer personas. They are the heart and soul of any customer journey map. They represent your typical customer, their preferences, behaviors, and needs. Then comes the journey stages – stages your customer moves through, like awareness, consideration, decision, and loyalty.

Next, we have touchpoints or interactions your customer has with your brand on social media. It could be viewing an Instagram post, clicking on a Facebook ad, or engaging with a Tweet.

Then comes understanding what actions customers take at each stage and how they feel. Are they confused, excited, or frustrated? These emotions can significantly impact their journey.

Lastly, we have pain points. These are the challenges or issues your customers face at each stage. It is like the villain in our customer’s journey story, the obstacle they need to overcome to reach their goal.

Steps to create a social media customer journey map. 

Now that we have outlined all the elements, let us get down to why you are here — how to map a social media customer journey. Here is a step-by-step framework for creating your very own social media customer journey map:

Define your customer personas. 

Think of this as character-building. You need to create a visual representation of who your customers are. Ask yourself: 

• Who are your customers? What is their age? 
• What do they like? What are their hobbies
• Where do they live? 
• How do they spend their free time? 
• Which social media platforms they are most active on? 

For instance, if you are a D2C eCommerce brand, your persona could be shopper Susan, a 30-year-old who loves Tiktok and keeps searching for new outfits to buy online. 

Outline the stages of the journey. 

Just like in a story, there are different stages in your customer’s journey. 

They start at the awareness stage, where they first discover your brand; move to the consideration stage, where they are evaluating if your product meets their needs; then to the decision stage, where they decide to purchase; and finally, the loyalty stage, where they become repeat customers.

Identify the touchpoints. 

Once you have outlined the stages, it is time to identify the times, places, and situations where customers interact with your brand. It could be a sponsored ad on Facebook, a product review on YouTube, or a customer testimonial on Instagram. 

One amazing example of identifying touchpoints comes from Spotify. They use data research and customer surveys to discover where customers interact with their brand and understand how users feel at each point, identifying pain points and areas of improvement.​

Highlight customer actions and emotions. 

The next two steps are an extension of the previous step. You need to understand what your customer is doing at each stage, how he behaves, and what they feel. 

For example, customers might feel curious or excited at the awareness stage when they first discover your social media page and see that you have a product that can solve their problem. Following this, they can visit your website, sign up for your newsletter, or buy your product immediately. 

Identify pain points and opportunities. 

After your customers have interacted with your brand, you should find their pain points. You need to dig deeper and find out what challenges they are facing. And most importantly, how can you help them overcome these challenges? 

Maybe they are having trouble navigating through your social media page and finding the relevant product category link, or they are confused by your product options on the Facebook shop. Once you have identified these pain points, you can brainstorm solutions to improve their experience. This can further improve your customer experience on the website, too. 

Draft and validate the map. 

Once you have marked out the components, it is time to bring everything on a single canvas — the persona, the stages, touchpoints, customer actions, behavior, perceptions, emotions, and more. 

You can use a simple mind map or a whiteboard to create a visual map highlighting everything. By the end of this activity, you will have a clear idea about how customers discover you and buy from you. 

In the following sections, there are a few real-life examples of customer journey maps to be inspired. Also, did you know you need to validate your customer map using online surveys or feedback tools? 

You can also validate the map by conducting market research on autopilot using GapScout. Gapscout scans online reviews and gives detailed insights into customers’ feelings about your brand or business online. 

Examples of social media customer journey maps.

To help you visualize what a customer journey map looks like, let us look at some real-world examples. 

First is Spotify’s customer journey map. They wanted to improve the music-sharing experience, so they created a map to understand where music-sharing fit into the customer experience, as below. 

With this information, they could identify pain points and make the music-sharing experience smoother and more seamless​.

Similarly, TurboTax created a customer journey map when launching a new product, Personal Pro. 

They used data research, customer surveys, and key conversations with tax professionals to understand how the product fits into customers’ lives. This allowed them to see and address pain points to improve the customer experience​​. 

Optimize your social media customer journey map using Gapscout.

Creating a social media customer journey map is great, but how do you keep it fresh and aligned with evolving customer expectations? 

GapScout is a valuable tool for mapping the customer journey and keeping it relevant. Scanning online platforms and gathering reviews offers real-time data about customers’ experiences and sentiments at different stages of their journey. Here are several ways it could be useful:

• Understanding customer sentiment at each stage: By analyzing reviews and comments, GapScout can help you understand how customers feel at each stage of their journey. For example, if many customers are expressing frustration about a particular aspect of your product during the consideration phase, this might be a pain point that needs addressing.
• Identifying common paths through the customer journey: GapScout can help identify common patterns in customer behavior, enabling you to map out customers’ most common journeys when interacting with your brand.
• Spotting gaps and opportunities: By collecting and analyzing a large amount of customer data, GapScout can help identify gaps in your current customer journey where customers might be dropping off or experiencing difficulties. These could represent opportunities for improvement.
• Personalizing the customer journey: Understanding customer sentiment and behavior can help personalize the customer journey. For example, if GapScout identifies that certain customers often express a particular need or preference, you could use this insight to tailor your communications and offerings to this group.
• Measuring the impact of changes: If you make changes to your customer journey based on insights from GapScout, you can then use social listening tools to track the impact of these changes. Are customers happier? Are they progressing more smoothly through their journey?

Next steps…

Remember, creating a social media customer journey map is not just about understanding your customers better. It is about improving their experience and making their journey as seamless and enjoyable as possible, and GapScout can help you in this regard. 

So, create your social media customer journey map, and do not forget to use Gapscout to make your journey map more meaningful. 

• Product-market fit research: Getting started.
• Content marketing for SaaS products.

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How to Improve Customer Journey on Instagram: Part 1

Home Blog Digital Marketing Planning & Strategy How to Improve Customer Journey on Instagram: Part 1

Updated on March 4th 2020

Hugh Beaulac | 10 min read

1. Awareness

In 2019, consumers can discover hundreds of items in a day without leaving their homes. There is no need to visit brick-and-mortar stores to spot things you want to purchase. Moreover, 70% of buyers trust online reviews  and friends recommendations more than branded copies. Once a potential customer wants to find a certain product to satisfy his or her needs and wants, online searching begins: as specified in one report by Pew Research Center , 84% of U.S. online shoppers review at least one social media site before making a purchase. The customer journey starts with customer awareness, so companies should know how to hook potential clients and convince them to consider their products as an option when making purchase decisions.

Show off your product on Instagram posts and Stories

• Use lifestyle photos to depict products without keeping the main focus on them
• Share carousel posts to show your product from different angles
• Add Instagram Stories to reach more followers

Your customers have to know everything about your product before buying it, so it’s important to tell them everything they may want to understand about your company, products, and benefits.

Collaborate with influencers to build trust

• Use a social listening tool   to find opinion leaders within your niche
• Keep track of your engagement rate
• Work with influencers who share your views

Boasting about your product’s benefits it’s not enough to grab your audience’s attention these days. Modern customers crave recommendations, so working with niche-focused influencers is a proven way to spread a word about your product.

2. Consideration

Create Stories Highlights to make the navigation easier

• Think about what new followers may wonder about and group Stories Highlights to answer their questions
• Create a descriptive title within 15 characters (you can also use emojis)
• If possible, add clickable links to Stories so that your followers can learn everything in-app

Since followers want to learn more about your product during this stage, you need to help them without easily and quickly. Thus, it’s important to keep all relevant information below your bio – and Stories Highlights is a perfect tool for it.

Publish UGC

• Offer discounts and perks for sharing UGC
• Engage with UGC posts by like and commenting
• Share the best posts and tag authors

It’s in human’s nature to follow a crowd, so potential customers will always choose a product other people buy. To influence buying behavior, post UGC on Instagram and your followers will be more likely to complete purchases.

Run a contest with branded freebies

• Think about the rules and gifts for your contest
• Announce your contest in advance to attract more participants
• Interact with all participants (like and comment on their posts) to build relationships with loyal followers
• Ask winners about their feedback on your product after the contest

If you have interested people in your company, that’s great. If you have convinced followers to purchase your products, that’s even better. While your potential customers are hesitating, you can take the bull by the horns and provide them with an opportunity to get your product for free. Over the long haul, the payoff is huge.

Over to you

Guest Blogger @Mention

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Table of Contents

Customer Journey Map Template

Map your customer journey and help your customers successfully get from A to B. Understand the reasoning behind their choices and design the best product experience and meet your customer's needs.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Customer Journey Map Template

A customer journey map, also known as a user journey map, is a visual representation of how customers experience your brand and company across all its touchpoints. In a customer journey map template, interactions are placed in a pre-made timeline to map out the user flow.

Since customers are the backbone of your business, it is important to understand their pain points, desires and needs so that you can create a customer-centric experience for them.

Many teams use customer journey mapping tools to visually represent customers' thought processes and emotions from their initial interaction until the end goal. This practice enables businesses to assess whether they are meeting their objectives. Doing so can improve their conversion rates and enhance the overall customer experience.

How to use Miro’s customer journey map template

Here are 6 steps to create a successful CJM using the customer journey mapping template. In each section, we will dive a little deeper, but remember, every customer journey map is different, so you may spend more time on one step compared to another.

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Identify your goal for the map. Identifying your ideal outcome will help set the foundations for a successful project.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

Why are you making a customer journey map?

Who is it specifically about?

What experience is it based upon?

Based on this, you may want to create a buyer persona. This is a fictitious customer with all their demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. Having a clear persona is helpful in reminding you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

2. Identify your user personas and define their goals

Use the Game-Changer container on the template to identify your persona.

Answer these three questions:

What are their key goals and needs?

What do they struggle with most?

What tasks do they have?

Conduct user research to help you in this process. Survey customers to understand their buying journey, or ask the sales team or customer service representatives for feedback or the most frequently asked questions. You would want to hear the experience of people who are interested in your product and who have interacted with it to understand their pain points and what can be done to improve.

3. Highlight target customer personas

Once you’ve discovered all the different buyer personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow the list down and select one or two to focus on.

A customer journey map is a specific journey one customer takes, so having too many personas on one map will not be a precise indication of their journey and not a reflection of their true experience.

4. Identify all possible customer touchpoints

Based on your research, you can now use this information to map out all the possible customer touchpoints your customer will face. Use the User Journey Map Template to add the outcomes you want your customer to achieve, and then map all the steps they need to take in order to achieve these outcomes.

List out all of the touchpoints your customer currently has, and then make another list of where you would like your customers to have additional touchpoints. Then check if there are any overlaps.

This step is vital as it can show you whether you have too few or too many touchpoints and gives you a rough idea of your current customer journey experience.

Touch points are not limited to just your website. Look at other areas such as:

Social media channels

Email marketing

3rd party reviews or mentions

Pro Tip:  Run a quick Google search of your business and identify all the pages that mention your brand. Verify this using Google Analytics to see what brings in the most traffic.

This step is very important as it can help you understand things like, are the lack of touchpoints the reason why my customers are turning away? If there are more than expected, are they getting too overwhelmed?

5. Build the customer journey map and try it yourself!

Once you have gathered all the necessary information and identified all the touchpoints your customer will experience, it will finally be time to start building your own customer journey map.

Ensure that you note down every point your customer will touch your business. Remember to add their actions, needs, pains, and feelings to your customer journey map.

Creating the map alone isn’t the end of the process. You will need to go through the journey yourself and analyze the results. By going through the journey first-hand, you will see the areas where expectations might not have been met.

For each persona, go through every journey from beginning to end and take notes.

6. Adjust as needed

Once you have gone through each persona map, you will get a clearer understanding of what your customers are experiencing.

Ensure that all the needs are met and pain points are addressed. No matter how big or small the changes are, every single change has an impact. And this small impact could be the deciding factor for purchase, signup, or download.

Add all the opportunities and improvements you could introduce to your User Journey Map Template . Brainstorm with your team ideas to implement changes, and make sure you assign the right team members to each process.

Share your expertise on Miroverse 🚀

Publish your own template and help over 60M+ Miro users jump-start their work. 

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What should be included in a customer journey map template?

Every customer journey map will be different. No map is linear, so it is okay not to have a direct A to B Journey. Below we have compiled a number of points that may be included in a customer journey map template:

1. Significant milestones

In order to begin with a successful customer journey map, it is important to draft a path your customer will be journeying through to reach your business’s goal. This step is also useful as you can preemptively identify potential hiccups that might ensue here.

2. User engagement

This element is where you map out the details of how your customer will interact with your site or product. Think of how you would like this to be in order for you to achieve your goal.

3. Emotions

As we seek positive experiences, it is also important to ensure our customers feel relief, excitement, and happiness. Therefore, to mitigate any negative emotions, ensure you have a clear and concise process with appropriate branding to avoid creating negative opinions.

4. Pain Points

When your customers are experiencing a negative emotion, there is a reason why. Adding pain points to your customer journey map will help you identify the reasons behind them and come up with a solution to fix them.

5. Solutions

And finally, add solutions. Once you and your team have identified the pain points, brainstorm and implement solutions to improve your user experience.

How do I use a customer journey map template?

You can create your CJM with Miro’s free Customer Journey Map Template and customize it according to your brand or product needs. When using your own CJM template, remember to define the scope, what touchpoints you want to analyze, and who inside your organization has ownership of which step.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Using a user journey map template can be key to better understanding your customers. Customer journey mapping puts you and your team in the mind of the customer and helps you to visualize what they are experiencing at each stage and touchpoint with your business or product. Outlining the stages of interaction, while keeping the customer front and center, allows you to identify any pain points that could be improved. This will better not only the customer experience but will help with customer retention in the long run.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. Touchpoints can be found in places where your business comes in direct contact with potential or existing customers. A display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can be considered a customer touchpoint. Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so it’s important that the different types of touch points are considered in your customer journey map because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work-in-progress. Reviewing it on a monthly or quarterly basis will help you to identify gaps and opportunities for streamlining your customer journey further. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks. It would also be helpful to schedule regular meetings to analyze any changes that might affect the customer journey.

Do all businesses need a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping is important for businesses of all sizes. From SMBs to Enterprise. It is also important for all functions. From sales and marketing to customer service. There is no one size fits all for customer journey maps. Therefore, it is important to take time to personalise your own customer journey map to fully understand your own process and identify your own pain points.

Get started with this template right now.

Gap Analysis Template

Works best for:.

Marketing, Strategic Planning, Business Management

Consider your team’s or organization’s ideal state. Now compare it to your current real-world situation. Want to identify the gaps or obstacles that stand between your present and future? Then you’re ready to run a gap analysis. This easy-to-customize template will let your team align on what obstacles are preventing you from hitting your goals sooner, collaborate on a plan to achieve those goals, and push your organization toward growth and development. You can focus on specific gap analyses — including for skills, candidates, software, processes, vendors, data, and more.

UML Diagram Template

Diagrams, Software Development

Originally used as a modeling language in software engineering, UML has become a popular approach to application structures and documenting software. UML stands for Unified Modeling Language, and you can use it to model business processes and workflows. Like flowcharts, UML diagrams can provide your organization with a standardized method of mapping out step-by-step processes. They allow your team to easily view the relationships between systems and tasks. UML diagrams are an effective tool that can help you bring new employees up to speed, create documentation, organize your workplace and team, and streamline your projects.

Work Breakdown Structure Template

Project Management, Mapping, Workflows

A work breakdown is a project management tool that lays out everything you must accomplish to complete a project. It organizes these tasks into multiple levels and displays each element graphically. Creating a work breakdown is a deliverable-based approach, meaning you’ll end up with a detailed project plan of the deliverables you must create to finish the job. Create a Work Breakdown Structure when you need to deconstruct your team's work into smaller, well-defined elements to make it more manageable.

Official 5-Day Design Sprint

Design, Desk Research, Sprint Planning

The goal of a Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days. You'll take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist. Steph Cruchon of Design Sprint created this template for Miro in collaboration with design sprint gurus at Google. This Design Sprint template is designed specifically for remote sprints so you can run productive and efficient sprints with colleagues around the world.

Root Cause Evaluation Template

When you first encounter a complex situation, it's not common to immediately delve into its underlying causes and effects. Often, we grasp the overall picture but fail to separate the problem from its surrounding circumstances. Root Cause Evaluation provides a method to better understand the interconnected factors that have contributed to the current situation.

Job Map Template

Design, Desk Research, Mapping

Want to truly understand your consumers’ mindset? Take a look at things from their perspective — by identifying the “jobs” they need to accomplish and exploring what would make them “hire” or “fire” a product or service like yours. Ideal for UX researchers, job mapping is a staged process that gives you that POV by breaking the “jobs” down step by step, so you can ultimately offer something unique, useful, and different from your competitors. This template makes it easy to create a detailed, comprehensive job map.

Customer journey map template

Think critically about your users' needs and motivations

Use the customer journey map template to better understand customer touchpoints, needs, motivations, and obstacles by illustrating the customer journey from start to finish. When possible, use this map to document and summarize interviews and observations with real people rather than relying on your hunches or assumptions.

Customer journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a brand, product, or service. Journey maps often include key steps a customer takes, their interactions, goals, positive moments, negative moments, and more.

Journey maps are crucial for understanding the customer experience, allowing teams to understand what pain points users or customer experience, create better solutions for the end-user, reduce frustrations, and make areas of opportunity clear from the onset.

Customer journey maps help teams:

• Step into a customer’s shoes and understand their perspective
• Gain empathy to understand customer needs, perceptions, and overall experience
• Identify problems and roadblocks that a customer may experience
• Align with other team members and stakeholders to solve cross-functional problems

How to use the customer journey map template

Follow these step-by-step instructions to build a robust customer journey map from the template.

1. Establish your customer scenario

Choose a customer persona or segment that you want to understand, and decide on a specific scenario that your customer would find themselves in (i.e.: browsing, booking, attending, and rating a local city tour).

If possible, choose a user persona informed by customer data and user research. This prevents teams from making incorrect assumptions and ensures that your target audience benefit from any changes in the customer journey.

2. Define the steps your customer or buyer persona takes

What steps does the customer persona take during the scenario you defined? List out each step and describe any smaller steps that are involved. Think about what someone may experience during this step and what the desired future-state of that experience would be. 

Dig Deep: For each of the following sections, ask the following questions:

• Entice : How does somebody initially become aware of this process? Where is the starting point?
• Enter : What do potential customers experience as they begin the step or process?
• Engage : In the core moments in the process, what happens?
• Exit : What do people typically experience as the process ends?
• Extend : What happens after the experience is over?

3. List the different interactions customers might have

Mention what interactions users face during each step of the process. This includes the people they see or talk to, where they are, and the digital touchpoints or physical influences used to move them into the funnel.

This could be anything from learning about a new product from a promoted social media post, to contacting customer support for an issue the user faces. Keep in mind that interactions and touchpoints can and should be different depending on where someone found you, or how they got to your website. 

4. Think about the customer’s goals and motivations

Step into the customer's shoes. For each step, what is the customer's primary goal or motivation? What can you do to fulfill their needs? For an emphasis on how your customer or user is feeling during the journey, an empathy map can help you tap into their thoughts and emotions.

5. Highlight the customer’s positive moments

List the steps users found enjoyable, productive, or motivating. Take inspiration from positive moments to improve weak areas. Positive moments can help you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and how to communicate with them on other channels.

6. Consider a customer’s negative moments

List which steps the user found frustrating, angering, or time-consuming. Identifying pain points, in particular, helps to make changes and improve the user experience.

For more instructions, check out our guide to creating customer journey maps .

Tips for creating better customer journey maps

• Use market research to guide your assumptions : Conduct surveys or interviews that ask customers how they came to learn about your company and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised. Real customer interactions will make your journey map more accurate and successful.
• Revisit and optimize the customer journey map : Your customer journey map will likely need to be updated and adjusted over time. Just as customers' wants, needs, and expectations change, so must your strategy.
• Share the customer journey map with involved stakeholders : The user journey will likely span multiple efforts in your organization, so be sure to let stakeholders know if they can help make the buyer journey more customer-focused. ‍
• Get real customer feedback : While you should be creating your customer journey map based on interviews and real-world data, try validating your assumptions by getting feedback from a customer on how accurate the user experience matches the different stages in your finished map.

How to create a Customer journey map template

Get started with this template right now.

Features to help you seamlessly map out your customer touchpoints

Sticky notes & text

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When and how to create customer journey maps.

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Map Templates

Use this customer journey map to help visualize the key interactions of a customer's product experience, from initial discovery to purchase and customer retention.

Walk a mile in your user's shoes and plot out what problems and goals they have. Use this template to identify opportunities to improve things for your users!

Use this template to plot out engagement on a user’s journey with a product, service, or experience over time. Focus on the user’s emotions and consider how they may feel at various touch points.

User Journey Mapping is a common Design Sprint method that maps out a user’s experience step by step as they encounter your problem space or interact with your product. This method enables the team to get into the mindset of the user and illuminates pain points, identifying opportunities to create new or improved user experiences.

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Description.

Use this file as a template for story mapping.

What is story mapping?

Story mapping captures the user's journey interacting with a product from beginning to end. It is a great way to plan an MVP, prioritize new features, or just see how new features fit in with the overall user experience.

• Each step at the top corresponds to the user journey, what will the user be doing (example: "Shop for groceries")
• Items below that are steps that the user will take during that phase in the journey (example: "Browse groceries", "Add groceries to cart")
• Finally, the cards represent specific user stories- each user stories corresponds to one of the steps (example for browse groceries: "Search for groceries", "Filter options", "Sorting",)
• Prioritize more important items at the top
• Organize user stories into categories (i.e, MVP)

🚀 Duplicate, change to fit your needs

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I had created a user persona template while working on a project and thought It would be a good idea to share it in the community. This will atleast save some of your valuable time.

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Recreated this template for FigJam for my previous design template

This is FigJam version of original User Flow Diagram Template for Figma you can find here:

• User Flow Diagram Template (Dribbble)
• Video with instructions (YouTube)

Easily create user journey map with pre-built, auto-layout components.

This is the file we daily use at buzzvil , we update it frequently. Comments and suggestions are always welcomed!

We share a lot more free and neat resources :)

https://www.figma.com/@buzzvil

• UCM ready, add signal and related metrics for each stage of your user journey.
• Vecto only! No pixel here.
• Auto-layout and variants (Cmd+arrow key to stretch on Jam).

This template will help users unpack user stories and themes into a customer journey map and unpack it even further into an app map or app flow.

Watch how we use it here @ Headway

05/10 : Added video link into the file.

Winner - Favorite Ideation Templates for FigJam

This file delighted to WIN the Favorite Ideation Templates for FigJam category at the first-ever  Figma Community Awards 2022 

Big thanks to every single person who voted for me. file for the winner of the 2022 Figma Community Awards!

Hi, Figma launched Figma and I am very excited. I qucikly created this to test out Figjam and it's amazing. Like Figma Design, it's fast, simple, easy to use and beautiful. I know this file needs a lot of improvement so please leave your feedback in the comments box. Cheers!

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A simple and easy-to-use User Journey Map to help visualize the user's flow through your site or product.

Customer Journey Map compiles a series of user goals and actions your customers go through when engaging with your company, whether it is a product, a website, a retail store, a service, or any combination in between.

It combines two powerful instruments: storytelling and visualization.

Please feel free to leave any feedback you may have. Thanks!

User Journey Maps for Power Users

This is a carefully crafted Template with some smart Components to enable you to create your user journeys in a fast, effective and collaborative way.

Make sure to not miss our new Persona Template which will integrate smoothly with this!

The main purpose of this template is to enable

• Speed while creating journeys
• Visually appealing, beautiful maps people understand
• Collaboration across departments
• Auto-Layouts all the way!

What's included

• We typically see the need for approvals and sign-offs so you can add them
• Multi-Touchpoint support
• Pain & Gains
• Multiple types of Interactions

How to use it

• The Sample journey contains a fully expanded sample
• There a reduced story which showcases how to use this technique in a quick and fast manner

A simple User Journey Map template to synthesize and visualize your user's journey within a certain experience, taking note of the pain points and opportunities that arise in every step. 

Create user stories in real time with your team. Get everyone on the same page and have fun doing it!

How to Map Your Ecommerce Customer Journey [Template Included]

Published: October 20, 2023

We’ve discussed how the customer journey impacts sales, service, and marketers.

But one segment that feels different is the ecommerce customer journey. The customer journey is different from service-based companies because it can be much quicker (buying from Amazon or an Instagram ad).

However, if you work at an ecommerce company, it’s important to understand the customer journey: all the touch points and stages. Below, let’s learn how to map your ecommerce company's customer journey.

Plus, you can download some templates to help you get started.

Ecommerce Customer Journey

The ecommerce customer journey is just like any customer journey. It describes the entire experience that a customer goes through to purchase a product from a company online — from the moment they're aware of your product to when they complete the purchase and reach out to customer support.

Touchpoints can include when someone sees a social media ad, when a friend tags them in a post online, when they come across your website when they read your blog posts, when your product shows up on Google, when they search on Amazon, etc.

The ecommerce customer journey includes the path from when they first contact you to when they purchase your product to if they reach out for a return.

Writing down these touchpoints might make you realize that the journey on your website isn't ideal. If that happens, you can look for solutions to help you, like WooCommerce (a WordPress plugin).

Stages of Ecommerce Customer Journey

• Consideration

1. Awareness

The first stage of the ecommerce customer journey is awareness. During this stage, a potential customer is experiencing a problem and is researching to understand their problem.

They see if it has solutions, overcome misconceptions, and prioritize solutions.

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, potential customers research products and methods to solve their problems in the consideration stage.

For example, let's say that I want to start a morning routine. I do some research on Google and see a few ads on social media, then realize I want a morning routine journal.

Now that I know what I want to buy and how to fix my problem, it’s time to research solutions. I’ll go to Google and Amazon to see what morning routine journals are available and which have the best reviews.

3. Decision

During this stage, potential customers are now narrowing their list to the top products they want.

This is when they’re learning what makes your product stand out from the competition and why your product is the one they need.

During this stage, it’s essential to understand the various touch points to communicate what makes your product unique.

4. Retention

For ecommerce, I'll add one more stage to the customer journey. That stage is retention.

After a customer buys your product, their experience and decision to purchase from you again rely solely on the quality of your product and customer service.

Let’s say the package was missing, delivered to the wrong address, or they want to return the product. They won't buy from you again if that experience fails. They’ll probably consider leaving a positive review if it does go well.

In this stage, consider retargeting marketing and social media ads so more of your products show up for them online. Once you’ve delighted your customers, they see you show up online and want to engage with you.

They’ll buy from you again and again.

To learn more about ecommerce marketing, you can check out HubSpot Academy’s free Ecommerce Marketing Course .

How to Improve Your Ecommerce Customer Journey

Now that you understand what the ecommerce customer journey is, you can take steps to improve your own.

To achieve this, your overarching mission must be to make each customer journey as enjoyable and personal as possible. Here are some general guidelines and practical steps you can take.

What might you fill out in each of these sections? Let’s take a look.

What is the customer thinking or feeling?

Consider what customers think or feel in each section of the buyer’s journey. By getting into their head, you can better address their concerns and meet their expectations to get them to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Awareness Stage: The customer is only becoming aware they have a problem. They may feel uncertain or uneasy, frustrated, or simply curious. They may have questions about things they are experiencing resulting from an underlying issue they have not yet identified.
• Consideration Stage: The customer is looking for potential solutions to their problem. They ask questions like their budget and what type of solution best fits their needs or lifestyle. Having identified the problem, they are considering the shape of a potential solution.
• Decision Stage: The customer evaluates specific solution providers and their advantages and drawbacks. Eventually, the customer will decide on a solution, reconsider their needs, or forego a solution if none match their constraints.

What is the customer’s action?

Customers will take different actions at each stage of the buyer’s journey that can either move them to the next step, return to an earlier stage, or see them leave your flywheel .

• Awareness Stage: The customers will look for information that informs them about a phenomenon they experience related to a problem or the problem itself. They may submit their email for a content offer, download a content offer, or click a link from a social post.
• Consideration Stage: The customer will want to explore different solutions but may need to settle on a particular provider. They will want to sign up for a free trial, schedule a live demo, attend a virtual conference, or read a white paper or case study.
• Decision Stage: The customer is considering purchasing your product and wants to learn more about it. They may schedule a meeting with a salesperson to learn more, sign a contract, or take a reduced deal.

What or where is the buyer researching?

Buyers will turn to different sources of information at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Awareness Stage: The customer will seek general information and answers to questions about their experiences. They are looking for blogs, white papers, social posts, and short videos addressing some of the problems they’re facing.
• Consideration Stage: The customer is looking for more in-depth material that addresses potential solutions to their problem. They will want to look for more in-depth content, such as long-form blogs, case studies, industry journals, and longer videos, to understand the benefits and drawbacks of potential solutions.
• Decision Stage: The customer will want to learn more about your product. They will want to read or watch testimonials, try out free trials, take samples, read spec sheets, and better understand your product's capabilities, benefits, and limitations.

How will we move the buyer along their journey with us in mind?

Customers require different incentives, calls to action, and cues to move from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next.

• Awareness Stage: The customer may be enticed to submit their contact information in exchange for a piece of content.
• Consideration Stage: Once you have the customer’s contact information, you may try to set up a meeting with your sales team. This can be accomplished by offering them content tailored to their needs.
• Decision Stage: The customer will be ready to close a deal, sign up for a lesser one, or part ways. Whatever the outcome, you can work to keep the customer in your flywheel to make a future sale with them, enjoy word-of-mouth promotion, or receive referrals.

For more information, you can check out this post on customer journey thinking and watch the video below to learn more:

Making Your Map

Now, you might wonder, “How do I create an ecommerce customer journey map?”

First, you'll create your buyer personas and then envision what your ideal customer goes through when they seek your product.

Once you do that, download our templates and take HubSpot's Ecommerce Marketing Course . Then, you can fill out the template and brainstorm how to improve the journey at every touch point.

Ecommerce customer journey mapping is essential to understanding your target audience and improving the customer experience. Focusing on providing the best customer experience will help retain customers and drive more leads and sales.

Creating the Best Ecommerce Customer Journey Possible

You can do it for your business now that you know the importance of ecommerce customer journey mapping.

With a visual representation of your customer journey, you can better understand the path a customer takes and ways to improve the overall experience. With the correct application of customer journey mapping, you can even increase conversions.

Ready to get started? Check out our free resource below for some templates you can use to map out your customer journey!

Don't forget to share this post!

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

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