The Essential Guide to Customer Journey Mapping for Product Managers

customer journey product management

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

customer journey product management

Why is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

  • Identify customer pain points and address them to improve satisfaction
  • Gain insights into potential areas of growth and optimization
  • Enhance the customer experience to increase loyalty and advocacy
  • Streamline processes and touchpoints to improve efficiency

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Customer Journey Map

Step 1: define your objectives, step 2: develop customer personas, step 3: identify touchpoints and channels, step 4: map the customer journey, step 5: analyze your customer journey map, step 6: identify opportunities for improvement, step 7: implement changes and monitor progress, step 8: share your customer journey map with stakeholders, best practices for customer journey mapping.

  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams : Involve representatives from different departments to gain a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and ensure alignment across the organization.
  • Keep your map up-to-date : Regularly review and update your customer journey map to account for changes in customer behavior, product features, or market conditions.
  • Prioritize actionable insights : Focus on identifying insights that can lead to tangible improvements in the customer experience and align with your product strategy.
  • Test and validate assumptions : When making changes based on your customer journey map, be sure to test and validate your assumptions through user testing, A/B testing, or other methods to ensure your efforts yield the desired results.

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The complete guide to customer journey management.

14 min read Effective customer journey management requires a keen understanding of how your customers move from touchpoint to touchpoint. Here’s how to understand and optimize every customer’s journey – and how to make proactive changes that boost the entire customer experience.

The interactions your customers have with you are never one-off moments, and they don’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, they form part of an overarching customer journey, which incorporates every single stage of each customer’s road to purchase – and beyond.

Understanding those customer journeys, and building experiences with every step in mind, is how you’ll create interactions that people love, remember, and recommend.

Delivering on those next-level customer journeys requires a deep understanding of how people discover your brand and buy your products, and that means working on a few core practices:

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey orchestration, customer journey optimization, customer journey analytics.

In this article, we’ll be going through the what, why, and how of customer journey management – as well as what mastering it will mean for your customers.

Deliver next-level customer journeys with Customer Journey Optimizer

What is customer journey management?

Customer journey management is the art of being able to understand, map, design, and improve the interactions and processes that make up the entire customer experience.

It’s a discipline stemming from the idea that no matter how a customer interacts with your brand, that interaction is one part of a larger journey and not just an individual event.

It doesn’t matter if a customer is actively researching your products, passively encountering a social media post, browsing in a physical store, or contacting customer support – whatever the interaction, it’s happening as part of an overall journey.

Managing that journey really just means making those isolated moments better, but also ensuring that they’re interconnected and aligned.

When exploring and visualizing customer journey data, we are assessing:

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

The purpose of customer journey management is ultimately to finetune the customer experience until it’s as seamless as possible, that the path towards purchase is frictionless, and that each touchpoint works as part of a broader CX strategy.

Successfully managing customer journeys, then, requires that you can master a mixture of customer data, behavioral science, customer feedback, industry insight, and a dash of business instinct.

Customer journey management: A mindset shift

Building customer journey management processes into your business requires a mindset shift. It’s not something that you can do once and forget about, and nor is it something that’s a quick change. That’s because customer journey management is a multi-faceted task that asks a little bit of every department.

Customer journey flow chart for management

Instead of siloed teams looking after their individual touchpoints or KPIs, true customer journey management needs to have an omnichannel focus. You’ll need to work across departments to deliver more a seamless customer experience no matter how your customers choose to interact with you.

Customer journey management is about pooling your resources to answer the following questions:

  • What journeys are your different customer segments taking?
  • Are customers able to get the answers and solutions they need?
  • Can you track and pinpoint where experience gaps lie?
  • How can you work to proactively fix those pain points?
  • Are you able to monitor the results of those changes?

Customer expectations are higher than ever, and people are much more careful with where they spend their hard-earned money. So it’s vital to be able to offer them journeys that offer zero resistance.

In that sense, customer journey management needs full company buy-in. It’s top-down, as well as bottom-up – where customer journey data informs both individual channels as well as your overarching business strategy.

The benefits of customer journey management

There are two core benefits to customer journey management: stronger business outcomes, and a better customer experience. But you needn’t just take our word for it; there’s strong evidence for both.

PwC , for example, cites that 65% of consumers are likely to become long-term customers if the entire customer journey offers a positive experience, while some 86% will leave a brand after two poor interactions, according to Emplifi. In fact, that same research says that 49% of consumers have done just that, with poor customer experience being the key driver of churn.

From a business outcomes perspective, there are plenty of reasons to ensure that your customer journeys are as polished as possible. Customer journey management means being able to offer customers a more personalized experience, for example, which is a great way to grow an audience of loyal customers.

Some 60% of consumers will become repeat buyers if the experience on offer is a personalized one, and 66% are willing to share personal data if it helps them get that. That shows an appetite for journeys that work better on an individual level. In our own 2022 research , we found that:

  • 63% of consumers said companies need to get better at listening to their feedback
  • 62% of consumers said that businesses need to care more about them
  • 60% of consumers would buy more if businesses treated them better

And then there’s the fact that orchestrating and fine-tuning the customer journey will result in a stronger omnichannel experience – which also boosts sales. Omnisend research found that omnichannel campaigns and experiences can drive as much as 494% more orders than single-channel ones.

customer journey product management

If you remember nothing else, remember this: customer journey management is an incredibly worthwhile practice to build into your business for three main reasons:

1. You become more customer-focused Customer journey management is about putting your customers at the forefront of your business practices and processes. 2. You can offer more personalized experiences You’ll know more about what makes your customers tick, which will let you tailor your offering to them in a more bespoke way. 3. You’ll break down siloes Customer journey management requires total transparency and teams that talk regularly to one another.

The building blocks of customer journey management

Customer journey management venn diagram

Let’s take a look at each part of the customer journey management framework:

A customer journey map is a theoretical version of the steps a customer persona or segment will take to achieve what they’re trying to do. That might be making their first purchase, making a repeat purchase, or seeking customer support.

The idea, then, is to create multiple customer journey maps for all of these different experiences and list out the steps and touchpoints along the way. This’ll give you an idea of the various processes that take place in any given journey.

You’ll normally create these maps as a team, as part of a journey mapping workshop. There are two stages here: defining your audience personas and outlining their various journeys.

Fo audience personas, you’re really asking who your customers are. What’s their age and location? What do they do for a living? What’s their family status? And what are their goals in relation to your product?

Their journeys can be understood by answering a series of behavioral questions. Who’s involved in the journey? What are the processes and stages? What does the customer think during these stages? What’s the greatest moment of emotional load? What are your customer needs at this moment? How do their needs change if this experience goes badly?

For the most part, this is an experience-driven process, rather than a data-driven one – in that your team should be able to create a customer journey map for a range of customer journeys based on instinct and understanding. These assumptions can then be tested by asking customers as part of your workshopping process.

Need more info? We’ve got a full guide to customer journey mapping here.

Customer journey orchestration and optimization

Once you know what your customer journeys look like, you can think about how to design ones that work best. If your customer journey mapping is a top-level exercise, then customer journey orchestration and optimization are more practical. These use customer data and a cross-team approach to ensure that customers can move from touchpoint to touchpoint smoothly.

Customer journey orchestration often relies on a dedicated team made up of marketing, product, and service personnel, who can work together to create more compelling journeys.

Imagine, for example, that you a customer has recently installed your SaaS tool, but now they’re experiencing an issue. Your customer service team will naturally spring into action here, but great customer journey orchestration would also mean that other teams know what’s happening.

customer journey product management

Your marketing team, for instance, would know not to bombard that customer with collateral about how great the product is until their issue has been fixed. The product team, meanwhile, would know about the issue the customer is facing and would be proactively working to ensure that the issue doesn’t arise for anyone else.

In other words, orchestration is about designing processes that can be standardized as a ‘best practice’ framework for each and every customer journey.

If orchestration is about designing flows that offer the best possible experience, then optimization is about looking at the ones currently in place, identifying pain points, and working to fix them.

Optimizing customer journeys is a cyclical process, rather than a ‘one and done’ job. Here, you’ll use customer data points, insight from analytics, social listening tools, regular customer feedback, and survey responses to build a picture of both customer behavior and high-priority pain points.

Armed with all that knowledge, you’ll be able to take active steps to improve the customer experience wherever you can.

Imagine, for example, that you know that a lot of your target audience arrives on your website via Instagram ads, but that a high percentage of them bounce without making a purchase. One way to optimize that journey could be to build a series of landing pages that are unique to each segment – with each targeted social ad sending people to a more personalized product offering.

Whatever the case, it’s essential to monitor the success of these initiatives and learn if they’ve worked, or if things still need changing. Optimization is about being holistic and agile, and not ignoring the data and insight available to you.

This brings us to the last part of the journey management process…

While instinct and some level of customer insight will help you map out a range of customer journeys, the ability to orchestrate and optimize things relies on access to customer data.

Customer experience management software is the answer here. The right customer journey management tools can provide masses of insight into the customer experience, help you track KPIs, and offer areas for improvement.

customer journey product management

This information can come from a variety of sources. Customer behavior tracking can be baked right into digital products and work across platforms to help you better understand their journeys, while AI and natural language processing can listen to and understand customer effort, intent, and sentiment.

When it comes to customer journey management, software like this can help you:

  • Audit journeys you think are happening
  • Find ones you didn’t realize were happening
  • Hear customer feedback from every touchpoint
  • Understand where things need to change
  • Measure the success of those change tactics

Information like this, both real-time and historical, can not only help you monitor the success of your customer journey management efforts but also provide a list of next steps to try, in order to attain better business outcomes.

Because of that, you can think of journey analytics as the engine behind an effective customer journey management approach.

Customer behavior: Bringing it all together

The three-part customer journey management framework is really a series of overlapping processes. Mapping informs orchestration and orchestration informs optimization, but the right analytics and data can inform all three.

So, in order to drive your desired business outcomes, you need to adopt the right tools. Customer experience management platforms, like the one offered by Qualtrics, can help you figure out what your customers are doing, saying, and thinking – and why.

customer journey product management

That information, alongside a much deeper understanding of who your customers actually are, can help you build personalized customer experiences that allow people to effortlessly float from touchpoint to touchpoint in a way that feels tailored to them.

The Qualtrics CustomerXM™ Platform has been designed to turn customers into fans. It allows you to hear every customer’s voice, fix every broken experience, and increase customer loyalty and spend. Click here to learn more.

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Customer Journey Map

What is a customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a visual depiction of all steps a customer or prospect takes when interacting with your company with a specific goal in mind. This could include, for example, the path a visitor to your website takes to reach your trial-signup page. You might also develop a customer journey map to document the entire process a customer goes through to buy your product — from their first visit to your website, through signing an agreement with a sales rep.

Why Are Customer Journey Maps Important?

Customer journey mapping is an important process because it can help various teams across a company gain a better understanding of the experience that prospective and existing customers have when dealing with their organization.

Sales teams, for example, can develop customer journey maps to get a holistic, objective view of every step a prospect must take as they move through the sales funnel. When stepping back and viewing this entire process, for example, the team might discover there are too many steps — some of which are unnecessary or could at least be shortened — and that as a result, they are losing prospects.

Similarly, when they can see and review their entire sales funnel, the team might realize there are missing steps in their customer’s journey, meaning they are asking their prospects to take too big a leap at some point to the next stage in the sales funnel.

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What Can Product Managers Learn from a Customer Journey Map?

Product managers can benefit in several ways from creating customer journey maps. For example, by mapping out the entire first-time-user experience, from landing on your product’s website to actually purchasing it, you and your product team can take a more objective look at the process from a potential user’s point of view.

This can help you better understand where a prospect might become confused or frustrated along their journey — as well as where your cross-functional team has created a compelling message or painless transition that will carry the prospect along to the next stage of the buying process.

You can then share this journey map with marketing, sales, design, and other teams across the company so you can work together to improve the customer experience where it’s needed.

As an example, here is a ProductPlan customer journey map that UX Raw founder Jeremy Rawson created to depict his experience with our company, from the first website visit through creating his company’s first product roadmap with our app.

Customer Journey Map Example Graphic by ProductPlan

Other things product managers can learn from customer journey roadmaps include:

  • Whether some area of your product itself does not allow your users to complete the desired action in a logical or streamlined way.

For a deeper discussion, read our blog on how journey maps can help product managers build better products .

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How Can I Create a Customer Journey Map?

Marketing expert Aaron Agius offers the following six-step process as a customer journey map template.

Step 1: Decide what you want from this journey map.

Before you can start creating a journey map, you need to determine what your objectives are for it. Do you want to know how customers go through your sales funnel, for example, or how they interact with your support team, or how they use some aspect of your product to achieve a goal?

You can create several customer journey maps, each addressing specific interactions your customers have when interacting with your company. But you’ll want to keep each map focused on a single aspect of the customer’s journey, to avoid confusion and to give your team a clearer picture of that journey.

Step 2: Figure out your personas’ goals.

This step will help you better understand where your prospects and customers are coming from, what they need and value, and how they view themselves. When you have all of this persona data to check against your journey map, you’ll have a clearer picture of where your current customer journey conflicts with the process you’re asking them to go through.

For example, let’s assume your primary personas are executives who describe themselves as “extremely busy” in your surveys or the market research you’ve reviewed. Knowing this, when you view your journey map, you will want to make sure your current buying process does not include too many steps or take any longer than necessary.

Step 3: Identify all touchpoints.

Now you will want to identify all of the channels a prospect could possibly take as their first step with your company. This could include online ads, social media posts, organic search leading to various pages on your website, or your company’s outbound marketing emails.

Next, you’ll want to assign to each of these touchpoints the likely emotional triggers that compel users to take action and seek to engage more deeply with your company or product.

At the same time, look for any obstacles that could be stopping users from taking further action on any of these channels. When they see a social ad, for example, perhaps your product’s cost is a turnoff. Or perhaps the next-step action — filling out a lengthy form, for example — might turn prospects away.

Step 4: Determine what you want your journey map to show.

Here Agius lists the four types of customer journey maps you can use:

Current state: A detailed walkthrough of how customers currently engage with your business.

Day in the life: Also a detailed walkthrough of your customer’s journey with your company today, but put into the broader context of everything else your customer does in the day.

Future state: Your vision of how you’d like customers to interact with your product, company, etc. in the future.

Blueprint: A map of either your current-state or future-state customer’s journey, but with roles, responsibilities, and possibly timelines added for implementing your desired improvements.

Step 5: Take the customer journey yourself.

Now you’re ready to act as your customer and take the path your company has put in place to achieve whatever objective you’re trying to measure.

If you want to learn exactly what steps your prospects must go through to download your free trial, or speak with a sales rep, or complete an action using your mobile app, take that journey now.

Important: You will also want to document every step of your journey, and make notes at each stage as well about insights you’ve had, pain points you’ve identified, and any gaps or unnecessary steps in the process.

Step 6: Adjust your journey map as needed.

After you’ve completed the journey and reviewed your notes, you will want to make all necessary changes to the map.

Then you can begin translating those changes into action across your company — which could mean updating your sales process, streamlining your free trial funnel, etc.

Here are a couple of other examples, taken from Agius’s Hubspot post on customer journey maps . You can use these as templates to start your own journey map.

Agius from Hubspot's Customer Journey Map

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Customer Journey Touch Points for Product Managers

Product management leaders will view every discussion, planning session, and milestone with the customer journey touch points in mind. A well-aligned corporate culture, emphasizing the customer at every interaction, will drive customer loyalty.

Customer Journey Touch Points for Product Managers

By Laurie Harvey

Laurie is a leader with more than 20 years of experience skilled in turning ideas into unprecedented results.

PREVIOUSLY AT

Introduction

This article looks at customer journey touch points from a product management (PdM) perspective. It assumes that the investment in the product/service has been approved and there is a business commitment to getting it to market. This is not an exhaustive list of all the checklist items that a PdM needs to consider, but rather an approach to support a successful customer-focused business.

A well-organized PdM will have a plan for coordinating with the entire organization as they plan their go-to-market strategy. They will look at the big picture and ask hard questions. Their skills in communicating, negotiating, and educating will be well exercised as they work with sister organizations to make sure their customers enjoy a stress-free, positive relationship with the company.

A PdM decision should always evaluate customer risk and reward. “Will a customer leave us if I don’t do this thing?” “Will I win more customers faster if I make this choice?” “Will our risks be mitigated if we prioritize this ?” PdMs make decisions that provide the best outcome.

Refer to the product management customer journey touch points to tease out the detailed plan, create new approaches, get creative, and gain supporters. Walk through customer journey touch point examples by asking the “how” questions. Tease out the gaps to resolve them before they become escalations.

What Are Customer Journey Touch Points?

Customer journey touch points start from the very second that a potential customer hears about the product. The job, as an expert PdM, is to ensure that from that first second, the customer relationship creates a positive outcome.

Customer Journey Touch Points

When you think about a customer journey cycle, consider it a company’s smooth interactions with a potential customer as the measure of preparedness. Daily decisions concerning how to represent each product will be required, and it should be continuously reviewed for changes and exceptions.

Customers Need to Find Out About It

PdMs need to establish a framework for customers to find out about a solution. Some of the touch points below will help get this done.

Marketing is a critical partner. Marketing turns vision into the values that customers are looking for . They will help move from talking about cool functions and features to describing how amazing technology has business value–changing the conversation from bits and bytes to dollars and cents.

Look to the marketing team for supporting the key go-to-market activities including website, collaterals, social platforms, launches, user groups, webinars, industry events, road shows, giveaways, advisory boards, branding, and naming. Work with marketing on sales enablement in preparation of a product launch. If the go-to-market approach leverages channels, then the channel programs need to be ramped up.

Sales Enablement Creates Informed and Productive Sellers

Sales enablement is a valuable investment of time for a PdM. The more informed a sales organization is, the more productive they will be. Invest time with marketing to ensure sales enablement is comprehensive. Test processes and procedures for how to take a prospect and turn them into a sale.

With a focus on lead generation, brand positioning, market positioning, and customer conversion, PdMs have the opportunity to help marketing position products for success and set the right expectations.

Project Management

The project management role varies in different business, but as a critical gatekeeper, the operational day-to-day business operations must be taken care of. Project management should coordinate with responsible owners to help drive the release process, including documentation, roadmaps, stock keeping units (SKUs), verifying the handling of order processing, supporting the deal desk, documenting pricing models , and supporting pricing exceptions. A strong project manager has the unique skill of identifying gaps before they become sinkholes.

Engineering and Quality Assurance

Aside from delivering a high-quality product to market, the PdM needs to consider the “what if” scenarios. Is the code protected; is it ensured for high availability and planned for disaster recovery? Is the data protected; is there a proper data management policy in place; are the best practices of security policies applied? Is the security appropriate, and does it meet regulatory requirements? If the solution includes elements from other vendors, what happens if that vendor fails? Is there a backup vendor?

During the early phases of the customer journey touch points , engineering may be asked to support a demo environment. As the relationship progresses, a proof of concept (PoC) or minimum viable product (MVP) may also be requested. Prepare the engineering team to work closely with customers to incorporate the appropriate decisions, get useful feedback and validate the quality and performance of the MVP.

PdMs must work with legal to protect the company at every juncture of the customer journey. Some areas to review include intellectual property rights (IPR) protections/patents, end-user license agreement (EULA) or subscription service agreements, copyrights, trademarks, brands, and names.

If there are third-party vendors that contribute to a solution, is there an escrow arrangement established? PdMs will want to coordinate with the deal desk/sales and legal to make sure that the customer and channel contracts are appropriately scoped to support the product and the business models.

Customers Need to Be Able to Buy It

When the company is starting to get the word out it’s time to examine and test the buying processes. “Time to close” and “time to revenues” are critical key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider and explore how you can improve. Onboarding (getting a customer to use a solution) may take more than just pricing it in a catalog on the website. Review and test the pricing models, the contracting models, the invoicing models, the provisioning methods and the training models.

Marketing should be part of your team for the early adopter programs (EAPs), proof of concepts (POCs), and minimal viable product (MVP) programs with regular feedback and an open line of communications, rewards, and incentives.

It is during this phase that PdM and marketing are testing the messaging and evaluating the prospect’s responses to a product. Success at this stage is critical to generating qualified leads and building a sales funnel.

What needs to be in place to move a customer from a qualified prospect to a sale? Beyond sales enablement, what else is required? Some considerations that should be discussed may include App Store or online catalog integration, calls to action on the website, partner programs, market development funding (MDF) for partners, launch incentives, migration plans, polishing of customer-facing materials, and other functions that will simplify the sales closing functions.

Sales become involved at this stage as prospects become qualified prospects. In preparation for a sale, PdMs should walk through the sales process from that first interaction to delivery and onboarding. Identify any sales incentives, customer or sales promotions. Triple check that the sales team are ready and able, contracts available, channels (if appropriate) and routes-to-market understood.

It’s not unusual for a company to have a prioritized list of strategic accounts (sometimes referred to as a VIP or LightHouse account list). Align the product management efforts with the strategic account priorities to focus energies in the specific areas that align with the priorities of the sales organizations. On a weekly call, ask the question, “ What can product management do to help you close this deal this week?” Commit and follow up to create a close relationship with the sales organization. Closing deals will be the foundation for success.

Systems Engineering

The Systems Engineering team are often a buffer for PdMs. They should be the direct interaction point with the technical teams from your customer. Ensure that they are ready with the training, processes, and tools to support demos, POCs, and MVPs.

In many organizations, the training organization may be associated with the systems engineering teams. Review that they are ready with the customer-facing training programs.

Manufacturing

PdMs must forecast carefully to ensure that the company can deliver against its orders when there are physical products involved. Early and constant communications, coordinating with sales and the systems engineering teams to predict volumes well ahead of time, is a critical success factor.

Finance/Operations

Work with your project managers to walk through the buying processes and “follow the money” in your product-customer journey analysis. Ensure that the order processing is linked in with the provisioning and software license enablement. What about the need for license keys? Are there downstream royalties that must be managed? What is the impact and action plan for payment delays, returns, replacements, upgrades? How are commissions handled? Does the software track the right metrics for financial reporting? How are bookings and revenues calculated?

With a solid understanding of the financial aspects, PdMs can make more effective decisions about pricing, competitive positioning, and deal management, while ensuring that the company is positioned for sales and growth.

Test out every customer contract negotiating scenario. Having these discussions with sales, deal desk and legal ahead of time will dramatically reduce the last-minute stress of contract negotiations when dealing with quarterly or annual deadlines. Ask what contract issues are going to be show-stoppers, and what are the negotiating tactics? Often these discussions will surround policies for service level agreements (SLAs), support, warranties or guarantees and liabilities.

Customers Need to Be Able to Use It – Fix It

The contract is signed. This is just a kickoff for gaining adoption. Successful products will be able to demonstrate growth in usage, creating ongoing value for a customer. Product managers must consider the reports and metrics that will provide continuous feedback to the customer and demonstrate that they’ve made a good investment.

There will be unhappy customers. Even if everyone has done everything perfectly, customers will want more, or maybe they did not have the right expectations. Discuss the planning and processes that need to be in place to ensure the offering(s) work, and that the reputation of the company is protected. Work with marketing and sales to set appropriate customer expectations at every step of the customer journey.

The brand image of the company is core to the success of marketing. Work with the marketing organization to explore replacement / upsell programs, customer incentives, documenting and promoting customer wins (or recovery wins). Coordinate with them for analysts relations (AR) and public relations (PR). If market share and market positioning are part of your corporate goals, plan these in the go-to-market strategy.

Network/Cloud Operations

PdMs should talk through the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will drive your SLAs, manage and advertise uptime, report outages as required, and accelerate onboarding, upgrades, and migrations. Define if or how you will publicize outages while protecting your company brand.

PdMs should coordinate with Support to be prepared and responsive in managing SLAs, help desk response times, working with the user community, and driving customer training. Support will be a high-value contributor to the new feature request (NFR) process and the backlog.

Customer Success

An emerging model for most long-term customer relationships – prevalent in subscription services, is the customer success program. Usually a billable service, this role encompasses driving adoption of the offering to extend the customer lifetime value (CLV). If “value” (more revenues, reduced costs, etc.) has been identified as part of the sales process, a customer success team should be able to track progress towards that value and catch any lack of progress before the customer churns. They will also be a key contributor to the NFR pool for future development.

Engineering

PdMs should review the support escalation processes with engineering to prioritize fixes, solve issues, and meet commitments and SLAs.

Customers for Life—Learn More, Buy More

It’s a common premise that it costs 6 times less to keep or grow an existing customer than to acquire a new customer. Explore how the different teams can extend the relationship with the customer to drive the CLV.

PdMs need to be thinking years ahead. Create short- and long-term roadmaps, and create a strong vision that your customers can share in. Always look for the appropriate pricing and business models and stay competitive, or, better yet, lead the market with innovative solutions that solve customer problems. Create a differentiable value.

Marketing has a strong role in the CLV. Some common tactics for extending customer relationships include customer conferences, webinars, seminars, training, customer advisory boards, social networking blogs, customer communities, and awards. Managing the net promoter score (NPS) is a common gauge for customer satisfaction.

Customers generally want to contribute/drive product direction. The Support organization can help with managing NFR inputs, monitor and self-heal against SLAs, and track and report “time to fix.”

The customer success team often has the strongest relationship with the customer. PdMs should partner closely with customer success in developing roadmaps, performing market research , and validating assumptions.

Network and Cloud Operations

Encourage marketing to work with the network and cloud operations teams to market strong results. Track volumes of customers, track volumes of transactions, track performance uptimes and promote the strength of the offerings.

PdMs should also coordinate with engineering and the network and cloud operations teams to manage gross margins. A goal of continuous improvement will help to drive profitability.

Whether it’s inside or outside sales, PdMs should constantly explore how to optimize revenues, sell more, sell faster, and upsell to more comprehensive solutions.

Bring systems engineering together with customer success to help drive the roadmap, increase usage of your product, effectively use more of the features, and help customers to buy more products.

There is no single approach to getting product management right. It is a unique role, bridging technology with the business needs of the customer. Everyone in the company has a role in supporting the positive relationship between the customer and the company. Product management needs to take a lead in discussing the customer journey touch points with each person in the company. Ask how they fit. Ask what they need from product management to make the customer journey a positive experience for each and every customer. You’ll be surprised at the support you get when you ask.

Further Reading on the Toptal Blog:

  • Growth Product Management: What You Need to Know
  • Product Management Empowered by the Entrepreneurial Mindset
  • Learning to Learn: 5 Tips to Master Any Product Management Domain
  • Customer Journey Maps: What They Are and How to Build One
  • Getting Started in AI Product Management
  • HiPPOs and the Product Roadmap: How to Manage Senior Stakeholder Intervention
  • 5 Signs Your Product Strategy Is Broken—and How Designers Can Help Fix It
  • Creating Success: A Guide to Product Manager KPIs
  • 5 Common Mistakes in Requirements Gathering

Understanding the basics

What is meant by customer journey.

Customer journey references any point of time that a prospect or customer engages in learning about, reading, connecting to, or calling the company to achieve a purpose.

Why is reviewing the customer journey important?

Product Managers need to influence their entire company to understand why they are being asked to help. Putting decisions in the perspective of the customer journey touch points will help with understanding and commitment from the team.

What are some examples of customer journey touch points?

Customer journey touchpoints may include a help desk request, a purchase, a request for pricing, or request for proposal. In early stages, it may just be a search of the corporate website, looking for specific product information.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a graphical representation of the points in time that a customer will interact with a system or a company. It will describe the inputs and outcomes of the “conversation.”

What are the four phases of a customer journey?

Phase 1 describes interactions with a prospect to find out about your product. Phase 2 will describe the conversion from prospect to customer touchpoints. Phase 3 will onboard the customer. Phase 4 will manage or upsell the customer.

  • ProductManagement
  • CustomerJourney
  • CustomerJourneyTouchPoints

Laurie Harvey

Port St. Lucie, FL, United States

Member since October 26, 2018

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

Aaron Agius

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2021? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map right at the last second?

person creating a customer journey map

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

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Download Now

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

Customer journey stages.

  • What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

What's included in a customer journey map, steps for creating a customer journey map.

  • Types of Customer Journey Maps
  • Customer Journey Map Best Practices

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

customer journey product management

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

In other words, buyers don't wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

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

Free Customer Journey Map Template

Fill out this form to access the free templates..

For example, at HubSpot, our customer's journey is divided into 3 stages — pre-purchase/sales, onboarding/migration, and normal use/renewal.

HubSpot customer journey map stages

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

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

Customer journey stages

1. Awareness Stage

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

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

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

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

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

  • Social media
  • Search engines

2. Consideration

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

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

Product marketing content may include:

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

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

  • Your website
  • Conferences

3. Decision Stage

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

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

Decision-stage content may include:

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

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

4. Retention Stage

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

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

Retention-stage strategies may include:

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

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

5. Loyalty Stage

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

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

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

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

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

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

  • Your products

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

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

What is the customer journey map?

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

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

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

What is UX journey mapping?

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

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

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

Why is customer journey mapping important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Buying Process
  • User Actions
  • User Research

1. The Buying Process

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

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

2. Emotions

Customer journey map template service

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

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

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

3. User Actions

customer journey mapping: user actions

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

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

4. User Research

customer journey mapping: user research

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

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

5. Solutions

customer journey mapping: solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer-Journey-map-meeting

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Template

free editable customer journey map template

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

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

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

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

Current State

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Current State Journey Map

Image Source

Day in the Life

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

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Day in the Life

Future State

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Future State Journey Map Example

Service Blueprint

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Service Blueprint journey map

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

Hubspot customer journey map examle

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

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

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

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

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

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

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

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

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

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. You can create a new target customer base.

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

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

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

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

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

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

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

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

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

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

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

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

free editable customer journey map template

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

B2B customer journey map example

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

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

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

ecommerce customer journey map example

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

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

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

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

future BTC customer journey map

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

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

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

customer journey map example for retail

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

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

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

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

1. Current State Template

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

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

current state customer journey map template

2. Day in the Life Template

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

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

Get an interactive day in the life template.

day-in-the-life

3. Future State Template

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

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

Get an interactive future state template.

Customer journey map template future state

4. Service Blueprint Template

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

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

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

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

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

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

Customer journey map template service

5. Buyer's Journey Template

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

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Customer journey map template buyer

Charter the Path to Customer Success

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide for Product Managers

22 August, 2018

e0a77d45f2235500f6fb529673354877?s=150&d=identicon&r=g

Content Manager

customer journey stages

To satisfy your user, you have to start thinking like a user and not like a product manager.

.css-61w915{margin-right:8px;margin-top:8px;max-height:30px;}@media screen and (min-width: 768px){.css-61w915{margin-right:38px;max-height:unset;}} “…maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent. ” – McKinsey

Do you know what the customer thinks along their journey to purchase your product? If you want to provide the best product to your potential customers, you should learn what the user journey is.

In this article, you will learn more about these customer journey stages . You will learn to understand your users better.

6 Stages of the Customer Journey

customer journey stages

What the user thinks: He knows that he has a problem, an issue. Nothing more, nothing less, and especially not what a solution could look like.

What to do next as a Product Manager: Arouse the customer’s interest. Let him know that your product or company exists and give him the first information and let him get in touch with your product for the first time. For this, you can talk with your marketing team and develop a strategy on how to communicate.

You have aroused the user’s interest, and now he wants to know more about your service.

What to do next as Product Manager: Make sure that you are findable online and/or offline. Give the user further and more detailed information. It is a must to do user research to get to know how to catch the user. Try to find out what the user is looking for.

What the user thinks: He knows that he doesn’t want to buy the first product he sees. The user has a clearer picture of what the solution could look like, and now he wants to compare different products and companies.

What to do next as Product Manager: Show him that your product could solve his problems and satisfy his needs. What to do if your product doesn’t fit his problems? Don’t worry; your product will fit someone else! Also, make sure that your product solves a problem in the first place.

Congratulations: The user wants to buy your product. You should design the purchase as easy as possible for him. A fast, easily understandable, and self-proclaiming process is the most comfortable for the customer.

What the user thinks: The user makes his own experiences with the product. He has the chance to influence the user journey of other users, e.g., posting on social media or writing reviews.

Do you know: 76% of customers read online reviews a minimum of half of the time before purchasing the product.

What to do next as a Product Manager: You should make sure that someone communicates with your customer and makes them feel cared for and safe. Moreover, you can ask the customer for a review if there are any indicators that the customer likes your product. These indicators can differ depending on what kind of product you sell. For an app, it could be the constant use of the app.

Re-Purchase

What the customer thinks: If the customer had positive experiences with your product and trusts in your company, he could be interested in using more of your products or in upgrading his already used products.

What to do next as Product Manager: Stay in contact with your customer and give them the chance to buy more of your products or use more of your services. There are many ways to offer your customer more of your products, e.g. an offer in a newsletter or a separate page in an app.

The right content for the stages of the user journey

Most of the time, your customer has a problem or a need, and he is looking for a solution to solve this problem. Now it’s your turn.

You, as a Product Manager, can influence how the marketing team creates the content for your product. Make sure that they create the right content to give your customer the right information at the right time of the user journey.

Because of this content, the customer could decide whether your product fits his needs or not.

This passage will focus on two different kinds of content. Awareness and research content.

Awareness Stage Content

Goal: Inform the user and show him what a solution could look like. Lead him to the Research Stage without giving him the feeling he is compelled to buy.

What to do: Focus on the user’s problems and issues and get him to trust in your product and company. Avoid aggressive promotion of your product. Don’t start your content by promoting your product. Create content that shows the user what a solution could look like and tell them gently that your product can help them to reach this goal.

The right content: The most powerful channels during this stage are search engines, official websites, newsletters, or emails.

Research Stage Content

Goal: The user has a clearer picture of his problem and what a solution could look like. But he still hasn’t decided which product he wants to buy. Get him to decide on your product.

How to: Show your user why he should buy your product. Give him more information about that in the Awareness stage and let him know what you can offer him and why you offer the best product for him.

The right content: You can link from Awareness Content to Research Content or a landing page. Moreover, you can provide your lead with downloadable resources like ebooks, guides, and templates. Another type of content you could provide is comparisons to show why your product is a fantastic choice compared to other products and companies. Demo versions of your product are also great. They give the customer an insight into what you offer.

How we at UXCam can help you: If you run a mobile app, UXCam will help you with User Journey Analysis.

Annemarie Bufe

Passionate hobby dancer. Working at UXCam.

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

Last updated

Reading time.

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

#How the Hotjar team mapped out the ‘customer using a heatmap’ journey using sticky notes

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

#A customer journey map example from Airbnb, starting when a user needs to book accommodation and ending after their stay in an Airbnb property

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

#A visual recap of your 2 and 1/2 days working on a customer journey map

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

#Website analytics from tools like Google Analytics are foundational to mapping customer journeys

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

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

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

#Get real-time input from your website users with Hotjar Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

#Use this empathy map canvas template to kick-start your customer journey mapping workshop

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

#An example of a customer journey map template with different stages and themes

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

customer journey product management

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

customer journey product management

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

customer journey product management

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

<#Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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Do your customers fall off the sales or marketing funnel owing to disjointed journeys? Leverage customer journey management to build cohesive and seamless customer journeys for your brand.

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What is customer journey management?

Processes of customer journey management, what factors influence customer journey management, how to build a customer journey management framework: 5 steps, best practices of customer journey management, latest trends in customer journey management, common mistakes with customer journey management.

The modern customer moves from touchpoint to touchpoint, expecting brands to remember their back story, needs and preferences throughout their journey. Customer journey management enables brands to understand each customer’s path toward conversion and beyond, and orchestrate journeys that are worth remembering and recommending.

This blog covers the basics of customer journey management – its definition, goals, implementation, best practices and common errors. Let's get started.

Customer journey management is the strategic process of elevating the overall experience a customer has with a brand at all touchpoints in their customer journey. This process involves a couple of sequential sub-processes, including:  

Customer journey mapping 

Customer journey orchestration 

Customer journey analytics 

The journey facilitator plays a crucial role in the entire process, managing and measuring the experience at diverse touchpoints within a journey and recommending necessary adjustments to minimize friction and churn.

Customer journey management revolves around crafting an outstanding customer experience at each touchpoint and adopting a comprehensive approach to ensure customer satisfaction (CSAT) .

Customer journey management is the sum total of many inter-connected parts and processes that culminate in enhanced customer experience and business growth. Here are the processes:

Mapping the customer journey involves visualizing and understanding each step a customer takes from the initial contact with the brand to post-purchase engagement. This process helps businesses identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

With a visual, state-of-the-art journey builder, business leaders can create unified, omnichannel customer journey maps, representing the touchpoints your brand uses to communicate with customers across different channels. Here is an example:

A sample customer journey map tracing a customer from awareness to advocacy

2. Orchestrating unified customer journeys  

Orchestration involves coordinating various touchpoints and channels to create a seamless and cohesive customer experience. It ensures that each interaction aligns with the overall customer journey strategy.

Designing the customer journey involves creating intentional and engaging experiences on digital and physical mediums.

Explore the Essentials: What Is Customer Experience Management?

3. Analyzing the customer journey experience

Next, customer journey analytics enters the picture, collecting and analyzing data related to customer interactions. By leveraging analytics tools, businesses can gain actionable insights into customer behavior, preferences and pain points.

Gaining consumer insights from raw behavioral data helps uncover customer motivations, preferences and the factors influencing their decision-making process.

The customer journey is influenced by various factors that shape and impact the overall experience, including:

1. Pricing strategy

Beyond the apparent monetary value, consumers assess the perceived worth of a purchase. Factors such as discounts, promotions and perceived value contribute to the overall perception of a brand's pricing strategy. A competitive pricing model can attract price-conscious consumers, while premium pricing may appeal to those associating cost with quality.

The intrinsic quality of a product or service is an enduring factor that underpins customer satisfaction and loyalty. Beyond marketing messages, the actual performance, durability and reliability of a product contribute significantly to customer perceptions. Consistent quality builds trust, fosters positive reviews and encourages repeat business.

Also Read: From Average to Awesome — 3 Secrets of Efficient and Quality Customer Service

3. Convenience

Convenience has emerged as a cornerstone of modern consumer expectations. From user-friendly online interfaces to hassle-free return policies, businesses that prioritize convenience at every touchpoint stand to gain a competitive advantage. This extends beyond the purchasing process to encompass the start-to-finish experience, team responsiveness and overall ease of interaction.

Watch on Demand: Does Your Organization Meet the Expectations of Modern Customers?  

4. Quality of customer support

Exceptional customer service builds stickiness and prevents customer churn . The post-sales phase is critical from a support standpoint, and businesses that deliver responsive and prompt support build customer loyalty. Customer service is not merely a transactional aspect but a relationship-building tool that can turn customers into brand advocates .

5. Corporate social responsibility

In an era where consumers are increasingly conscious of corporate values, social responsibility has become a significant influence on the customer journey. Businesses engaged in ethical practices, environmental sustainability and community support resonate with socially conscious consumers. Brands that actively communicate and demonstrate their commitment to social responsibility stand to build a positive and enduring reputation.

A customer journey management framework is a structured approach that helps businesses understand and optimize their interactions with customers. This framework typically involves several steps like:

Step 1: Identify customer segments The first step in creating a journey framework is to identify and understand different customer segments . This involves analyzing demographics, behaviors and preferences to tailor the customer journey to specific audience needs.

Step 2: Perform customer journey mapping Mapping the customer journey is a visual representation of every interaction a customer has with a brand. This includes touchpoints across various channels - digital, voice and traditional. 

Read More: Top 8 Customer Service Channels to Know About

Step 3: Collect customer feedback Actively seeking and collecting customer feedback is crucial for evaluating experiences without subjectivity. Feedback can be gathered through customer surveys , reviews and direct interactions, providing valuable insights for improvement.

Step 4: Analyze and optimize Once data is collected, businesses can analyze customer interactions to identify pain points and areas for improvement. Optimization involves refining strategies and making adjustments to enhance the overall customer experience. 

Also Read: Customer Service Analytics – A Comprehensive Guide

Step 5: Implement and monitor After optimizing the customer journey, it's essential to implement changes and monitor results rigorously. Regular monitoring ensures the customer journey remains aligned with business goals and adapts to evolving customer expectations.

For the efficient implementation of customer journey management, it pays to adhere to certain best practices, such as:

1. Determine the right success metrics

To manage the customer journey effectively, it is essential to establish and monitor success metrics for customer experience . These metrics serve as quantitative indicators of how well the customer journey aligns with business objectives. Metrics may include customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS ) and customer retention rates. By regularly measuring and analyzing these metrics, organizations gain actionable insights into the efficacy of their customer journey strategies.

Interesting Read: Average Customer Retention Rates by Industry

2. Leverage journey scores

Journey Scores, a nuanced approach to evaluating the customer experience at various touchpoints, offer a more holistic perspective than standalone CX metrics.  By assigning scores to different stages of the customer journey, organizations can pinpoint areas of excellence and identify potential pain points. This granular assessment enables targeted improvements, ensuring a seamless and satisfying customer experience from awareness to post-purchase interactions.

Also Read: Customer Experience Mapping: Definition & Strategy

3. Maintain momentum

Continuous optimization is the heartbeat of successful customer journey management. Organizations must embrace an iterative approach, refining and adapting strategies based on real-time customer feedback, emerging trends and evolving business goals. This optimization process involves leveraging data analytics, customer feedback loops and market research to fine-tune touchpoints, streamline processes and enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Staying abreast of the latest CX trends is essential for businesses aiming to remain competitive in the dynamic landscape of customer experience management. Here are advancements to look out for in the coming years:

AI will be used to address staffing shortages

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly employed to enhance customer service, especially in addressing staffing challenges. AI-powered chatbots , virtual assistants and automated responses are not only helping companies manage increased customer queries but also providing quick and efficient solutions ensuring a seamless customer journey even during peak times.  Learn More: All About AI in Customer Service

There will be continued investment in customer loyalty

Recognizing the cost-effectiveness of customer retention over customer acquisition, businesses are making sustained investments in customer loyalty programs. These initiatives go beyond traditional point systems, incorporating personalized rewards, exclusive offers and engaging experiences to foster long-term customer loyalty .

Hyper-personalized experiences will rule the roost

The demand for hyper-personalization is driving the customization of customer experiences at an unprecedented level. Through advanced algorithms and machine learning, businesses can deliver tailored content, product recommendations and communication strategies, ensuring that each interaction resonates with individual preferences and behaviors.

customer journey product management

The Personalization Revolution: Enhancing CX Journeys with Sprinklr & Adobe

Lines between physical and digital experiences will blur

The convergence of physical and digital realms is reshaping the customer journey. Businesses are integrating online and offline touchpoints seamlessly, providing customers with a cohesive experience. This trend involves technologies like augmented reality, IoT devices and innovative in-store digital experiences to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds.

Interesting Read: The Very “Undigital” Truth About Digital Transformation

Despite the benefits of customer journey management, businesses often make common mistakes that can hinder the effectiveness of their strategies. Some of them are -

Fail #1: Not mapping the customer journey

One of the most significant mistakes is neglecting to map the customer journey comprehensively. Without a clear understanding of the customer's interactions, businesses may miss critical touchpoints.

Fail #2: Not involving stakeholders  

Effective customer journey management requires collaboration across departments. Failing to involve key stakeholders, including marketing, sales and customer service teams, can result in a disjointed customer experience.

Fail #3: Neglecting impact evaluation  

Measuring the impact of customer journey management strategies is essential for continuous improvement. Failing to track key performance indicators and analyze the results can hinder the ability to refine the customer journey effectively.

Fail #4: Ignoring real-time feedback  

Customer feedback is a valuable resource for improvement. Ignoring or dismissing customer input can lead to missed opportunities for enhancing the customer experience.

Fail #5: Misalignment with the executive team  

Successful implementation of customer journey management requires support from leadership and throughout the organization. Without a commitment to customer-centric strategies, the effectiveness may be limited.

Watch on Demand: The Re-Imagined Digital Customer Journey

Final thoughts

Customer journey management is a dynamic and essential aspect of modern customer retention strategies. As the business landscape continues to evolve, embracing customer journey management remains a strategic imperative for organizations aiming to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

As we wrap up this guide, it's crucial to highlight Sprinklr Service as a leading solution in this space. With Sprinklr Service, businesses can harness the power of cutting-edge technology to collect, analyze and leverage customer data effectively. In addition to supporting continued investment in customer loyalty, it prioritizes data privacy and continuous reporting.

Consider Sprinklr Service as a strategic ally to proactively shape and enhance your customer journey. But don't take our word for it! Use Sprinklr for free and understand how it assists you with unified customer journey management.

Frequently Asked Questions

Customer journey management enhances scalability by optimizing interactions, ensuring positive experiences and fostering customer loyalty, thereby supporting sustainable business growth.

Absolutely. Even small businesses can adopt cost-effective customer journey management strategies, focusing on personalized customer interactions and optimizing touchpoints within their means.

Data privacy is a critical consideration. Rigorous measures are essential to comply with regulations, build customer trust and align with the industry's heightened focus on safeguarding sensitive information.

Seamless integration of technologies, such as augmented reality and IoT devices, enables businesses to converge physical and digital experiences, creating a cohesive customer journey across various channels.

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  1. Customer journey mapping for product managers - DigitalOcean">Customer journey mapping for product managers - DigitalOcean

    The best customer journey mapping tool for you will depend on your specific needs and budget. Build a product that customers love with DigitalOcean. Creating a customer journey roadmap for product development and customer success is just one step in building a successful product.

  2. Customer Journey Mapping for Product Managers">The Essential Guide to Customer Journey Mapping for Product...

    Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool that allows product managers to visualize the entire customer experience, identify pain points, and uncover areas for improvement. In this guide, we'll walk you through the process of creating a customer journey map and provide best practices for optimizing the customer experience.

  3. Customer Journey Management: The Complete Guide - Qualtrics XM">Customer Journey Management: The Complete Guide - Qualtrics XM

    Customer experience management software is the answer here. The right customer journey management tools can provide masses of insight into the customer experience, help you track KPIs, and offer areas for improvement. This information can come from a variety of sources.

  4. Journey Maps Help Product Managers Build Better Products">How Journey Maps Help Product Managers Build Better Products

    With a customer journey map to illuminate every required step in the purchase of your product, you’d be able to experience this process exactly as your customer does — and you’d have a much better chance of discovering problems before you chase a real would-be customer away from your site.

  5. Customer Journey Map | Definition | Product Management Glossary">Customer Journey Map | Definition | Product Management Glossary

    A customer journey map is a visual depiction of all steps a customer or prospect takes when interacting with your company with a specific goal in mind. This could include, for example, the path a visitor to your website takes to reach your trial-signup page.

  6. Customer Journey Touch Points for Product Managers | Toptal®">Customer Journey Touch Points for Product Managers | Toptal®

    Customer Journey Touch Points for Product Managers. Product management leaders will view every discussion, planning session, and milestone with the customer journey touch points in mind. A well-aligned corporate culture, emphasizing the customer at every interaction, will drive customer loyalty.

  7. Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples + Template]">Customer Journey Maps: How to Create Really Good Ones [Examples +...

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

  8. Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide for Product Managers">Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide for Product Managers

    There are three steps before a customer purchases a product: Awareness, Interest, and Research. In this article, you will learn more about these customer journey stages. You will learn to understand your users better. 6 Stages of the Customer Journey. Let's start with a deep understanding of the 6 stages of the Customer Journey;

  9. Customer Journey Map: Template & Guide - Hotjar">How to Create a Customer Journey Map: Template & Guide - Hotjar

    A customer journey map (CJM) is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints. By visualizing the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience, a customer journey map helps you better understand them and identify the pain points they encounter.

  10. Customer Journey Management [Process & Benefits] | Sprinklr">Customer Journey Management [Process & Benefits] | Sprinklr

    Customer journey management is the strategic process of elevating the overall experience a customer has with a brand at all touchpoints in their customer journey. This process involves a couple of sequential sub-processes, including: Customer journey mapping. Customer journey orchestration. Customer journey analytics.