customer journey explained

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

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

1. Awareness Stage

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

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

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

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

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

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

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

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

Product marketing content may include:

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

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

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

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

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

Decision-stage content may include:

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

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

4. Retention Stage

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

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

Retention-stage strategies may include:

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

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

5. Loyalty Stage

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

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

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

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

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

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

• Your products

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

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

What is the customer journey map?

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

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

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

What is UX journey mapping?

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

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

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

Why is customer journey mapping important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

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

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

2. Emotions

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

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

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

3. User Actions

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

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

4. User Research

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

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

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

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

Current State

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

Image Source

Day in the Life

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

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

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

Future State

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

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

Service Blueprint

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

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

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

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

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

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

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

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

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

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. You can create a new target customer base.

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

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

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

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

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

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

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

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

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

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

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

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

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Current State Template

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

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

2. Day in the Life Template

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

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

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

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

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

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

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

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

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

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

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

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

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

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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

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The customer journey — definition, stages, and benefits

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

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

This post will discuss:

• What a customer journey is

Customer journey stages

Benefits of knowing the customer journey.

• What a customer journey map is

How to create a customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer journey vs. the buyer journey

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

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

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

1. Awareness

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

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

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

2. Consideration

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

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

3. Purchase

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

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

4. Retention

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

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

5. Advocacy

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

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

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

More specifically, acknowledging the customer journey can help you:

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

Customer journey touchpoints

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

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

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

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

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

1. Create buyer personas

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

To create a buyer persona, you will need to:

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

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

2. List the touchpoints at each customer journey stage

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

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

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

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

3. Map the customer experience at each touchpoint

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

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

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

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

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

Getting started with customer journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales CRM Terms

What is the Customer Journey? (Explained With Examples)

Oct 11, 2023

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

1°) What is the Customer Journey?

1.1 - definition of the customer journey.

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

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

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

1.2 - Advantages of the Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

1.3 - Disadvantages of the Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

2°) Examples of the Customer Journey

2.1 - example in a startup context.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.2 - Example in a Consulting Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.3 - Example in a Digital Marketing Agency Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.4 - Example with Analogies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the author

Arnaud Belinga

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Customer Journey

The customer journey consists of actions your customers take before and after they make a purchase. It should be part of your overall marketing strategy to improve lead generation and enable more effective marketing. By understanding the different actions your customers take before and after a conversion, you can start brainstorming new marketing tactics to improve the customer experience and keep them coming back for more.

Turn clustomers into customers with personalization

Discover ways to personalize messaging using Mailchimp segmentation and automation for customer differentiation and growth.

Think of a customer journey as a detailed map that shows the full experience a customer has with your business. It lets you see every interaction they have with your company, even before and after they engage. By first understanding the customer journey , it will be easier to define your goals and use our automation tool to create the overall marketing experience you want to provide.

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey outlines the different steps your customers take to become customers. Without the customer journey, your marketing funnel couldn’t exist. A marketing funnel helps you market your products and services to customers based on where they are in their customer journey. For example, someone researching products is at the top of the marketing funnel or at the very beginning stages of their journey.

Ultimately, a customer journey map tells a story about how customers interact with your brand, including how they first discovered your business to whether or not they’ll make a repeat purchase. The journey lays out different interactions someone could have with your brand, although not every customer needs to use all those touch points before converting.

While not all customer journeys are the same, you can use your website and marketing efforts to easily guide customers through the journey by taking them through different touchpoints.

What are the phases of a customer journey?

Knowing the customer journey definition is only the beginning; now you must learn the different stages involved. A customer journey is made up of phases , which are the distinct stages a customer passes through as they’re guided to take specific actions. The phases you include will depend on your business goals.

Do you want a user to adopt a new app you’ve released? Are you looking to get inactive newsletter subscribers to read your emails? Is your aim to turn occasional shoppers into regular, loyal customers? All these marketing paths require a strategy for getting your customers from point A to point B.

Most customer journeys will usually account for these phases:

This is how someone discovers your company, usually through a search engine or your paid advertising efforts. Let’s say your new future customer sees an ad for your latest line of ‘I Have the World’s Okayest Cat’ mugs, and they click through to your website to learn more about the brand and product. Now your business is stored in their memory.

Acquisition

Congrats! You can now call that new future customer an actual customer, because they loved the ‘I Have the World’s Okayest Cat’ mugs you released so much that they bought one. Not only that, they also signed up for your email list through a form on your site so they can be the first to learn about any new merchandise.

Now that you’ve acquired a new customer, you can send them a series of emails to make them feel welcome, showcase other stuff in your store they might be interested in, and help them understand when and how they might expect to hear from you in the future.

This refers to how you can get customers to regularly use your product or service, shop at your store, or read your content. Consider using email, social media, in-product messages, and personalization to make your customers’ experience more enjoyable.

Make your customers so happy that they’ll recommend your brand to others. This is probably one of the best ways to get new customers.

Once you’ve established the phases of a customer journey, you can plan the touchpoints you’ll use to connect with customers at the right moments.

Advantages of a customer journey map

Customer journey maps are useful marketing tools that can help you better understand your target audience and use that information to lead them down a path to conversion. All businesses can benefit from having a customer journey map, so whether you’re doing B2B marketing or building an e-commerce brand, it’s good to know how customers interact with your company.

A few other advantages of a customer journey map include:

• Understand consumer behavior . Understanding how users interact with your brand can help you comprehend their motivations.
• Identify touchpoints . Identifying the different interactions customers have with your brand before making a purchase can help you create more effective marketing campaigns.
• Support your marketing efforts . Learning as much as you can about your customers can improve marketing performance by allowing you to shorten the customer journey and increase conversions.
• Improve the customer experience . With customer data, you can improve customers' experiences with your brand, making them more likely to convert.
• Predict how customers will behave . Customer journey maps help you predict what customers will do next, allowing you to market to them no matter where they are in the funnel.
• Boost customer loyalty and engagement . By creating a path for your customers and providing great experiences, you can keep customers coming back for more. This makes customer journey mapping an essential customer retention strategy .

How to build a customer journey map

Building a customer journey map is easy, and it’s an effective way to learn more about your customers.

To build your own customer journey map, follow the steps below.

• Determine your business goals . You’ll need to determine your goals before establishing the touchpoints for your customer journey map. Goals can include converting more qualified leads into customers, increasing brand awareness, and so on.
• Understand your customers . Gather data on your customers to learn about their behavior and uncover new ways to market to them.
• List opportunities for communication . Consider all the different ways you can communicate with customers, including social media and email marketing.
• Test your customer journey . Pretend you’re the customer and test your journey to see how you can make it easy for customers to convert after their initial touchpoint with your business.
• Refine customer journey map if necessary . Refine your customer journey map when there are changes to your business. Breaking down the map into stages can help you meet your customers’ needs no matter where they are in their journeys.

How does marketing automation benefit the customer journey?

Marketing automation uses technologies that eliminate the need for you to send one-off emails or set up other marketing efforts every time you need to connect with customers. Basically, you set up an automation to execute your strategy the way you want, and it’ll do the marketing work for you.

Since automations are usually powered by if-then logic, they adapt to match the individual paths your customers take.

For example, before making a purchase people might read your website, consider what product they want, sleep on it, and eventually go back to buy. This wandering route is different for everyone. With automation, you can automatically send an email during the consideration stage of their journey, reminding them of the products they were interested in and encouraging them to finalize the purchase.

Here are a few ways automation can help you build lasting relationships by connecting with customers at each step of their journey with your business.

Connect with new fans

When someone expresses interest in what you have to offer and enters their email address in a subscriber pop-up form on your site, you can send them a welcome email to introduce yourself—and give them a reason to stick around. You can also provide information about how often they’ll receive marketing correspondence from your business.

Sell more stuff

When that contact starts to move toward a purchase, such as putting something in their cart without checking out, you can set it up so they receive an abandoned cart email from you.

Meanwhile, you can send occasional reminders to prospects that haven't interacted with you in a while. Retargeting ads and emails, for example, remind people about the great stuff they saw on your site. Chances are, at least some of them are still interested and will take action if you reach out.

Cultivates a trusting 2-way relationship

When you deliver relevant content to your customers , you show them that you care about them. The more you target your communications, the more they will trust you to keep providing high-quality products or services . You can even use automation to send coupons or other discounts to people that meet certain criteria for loyalty or spending.

Increase open and click rates

Build automated workflows to send relevant messages based on how your customers interact with your brand.

What is a Customer Journey in Mailchimp?

In Mailchimp, a Customer Journey is a marketing automation tool that lets you visually map dynamic, automated marketing paths for your customers. Depending on the phases you want customers to pass through—discovery, acquisition, retention, etc.—you can choose the starting points and other unique interactions to engage your customers every step of the way.

Any marketing or purchasing paths that you want to use your data to create can be mapped out with the Customer Journey Builder, which allows you to target specific users and focus on what will get them to move from one point to another.

To illustrate this, let's take a look at the welcome journey that people will enter when they sign up to receive your marketing. You’re probably familiar with welcome emails and have heard us talk about their value a bunch. The concept of a welcome journey is the same: greeting new contacts and introducing them to your brand.

A journey should include emails, but it also differs from an automated welcome email in 2 key ways:

• People don’t just trigger an email once they’ve met the criteria of your starting points. They’re added to and start a path that’s customized for them.
• You can plan what actions you want new customers to take throughout this journey and where you want them to end up.

Adding the right mix of rules and actions—including branching points and email—to a journey map can put new subscribers on the path to becoming loyal users and customers. Branching points help make the journeys you build for your customers more dynamic and adaptable, taking customers down If/Else paths based on specific behaviors.

You can also use a Customer Journey to tag new contacts based on insights that are important to your business. This will allow you to track customer interests and send more relevant marketing content later.

Ways to use automated Customer Journeys

Of course your needs for setting up automated Customer Journeys will vary based on how your business functions and scales, but there are a few key workflows that can help any small business build and maintain relationships with their customers.

Create Customer Journeys to:

Greet new customers & introduce your brand

First, you need to onboard new people who start following your brand. A great first impression is key to establishing a long-lasting relationship. Begin with an email that thanks people for signing up and provides the information they need to know. Show customers you care about getting to know them by sending a survey to discover what they’re interested in, so you can customize your marketing to fit their needs. You can also use this journey to measure how often your contacts want to hear from you and when they’re most likely to engage.

Reunite shoppers with their carts

Research shows that 69% of e-commerce shoppers abandon their carts before checking out. If you don’t have an abandoned cart automation setup, you’re missing out on a lot of easy sales. Shoppers who have left a cart have already expressed interest in your brand; they just need a nudge back to your store to finish buying. With a journey, not only can you set up an automated email to send when someone abandons a shopping cart, but you can use the flow to highlight other stuff you sell and keep customers coming back.

Re-engage customers who have lost interest

There are several ways you can win back inactive customers—it just depends on what type of engagement is most important for your business goals. You can set up a journey that customers will start when a specific amount of time has passed since they last bought something from your store, or you can target customers who haven’t opened any of your last 5 email campaigns. From there, you can decide what interactions will get these customers to fall in love with your brand again.

Ask for product reviews or feedback on your service

When someone buys a product, that’s the perfect time to reach out and make a connection. Get their thoughts on the order and shipping process. Check in on how they’re liking their purchase. And don’t forget to include a coupon for other stuff in your store they’re sure to love.

Organize your contacts based on their interests and levels of engagement

Use a Customer Journey to help manage your audience based on insights that are important to your business. Make behind-the-scenes changes—like adding and removing tags—that'll help you send relevant messages and create more meaningful interactions.

Find success with customer journeys

Customer journeys are an important marketing tool to communicate effectively with your customers and lead them down a path to conversion. The easier your customer journey is to follow, and the more touch points you take advantage of, the better experience you can provide. Even after your customers have converted, deliver ongoing support and communication to retain them and promote brand loyalty.

Visualizing your customer journey is simple with Mailchimp. Using our Customer Journey Builder , you can start to learn more about your customers’ behavior and write a sales email that converts no matter where they are in the buying process.

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

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

What is the customer journey?

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

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

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

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

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

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

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

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

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

• Consideration

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

• Sale/Purchase

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

Customer journey: Pre-sale

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

Awareness stage

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

Consideration stage

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

Customer journey: Sale

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

Decision stage

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

Customer journey: Post-sale

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

Retention stage

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

Advocacy stage

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

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

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

Why are the customer journey stages important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

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

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

1. Perform customer journey mapping

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

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

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

2. Listen like you mean it

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

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

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

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

3. Get personal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

Customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, b2b customer journey 13 min read, customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, request demo.

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Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty

A version of this tutorial originally appeared in the free Primer app .

In an ideal world, the journey people take to become loyal customers would be a straight shot down a highway: See your product. Buy your product. Use your product. Repeat.

In reality, this journey is often more like a sightseeing tour with stops, exploration, and discussion along the way—all moments when you need to convince people to pick your brand and stick with it instead of switching to a competitor.

Staying on top of all of these moments might seem overwhelming, but mapping your customer’s journey can help. It can give you and your team a greater understanding of how your customers are currently interacting and engaging with your brand, and also help illustrate how your products and services fit into their lives, schedules, goals, and aspirations.

Let’s take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping.

1. Find the sweet spot where your customers’ goals and your own align

Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any marketing and communication you deliver during the customer journey should be focused on helping your brand reach those goals.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that your customers’ goals might be different from yours. For example, let’s say your goal is to sell more sunglasses with new, improved lenses that have a better profit margin. Meanwhile, your customers’ top concern might be getting sunglasses that match their personal style. Lens protection could be their second or even third priority.

Consider how your marketing and communication strategies can help your customers reach their goals while also getting you closer to yours.

2. Identify all of the communication touchpoints in your customer’s journey

When do you traditionally communicate or engage with customers? Make a list of these moments and group them based on when they happen during the journey: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

Now find communication touchpoints you may have missed. Track what actions and interactions between your brand and your customers happen just before and after each of the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages.

For example, you might decide that a major moment in your purchase stage is when your customers are guided through your website to buy an item in their shopping cart. But you might notice other communication touchpoints right before that purchase moment, like your website confirming to customers that an item has been added to their shopping cart, then suggesting related products.

Looking for all these touchpoints can quickly bog your team down in a lot of details and micro-interactions. To avoid that, prioritize the moments that get you closer to achieving your business goals.

3. Recognize pain points and moments of delight

How might your customers feel at the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages as they attempt to achieve their goals? For example, could your customers be happy that your website makes browsing easy, but frustrated at how confusing it is to purchase a product?

Find the moments where your customers might have negative experiences. Who on your team is involved in those touchpoints? Your web designers? Your marketing team? Your copywriters? Are there other team members who could collaborate and improve the situation?

Say a customer likes how your online ad describes your product. But when they go to your store, salespeople present the product differently. That’s an opportunity for your copywriters and salespeople to better align their language and sales pitches.

4. Experience the customer journey yourself

Imagining how your customers might feel during their journey is valuable, but actually experiencing it for yourself can uncover much-needed insights.

If your business is run online, open a browser and experience what it’s like to be your customer. Similarly, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, go into a location that sells your product. Afterwards, ask yourself about the main communication touchpoints you encountered. Did they work well? Did they help you complete your journey? What was missing?

And don’t forget about the competition. Become one of their customers and experience the journey they’ve created. Then ask yourself all of the same questions.

5. Visualize your customer journey map

Go beyond just writing down your customer journey and communication touchpoints, and actually create a visual map of them. This doesn’t need to be a polished, heavily-designed visualization. Simply write each of your touchpoints down on individual sticky notes or papers, then pin them in order to a wall.

By doing this exercise, you’re helping your team take a bird’s eye view of the entire customer journey. You can organize your thoughts and collaboratively brainstorm new ideas for changing or adding to your communication at these touchpoints.

Make sure to create hypotheses around why new communication touchpoints will improve the customer journey, then implement and test them. If your hypotheses are wrong, go back to your journey map, reassess, tweak, and improve.

Yes, the journey mapping process can be fairly intensive, but it can have a big impact on your business. That’s why it shouldn’t be just a one-time event. Customer tastes can shift, new technology can become available, and your brand itself might evolve. So it’s important to do journey mapping at least once a year and evaluate what communication touchpoints are still working and what needs to be revisited.

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Stuart Hogg is a marketing consultant who has worked with a number of Fortune 500 brands. He created “Journey Mapping: Connect the Customer Dots” for the Primer app.

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What is a customer journey map?

Table of Contents

Definition of customer journey mapping.

A customer journey map (or CJM) is a visual representation of the process your customers go through when interacting with your company. This diagram takes you through the exact steps that lead to a customer choosing your specific product and buying it from your business. Creating a customer journey map will provide you with a visual storyline of how a buyer or a customer persona engages with your business at every touchpoint. From seeing your brand on social media to going into the store to buy the product — the customer journey will document the entire story. Customer journey maps are especially useful when they chart the experience of a single persona. By taking one specific customer persona, such as a small business owner or a single mother, the journey map can be detailed and specific — providing you with data and information about how to target specific customers. If you include too many personas on one customer journey map, you risk your diagram becoming too generic, and you may overlook new opportunities. You’ll likely need multiple customer journey maps to accurately depict the many personas of your target audience. But of course, you’ll need to define those personas first. Miro has a user persona template that can help you represent your target audience and better understand how to satisfy their needs with your product.

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Ever wondered what makes a customer buy a specific product from a certain company? The answer often lies in the journey the customer takes above all else. Here’s why mapping the customer journey is so important for every business, no matter how big or small.

Makes complex customer journeys easy to understand

Like other diagrams and concept maps, turning a complex process like a customer journey into a visual representation brings clarity and shared understanding. Instead of trying to describe a customer journey model exclusively with words, the diagram gives everyone on your team a visual overview of the entire customer experience.

Most customer journey touchpoints are mapped on a timeline, which creates a chronological understanding of the needs and wants of the customer at each stage of the process. Having a tool that makes it easier for your team to understand these complex journeys is crucial, as often, a customer journey doesn’t align with one specific department. For example, marketing, sales, customer service, and technical support may all need to be involved in creating an ideal user experience.

Everyone from each of these departments needs to be clear on how the journey works, where the handoffs are, and how to maximize the experience. By having one diagram act as a point of reference, different departments can ensure they are on the same page and can make informed, collaborative decisions.

Puts you in the customer’s shoes

An effective customer journey map helps you learn not only customer behavior but also how customers interact with your product. It also helps you understand your customers on an emotional level, acknowledging what causes them frustration, happiness, and excitement. By putting yourself in a customer’s shoes, you can follow their entire journey from brand awareness to advocacy. This allows you to gain deeper insights into the customer’s pain points and what compelled them to choose your company’s product. Based on this analysis, you can tailor your business processes to attract similar personas and increase conversions.

Creates a clearer understanding of your customer’s expectations

Customer journey mapping is a strategic approach that allows your company to understand customer expectations as well as what attracts certain personas to buy your product. By taking the time to understand the customer’s journey, you can understand what they expect from their experience with your business and product. This deeper understanding of what they need from your business allows you to proactively support them. It may also identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

Contributes to long-term customer retention

Striving to understand what the customer needs and following their journey will allow you to optimize their experience with your company. This will make your customer feel heard and appreciated, and, as a result, brand loyalty among your customer base will increase. In turn, this will lead to high customer retention and, hopefully, an increase in purchase frequency, which will benefit your company greatly in the long term.

The benefits of customer journey mapping

Many great tools can help you understand the customer journey. Why should you care about this one? Here are a few reasons why CJMs should be an essential part of your business toolkit.

Build better experiences

Customer journey mapping gives you a big-picture experience of your customer’s interaction with your brand. Think of a CJM as a map of a physical location like a city or a town. Once you have a map spread out in front of you, it’s easier to understand where you might run into roadblocks. It helps you plan ahead, and make adjustments to help customers overcome those obstacles.

Once you can visualize all phases of your customer’s journey, you can see where you’re not meeting their expectations. Armed with that knowledge, you can build a customer experience that’s seamless and satisfying. That translates into improved products and processes, more sales, faster sales cycles, and greater customer retention.

Enable customer success

For your business to succeed, your customer must also succeed. Customer journey mapping helps you see what is and isn’t working for your customer so you can set them up for success. Even a stylized picture of your customer’s journey can empower you to create, monitor, adjust, and enhance touch points.

Work better as a team

Even if your objectives are different, everyone in your organization is working toward the same goal: satisfying your customers. But it’s easy to lose focus. Engineering teams are busy coding, marketing teams are writing ad copy, sales teams are trying to sell to their prospects.… How do you all stay aligned?

Customer journey mapping is powerful because it keeps everyone focused on the customer. By creating a CJM, you can gain deep insight into what your customers want and need. For the marketing team, that means building better campaigns. For the sales team, that means deeper engagement with customers and prospects. For engineering, that means a holistic understanding of what programs are meant to achieve. Customer journey mapping makes it easy to equip every team member with a sophisticated understanding of your customers.

Set yourself apart from the competition

A  recent report  shows that 90% of the organizations that use customer journey mapping saw a decrease in churn and customer complaints. Customers and prospects respond positively when they feel like a brand understands their desires and pain points. The data is clear: customer journey mapping can set you apart from your competition.

5 customer journey stages

The customer journey map can be split into five important stages, as seen in this customer journey mapping template pack . Each customer will go through these stages as they interact with your company during their journey.

1. Awareness

Awareness is the moment when a buyer first becomes aware of your company, product, or brand. This can happen through a variety of mediums, from social media advertising to a word-of-mouth referral from another customer. Your brand can increase awareness and attract more customers through marketing practices and brand advertising. Paying attention to how your target audience grows their awareness of your brand enables you to optimize your marketing approach, budget, and channel prioritization.

2. Consideration

After your customer has become aware of your brand, they move into the consideration stage. This is a stage of ideation in which the customer considers whether they need the product or service your business is offering. They may also consider other companies that offer the same product. This stage proves the importance of good advertising at the awareness stage. If your company markets itself well, the customer will likely consider your product even more closely at this stage.

3. Purchase/Decision

After the customer has considered all of their options, it’s time to decide on the product or service they are going to purchase — or whether they’re going to make a purchase at all. Should they decide against buying, that will be the end of their personal customer journey. If that is the case, your company should focus on improving the awareness and consideration stages by working on its customer service or trying out new advertising or personalized promotional techniques.

4. Retention

Remember: the customer journey doesn’t end once they’ve made a purchase. Every company wants a loyal base of customers who return time and time again, which is why your team should analyze what needs to be done to stop customers from leaving. Fostering brand loyalty is a great way to improve your business’s general income. You can aim to retain customers by providing things like incentives, better customer support, and reminders about new products through digital marketing.

5. Advocacy

The last stage in the customer journey is advocacy — letting other people know about your brand or the service that you offer. Customers are more likely to advocate for your company if they are completely satisfied throughout each stage of the customer journey. This shows the interconnectedness of every step and how the journey is a circular pattern, even if it focuses on different personas.

What are customer journey touchpoints?

Throughout the five customer journey stages, there are different customer touchpoints . These are the moments in the customer journey when the customer interacts or engages with the business. Let’s take a closer look at the three types of touchpoints.

1. Pre-purchase touchpoints

A pre-purchase touchpoint includes any time when the customer interacts with your business before making a purchase decision. Pre-purchase touchpoints can occur in the awareness and consideration stages. They can also happen when another customer that has already gone through the entire customer journey refers your business. Pre-purchase touchpoints can happen if a buyer comes into contact with your business by visiting your website, seeing a post about you on social media, or hearing about your product from a friend. This point of the customer journey is all about persuasion and explanation. You need to make sure that when the customer discovers your business for the first time, you demonstrate that you can fulfill their buying needs.

2. Purchase touchpoints

Purchase touchpoints take place during the decision/purchasing stage of the buyer’s journey. This can happen in-store or online. You should optimize this stage to be as efficient and streamlined as possible so that the customer doesn’t change their mind during the purchase. For example, having a slow website that isn’t mobile optimized or forcing the customer to jump through hoops with a sales assistant to make a purchase will affect the buying process. Optimizing this touchpoint is essential to retaining customers, as a quick and easy purchase process could compel them to return in the future.

3. Post-purchase touchpoints

Post-purchase touchpoints include the journey’s advocacy and retention phases. The success of these touchpoints depends on how well-optimized the previous stages in the journey were. If the entire journey up until this point was enjoyable for the customer, they are more likely to refer your product or service to their friends and family. You should try to stay in regular contact with the customer to remind them about the journey and your company, as this will encourage them to return in the future.

What’s the difference between a customer journey map and a user story map?

Although customer journey maps and user story maps resemble each other, their functions are slightly different.

User stories are used to plan out features or functionalities, typically in an Agile model. In a user story, you describe a feature or functionality from user perspectives. That way, you can understand what the user wants to do and how that feature can help them accomplish it. Use a customer problem statement template to help you craft these perspectives.

Typically, a user story takes this form: “As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].” For example, “As a UX designer, I want to sketch on an online whiteboard, so I don’t have to be in the same location as my collaborators.”

You can then visualize that user story with a user story map. For example, if you wanted to visualize the user story above, you would start by detailing the various steps the user will take when using that functionality. In this case:

Sketch on the whiteboard

Share with teammates

See teammates sketch in real time

Then, you would document the features required to take each step. Once you’ve done that, you would write these features on sticky notes and rearrange them based on their corresponding functionalities.

In short, user story maps allow you to plan and implement changes to the customer journey. Customer journey maps allow you to discover and understand what those changes might look like.

How to create a customer journey map

Creating a great customer journey map can be challenging. You need to get into the mind of a specific customer persona and understand not only their needs but also the different ways in which they interact with your company. With Miro’s customer journey mapping tool , you can streamline the process of creating one of these maps for your specific needs. Or, if you'd rather not start from scratch, follow these steps when filling out Miro’s customer journey map template :

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Before diving into the creation of your customer journey map, ask yourself why you need to know this information. Are you looking to optimize certain touchpoints? Are you looking to see why customer retention is low? Do you want to determine why customers decide against your product? Figuring out why you’re building the map is essential to the success of the exercise.

2. Identify profiles and personas

As previously mentioned, you need to focus on a specific persona when examining the customer journey. It’s important to remember that the customer journey map should focus on one specific audience at a time. This will help you figure out exactly who your target customer base is and gain an in-depth understanding of the buyer’s needs that your company is attempting to fulfill.

3. List the customer journey touchpoints

Next, you need to understand what happens each time the customer comes into contact with your company. These points in the process will tell you which areas of the journey you need to streamline and optimize to improve the customer experience.

4. Take the customer journey yourself

For the customer journey map exercise to be productive, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and be honest with the experience that you have. This is the best way to see if your customer journey mapping is accurate and identify areas for improvement in the customer journey.

Customer journey mapping example

Here are some customer journey mapping examples for you to draw inspiration from and better understand what goes into a customer journey model.

Alex Gilev’s Practical Customer Journey Map

Alex Gilev is a certified UX expert and product leader experienced in creating highly usable and intuitive web applications. His practical customer journey map example created in Miro is based on the idea that you want to create an irreplaceable product for your customers. This customer journey map is divided into four phases: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame.

This take on a customer journey map allows you to figure out practical fixes that will increase your competitive advantage over other businesses in the same industry. It helps you identify the value metrics that make your product desirable to the specified persona so that they’ll want to use your product frequently and repeatedly.

Build a customer journey map suited to your needs 

As we’ve shown, creating a customer journey map with your team has many benefits. This exercise can help you create the ideal experience for anyone who may come into contact with your company. It could be invaluable to the future of your business and help you build a loyal customer base.

Are you ready to get started with customer journey mapping? Try the Customer Journey Map Template , the ideal foundation on which to begin. This template is tailored to help your company identify touchpoints so that you can meet your customers’ needs.

How to make a customer journey map?

Benefits of a customer journey map

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Service blueprint vs. journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

Business growth

Marketing tips

Customer journey mapping 101 (+ free templates)

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

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

Table of contents: 

Customer journey map template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the customer doing?

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

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

What is the customer thinking?

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

Where and how could the customer encounter our brand?

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

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

What touchpoint opportunities are missing?

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

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

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

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

Consideration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand loyalty

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

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

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

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

Survey your customers and customer teams

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

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

Automate customer data collection

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

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

Tweak for B2B, B2C, and SaaS industries

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

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

Create multiple maps for different journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day/week/month in the life map

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support experience map

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researches local gyms online

Reads reviews

Compares membership options

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

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

Encounters: 

Online reviews

Social media pages

Missing touchpoint:

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

Views gym's social media

Visits gym's website

Views membership pricing page

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

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

Contact form

Free trial request pop-up

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

Visits the gym to take a tour

Meets with a membership consultant

Potentially signs up for free trial

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

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

In-person visit

Facility tour

Consultation

Free trial sign-up

Orientation session

Gym access card

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

Visits the gym regularly

Participates in classes

Engages with personal trainers

Potentially pays for membership after free trial ends

"Maybe I should compare options again." 

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

Personal trainer consults

Email reminders about upcoming end to free trial

Personalized offer encouraging renewal

Follow-up call

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

Refers friends and coworkers

Promotes the gym on social media

Regularly visits and attends classes 

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

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

Referral programs

Social media engagement

Reviews gym

Potentially provides a testimonial for gym

Missing touchpoints:

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

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

Related reading:

Beyond the sales pipeline: Using a CRM for customer success

A quick guide to contact management

B2B email marketing: Proven strategies + examples

4 tips for creating an inbound marketing strategy

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

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Customer Journey Maps

What are customer journey maps.

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

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

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

• Transcript loading…

Customer Journey Maps – Tell Customer Stories Over Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Define Your Map’s Business Goal

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

Conduct Research

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

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

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Review Touchpoints and Channels

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

Make an Empathy Map

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

Sketch the Journey

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

Iterate and Refine

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

Share with Stakeholders

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

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

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

Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This customer journey map template features three zones:

Top – persona and scenario. 

Middle – thoughts, actions, and feelings. 

Bottom – insights and progress barriers.

Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

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

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

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

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

Resource Intensity

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

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

Risk of Bias

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

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

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Customer Behaviors

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

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

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

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

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

Misalignment with Customer Needs

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

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

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

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

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

Over-Reliance on the Map

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

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

Data Privacy Concerns

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

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

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

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

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

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

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

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

Learn more from this insightful video:

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

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

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

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

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

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

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

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

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

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The Essential Guide to The Customer Journey and Lifecycle

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

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

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

Phase 1: Reach

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

Tracking Reach

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

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

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

Phase 2: Acquisition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracking Acquisition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 3: Conversion

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

Tracking Conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 4: Retention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 5: Loyalty

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

Tracking Loyalty

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

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

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

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

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More related content, how to manage your customer lifecycle from the customer’s perspective, how to map the customer journey with engagement models, customer lifecycle management.

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How to use customer journey mapping to improve your business

Katie Leask

May 17, 2021 | 6 min read

Last Updated: Jun 7, 2023

Table of Contents

Mapping the customer journey

• What is a customer journey map?
• What is customer journey mapping?

The customer journey mapping process

How to create a customer journey map, example customer journey maps, take away the hassle of digital customer journey mapping with contentsquare.

What exactly is customer journey mapping and why is it so important for success? In this post, we’ll cover what a customer journey map is and how to create one, plus share examples of customer journey maps to inspire you.

At Contentsquare, we’re committed to creating better digital experiences for all. Our advanced customer journey analysis shows you exactly how visitors progress through your site from entry to exit. So you can discover your biggest opportunities and frustrations within minutes.

A few decades ago, the customer journey was pretty straightforward.

A customer may see an ad in a magazine or on television, and then head out to buy your product from a local shop. For marketers, life was relatively simple.

But thanks to social media and advancements in digital marketing, the way we shop has changed. What may have once been a three- or four-touchpoint journey from awareness to purchase, can now be influenced by hundreds of messages coming from a broad range of channels.

Display ads, WhatsApp, social media promotion, Amazon Alexa, email marketing ; in 2021, the available touchpoints for you to get in front of your customer are almost endless.

This means customer journey mapping is a necessity if you want to make sure you’re getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Why? Because the key to success is making sure your customer’s path to purchase is as smooth and frictionless as possible. And customer journey mapping will help you do just that.

What is a customer journey map ?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every touchpoint a customer has with your company, from the awareness stage right through to the purchase and then the advocacy stage.

An in-depth customer journey map can help you understand your customers better by uncovering common pain points in their path to purchase.

In eCommerce, for example, marketers will use a customer journey map to identify which stages of the buying journey are causing problems with their target audience.

Then, by mapping out the content you have against each stage of your customer’s journey, you’re able to pinpoint gaps in your content marketing strategy . 

Maybe you don’t have enough case studies to help get bottom-of-the-funnel prospects over the line? Perhaps customers are losing interest in your site because you don’t have buyer’s guides for those in the consideration phase?

One of the main benefits of a customer journey map is being able to ensure you have content ready for each stage of your buyer’s journey to help progress them down the funnel, entirely friction-free.

What is customer journey mapping ?

Customer journey mapping is the process of creating a customer journey map . This is a super important process and, while it may take some time and energy to complete, will be worth it in the long run.

It means getting to know your customers as best you can; where they hang out online, what problems they’re trying to solve, what their budgets are, what content they like to consume and how they like to consume it.

Now you know why you need a customer journey map, how do you create one? 

A basic customer journey map is relatively straightforward to build, but it will take some time to research and populate with great content.

You’ll also need to keep it updated in line with a fast-paced marketing environment and be prepared to adjust and optimize it as you go.

Step 1: Persona research 

The first step is finding out as much about your customers as possible. 

Remember, effective research relies on more than just current customer interviews. So you’ll want to find out why people didn’t choose you too.

Speak to your sales team about opportunities that you’ve lost historically and what issues were sighted most commonly. Why did people choose to go elsewhere? What might have persuaded them to stay?

Take a look at your web analytics to see what content your customers are engaging with and what impact these touchpoints have on moving people down the funnel. 

Speak to your customers and ask them directly what made them choose you over competitors.

• What do they like most about you?
• What improvements have they seen since choosing you?

Step 2: Define touchpoints

Once you know who your customers are and what they need, you can start plotting the touchpoints they have with your business. 

These touchpoints will depend on what industry you work in and how your specific customers interact with your brand. 

For example, the first few touchpoints for a coffee shop might look like this: 

• The customer sees a geo-targeted ad
• The customer visits your shop
• The customer buys coffee
• The customer follows your brand on Twitter

Whereas for a clothing company, it might look like this: 

• The customer sees a social media promotion
• The customer clicks on your website
• The customer browses your site
• The customer adds an item to their basket

The stages of the customer journey are different for everyone, but here are the most commonly used stages to get you started:

Awareness > Consideration > Purchase > Retention > Advocacy

And here are some examples of the types of content you’ll need for each stage: 

• Awareness: Social media ad, PPC 
• Consideration : Blog content, buying guides
• Purchase : PLP, PDP
• Retention : Email nurture
• Advocacy: Co-creation, social media posts

Step 3: Choose your tools

Once you know your customer and what their touchpoints look like, it’s time to plot these onto a customer journey map . 

A Google Sheet is a great place to start. It’s easily editable and shareable with dropdown functionality and conditional formatting to keep everything organized.

Step 4: Populate your customer journey map

Next up, add columns for each stage of the buying process that you defined earlier. These don’t have to be too granular to start with, though you may want to expand them later on down the line to create super personalized content.

Add in details about how your customers are feeling at each stage of their journey, plus what pain points they might have. The more detail you can add here, the easier it will be to create the right content .

Step 5: Create kickass content

Once mapped, it’s time to make sure you have kickass content for every stage of your customer journey map. Your map will inform your content strategy; such as creating more upper-funnel content (such as PR stories and SEO-focused blog content) or better optimizing your bottom of funnel content (such as Product Listing Pages and Product Detail Pages).

Next up: Layer your audiences

If you want to go one step further, you can layer more specific audiences to ensure your content consistently hits the right spot with different audiences.

For example, you may want to create customer journey maps for different job roles or industries to make sure you’re delivering the right messages to them at the right time.

Whether you decide to segment your audience by most common pain points, job title, or industry, your customer journey map will help you spot points of friction and content gaps to ensure a smooth customer experience for everyone.

What does a customer journey map look like in practice? Here are two examples of customer journey map layouts that you may want to use for inspiration.

Example 1: NN Group

NN Group has defined their buying stages based on their customer’s very specific buying cycle. Consider, explore, compare, test, and negotiate. They’ve also included quotes from customers at various stages to better understand their pain points and feelings.

Example 2: UX Hints

This second example from UX Hints uses a grid format to map out what their customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage of the buying process. Using emojis is a quick and engaging way to share feelings, something you may want to emulate in your customer journey map.

Once a customer lands on your site, our customer journey analysis software tells you everything you need to know about their digital journey.

From uncovering their most common pain points in seconds to understanding where unexpected drop-offs occur and what optimizations will increase engagement on your website, we can help you get as close to your customers as possible.

What’s more, our signature sunburst visualizes aggregated data from every single one of your customer journeys, allowing you to make quantitative and qualitative decisions about which website optimizations will have the most positive impact.

If you’re interested to know more about your customers and how they interact with your site, get in touch with us today.

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Katie is Contentsquare’s Global Content Manager. With five years of content experience both agency and client-side, she knows a thing or two about creating content that drives traffic and converts. She enjoys reading, red wine, and going to bed early. She’s also pretty fond of rooftops and is rarely seen without freshly painted nails.

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From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do

When most companies focus on customer experience they think about touchpoints—the individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings. This is logical. It reflects organization and accountability, and is relatively easy to build into operations. Companies try to ensure that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, sales staff, or marketing materials. But this siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes—along the entire journey taken—can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.

Customer journeys include many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. Journeys can be long, stretching across multiple channels and touchpoints, and often lasting days or weeks. Bringing a new customer on board is a classic example. Another is resolving a technical issue, upgrading a product, or helping a customer to move a service to a new home. In our research, we’ve discovered that organizations that fail to appreciate the context of these situations and manage the cross-functional, end-to-end experiences that shape the customer’s view of the business can prompt a downpour of negative consequences, from customer defection and dramatically higher call volumes to lost sales and lower employee morale. In contrast, those that provide the customer with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.

This is especially true in today’s multitouchpoint, multichannel, always-on, hypercompetitive consumer markets. The explosion of potential customer interaction points—across new channels, devices, applications, and more—makes consistency of service and experience across channels nigh impossible—unless you are managing the journey, and not simply individual touchpoints. Indeed, research we conducted in 2015 involving seven EU telecom markets found that when consumers embarked on journeys that involved multiple channels their experience was materially worse than during single-channel experiences, whether those experiences were digital or not.

The trouble with touchpoints

Consider the dilemma that executives faced at one media company. Customers were leaving at an alarming rate, few new ones were available for acquiring in its market, and even the company’s best customers were getting more expensive to retain. In economic terms, a retained customer delivered significantly greater profitability than a newly acquired customer over two years. Churn, due to pricing, technology, and programming options, was an increasingly familiar problem in this hypercompetitive market. So was retention. The common methods for keeping customers were also well known but expensive—tactics like upgrade offers and discounted rate plans, or “save desks” to intercept defectors.

So the executives looked to another lever—customer experience—to see if improvements there could halt the exodus. What they found surprised them. While the company’s overall customer-satisfaction metrics were strong, focus groups revealed that a large number of customers left because of poor service and shoddy treatment over time. “How can this be?” one executive wondered. “We’ve measured customer satisfaction for years, and our call centers, field services, and website experience each score consistently over 90 percent. Our service is great!”

As company leaders probed further, however, they discovered a more complex problem. Most customers weren’t fed up with any one phone call, field visit, or other individual service interaction—in fact, most customers didn’t much care about those singular touchpoint events. What was driving them out the door was something the company wasn’t examining or managing—the customers’ cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints, multiple channels, and over time.

Take new-customer onboarding, for example, a journey that spanned about three months and involved an average of nine phone calls, a home visit from a technician, and numerous web and mail interactions. At each touchpoint, the interaction had at least a 90 percent chance of going well. But average customer satisfaction fell almost 40 percent over the course of the entire journey. The touchpoints weren’t broken—but the onboarding process as a whole was.

Many of customers’ numerous calls during the process represented attempts to clarify product information, fix problems with an order, or understand a confusing bill. Most of these service encounters were positive in a narrow sense—employees answered the questions or solved the issues as they arose—but the underlying problems were avoidable, the root causes left unaddressed, and the cumulative effect on customer experience was decidedly negative. The company’s touchpoint-oriented, metric-driven way of thinking about customer experience had a large blind spot.

Solving the problem would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but the company needed a whole new way of thinking about and managing its service operations to identify and reimagine the customer-experience journeys that mattered most.

More touchpoints, more complexity

The problem encountered by the media company is far more common than most organizations care to admit and is often difficult to spot. At the heart of the challenge is the siloed nature of service delivery and the insular cultures, behaviors, processes, and policies that flourish inside the functional groups that companies rely on to design and deliver their services. In many cases, these groups are also the keepers of the touchpoints that shape and measure how the company’s activities meet the customer’s—say, an in-store conversation with a sales rep, a visit to the company’s website, or a query to the company’s call center. Whether because of poorly aligned incentives, management inattention, or simply human nature, the functional groups that manage these touchpoints are constantly at risk of losing sight of what the customer sees (and wants)—even as the groups work hard to optimize their own contributions to the customer experience.

The media company’s sales personnel, for example, were measured and rewarded for closing new sales—not for helping customers navigate a complex menu of technology and programming options to find the lowest-price offer that met their needs. Yet frustration about complex pricing for high-end equipment, confusion about promotions, and surprise over program lineups were all frequent causes of dissatisfaction later in the process, as well as frequent sources of queries to the company’s call centers. Executives knew that each of these discrete items was a challenge—but only when they took a broader end-to-end view did it become apparent that even though each individual link in the service-delivery chain appeared healthy, the cumulative effect was quite the opposite.

The answer isn’t to replace touchpoint management and thinking. Indeed, the expertise, efficiencies, and insights that functional groups bring to bear are important, and touchpoints will continue to represent invaluable sources of insights—particularly in the fast-changing digital arena. Instead, companies need to recognize and address the fact that—at least, in most cases—they are simply not wired to naturally think about the journeys their customers take. They are wired to maximize productivity and scale economies through functional units. They are wired for transactions, not journeys.

So how should companies tackle this issue? In our experience, six actions are critical to managing customer-experience journeys (articles elsewhere in this volume explore several of these topics in depth):

• Step back and identify the nature of the journeys customers take—from the customer’s point of view.
• Understand how customers navigate across the touchpoints as they move through the journey.
• Anticipate the customer’s needs, expectations, and desires during each part of the journey.
• Build an understanding of what is working and what is not.
• Set priorities for the most important gaps and opportunities to improve the journey.
• Come to grips with fixing root-cause issues and redesigning the journeys for a better end-to-end experience.

The amount of time it can take to identify journeys, understand performance, and redesign the experience can vary widely from company to company. For companies seeking only to fix a few glaring problems in specific journeys, top-down problem solving can be enough. But those that want to transform the overall customer experience may need a bottom-up effort to create a detailed road map for each journey, one that describes the process from start to finish and takes into account the business impact of enhancing the journey and sequencing the initiatives to do so. For many companies, combining operational, marketing and customer, and competitive-research data to understand journeys is a first-time undertaking, and it can be a long process—sometimes lasting several months. But the reward is well worth it; creating a fact base allows management to clearly see the customer’s experience and decide which aspects to prioritize.

Journeys explained

To better see how customer journeys work, let’s look at a measurable and routine service event—say, a product query—from the point of view of both the company and the customer. The company may receive millions of phone calls with questions about its product, and it is imperative to handle each of these calls well. But when customers are asked to recall their side of the experience months later, it is highly unlikely that they would describe such calls simply as a “product question.” That’s because the call has a context, and understanding it is the key to understanding customer journeys (Exhibit 1).

A customer-journey scorecard

Managers should know what a customer journey entails:

A journey is a specific, discrete experience in the customer life cycle. The act of simply purchasing a product in a store is a touchpoint within a customer’s journey. Researching and then buying a new product and getting it up and running at home would constitute the full journey as the customer sees it.

End-to-end experiences

It’s not enough to measure customer satisfaction on any single touchpoint; what matters is the customer’s experience across the entire journey. It’s common to generate high individual touchpoint-satisfaction scores and unacceptably low scores across the end-to-end journey.

Do managers describe journey events in the way a customer would (for example, “upgrading my product or service”)? Or do they lapse into company-speak (for example, “shipping new equipment”)?

Often multitouch and multichannel in nature, a “new-product onboarding” journey might begin with a website visit, then a sales call, then a second website visit, followed by a store visit, then a technical-help call during the activation or installation stage.

Journeys are often longer than you think. For example, the onboarding journey in the cable industry can extend through two or three billing cycles. (Most calls in the first few months are actually onboarding-related issues and inquiries.)

Journeys are repeatable—and can be repeated for a meaningful percentage of customers.

The customer might have been trying to ensure uninterrupted service after moving, for example, or was confused about renewal options at the end of a contract, or was trying to fix a nagging technical problem. A company that effectively manages its customer journeys would still do the best job it could with the individual transaction—but its agents would also understand the context for the call, address the root cause for the customer’s query, and create the feedback loops to help the company continuously improve the wide range of upstream and downstream interactions that surround (and sometimes cause) the call. That is a broader lens than most call centers apply (see sidebar, “A customer-journey scorecard”).

Most executives we talk to readily grasp the journey concept but wonder whether perfecting journeys pays off in hard-dollar outcomes. Our research, in the form of annual cross-industry customer-experience surveys that span pay TV, retail banking, auto insurance, and other sectors, shows that it does. Companies that excel in delivering journeys tend to win in the market. In both the insurance and TV industries, for example, better performance on journeys correlates strongly with faster revenue growth ; in fact, in measurements of customer satisfaction with the firms’ most important journeys, a one-point improvement on a ten-point scale corresponds to at least a three-percentage-point increase in the revenue-growth rate (Exhibit 2).

Moreover, the companies that perform best on journeys have a more distinct competitive advantage than those that excel at touchpoints; in one of the industries we surveyed, the gap on customer satisfaction between the top- and bottom-quartile companies on journey performance was 50 percent wider than the gap between the top- and bottom-quartile companies on touchpoint performance. Put simply, most companies perform fairly well on touchpoints, but distinctive performance on journeys can set a company apart.

Why are journeys so much more effective at driving results? For one thing, our research suggests that journeys are more predictive of desired outcomes. In most industries, the three journeys that matter most to customers account for more than 25 percent of total customer satisfaction. Indeed, across industries, performance on journeys is substantially more strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than performance on touchpoints—and performance on journeys is significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes such as revenue, churn, and repeat purchase. In other words, delivering a distinctive journey experience makes it more likely that customers repeat a purchase, spend more, recommend to their friends, and stay with your company (Exhibit 3).

Journeys versus touchpoints: Some practical examples

Consider the case of the local operating entity of a global insurance player. Market leadership in one of its largest lines of business, car insurance, was under siege by both established players and new entrants. Executives knew that they would have to innovate in order to differentiate their offering. They also knew that for a long time the fragmented nature of their customer experience had been a problem: many of their customers bought their product and managed their claims via a broker. When a car needed repair after an incident, a local mechanic typically managed the process, with little involvement from the car insurer. With so many individual touchpoints outside the company’s control, the insurer struggled to provide a consistently high-quality and repeatable experience.

Research identified consistent and clear communications as one of the most important elements of customer experience. Improving the experience started with offering insurance policies that were easy to read, understand, and compare with those of competitors. But even more important to customers was securing answers to questions regarding the status of their car while under repair. What was being replaced or repaired? When would they get the car back?

The effort made it apparent that there was potential to resolve a critical frustration for customers during a very important part of their overall customer journey with the insurer. It also revealed the opportunity to build a deeper engagement and relationship. So the company set out to provide an end-to-end communications “glue” to what had been a multitouchpoint, multiparty customer journey.

Executives rapidly created a prototype using a sample of 20 current customer cases. Each day, the company would track where the case was and provide a simple update to the customer via email or text. The company set up “personal contacts” for each customer who would send the emails, serve as a single source of contact, and phone the customer directly if there was a material update to be announced, such as a delay in finishing the work. Overall, every effort was made to personalize communication during an important phase in the customer’s journey. By the end of the pilot, the company had learned a number of lessons related to the appropriate frequency of contact, the importance of using the customer’s preferred channels, and timing communications. The company also learned how to scale the service without adding substantial costs, largely by using underutilized call-center resources at off-peak hours.

The impact was profound. Net promoter scores for the customer journey climbed by 15 percentage points, and by 50 points for difficult cases, such as when repairs were first attempted but eventually the car had to be declared a total write-off. Delighted customers sent thank-you notes to the company, and brokers and mechanics reported significant improvements in their dealings with customers, who were now much better informed.

Or consider the European energy retailer that identified the “home moving” journey as a particular point of dissatisfaction among its customers, as well as a significant source of churn. The company mobilized a cross-functional team (service, sales, marketing, and IT) to understand what was happening—from the customer’s viewpoint—along the journey to prompt these high levels of customer dissatisfaction. What the team found was a basic journey that was performing poorly across the various functions and departments that supported it.

The journey’s design suffered from several features that imposed unnecessary inconvenience and anxiety on customers when moving. For example, customers had to contact the company no earlier than ten days before their move date to provide all of the necessary details—otherwise the IT systems would not record the information. An organized customer, one who called perhaps a month before the move date to set everything up, would find that his or her move details were never recorded. Customers also had only one method—voice calling—to contact the company.

Once the customer had notified the company of moving plans, he or she would receive several different forms of communication. Upon examination, the team found that some of the communications were redundant, while others contradicted other accurate pieces of communications. All this generated additional anxiety and confusion.

Poor communication, in fact, was the single largest reason that customers called into the call centers, and it was another source of dissatisfaction. Customer-service agents had no method of tracking where the customer was on his or her moving journey. More often than not, this meant that agents had to hand off the inquiry to a back-office team for further investigation and problem resolution. The back-office team, inundated with these types of inquiries, suffered delays in getting back to the customer with a resolution, naturally producing additional calls to the call center—and so on.

The good news was that, for the first time, the company understood the benefit of taking an end-to-end view of the customer journey and the importance of understanding how interdependent individual touchpoints were along the journey.

Several improvements were designed and implemented rapidly to address the key problem areas. The moving journey was redesigned into a signature customer journey for this energy-retail company: customers now have the flexibility to provide the company with their move information at a time that suits them. They also have the option to use a phone, the web, or a smartphone app to contact the company; all essential communications are now delivered consistently in a single “home movers” pack. Finally, the company now incorporates into the home-movers pack discount vouchers for do-it-yourself stores, tradespeople, and restaurants in the area—creating a welcoming cluster of local businesses (the businesses also happen to be customers of the energy retailer’s small and midsize business unit, thus creating a positive customer experience across all customer segments). The result? A 50 percent increase in customer satisfaction from the starting position, and a 15 percent reduction in the company’s customer-service cost. Employee satisfaction increased by 20 percent and churn related to this journey was cut by more than half.

In most cases, companies are simply not naturally wired to think about the journeys their customers take. Thinking about customer journeys—instead of traditional touchpoints—can require an operational and cultural shift that engages the organization across functions and from top to bottom. For the companies that master it, the reward is higher customer and employee satisfaction, revenue and cost improvements, and an enduring competitive advantage.

Nicolas Maechler is a principal in McKinsey’s Paris office, Kevin Neher is a principal in the Denver office, and Robert Park is an associate principal in the London office.

The authors wish to thank Conor Jones and Laird Rawsthorne for their contributions to this article.

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Understanding Customer Journey Stages And Touchpoints

There’s no doubt that customer journeys are more complex than ever. But by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, you can make great strides in both customer experience and business success.

The term ‘customer journey touchpoints’ refers to the various interactions a customer has with your business during their purchasing process. This process includes stages that remain constant, whether a customer is buying a physical or digital product, signing up for a service, or making a booking.

In this article, we’ll unpack customer journey stages touchpoints, helping you to better understand how to effectively connect with and guide your customers every step of the way.

Here’s what we’ll be delving into. If you want to jump to a specific section, simply click on the corresponding link, and you’ll be taken right there.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey, the customer journey stages, how customer journey stages work in practice, customer journey stages vs customer touchpoints, why is it important to know your customer journey touchpoints, how to identify your customer journey touchpoints, how to define your customer journey, faqs about customer journey stages and touchpoints.

First things first. What do we really mean when we talk about the customer journey? The customer journey describes the customer’s path to making a purchase and beyond. Customer’s very rarely decide to buy on a whim. Instead, they work through a series of steps to become aware of, consider and evaluate their options before making a decision. 

Understanding your customer journey is essential for any business. Why? By knowing their goals and expectations every step of the way, you can do a much better job empathising with your customers and perfectly positioning your product or service. 

There are many different variations of the customer journey. However you’ll most commonly find it split into five main stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Stage 1: Awareness

This is where someone first encounters your brand, usually when they are looking for a solution to some kind of problem. 

For example, if someone wants to plan a trip to Paris, their first step will likely be to search online for hotels or apartments in the city. By clicking on things like booking portals, travel blogs and individual hotel websites, they become aware of different accommodation options.

What’s important to know is that at this stage the customer is not ready to make a decision. Rather, they are becoming familiar with what is available. Your goal here is simply to communicate what you have to offer.  

To be discovered during this early phase, online visibility is key. Things like online reviews , blog posts, social media posts and optimising your website for SEO can all help you show up in search results.

Stage 2: Consideration

This stage is where the customer begins to more seriously evaluate their options as opposed to casually browsing. They will be more specific about the features they are looking for in a product or service and will also begin to compare companies or products.

Your goal here is to convince your target customers that your product or service can resolve their problem (ideally in a way that your competitors can’t) . It’s a really important stage, because it’s one where you’re most likely to have your prospect’s full attention.

With that in mind, it’s a good point to really focus on providing the best possible customer experience . Think about content and interactions that will not only answer your prospects’ questions but also make sure they feel valued. 

Not sure where to start? Getting feedback from your existing customers is a great way to get real-life insights and see where you can improve.

Stage 3: Decision

The stage we’ve all been waiting for! The customer has now done the bulk of their research and is ready to take the plunge. But don’t get too excited just yet! It’s still possible to lose your customer at this stage. 

As a business, your role here is to make the purchasing process as easy and convenient as possible . This applies not only from a user experience perspective but also in terms of what you can offer your customer. Things like free demos, trial periods and introductory discounts can be enough to clinch the decision.

Another huge factor here is online reviews. Why? Nearly nine out of ten consumers read reviews before making a purchase (1). To make sure you are getting a steady stream of fresh opinions, a review management tool is the way to go. It will not only help to automate the process but will also provide you with valuable analysis that you can use to grow your business.

Stage 4: Retention

Remember, the customer journey does not finish as soon as they’ve made their purchase. Research shows that a 5% increase in customer retention can produce more than a 25% increase in profit (2). That’s why it’s essential to keep the contact going at this stage of the customer journey. But how?

Surveys are an essential part of the retention stage for any business. They are a fantastic way to get honest opinions from your customers and the insights you need to make sure they stick around. 

Metrics like the Customer Effort Score (CES) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) are a great indicator of customer loyalty and are really easy to implement. If you want to read more about these and other key metrics, you can have a read of our handy article: How to measure customer satisfaction KPI: NPS, CSAT, CES, & CLI .

Just bear in mind that to see real change, you not only have to collect customer feedback but also act on it! Individual follow-ups to any issues that arise can go a long way in turning things around. 

At this stage, keep the focus on strengthening the relationship with your customer and ensuring they have the best possible experience. Do that, and chances are they’ll keep coming back for more. 

Stage 5: Advocacy

This is the stage where happy customers turn into brand advocates! They let others know about their experience by leaving online reviews and generate more business through word of mouth marketing. 

The core concept at the advocacy stage is creating a community around your brand and making your customers feel appreciated . Of course, not every customer will reach this stage, but those that do are invaluable to your brand.

The advocacy stage should always include proactive ways of managing customer feedback . This means not just collecting customer feedback but also responding to it in a personal and timely way. In other words, show your customers that their opinions really matter!

Incentives are also key here. Personalised rewards, offers and referral programs are all great ways to encourage customers to spread the word. 

It’s all well and good explaining the customer journey stages, but perhaps now you’re wondering how they really work in practice. Let’s have a look at one together!

Take the example we used earlier of someone who wants to plan a trip to Paris. Here is an example of how they may work their way through the customer journey stages.

• Awareness – They begin by doing a basic online search for ‘ hotels in Paris ’. They click on a few different links and become aware of some accommodation options. While searching, they also read a few articles on some of the best things to see in Paris and the best neighbourhoods to stay in.
• Consideration – Following on from their initial search, they decide that they want to stay in a hotel in the Montmartre neighbourhood. Ideally they would like to stay somewhere with a hotel bar that offers breakfast as part of the rate. With this in mind, they begin to narrow down their options, comparing amenities, prices and reviews.
• Decision – The guest finds two hotels that fit their needs. The prices are almost exactly the same, so they take a closer look at the reviews for each. Option A has good reviews, but the latest is from several months ago and so they’re not sure how relevant it is. Option B, on the other hand, consistently gets good reviews, with one left as recently as last week. Because of this, the guest makes the decision to book option B.
• Retention – The guest has a great stay at the hotel. They can check in easily online, make requests to the front desk straight from their device, and the service and amenities exceed their expectations. They are offered a 5% discount on their next stay and feel happy about booking again for their next stay in Paris.
• Advocacy – When they get home they receive an invitation from the hotel to leave an online review, which they do gladly. Back at work the following week, their colleagues ask them about their trip and they tell them all about the hotel and how excellent it was. One particular colleague was thinking about planning a trip themselves, and asks them for a link to the hotel website where they later make a booking.

When looking at the customer journey, you may also come across the phrase customer touchpoints. While the phrases sound similar, there is a key difference between the two that it’s important to understand. 

Customer touchpoints are the individual interactions that someone has with your company during each customer journey stage. For example, in our hotel example, touchpoints might include:

• Following the hotel on social media
• Asking a question via live chat
• Checking prices or looking for information on the website
• Reading hotel reviews
• Checking in at the front desk

Note that touchpoints can be both on and offline, so it’s important to think about both throughout the customer journey.

Understanding your customer journey touchpoints is crucial to shaping a top-notch customer experience. Picture touchpoints as the moments your customers interact with your business. These interactions mold their overall impression of your brand. So, knowing these touchpoints well enables you to spot and fix problem areas, and tailor your strategy.

Consider this: you run a bakery. When a customer visits your website, places an order, enters your shop, or shares their experience on social media – those are touchpoints. Your goal is to ensure all these interactions contribute to a standout customer experience.

By tracking these touchpoints, you can allocate resources effectively, knowing when to engage with customers and when to step back. Plus, understanding customer interactions throughout their journey helps you address weak spots, turning potential churn into conversions.

Mapping out your customer journey touchpoints is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle, revealing a complete picture of your customers’ experience with your brand. Here’s how to identify these critical points:

• Start with the customer’s perspective : imagine yourself as a customer interested in your product or service. How would you find out about your business? What steps would you take to make a purchase? Walk through the entire process from discovery to post-purchase support.
• List every possible interaction : note down every possible interaction a customer may have with your brand. This includes visiting your website, following you on social media, receiving promotional emails, talking to your customer service team, and so on.
• Group touchpoints by stage : organize these interactions by customer journey stages – awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. This will help you understand the sequential order of touchpoints and their impact on the customer’s journey.
• Involve your team : your sales, marketing, and customer service teams interact with customers every day and can provide valuable insights. Use their experiences to help identify other potential touchpoints you might have missed. Tools like Miro are great for working collaboratively and getting everyone’s ideas in one place.
• Ask your customers : lastly, never underestimate the power of direct feedback. Surveying your customers about their experiences can reveal insights that internal brainstorming might miss.

By identifying and understanding your customer journey touchpoints, you’ll be well-equipped to optimise each interaction and create a better customer experience. Remember, the goal isn’t to manage every single touchpoint, but rather to manage them in a way that they collectively deliver a satisfying and cohesive customer journey.

So, now you know the basics of customer journey stages and touchpoints. But what should you do with this information? 

Customer journey mapping is an incredible tool for plotting your customer’s entire experience from A to B. It not only includes every stage but every individual touchpoint. Along with every interaction, a customer journey map also outlines any pain points your customers may encounter and details the emotions they feel along the way. 

The Benefits Of Customer Journey Mapping

Visualising your customer journey has many benefits for your business. It allows you to:

• Get a better understanding your customers goals and expectations
• Identify and eliminate pain points to make customer journeys smooth as possible
• Get rid of ineffective consumer journey touchpoints that may hurt your conversions
• Work out what customers actually receive vs. what customers want
• Assign ownership of touchpoint to increase the accountability of your employees and departments

Customer journey mapping helps make your customer experience management the best it can be. Look at it like this. The more you understand your customers, the more you can increase customer satisfaction . And the more happy customers you have, the more will reach the advocacy stage and introduce even more people to your brand. Cool, right? 

If you’d like to learn more about customer journey mapping (including step-by-step instructions for getting started), head over to our article: How a Customer Journey Map Helps you Offer Unique Experiences .

Just like customers are all unique, so is the customer journey for any given company, from a small or medium sized business to an international enterprise brand. Though the five stages we’ve shared with you are the most common way to segment the journey, feel free to do so in a way that works for you! The main thing is that you have a solid understanding of your specific customer and the journey they go on with your brand. 

By doing so, you’ll be better equipped to offer unrivalled customer satisfaction , boost your revenue and turn everyday customers into raving fans. Of course, mapping out your customer journey is easier when you have the right tool for the job.

Any good Voice of the Customer program should include a way to visualise the customer journey. At Customer Alliance, our customer journey feature gives you a holistic view of satisfaction every step of the way, plus smart analytics that enable you to compare data across individual touchpoints. 

Want to find out more? Join us for a free introductory call and see what we can achieve together. 

What does “customer journey” mean?

The customer journey is the path that a customer takes from the moment they first learn about your product or service until the point of purchase and beyond. This journey is usually split into five main stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Advocacy. Understanding this journey is essential because it helps businesses align their offerings with the customer’s goals and expectations at every stage.

What’s the difference between customer journey stages and customer touchpoints?

While customer journey stages represent the overall path a customer takes, customer touchpoints are the specific interactions a customer has with your brand at each stage. These interactions, both online and offline, can include visiting your website, following you on social media, receiving emails, engaging with customer service, etc. Touchpoints are crucial to understand as they shape a customer’s impression of your brand and influence their experience.

How can I identify my customer journey touchpoints?

Identifying your customer journey touchpoints involves considering the customer’s perspective and listing every possible interaction they may have with your brand. Group these touchpoints by stage and collaborate with your team to ensure you’ve covered all potential interactions. Don’t forget to ask your customers for feedback as well; their direct experiences can provide valuable insights you might have overlooked.

Why is customer journey mapping beneficial?

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for visualizing your customers’ experience from discovery to advocacy. This process helps businesses understand customers’ goals and expectations better, identify and eliminate pain points, streamline touchpoints, and increase accountability within the team. It aids in optimizing customer experience management and ultimately leads to increased customer satisfaction and advocacy.

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Understanding the customer journey from start to finish

The customer journey is easily one of the most important, yet most misunderstood, parts of doing business. One of the reasons for this is that the needs of customers can change. Additionally, not all customers are alike. Therefore, it can be difficult for many businesses to ensure customers have the best buying experience from the start of their journey through to making their purchase and using the product or service.

Businesses that want to have a better overall feel and understanding of the journey their customers take will need to learn more about what the journey is and the path most customers will follow when they are making a buying decision. Knowing and understanding the customer journey map is more than just a good idea. It is essential for optimizing the customer journey .

What is the Customer Journey Map?

Although you may know about the customer journey, you might not know what a customer journey map is. Essentially, this is just the visual representation of the engagement your customer has with your brand from the time they know they need a product to the point of making a purchase. The visual timeline doesn’t need to have fancy graphics, of course. It could simply be a list that touches on the various points of the customer journey.

The map needs to lay out all the stages the customer will work through when buying, along with helping to identify the pain points during the journey. A customer journey mapping study from 2018 found that 67% of customer experience professionals that participated in the survey had been using this type of mapping in their business, and 90% of those using it found that it had a positive impact.

Below, we’ll be briefly discussing the benefits of the customer journey map. You’ll also see some simple examples to give you an idea of how you can make your own map. It’s easier than you might think, but it is well worth taking the time and putting in the effort to create journeys for the various products or services that you offer. After all, a single customer journey map will not work for all products or services.

Why Create a Customer Journey Map?

Ultimately, the customer journey map will help to improve the experience customers have with your company. You can better visualize and understand what the customer is experiencing at each step along the way. This could help you find some common pain points that will need to be addressed or that could be used to help with the marketing of the service.

Mapping the customer journey can help you to get answers to a range of questions. For example, you can learn more about where customers might be dropping out of your sales funnel. Are they leaving your website? This could mean that the site is not user-friendly, and it might not meet the customer expectations. How often does the customer reach out to customer service with questions? Is the customer service department able to answer those questions efficiently and in a timely manner? What interactions is the customer having with your brand before they make a purchase, or before they leave and don’t come back?

When you have the answers to these questions, and when you are creating quality customer journey maps for the services and products you offer, it can help immensely. You can use the map and the information it provides to help you train the other team members on the customer experience best practices. You can make sure that the team is focused on the customer, you can improve your marketing using information from the maps.

Consider the benefits that the customer journey map can offer:

• Find Gaps in Service or Communication: You can often find problems and gaps that occur in your customer service, your website, communication among employees, etc.
• Increase Sales: One of the other major benefits is the potential for increased sales. Naturally, when you can understand the customer’s journey and find ways to make it easier on them, there is a greater chance that they will end up buying from your company. It could also help with upselling and cross-selling, as you are learning more about the customers and the best ways to market to them.
• Better Customer Satisfaction: When customers are provided with the types of experiences they want, and when you can make buying easier, they will be more satisfied with your company. They will not only be more willing to buy from you in the future, but they are likely going to let friends and family know about your business.
• Better Employee Satisfaction: Additionally, knowing the customer journey and creating a customer map will help your employees to know the customers better. This means they can perform their roles better and ensure they are providing the best possible service to customers at various points along the journey.

As you can see, there are many benefits to creating a customer journey map. However, you might not know where to begin. Fortunately, it is not as difficult as some might think. Let’s look at what you need to do to create these maps.

Creating a Customer Journey Map in Seven Steps

Below are seven simple steps that you can take to start creating your customer journey map. Keep in mind that this is just one way to create the customer journey. It can be a good starting point for you. Graphically, it can be anything that makes sense to you and that will work for your business. Once you have created the customer journey map, you can put it to use and start gleaning information that can help your company provide a better overall customer experience.

Step 1: Know Your Goals and Set Your Targets

The first thing you need to know is what your goals are for creating the customer journey map. What are your targets? When you know the goals and targets, you will have a destination that you want to reach. Knowing your goals will make it much easier to narrow down the best ways to hit your targets. The goals will help you to keep on track.

Here are some of the most important questions you have to ask when you are creating your goals and targets before you get too deep into creating the customer journey map.

• Why are you making the map?
• What do you want to find out from the map?
• What do you want/need to achieve?
• Whose perspective will the map be from?
• What experiences will be factored into the map?

Remember, you will likely need to have more than just one customer journey map for your business. This is because you may need to cover different types of services or products, or because you have different types of customers. The next step will help you with this.

Step 2: Create Buyer Personas

Now that you know your goals, you will next need to create buyer personas. Most companies that have done any sort of marketing will have an understanding of buyer personas and their importance. They are fictional versions that represent a specific type of customer segment for your brand. When you are putting together a buyer persona, you need to make sure to consider and include important characteristics such as:

• Demographics
• Personality
• Shopping preferences
• Information sources

The market research that you have done for the company will be beneficial here. The more data you have available, the better it will be when it comes to seeing things from the customers’ perspective.

When you are creating the buyer personas, it is a good idea to use only one to three in total. You want to avoid using any more than this, or it will dilute your focus. You won’t end up getting the information that you need when it comes to narrowing down pain points, needs, etc.

Step 3: Identify Customer Motivations

Once you have narrowed down the customer personas you will be using for your map, you then need to think about the motivations of the buyer persona. Keep in mind that the motivations will vary based on the persona and the product or service involved. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Think about what it is that they will be thinking about when they are looking to buy.

Just as you need to know your own goals when creating the customer journey map, you also need to know the customer goals when it comes to their journey. Why do they need to buy? What is it that has caused them to come to the decision that they need whatever it is your company—and your competitors—are offering? Think about it from their perspective.

Step 4: Identify Pain Points

As you are going through and identifying the motivations the customers have, you will also want to stop to think about the potential pain points. What is it that could be causing them to hesitate and not reach their goals? Are they worried about things like the price? Shipping? Installation of a product? Are they worried because there are so many options available, and they don’t know which one to choose? This can lead to analysis paralysis, where they continue researching products but don’t make a decision.

When you can see the pain points, you have an advantage over your competitors. You can then see what you can do differently to improve the customer journey. You can focus on removing those pain points. If the customer is nervous about spending the money, you can mention that you have a return policy, or you could talk about all the benefits that the product or service offers that will make their lives easier. Think about the ways that your brand can help.

Step 5: Understand the Journey the Buyer Takes

Most of the time, there will be three main stages in the buyer’s journey. Of course, there could be more substages depending on how their experience goes. The three main stages include awareness, consideration, and decision.

At the awareness stage, they know that they have an issue or that they want to make a purchase for one reason or another. The consideration stage is when the customer is trying to determine exactly what they need and how it will help them. The decision stage is when the customer knows what they need and is searching for the best solution or product to meet their needs.

You want to get an idea of what the buyer is thinking at all of these stages. When you know what they are thinking, it becomes much easier for you to find areas where your company can meet those needs or answer those questions as early as possible.

Step 6: Have Plenty of Touchpoints

In the digital world, there are many potential contact points where a customer might encounter your brand. You want to have as many touchpoints and channels available as possible, so you can increase the chance of the customer finding your business at the various stages of their journey. Some companies will have traditional touchpoints, not just digital, of course. The goal is to make sure that all of them, whether it’s a storefront in a brick-and-mortar store or a website, can provide the customers with what they need. Remember, think about things from their perspective. Make it as easy as possible for them.

Step 7: Revise and Improve

Mapping the customer journey is not something that you are only going to do once. This is something that you need to watch and update regularly. If the customer’s journey changes, then your map and your efforts will need to change as well. It’s expected that you will continue revising, working on, and improving to meet the changing needs of your customers.

Two Examples of Customer Journey Maps from the Customer’s Perspective

Below are two customer journeys for different types of products and services. By understanding these types of journeys from the perspective of the customer, it will help to make it easier for you to apply them to your own business.

• It’s hot already, and summer is fast approaching. You don’t have central AC, but you need to stay cool.
• You search on the web for ways to reduce the heat in your apartment and find several Window AC units, portable AC units, and fans. You know that fans don’t work well enough, and you want to avoid going through the hassle and expense of a large window unit. So, you choose a portable AC unit instead.
• However, when you start to research the options, you find that there are so many choices available, it’s hard to make a selection. You spend time looking at reviews, features, costs, etc.
• Once you finally narrow your selection, you then head to an online retailer. However, the one that you choose has a terrible website layout and the shipping is outrageous. They don’t have an option to have someone install it,
• You then search for a different retailer that offers free delivery and installation. Even though the unit costs slightly more, you go for this option because it has what you need.

This is just one example. These are the same types of things that your potential buyers are thinking about when they visit your website. Although the products might be different, the types of pain points that they come across could be the same.

• You go out to start your car only to find out it doesn’t want to cooperate. Nothing happens when you turn the key.
• You check the battery and find that it’s fully charged. It’s a different problem. Maybe the starter or the ignition switch, but you aren’t certain.
• You head online to look for mobile mechanics that can get out to the house and see what’s wrong with the vehicle and complete the repair.
• You have to narrow your selection based on where you live and which mechanics will service your area. After finding a suitable mechanic with good reviews, you contact them and see if they can provide an estimate once they examine the vehicle.
• The first mechanic calls you back and tells you that it’s a problem that needs to be fixed by a locksmith rather than a mechanic without even looking at the vehicle.
• You contact a locksmith, but they examine the vehicle and tell you it’s a problem for a mechanic.
• You go to a second mechanic who comes out and diagnoses your vehicle, finds the problem, and fixes it for you.

Now, taking the two simple examples above, you can start to think about how a company might be able to better illustrate the customer journey using the stages that the customer goes through— awareness, consideration, and buying .

Putting the Customer Journey Map Into Action

Once you know how to put yourself into the shoes of the customer, and how to build and apply their journey to your map, you can start to find ways that you can improve your service. You will start to see the things that the customers want or don’t want, you can better identify their goals and their pain points, and you can work toward improving the way your company handles those things.

Even if you feel that your customers aren’t having any problems, that’s probably not true. It just means that you aren’t yet aware of them. Creating a customer journey map and being proactive about these matters is the only way to find out and make the improvements that are needed.

You can make the changes you need easily when you are using the right platforms. With NICE CXone, the most complete cloud contact center platform, you will find that it’s easier than ever to create extraordinary customer experiences. The platform can handle all the interactions with customers across over 30 digital and self-service channels, as well as provide AI-driven customer insights, performance metrics, and reporting. This makes it easier than ever for you to manage the customer journey from beginning to end.

With CXone, you can align your company to improve the customer journey. You can better understand your customers, so you can find ways to improve their satisfaction. Learn more about NICE CXone and see how you can offer the digital-first experience that customers demand today.

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Customer Journey Map (2024): How-to & Examples [+ Template]

Home » Customer Journey Map   | 🕑 

Gust de Backer

November 10, 2023.

The Customer Journey is the process your customers go through with your company. This then covers the first to last interaction someone has with your company.

Many companies do not have a map of how their customers orient, what they care about or when the company comes into the potential buyer’s mind.

Not having enough mapping of the Customer Journey puts you at risk of having, perhaps unknowingly, negative touchpoints with your (potential) customer.

I’m going to show you:

• What the Customer Journey is
• How to create your Customer Journey
• And what good examples of a Customer Journey are

Let’s get started…

Table of Contents

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is the process that maps every interaction with your brand:

The first interaction someone has with your brand is the beginning of the Customer Journey. If you find yourself in a niche market, it can also be interesting to map interactions with your niche.

The Customer Journey for B2B and B2C often looks quite different:

The Customer Journey is relevant to any business, but particularly important for companies that:

• Are customer-centric
• Want to improve customer satisfaction
• Want to increase sales

In general, you often see in companies that the marketing department is responsible for ensuring that (potential) customers have a positive experience with the brand.

A nice trend you see is that marketing/growth teams are becoming more responsible for the entire funnel rather than just reaching and bringing in new customers.

7 Stages of the Customer Journey

There are different models you can use to map out the Customer Journey, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing:

Keep in mind the different roles of the Decision-making Unit , but essentially there are 7 steps you can include in the Customer Journey….

Your (potential) customer can have 2 types of needs:

• Latent need : the person does not yet know he needs something. If you are going to buy a car you are not yet directly concerned with insurance.
• Concrete need : the person knows they have a certain need, here it is important to be visible with your brand. For example, think of buying a phone when your old one is broken.

Every Customer Journey basically starts with a certain need.

In practice, you can encounter 5 types of customers in this:

• Unaware : don’t realize they have a problem or need.
• Problem Aware : realize they have a problem or need.
• Solution Aware : they know there are solutions to their problem or need, but they don’t know you.
• Product Aware : they know you, but haven’t bought you yet.
• Most Aware : brand ambassadors.

2. Orientation

The orientation process has changed a lot in recent years thanks to digitalization, which makes it extra important to map it out using research.

You want to be visible with your brand at least in the orientation phase so that you will eventually be included in the consideration phase .

Some examples of behavior in the orientation phase:

• Concrete keywords in search engines
• Asking acquaintances for their opinions
• Checking out inspiration platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok or Instagram

3. Consideration

In the consideration phase, we examine which option from the orientation phase best meets the customer’s wishes and needs.

Here it is important to know which decision criteria weigh most heavily for the customer; this should be properly researched.

Some examples of decision criteria:

• Brand awareness

4. Decision

In the decision phase, a product or service from a specific vendor is actually chosen.

There are a number of things that make it easier for the customer to choose your product or service:

• Make it easy to compare
• Provide a good selection in different options
• Offer a good deal, make sure your customer can’t say no
• Provide a smooth payment process
• Increase engagement in your brand by providing valuable content, offers and support

Provide as few distractions as possible during the decision phase, people who are still Googling “[company name] discount code” from the checkout want to be convinced to convert.

5. Delivery

After someone has become a customer, a product or service will need to be delivered.

Here the first moments of evaluation will be whether someone actually made the right choice to choose your company, product or service.

• Make sure you deliver on time and that your product arrives in the right condition or that your service is of high quality.
• Give clear instructions on how to use or what the added value of the service is.
• Provide good support if the customer experiences problems in using your product or service.

In the use phase it is important that customers get the most out of your product or service and that they really see the added value .

You can stimulate this in a number of ways:

• Include tutorials
• Measuring and communicating impact
• Aftersales phone call

This is the ultimate evaluation moment ; if your product or service did not help the customer well, there is little chance that they will make a repeat purchase or become a brand ambassador .

In any case, it is important to prevent people from talking badly about your brand, so make sure that in the earlier stages you already make sure that people who are not ideal customers for you are excluded and that you make sure that customers see the added value of your product or service.

It is 5 to 7 times cheaper to retain a customer than to bring in a new customer. This is precisely why it is so important to encourage loyalty.

Loyalty can be expressed in the number of repeat purchases or upsells a customer eventually makes with you. You can encourage this by offering valuable content, offers and support.

The goal is for people to remain loyal to your brand and not switch to a competitor or go out of business in the first place.

There are different forms of loyalty:

• Transactional Loyalty : getting customers to make repeat purchases by giving offers.
• Social Loyalty : interacting with your customers on social media, for example.
• Engagement Loyalty : you reward people who engage with you where you can receive points for subscribing to a newsletter, for example.
• Emotional Loyalty : if your brand is positively aligned with your customer’s emotions, you can’t get this kind of loyalty with offers. In this, you want to make people feel part of something.
• Behavioral Loyalty : a level of loyalty in which you want to make customers do something like buy higher volumes where you give a third product for free after buying 2 products.
• Advocacy Loyalty : you are going to reward people who recommend others to become customers of your brand.

Customer Journey Mapping

Download the Customer Journey Canvas:

Good choice! Check your e-mail for the resources...

How do you complete the Customer Journey Canvas?

Once you know who all is in your Decision-making Unit, you can start creating personas and empathy maps so you can better understand the behaviors, needs, problems and wants of those individuals.

Determine what questions you would like to have answered after doing your Customer Journey Mapping research. Some common questions are: – When do you experience X? – On a scale of 1 – 10, how much would you like a solution to X? – How much are you willing to pay for a solution on X? – How would you orient yourself to a solution for X? – What brands would you consider in a solution for X? – What should a solution for X satisfy you in? – How would you go about determining if the solution was effective?

The threshold in terms of time and cost is often somewhat lower for quantitative research than for qualitative research. In it, you can gather good insights about your target audience from a helicopter perspective. Consider, for example: – Questionnaire – Post-purchase survey – Exit-intent Survey – Search volume

Once you have a high-level validated understanding of your target audience, you can begin to supplement your findings at a detailed level using qualitative research. Consider: – Customer interviews – User tests – Screen recordings

If you have made your Customer Journey Map comprehensible, you have gathered many insights on which you can improve your Customer Journey. To prevent it from becoming a dusty document that is no longer looked at, it is important to determine follow-up actions and evaluate them accordingly.

Common mistakes

There are a number of mistakes that you often see passed in Customer Journey Mapping:

• Based on assumptions : often you see that a Customer Journey is completely based on assumptions and not on validated research.
• Wrong scope : critically determine in advance where you want your Customer Journey to begin and end otherwise you quickly lose focus and overview.
• No customer perspective : reason the Customer Journey from your persona or customer and not from your company.
• Inside-out : if you start from how you do it as a company you are not customer-centric and there is going to be a mismatch in how the customer experiences something and how your company does it. Make sure your Customer Journey is actually completed from the customer’s perspective.
• Stakeholders : it is important to involve all relevant stakeholders so that you start creating support for the Customer Journey.
• End goal : the Customer Journey is not an end goal, but a starting point. It is something that will continuously play out and needs to be changed.

And now you…

Now you’re armed with enough knowledge to start visualizing your Customer Journey.

I’m curious, what has been the biggest insight for you in understanding your target audience?

Let me know in a comment.

P.S. if you would like additional help you can email me at [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

The 7 steps of the Customer Journey are: need, orientation, consideration, decision, delivery, use and loyalty.

A customer journey is a term used in marketing and customer experience management to describe the path a customer takes through the stages of awareness, consideration, purchase and use of a product or service. The term can also be used to describe the path a potential customer takes.

A customer journey map is a visualization of a customer’s experience with a company, product or service. It begins when the customer first becomes aware of a need and ends at the level of loyalty. The map tracks all the contact moments the customer has with a brand, both online and offline. Customer journey maps can help companies understand where they need to make improvements to provide a better experience for their customers.

The Customer Journey for every business is different. It is important to research for your business what the most ideal customer journey is, in doing so you want to validate all assumptions.

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Account-Based Marketing | Business Strategy | Customer Development Process | Customer Journey | Decision-Making Unit | Digital Marketing | Lead Generation | Market Research | Marketing and Sales | Marketing Strategy

Gust’s Must-Reads 👇🏼

• TAM SAM SOM
• Value Proposition
• Brainstorming
• Decision Making Unit
• Product-Market Fit
• North Star Metric
• Market Research
• Customer Development
• Growth Hacking
• Brand Identity
• Customer Journey
• Account-Based Marketing

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Thanks! I’m trying to understand how to explain this approach in simple words, and your material is one of the best so far.

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Customer Journey Map

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If you are a business owner or a marketer, familiarizing yourself with the customer journey will mean that you’ll be nurturing the customer experience and the looking at their interactions with your brand.

When customers have a positive experience it boosts brand awareness, credibility, and loyalty.

In this post, we’re looking at the basic guidelines you need to know to improve your customers’ journey, thus boosting your brand. 

Truths About the Customer Journey

To better grasp the customer’s journey, it’s helpful to put ourselves in their shoes. Here are some truths you should remember when designing a customer journey for a target demographic:

• Your customers aren’t always sure they want to buy your products or services.
• The customer journey is about the experience before, during, and after each purchase.
• Your customers value their entire experience.
• A good customer journey starts from the minute a consumer learns about your brand to the moment they are satisfied with their experience.
• Satisfied customers become loyal and help your company grow.

Knowing how your customer thinks and why they behave the way they do is the key to understanding the customer journey.

5 Steps to Improve the Customer Journey

Here are 5 steps that you and your marketing team can take to improve the customer journey:

1. Commit to Nurturing Your Customer Growth

The process of improving the customer journey design doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it stop. It might take a year or two to see the full results of your decisions, so your commitment is crucial.

2. Integrate Technology Into Your Customer Experience

Technology and innovative ways of growing your brand awareness provide a competitive edge. Moreover, new technologies make it easier to reach a global audience.

Having a mobile app is another way to improve the customer journey because most customers prefer to use an app—even for customer service.

3. Use Customer Feedback

A customer journey map must include customer feedback. It’s the best way to learn about their expectations and improve your customer journey experience.

4. Have a Growth Mindset

Keeping and improving the customer journey is part of growing your business, so you have to think about the long-term results. You will surely encounter challenges and obstacles, but you can overcome them by taking actions that work for your company.

5. Be Consistent

Your customers want consistency in every step of the journey. It helps them get used to your brand and build trust. Inconsistency makes you look unreliable, which can kill your business.

Creating Journey Maps

Finally, to improve your customer journey, you need to create a customer journey map. Here are 5 essential steps to take to accomplish this:

1. Take a Multichannel Approach

Create a customer journey map for every website and mobile app you may have, as well as your in-person stores.

2. Engage in Customer Learning

The best way to create a map is by learning about the customer journey from your customers themselves. Aside from feedback forms, check forums where your brand is mentioned, or check comments consumers leave on your social media accounts.

3. Find the Most Competitive Place in Your Journey

The best way to create a customer journey map is to pinpoint the place in the journey where you’re losing the most customers that need immediate fixing.

Improve that area by upgrading your product or services to avoid consumer abandonment.

4. Utilize Customer Segmentation

Different customers will have different journeys, so segmenting your audiences is crucial. This helps you identify which customer journey works best for each segment.

5. Take a Full View of Your Customer Journey

A customer journey map is about the entire customer experience, so you should take a holistic approach.

When you look at your customer journey, you should see connections to your branding, messaging, and customer service. If a decision you’re making isn’t grounded in the customer journey, you have to find a way to make it fit.

A customer journey map is indispensable in improving the customer experience. It shows you how you’re developing an experience that will draw them to return.

Not sure how to improve customer experience? The customer journey is an excellent place to start, but it may not be enough. Operating a business requires a comprehensive look at the complete customer experience.

Elly and Nora Creative is a digital marketing agency in Phoenix that offers branding, content, and publicity for purpose-driven entrepreneurs, companies, and experts who want to grow their income and impact. If you’re ready to boost your brand to new heights, contact us today!

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