Customer Journey (2024): Uitleg en Voorbeelden [+ Template]

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customer journey mapping betekenis

Gust de Backer

November 1, 2023.

Customer Journey Map

De Customer Journey is het proces dat je klanten doorlopen met jouw bedrijf. Dat gaat dan over de eerste tot en met de laatste interactie die iemand met jouw bedrijf heeft.

Veel bedrijven hebben niet in kaart hoe hun klanten oriënteren, wat ze belangrijk vinden of wanneer het bedrijf in kaart komt bij de potentiële koper.

Het onvoldoende in kaart hebben van de Customer Journey brengt het risico met zich mee dat je, wellicht onbewust, negatieve touchpoints met je (potentiële) klant zou kunnen hebben.

Ik ga je laten zien:

  • Wat de Customer Journey is
  • Hoe je jouw Customer Journey opstelt
  • En wat goede voorbeelden van een Customer Journey zijn

Laten we beginnen…

Inhoudsopgave

Wat is de Customer Journey?

De Customer Journey is het proces dat elke interactie met je merk in kaart brengt:

Customer Journey

De eerste interactie die iemand met je merk heeft is het begin van de Customer Journey. Als je jezelf in een niche-markt bevindt kan het ook interessant zijn om interacties met je niche in kaart te brengen.

De Customer Journey voor B2B en B2C ziet er vaak behoorlijk anders uit:

De Customer Journey is voor ieder bedrijf relevant, maar met name belangrijk voor bedrijven die:

  • Klantgericht zijn
  • De klanttevredenheid willen verbeteren
  • Omzet willen verhogen

Over het algemeen zie je vaak in bedrijven dat de marketingafdeling verantwoordelijk is om te zorgen dat (potentiële) klanten een positieve ervaring krijgen met het merk.

Een mooie ontwikkeling die je ziet is dat marketing / growth teams steeds verantwoordelijker worden voor de volledige funnel in plaats van enkel het bereiken en binnenhalen van nieuwe klanten.

7 Fases van de Customer Journey

Er zijn verschillende modellen waarmee je de Customer Journey in kaart kunt brengen, maar uiteindelijk komen ze allemaal op hetzelfde neer:

See Think Do Care

Houdt rekening met de verschillende rollen van de Decision-making Unit , maar in essentie zijn er 7 stappen die je in de Customer Journey kunt opnemen…

1. Behoefte

Je (potentiële) klant kan 2 soorten behoeftes hebben:

  • Latente behoefte : de persoon weet nog niet dat hij behoefte heeft aan iets. Als je een auto gaat kopen ben je nog niet direct bezig met de verzekering.
  • Concrete behoefte : de persoon weet dat die een bepaalde behoefte heeft, het is hierbij belangrijk om zichtbaar te zijn met je merk. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het kopen van een telefoon als je oude kapot is.

Iedere Customer Journey begint in principe bij een bepaalde behoefte.

In de praktijk kun je hierin 5 type klanten tegenkomen:

  • Unaware : realiseren zich niet dat ze een probleem of behoefte hebben.
  • Problem Aware : realiseren zich dat ze een probleem of behoefte hebben.
  • Solution Aware : ze weten dat er oplossingen zijn voor hun probleem of behoefte, maar ze kennen jou niet.
  • Product Aware : ze kennen jou, maar hebben je nog niet gekocht.
  • Most Aware : merkambassadeurs.

2. Oriëntatie

Het oriëntatieproces is de afgelopen jaren sterk veranderd dankzij de digitalisering, dat maakt het extra belangrijk om deze in kaart te brengen met behulp van onderzoek.

Je wilt met je merk in ieder geval zichtbaar zijn in de oriëntatiefase zodat je uiteindelijk ook meegenomen wordt in de overwegingsfase .

Enkele voorbeelden van gedrag in de oriëntatiefase:

  • Concrete zoekwoorden in zoekmachines
  • Bekenden om hun mening vragen
  • Inspiratieplatformen bekijken zoals Pinterest, TikTok of Instagram

3. Overweging

In de overwegingsfase wordt er gekeken welke optie uit de oriëntatiefase het beste aansluit op de wensen en behoeftes van de klant.

Het is hierbij belangrijk om te weten welke beslissingscriteria voor de klant het zwaarste wegen, hier dient goed onderzoek naar gedaan te worden.

Enkele voorbeelden van beslissingscriteria:

  • Merkbekendheid

4. Beslissing

In de beslissingsfase wordt er daadwerkelijk voor een product of dienst gekozen van een specifieke leverancier.

Er zijn een aantal zaken die het voor de klant makkelijker maken om voor jouw product of dienst te kiezen:

  • Maak het makkelijk om te vergelijken
  • Zorg voor een goede selectie in verschillende opties
  • Biedt een goede deal, zorg ervoor dat je klant geen nee kan zeggen
  • Zorg voor een soepel betaalproces
  • Verhoog de betrokkenheid in je merk door waardevolle inhoud, aanbiedingen en ondersteuning te bieden

Zorg voor zo min mogelijk afleiding tijdens de beslisfase, mensen die vanuit de checkout nog gaan Googelen naar “[bedrijfsnaam] kortingscode” wil je overtuigen om te gaan converteren.

5. Levering

Nadat iemand klant is geworden zal er een product of dienst geleverd moeten worden.

Hier zullen de eerste momenten van evaluatie zijn of iemand daadwerkelijk de juiste keus heeft gemaakt om voor jouw bedrijf, product of dienst te kiezen.

Enkele tips:

  • Zorg ervoor dat je op tijd levert en dat je product in de juiste staat aankomt of dat je dienst van hoge kwaliteit is.
  • Geef duidelijke instructies voor het gebruik of geef aan wat de toegevoegde waarde van de dienst is.
  • Biedt goede ondersteuning als de klant problemen ondervind in het gebruik van je product of dienst.

In de gebruiksfase is het belangrijk dat klanten het maximale uit je product of dienst halen en dat ze écht de toegevoegde waarde ervan inzien.

Dat kun je op een aantal manieren stimuleren:

  • Tutorials opnemen
  • Impact meten en communiceren
  • Aftersales telefoontje

Dit is het ultieme evaluatie-moment , als je product of dienst de klant niet goed heeft geholpen dan is de kans klein dat er een herhaalaankoop gemaakt gaat worden of dat diegene een merkambassadeur wordt.

Het is in ieder geval belangrijk om te voorkomen dat mensen slecht over je merk gaan praten, zorg er dus voor dat je in de eerdere fases al zorgt dat mensen die geen ideale klant voor je zijn worden uitgesloten en dat je zorgt dat klanten de toegevoegde waarde van je product of dienst inzien.

7. Loyaliteit

Het is 5 tot 7 keer goedkoper om klant te behouden dan een nieuwe klant binnen te halen. Juist daarom is het zo belangrijk om loyaliteit te stimuleren.

Loyaliteit kan worden uitgedrukt in het aantal herhaalaankopen of upsells een klant uiteindelijk bij je maakt. Dit kun je stimuleren door waardevolle inhoud, aanbiedingen en ondersteuning aan te bieden.

Het doel is dat mensen loyaal blijven aan je merk en niet gaan overstappen op een concurrent of überhaupt uit de markt gaan raken.

Er zijn verschillende vormen van loyaliteit:

  • Transactional Loyalty : klanten herhaalaankopen laten maken door aanbiedingen te geven.
  • Social Loyalty : interactie aangaan met je klanten op bijvoorbeeld social media.
  • Engagement Loyalty : je beloont mensen die engagement met je hebben waarbij je bijvoorbeeld punten kunt ontvangenvoor het inschrijven op een nieuwsbrief.
  • Emotional Loyalty : als je merk positief in lijn ligt met de emoties van je klant, deze vorm van loyaliteit kun je niet krijgen met aanbiedingen. Je wilt hierin zorgen dat mensen zich onderdeel voelen ergens van.
  • Behavioral Loyalty : een mate van loyaliteit waarin je klanten iets wilt laten doen zoals het kopen van hogere volumes waarbij je een derde product gratis geeft na aankoop van 2 producten.
  • Advocacy Loyalty : je gaat mensen belonen die andere aandragen om klant bij jouw merk te worden.

Customer Journey Mapping

Download het Customer Journey Canvas :

Customer Journey Map Template

Hoe vul je het Customer Journey Canvas in?

Decision Making Unit

Als je weet wie zich allemaal in je Decision-making Unit bevinden kun je persona’s en empathy maps op gaan stellen zodat je beter inzicht krijgt in de gedragingen, behoeften, problemen en wensen van die personen.

Bepaal op welke vragen je graag antwoord zou willen hebben na het doen van je Customer Journey Mapping onderzoek. Enkele veelvoorkomende vragen zijn: – Wanneer ervaar je X? – Op een schaal van 1 – 10, hoe graag zou je een oplossing hebben voor X? – Hoeveel ben je bereid te betalen voor een oplossing op X? – Hoe zou je je gaan oriënteren op een oplossing voor X? – Welke merken zou je in overweging nemen in een oplossing voor X? – Waar moet een oplossing voor X in voldoen voor jou? – Hoe zou je gaan bepalen of de oplossing effectief was?

De drempel qua tijd en kosten ligt voor kwantitatief onderzoek vaak wat lager dan voor kwalitatief onderzoek. Hierin kun je vanuit een helicopterperspectief goede inzichten vergaren over je doelgroep. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan: – Vragenlijst – Post-purchase Survey – Exit-intent Survey – Zoekvolume

Als je op hoog niveau gevalideerd inzicht hebt in je doelgroep kun je je bevindingen gaan aanvullen op gedetailleerd niveau met behulp van kwalitatief onderzoek. Denk hierbij aan: – Klantgesprekken – User tests – Screen recordings

Als je je Customer Journey Map inzichtelijk hebt gemaakt heb je veel inzichten vergaart waar je je Customer Journey op kunt gaan verbeteren. Om het geen stoffig document te laten worden waar niet meer naar gekeken wordt is het belangrijk om vervolgacties te bepalen en daarop te gaan evalueren.

Veelgemaakte fouten

Er zijn een aantal fouten die je vaak voorbij ziet komen in Customer Journey Mapping:

  • Op basis van aannames : vaak zie je dat een Customer Journey volledig wordt berust op basis van aannames en niet op gevalideerd onderzoek.
  • Verkeerde scope : bepaal vooraf kritisch waar je wilt dat je Customer Journey begint en eindigt anders verlies je snel focus en overzicht.
  • Geen klantperspectief : beredeneer de Customer Journey vanuit je persona of klant en niet vanuit je bedrijf.
  • Inside-out : als je begint bij hoe je het als bedrijf doet ben je niet klantgericht en gaat er een mismatch ontstaan in hoe de klant iets ervaart en hoe je bedrijf het doet. Zorg dat je Customer Journey daadwerkelijk vanuit de klant zijn perspectief wordt ingevuld.
  • Stakeholders : het is belangrijk om alle relevante stakeholders te betrekken zodat je draagvlak gaat creëren voor de Customer Journey.
  • Einddoel : de Customer Journey is geen einddoel, maar een startpunt. Het is iets wat continu zal blijven spelen en veranderd moet worden.

Nu ben je bewapend met genoeg kennis om je Customer Journey te gaan visualiseren.

Ik ben benieuwd, wat is voor jou het grootste inzicht geweest bij het inzicht krijgen in je doelgroep?

Laat het weten in een reactie.

P.S. als je graag extra hulp zou willen krijgen kun je me een mail sturen op [email protected]

Veelgestelde vragen

De 7 stappen van de Customer Journey zijn: behoefte, oriëntatie, overweging, besluit, bezorging, gebruik en loyaliteit.

Een customer journey is een term die in marketing en customer experience management wordt gebruikt om de weg te beschrijven die een klant aflegt door de stadia van bewustwording, overweging, aankoop en gebruik van een product of dienst. De term kan ook worden gebruikt om de weg te beschrijven die een potentiële klant aflegt.

Een customer journey map is een visualisatie van de ervaring van een klant met een bedrijf, product of dienst. Het begint wanneer de klant zich voor het eerst bewust wordt van een behoefte en eindigt bij de mate van loyaliteit. De kaart volgt alle contactmomenten die de klant met een merk heeft, zowel online als offline. Customer journey maps kunnen bedrijven helpen te begrijpen waar ze verbeteringen moeten aanbrengen om hun klanten een betere ervaring te bieden.

De Customer Journey voor ieder bedrijf is anders. Het is belangrijk om voor jou bedrijf te onderzoeken wat de meest ideale customer journey is, hierbij wil je alle aannames valideren.

customer journey mapping betekenis

Ik probeer bedrijven door hun groeiplafond heen te helpen met mijn content.

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Account-based Marketing (ABM) | Bedrijfsstrategie | Customer Development Process | Customer Journey | Decision-making Unit (DMU) | Leadgeneratie | Marketing en Sales | Marketing Strategie | Marktonderzoek | Online Marketing

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customer journey mapping betekenis

Customer journey map: de klantreis in kaart brengen

Lucid Content

Leestijd: ongeveer 9 min

Onderwerpen:

Een customer journey map maken

  • Stel doelen  - Door de juiste doelen te stellen heeft je customer journey de gewenste impact.
  • Doe onderzoek naar persona  - Verzamel zoveel mogelijk info over de wensen en behoeften van je klanten.
  • Definieer contactpunten voor klanten  - Breng alle interacties tussen de klant en je merk in kaart
  • Breng huidige situaties in kaart  - Visualiseer je huidige staat. Pro tip: Gebruik Lucidchart !
  • Breng toekomstige situaties in kaart  - Deel de resultaten van je onderzoek met relevante stakeholders en ga samen op zoek naar verbeteringen.

Steve Jobs, het brein achter de unieke klantervaring van Apple, zei: "Je moet beginnen met de klantervaring en dan naar de technologie toe werken, niet andersom."

Tegenwoordig is een duidelijke visie en strategie voor interacties met klanten niet langer een optionele "nice-to-have"—het is essentieel. Terwijl je je customer experience verfijnt, is een customer journey map één van de krachtigste manieren om inzicht te krijgen in je huidige situatie en toekomstige situaties.

customer journey mapping betekenis

Een customer journey map is een diagram die het proces weergeeft waar je klanten doorheen gaan bij interactie met jouw bedrijf, zoals de ervaring op de website, de ervaring in de winkel, de service, een product of een mix van deze dingen.

Wat is een customer journey?

Een customer journey, ofwel klantreis, is een visuele weergave van de ervaring van een klant met jouw merk. Deze beelden vertellen een verhaal over hoe een klant zich door elke fase van interactie beweegt en elke fase ervaart. Je customer journey map moet contactpunten en momenten van waarheid bevatten, maar ook potentiële gevoelens van de klant, zoals frustratie of verwarring, en eventuele acties die je wilt dat de klant onderneemt.

Customer journey maps zijn vaak gebaseerd op een tijdlijn van gebeurtenissen, zoals het eerste bezoek van een klant op je website en de manier waarop ze evolueren naar hun eerste productervaring, daarna de aankoop, onboardingmails, annulering, enz. 

Je customer journey maps moeten misschien worden afgestemd op je bedrijf of product, maar de beste manier om deze fasen te identificeren en te verfijnen is door daadwerkelijk met je klanten te praten. Doe onderzoek naar je doelgroepen om te begrijpen hoe ze beslissingen nemen, overgaan tot aankoop, enz. Zonder een essentieel inzicht in je klanten en hun behoeften, zal een customer map je niet naar succes leiden. Toch kan een goed geconstrueerde en onderzochte customer journey map je de nodige inzichten geven om de customer experience van je bedrijf drastisch te verbeteren.

De voordelen van het in kaart brengen van customer journeys

Het in kaart brengen van de customer journey is een krachtig hulpmiddel om inzicht te krijgen in de klantervaring, zakelijke doelen te stimuleren en veerkracht op te bouwen in een veranderende markt. In een rapport uit 2022 ontdekte Hanover Research dat 94% van de bedrijven zei dat hun customer journey maps hen helpen nieuwe producten en diensten te ontwikkelen die aansluiten bij de behoeften van de klant. Nog eens 91% zei dat hun maps de verkoop stimuleerden.

Het begrijpen van een customer journey door je hele organisatie doet echter zo veel meer dan je inkomsten uit marketingcampagnes verhogen, je servicekosten verlagen en je verkoopcyclus verkorten. Het stelt je in staat te ontdekken hoe je consistent kunt zijn als het gaat om het bieden van een positieve customer experience en het behouden van klantloyaliteit. Dit was vooral duidelijk in de afgelopen jaren, aangezien naast het verbeteren van marketing, customer journey maps naar voren kwamen als een waardevolle manier om evoluerend kopersgedrag te begrijpen. Sterker nog, 1 op de 3 bedrijven gebruikte klantreiskaarten om hen te helpen navigeren door het veranderende landschap tijdens de pandemie.

Wanneer het goed is uitgevoerd, helpt het in kaart brengen van de customer journey om:

  • De betrokkenheid van klanten te verhogen door kanalen te optimaliseren.
  • Momenten van waarheid in de CX te identificeren en optimaliseren.
  • Ineffectieve contactpunten te elimineren.
  • Van een bedrijfsgericht naar een klantgericht perspectief over te stappen.
  • Silo's tussen afdelingen te doorbreken en interdepartementale kloven te dichten.
  • Je te richten op specifieke buyepersona's met marketingcampagnes die relevant zijn voor hun identiteit.
  • De omstandigheden te begrijpen die eventueel tot onregelmatigheden in bestaande kwantitatieve gegevens hebben geleid.
  • Eigendom toe te kennen aan verschillende contactpunten voor klanten om de verantwoordelijkheid van de werknemers te vergroten.
  • Het mogelijk te maken om de ROI van toekomstige UX/CX-investeringen te beoordelen.

Door het proces te volgen dat we hierboven hebben geschetst, kan het in kaart brengen van klanten je organisatie op een heel nieuw succesvol traject zetten. Volgens onderzoek van HAnover Reasearch beschikt slechts 47% van de bedrijven momenteel over een proces om customer journeys in kaart te brengen. De investering om je customer journey in kaart te brengen en dat proces te versterken als onderdeel van het DNA van je bedrijf, kan resulteren in aanzienlijke voordelen in het competitieve landschap, waardoor jouw oplossing de beste optie wordt waar klanten van houden.

Customer journey map maken

Customer journey maps kunnen ingewikkeld worden als je ze niet overzichtelijk houdt. Hoewel je je op meerdere persona's kunt richten, kies je toch maar één persona en één klantenscenario per keer om te onderzoeken en te visualiseren. Als je niet zeker weet wat je persona's of scenario's zouden kunnen zijn, verzamel dan een aantal collega's en probeer een  affiniteitsdiagram in Lucidchart uit om ideeën op te doen.

1. Stel doelen

Zonder een doel zal het moeilijk zijn om te bepalen of je customer journey map zich zal vertalen in een tastbare impact voor je klanten en je bedrijf. Je zult wellicht bestaande en toekomstige kopers moeten identificeren, zodat je specifieke doelen kunt stellen voor die doelgroepen in elke fase van hun ervaring.

Breng de belangrijkste stakeholders van je bedrijf samen — van wie velen wellicht te maken hebben met verschillende punten van de customer experience. Om een logisch en haalbaar doel te stellen, is functieoverschrijdend teamwork essentieel. Verzamel unieke perspectieven en inzichten over elk onderdeel van de huidige customer journey, waar verbeteringen nodig zijn en hoe die verbeteringen gemeten zullen worden.

Pro Tip : Creëer buyer personas, als je deze nog niet hebt, ze helpen je om je customer journeys te focussen op de specifieke kopers waar je voor optimaliseert.

2. Doe klantonderzoek

Geef zoveel mogelijk informatie over de persona waarop je customer journey map is gebaseerd. Afhankelijk van de maturiteit van je bedrijf, heb je misschien maar een handvol dossiers, rapporten, of andere bestaande gegevens over de doelpersoon. Je kunt je voorlopige bevindingen samenvoegen tot een schets van hoe de customer journey er volgens jou uit zou kunnen zien. De belangrijkste gegevens die je kunt verzamelen, zijn die van echte klanten of potentiële klanten, van degenen die daadwerkelijk ervaring hebben met je merk. Verzamel nuttige klantgegevens op een van de volgende manieren:

  • Doe interviews.
  • Praat met werknemers die regelmatig met klanten communiceren.
  • E-mail een enquête naar bestaande gebruikers.
  • Doorzoek de logboeken van de klantenservice en klachten.
  • Haal fragmenten uit opgenomen telefoongesprekken van het callcenter.
  • Volg discussies over je bedrijf die op sociale media plaatsvinden.
  • Maak gebruik van webanalyses.
  • Verzamel gegevens over de Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Zoek naar informatie die verwijst naar:

  • Hoe klanten je merk hebben gevonden
  • Wanneer/of klanten kopen of annuleren
  • Hoe eenvoudig of moeilijk ze je website vonden om te gebruiken
  • Welke problemen je merk wel of niet heeft opgelost

Door tijdens het onderzoeksproces zowel kwalitatieve als kwantitatieve informatie te verzamelen, zorg je ervoor dat je bedrijf datagestuurde beslissingen neemt op basis van de mening van echte klanten.

customer journey mapping betekenis

Ontdek meer manieren om de Voice of the Customer te begrijpen

3. Definieer contactpunten voor klanten

Contactpunten voor klanten vormen het leeuwendeel van je customer journey map. Zij zijn de manier waarop en de plaats waar klanten met je merk in aanraking komen en het ervaren. Wanneer je onderzoek doet en je contactpunten uitstippelt, zorg er dan voor dat je informatie opneemt die elementen van actie, emotie en potentiële uitdagingen aanpakt. 

Het aantal en het soort contactpunten op je customer journey map hangt af van het soort bedrijf. Zo zal de customer journey bij een SaaS-bedrijf inherent anders zijn dan die van een koffiehuis. Kies de contactpunten die de customer journey met je merk nauwkeurig weergeven.

Nadat je je contactpunten hebt gedefinieerd, kun je ze gaan ordenen op je customer journey map.

4. Breng de huidige situatie in kaart

Schets wat volgens jou de huidige status is van de customer journey, de huidige customer experience. Gebruik een visuele werkruimte zoals Lucidchart, en begin met het organiseren van je gegevens en contactpunten. Geef voorrang aan de juiste inhoud boven esthetiek. Vraag de stakeholders om input en maak samen een customer journey map om de nauwkeurigheid te garanderen. 

Nogmaals, er is geen "juiste" manier om je customer journey map op te stellen, maar vermeld voor elke fase van de journey de contactpunten, acties, kanalen, en toegewezen verantwoordelijkheid van een contactpunt (verkoop, klantenservice, marketing, enz.). Pas vervolgens het ontwerp van je diagram aan met afbeeldingen en kleur- en vormvariaties om de verschillende acties, emoties, overgangen, enz. beter te visualiseren in één oogopslag.

Door je huidige situatie in kaart te brengen, kun je ook beginnen met het identificeren van tekortkomingen of rode vlaggen in de ervaring. Bijdragers kunnen direct commentaar geven op verschillende delen van je diagram in Lucidchart, zodat het precies duidelijk is waar er ruimte is voor verbetering.

5. Breng de toekomstige situatie in kaart

Nu je de huidige situatie van de customer journey hebt gevisualiseerd, zal je map waarschijnlijk enkele tekortkomingen in je CX laten zien, overlappende informatie, slechte overgangen tussen fases, en belangrijke pijnpunten of obstakels voor klanten.

Gebruik hotspots en lagen in Lucidchart om gemakkelijk potentiële oplossingen in kaart te brengen en vergelijk snel de huidige situatie van de customer journey met de ideale, toekomstige situatie. Presenteer je bevindingen aan het hele bedrijf om iedereen op de hoogte te brengen van de verbeterpunten, met een duidelijk stappenplan voor verwachte veranderingen en hoe hun rol kan bijdragen aan het verbeteren van de customer journey.

Sjablonen voor customer journey mapping

Je beschikt over alle juiste informatie voor een customer journey map, maar het kan moeilijk zijn om precies te weten hoe je de informatie moet rangschikken op een leesbare en visueel aantrekkelijke manier. Deze voorbeelden van customer journey mapping kunnen je op weg helpen en je inspiratie geven over wat en hoeveel je waar in kaart moet brengen.

customer journey mapping betekenis

Laat de mogelijkheid van een slechte customer journey je geen slapeloze nachten bezorgen. Ken de huidige status van de customer journey met je bedrijf, en breng de veranderingen aan die je nodig hebt om klanten aan te trekken en tevreden te houden.

customer journey mapping betekenis

Customer journeys in kaart brengen is gemakkelijk met Lucidchart.

Lucidchart, een slimme diagramapplicatie in de cloud, is een kernonderdeel van Lucid Software's pakket voor visuele samenwerking. Met deze intuïtieve cloudgebaseerde oplossing kunnen teams in realtime samenwerken om flowcharts, mockups, UML-diagrammen, kaarten van customer journeys en meer te maken. Lucidchart stuwt teams vooruit om sneller aan de toekomst te bouwen. Lucid is trots op zijn diensten aan belangrijke bedrijven over de hele wereld, waaronder klanten als Google, GE en NBC Universal, en 99% van de Fortune 500. Lucid werkt samen met brancheleiders, waaronder Google, Atlassian en Microsoft. Sinds de oprichting heeft Lucid talrijke onderscheidingen ontvangen voor zijn producten, bedrijfsvoering en werkcultuur. Ga voor meer informatie naar lucidchart.com.

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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.

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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. 

Customer Journey Map

How to Create a Customer Journey Map for Exceptional Experiences?

An infographic showcasing seven steps to create customer journey maps.

© 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. 

User Journey Example

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.

A gist of differences between customer, buyer, and user journeys.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

Drawbacks of Customer Journey Maps

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

Over-simplification of Customer Experiences

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

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

Resource Intensity

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

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

Risk of Bias

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

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

Common biases in customer journey mapping include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Customer Behaviors

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

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

Challenges in Capturing Emotions

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

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

Misalignment with Customer Needs

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

Putting business aims first, not what customers need.

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

Not using customer feedback in the journey map.

Thinking every customer follows a simple, straight path.

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

Over-Reliance on the Map

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

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

Data Privacy Concerns

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

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

Learn More about Customer Journey Maps

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

Explore this eBook to discover customer journey mapping .

Find some additional insights in the Customer Journey Maps article.

Questions related to Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

Consideration: They research potential solutions or products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlighting the resulting value when these needs are met.

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

Brainstorming possible solutions and eventually narrowing down to specific features.

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

Learn more from this insightful video:

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

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

Customer journey mapping offers several key benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature on Customer Journey Maps

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

Learn more about Customer Journey Maps

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

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

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

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

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

Throughout the course you will learn from four industry experts. 

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

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

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

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

All open-source articles on Customer Journey Maps

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

customer journey mapping betekenis

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What is a Customer Journey Map? Definition, Importance, Examples, and Process

By Paul VanZandt

Published on: April 28, 2021

What is a Customer Journey Map

Table of Contents

What is a Customer Journey Map?

Importance of customer journey map, examples of customer journey maps to elevate user experience, customer journey map process.

The principal goal of almost every business is attracting customers and driving profit. This is no secret, and some of the most successful companies make an effort to put the intentions and priorities of the customer first. How then, do you plan around what your customer wants Using various versions of a customer journey map helps teams identify, empathize, and target their customers in ways that position them toward their specific customer-facing goals.

This article will talk about what customer journey maps are, why they’re so important, and some common applications through IdeaScale Whiteboard . Check out our guides to online whiteboards and visual collaboration if you want to learn more about how IdeaScale Whiteboard enables collaboration for teams everywhere.

A Customer Journey Map serves as a dynamic visualization, illustrating the intricate pathway customers traverse when engaging with your product or service. Unlike mere records of tangible actions, our Customer Journey Map meticulously captures the nuances of customer assumptions, motivations, and emotions at every interaction. This strategic tool is a compelling narrative that unfolds the complete story of a customer’s experiences across all touchpoints with our brand.

Distinguishing between a Customer Journey Map and the process of Customer Journey Mapping is crucial. Our map functions as a comprehensive template, delineating the precise steps and actions that define the principal user’s journey. Meanwhile, Customer Journey Mapping, as a proactive and iterative process, entails deciphering customer actions and motivations, offering a visual representation that goes beyond the ordinary.

Our meticulously crafted Customer Journey Map is more than a static guide; it’s the cornerstone for strategic decision-making. By understanding and optimizing each stage of customer interaction, we not only elevate their experience but also set the stage for unparalleled brand affinity and loyalty.

Customer journey mapping is all about understanding your customer’s intentions and creating the most optimal user experience while interacting with your brand. In order to both attract new customers and maintain loyalty with the ones you currently have, optimizing your customer experience is vital.

Creating a unique, personalized, and effective customer experience increases the value of your brand to new and existing customers. This experience can create important actions depending on the specific endpoints different customers interact with and you customize their experience.

Revealing the different scenarios where customers interact with your product/service and their reasons for doing so helps create a better understanding of why they are using your product/service. Having a clear understanding of these reasons allows you to target different sectors of your potential customer base with different strategies to best turn use into conversions.

Customer journey mapping is a key point of interest with the end goal of improving customer experience , and without mapping their intentions and actions it can be easy to mislead the experience provided to the customer. For that reason, customer journey mapping is a vital step in determining how to target your customers effectively.

Learn more: Experience Map vs. Customer Journey Map

1. Storyboarding: Crafting Seamless Experiences for Higher Engagement

Storyboarding stands as a fundamental method in customer journey mapping, offering a dynamic approach to understand and improve user experiences. Begin by defining the scenario under examination, setting clear collaboration parameters, and establishing boundaries for focused contributions.

Break down each step of the user’s journey explicitly, aiming for simplicity. This allows for a granular examination of user emotions and intentions at every touchpoint. Storyboarding, a crucial technique for those new to customer journey mapping, is versatile and applicable to a wide range of customer-facing scenarios.

Persona Diagram

2. Persona Diagrams: Illuminating Customer Identities for Targeted Engagement

While not the most conventional approach, persona diagrams are powerful tools for delving into customer identity and traits. Unraveling your customer’s persona provides valuable insights into their motivations for using your product or service.

Persona diagrams encompass various aspects of your principal user, including their description, goals, attitudes, feedback, and solutions to their issues. This nuanced understanding enables precise targeting of customer needs, facilitating more effective communication and personalized interactions.

3. Customer Experience Map: Navigating Emotions and Impressions for Enhanced Satisfaction

Differing from maps focusing solely on specific actions, the customer experience map centers on the emotions and impressions felt by customers throughout the process. Select a scenario for analysis and deconstruct what customers need to learn, use, and remember.

By pinpointing the elements you want customers to use, learn, and remember, you not only shape the experience but also influence how customers interpret changes. Addressing these interpretations is crucial for refining your solution and filling any existing gaps in customer experience.

Retrospective Analysis

4. Engaging New Customers: Strategic Approaches for Attracting and Retaining Audiences

When envisioning the journey of potential users, consider not just existing customers but those you aim to attract. The Engaging New Customers board focuses on reaching and meeting the needs of prospective customers at every stage.

This board enables you to plan how to reach, impress, engage, and encourage the return of new customers. By dissecting their interaction stages, you can align your strategies with their intentions, providing a tailored experience to optimize their journey.

While not a traditional customer journey map, the Engaging New Customers board is invaluable for understanding the assumptions and needs of new customers. Teams seeking to break down and optimize user experiences should consider incorporating this dynamic tool into their toolkit.

Learn more: What are Customer Needs?

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, understanding your customers and providing exceptional experiences is paramount. One valuable tool that can help you achieve this is the customer journey map.

This visual representation of a customer’s interaction with your product or service offers deep insights into their experiences, pain points, and areas for improvement. In this blog, we’ll guide you through the process of creating an effective customer journey map.

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

Before diving into the customer journey mapping process, clarify your goals. What are your intended outcomes with the creation of this map? Whether it’s improving customer satisfaction, increasing conversions, or enhancing user experience, a clear objective will guide your efforts.

Step 2: Identify Your Personas

Understanding your target audience is crucial. Generate in-depth customer personas to depict diverse segments of your audience. These personas will serve as the foundation for your customer journey map, as different customer types often have distinct paths.

Step 3: Gather Data

To craft a precise customer journey map, data is imperative. Collect information from various sources, including customer feedback, surveys, interviews, analytics, and customer service records. Both qualitative and quantitative data are essential for a comprehensive view of your customer’s experience.

Step 4: Outline Touchpoints

Enumerate all the points of interaction where customers engage with your brand. These could include website visits, social media engagement, email communication, in-store visits, and more. Identifying all touchpoints is a critical step in understanding the customer’s full journey.

Step 5: Create a Visual Representation

Customer journey maps are typically visual, using diagrams, charts, or software tools. A visual representation makes it easier to understand and communicate the customer’s journey.

Step 6: Plot the Stages

Divide your map into key stages that customers go through in their journey, such as Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Onboarding, Usage, and Support. Customize these stages according to your specific business model.

Step 7: Document Customer Actions and Emotions

For each stage, detail the specific actions customers take and the emotions they experience. Understanding their mindset at each stage is essential for improving the customer experience.

Step 8: Identify Pain Points and Opportunities

During your mapping process, pinpoint areas where customers face challenges or frustrations (pain points). Simultaneously, identify opportunities to enhance the experience or add value to the customer’s journey. These insights will be instrumental in shaping your improvements.

Step 9: Link Touchpoints

Connect touchpoints to the stages of the customer journey. Determine how customers move from one touchpoint to another. This helps you understand the flow of the customer experience.

Step 10: Add Metrics and KPIs

Include key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics related to each stage. These metrics will allow you to measure the success of your customer experience improvements.

Step 11: Share and Collaborate

Collaboration is key. Share your customer journey map with relevant stakeholders across your organization, including marketing, sales, customer support, and product development teams. Encourage input and collaboration to ensure a holistic approach to improving the customer journey.

Step 12: Iterate and Improve

Remember that a customer journey map is a dynamic tool. It should evolve as your business and customer needs change. Regularly revisit and update it based on new data and customer feedback.

Step 13: Implement Changes

After identifying pain points and opportunities, work on implementing changes to address them. This could involve changes to your website, marketing materials, customer service processes, or product features.

Step 14: Monitor and Measure

Continuously monitor the impact of your changes by tracking relevant KPIs. Collect feedback from customers to assess whether their experiences have improved.

Customer journey maps provide some of the most effective methods of targeting new users and optimizing their experience. If you are looking to learn more about how to target your customers and create an enjoyable customer experience then try using the boards above.

You can check out our recent article on the Lander blog to learn more about content marketing, and if you are interested in learning more about virtual workshops check out our guides on IdeaScale Whiteboard and use our boards in our web app!

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

Aaron Agius

Published: August 21, 2023

Free Customer Journey Template

customer journey mapping betekenis

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

Thank you for downloading the offer.

Did you know nearly 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2021? Why would a customer spend hours looking through a store and adding products to their cart just to close the tab right at the last second?

person creating a customer journey map

Well, here's the thing — understanding your customers' minds can be extremely challenging.

And even when you think you've considered every possible factor, the journey from awareness to purchase for each customer will always be unpredictable, at least to some level.

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Templates

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That said, while it isn't possible to predict the customer journey with 100% accuracy, customer and user experience (UX) journey mapping will allow you to understand as much as possible.

This post will explain everything you need to know about customer journey mapping — what it is, how to create a journey map, and best practices.

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

Customer journey stages.

  • What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

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

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

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

customer journey mapping betekenis

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

You might be confused about the differences between the customer journey and the buyer's journey. The buyer's journey is the entire buying experience from pre-purchase to post-purchase. It covers the path from the customer's awareness of an existing pain point to becoming a product or service user.

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

The customer journey refers to your brand's place within the buyer's journey: that is, the customer touchpoints where you will meet your customers as they go through the stages of the buyer's journey. When you create a customer journey map, which we'll discuss further below, you're taking control of every touchpoint at every stage of the journey, instead of leaving them up to chance.

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

At each of these stages, HubSpot has a specific set of touchpoints to meet customers where they are, such as publishing blog posts to help customers learn about their pain points, then nurturing them slowly toward a paid subscription. Within later stages, there are several "moments" such as comparing tools, sales negotiations, technical setup, and so on.

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.

At this point, you may be wondering: What are the stages of the customer journey? 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 have realized that they have a problem and a pain point to solve for. At this point, a customer may not yet know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands deliver educational content to help customers diagnose a problem and offer potential solutions. The aim is to help customers navigate their new pain point, not encourage a purchase.

Educational content may include:

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

Educational content may 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 their offerings.

During this stage of the customer journey, brands 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 solution 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, brands deliver a seamless purchase process to make buying their products as easy and simple as possible. No 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 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 their family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.

During this phase, brands focus on providing a fantastic end-to-end customer experience , from your website content to your sales reps, from your social media team to your product's UX. Most importantly, customers become loyal when they've achieved success with your product — if it works, they will likely 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, it's advisable to carry out 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 such as Service Hub .

To visualize the specific stages of your customers' journey, it's essential to create a 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.

What is UX journey mapping?

A UX journey map represents how the 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 on the surface — the company offers a product or service, and customers buy it — for most businesses, it typically isn't.

In reality, it is 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.

Within this process, 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 data gathering is not simply for the sake of the data itself but 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 only sometimes happen linearly. Instead, buyers often take a back-and-forth, cyclical, multi-channel journey.

Let's look at the stages in the customer journey.

  • The Buying Process
  • User Actions
  • User Research

1. The Buying Process

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

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

2. Emotions

Customer journey map template service

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

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

3. User Actions

customer journey mapping: user actions

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

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

4. User Research

customer journey mapping: user research

Similar to the 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 are researching so you can best address their pain points.

5. Solutions

customer journey mapping: solutions

As the final element in your customer journey map, solutions are where you and your team will brainstorm potential ways to improve your buying process so that customers encounter fewer pain points as they journey.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. You can find touchpoints in places where your business comes in direct contact with a potential or existing customer.

For example, a display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can be considered a customer touchpoint.

Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so you must consider the different types of touchpoints in your customer journey map because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

  • Use customer journey map templates.
  • Set clear objectives for the map.
  • Profile your personas and define their goals.
  • Highlight your target customer personas.
  • List out all touchpoints.
  • Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.
  • Take the customer journey yourself.
  • Make the necessary changes.

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 .

The offer includes templates that can help you map out your buyer's journey, a day in the life of your customer, lead nurturing, and more.

Utilizing these templates can help your sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company's buyer persona. With this deeper understanding, you can come up with improvements to your product and provide a better customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

Based on this, you should create a buyer persona . This is a fictitious customer with all the demographics and psychographics representing your average customer.

Having a clear persona helps remind you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

Next, you should conduct research.

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, you'll need to narrow 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, as it gives you insight into your customers' actions.

If they use fewer touchpoints than expected, does this mean they are 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 can help you understand the ease or difficulties of the customer journey.

Aside from your website, you also need to look at how your customer might come across you online. These 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.

Consider the following touchpoints as you create your UX journey map.

Customer Actions

List your customers' actions throughout their interaction with your brand. This might be a Google search for keywords or clicking on an email.

You may wind up with a long list of actions, and that's fine. You'll get a chance to rationalize your information later.

It's important to recognize when customers are expected to take too many actions to achieve their goals. Reducing the number of steps a customer needs to take can feel risky but pays off in higher conversion rates.

Customer Emotions & Motivations

All marketing is a result of cause and effect. Likewise, every action your customers take is motivated by emotion. And your customers' emotions will change depending on which part of their journey they're at.

A pain point or a problem is usually the emotional driver of your customer's actions. Knowing this will help you provide the right content at the right time to smooth the customer's emotional journey through your brand.

Customer Obstacles & Pain Points

Get to know what roadblocks stop your customer from taking their desired action.

One common obstacle is cost. For example, one of your customers could love your product but abandon their cart upon discovering unexpectedly high shipping rates.

Highlighting these potential obstacles in your customer journey can help you mitigate them. For example, you could provide an FAQ page that answers common questions about shipping costs.

6. Determine the resources you have and the ones you'll need.

Your customer journey map is going to touch on nearly every part of your business. This will highlight all the resources that go into creating the customer experience.

So taking inventory of your resources and the ones you'll need to improve the customer's journey is essential.

For example, maybe your map highlights that your team doesn't have the tools to follow up with customers properly. Using your map, you can advise management to invest in customer service tools to help your team manage customer demand.

And by including these new tools in your map, you can accurately predict how they'll impact your business and drive outsized value. This makes it much easier to convince gatekeepers and decision-makers to invest in your proposals.

7. Take the customer journey yourself.

Just because you've designed your map doesn't mean your work is done. This is the most critical part of the process: analyzing the results.

How many people click on your website but then close out before making a purchase? How can you better support customers? These are some of the questions you should be able to answer with your finished map.

Analyzing the results can show you where customer needs aren't being met.

By approaching this, you can ensure that you're providing a valuable experience and making it clear that people can find solutions to their problems with your company's help.

The whole exercise of mapping the customer journey remains hypothetical until you try it out yourself.

For each of your personas, follow their journey through their social media activity, reading their emails, and searching online.

8. Make the necessary changes.

Your data analysis should give you a sense of what you want your website to be.

You can then make changes to your website to achieve these goals. Perhaps this is adding more specific call-to-action links, or it's writing longer descriptions under each product to clarify its purpose.

No matter how big or small the changes are, they will be effective as they directly correlate with what customers listed as their pain points.

Rather than blindly making changes in the hopes that they will improve customer experiences , you can feel confident that they will.

And, with the help of your visualized customer journey map, you can ensure those needs and pain points are always addressed.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work in progress.

Reviewing it monthly or quarterly will help you identify gaps and opportunities for further streamlining your customer journey. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks.

Keep all stakeholders involved in this process, which is why you should consider visualizing your maps in a collaborative tool such as Google Sheets.

Additionally, consider having regular meetings to analyze how new products or offerings have changed the customer journey.

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Template

free editable customer journey map template

HubSpot's free customer journey map template makes it easier than ever to visualize the buyer's journey. By utilizing it, you can outline your customer's experience and how your product can improve their 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 customer journey maps , each with unique benefits. Depending on the specific purpose of the map, you can choose the proper one.

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 are best used for continually improving the customer journey.

Customer Journey Map Example: Current State Journey Map

Image Source

Day in the Life

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

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Day in the Life

Future State

These customer journey maps visualize what actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers will experience in future interactions with your company.

Based on their current experience, you'll have a clear picture of where your business fits in.

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Future State Journey Map Example

Service Blueprint

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Service Blueprint journey map

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 you need the UX journey map 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.

You might be telling yourself, "This doesn't seem necessary for my company or me. We understand the needs and pain points of our customers." This may be true at surface level.

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

After all, everything you do should be about solving customer problems and helping them achieve long-term success with your product or service. See other benefits below.

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

Rather than trying to discover your 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 about your company and what's turning them away.

You can create content that will attract them to your company and keep them there.

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 shows you 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, suppose it's around the holidays, and you anticipate a customer service surge .

You can send a message to your customers letting them know about your team's adjusted holiday hours.

You can also tell them about additional support options if your team is unavailable and what to do if an urgent problem needs immediate attention.

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 hard to coordinate all the departments to be as customer-focused as your customer service, support, and success teams are.

They often have sales and marketing goals based on things other than what real customers want.

A clear customer journey map can be shared 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.

Based on this rationale, you can't deny the importance of a customer journey map. Thus, we've created the following steps for crafting the best map to help your company and customers prosper.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

The goal of a company is to get its customers from point A to point B.

While it's up to the business or organization to decide what that goal is, it typically involves purchasing a product or service. Potential customers and clients need to be led along this journey.

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 can help organizations gain new insights on their customers and help make improvements to product, marketing, and customer support processes.

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

free editable customer journey map template

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

B2B customer journey map example

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

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

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

ecommerce customer journey map example

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

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

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

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

future BTC customer journey map

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

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

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

customer journey map example for retail

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

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

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

The 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 the Dapper Apps example, its phases were research, comparison, workshop, quote, and sign-off.

current state customer journey map template

2. Day in the Life Template

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

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

Get an interactive day in the life template.

day-in-the-life

3. Future State Template

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

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

Get an interactive future state template.

Customer journey map template future state

4. Service Blueprint Template

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

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

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

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

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

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

Customer journey map template service

5. Buyer's Journey Template

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

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Customer journey map template buyer

Charter the Path to Customer Success

Once you fully understand your customer's experience with your business, you can delight them at every stage in their buying journey.

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 your journey for the customer 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 in your business.

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

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What is Customer Journey Mapping? Simply explained.

Finally demystify this things which every customer experience professional is talking about these days.

Published in:  Journey Mapping / Last update: August 2020

In order to fully understand what customer journey mapping is, we need to explore its relationship to the customer journey and the customer journey map. We'll get to that in a minute. 

The relationship between Customer Journey Mapping, the Customer Journey and the Customer Journey Map

First, let's start with a practical definition of customer journey mapping. To put it simply:

Customer Journey Mapping is the ongoing activity of making the steps a customer goes through in order to achieve a specific goal explicit, in a visualization that looks like a map, including the needs and emotions of the customer throughout the entire process.

A very important part of the journey mapping process is gathering the actual data that goes into the map through qualitative user research. How else would you know what to visualize?

So, don't be misled into thinking that journey mapping is just about the visual aspect of the map. Journey mapping is just as much about analyzing data and structuring it in a meaningful way.

Customer Journey Mapping is an ongoing activity

These days, professional journey mapping tools have made it possible to take the journey mapping process online and collaborate on a journey map even when you're not physically in the same space.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is often also referred to as simply a journey map. The previous section already gave it away in large part, but let's zoom in a bit closer on what a journey map is.

A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the steps, activities and situations a customer goes through in order to achieve a specific goal, including the needs and emotions of the customer. It keeps evolving and is never done.

Customer journey maps literally come in all shapes and sizes. This can be quite confusing if you're new to the practice.

But it's not that strange when you think about it. Take geographic maps as an example. Sometimes you want a very detailed map that helps you navigate on street level, but while planning your next summer holiday, a map with a worldview might be what you need.

The same goes for customer journey maps. High-level journey maps act as a strategic compass, while detailed maps help you plan actions and allocate resources on a day-to-day level.

The Customer Journey Map is a visual representation

More than Metrics (company behind  Smaply ) wrote a very interesting article that digs deeper into  the similarities between journey maps and geographic maps .

Why a journey map and not a journey flow or journey chart? What is so special about maps? 

We have to look at the purpose of a map.

Maps help you understand where you are today and navigate to where you want to be tomorrow.

You create a journey map because there's a situation that you want to improve. You want to create a better future. A map helps you make better and more informed choices about the steps you need to take toward that desired future state.

Maps help you to navigate

When you're in the field of creating a better customer or employee experience, a major part of your work revolves around navigating complexity. That's why you see so many different types of maps used in this field.

What is a customer journey?

Now we get to what is maybe the most important question: What is a customer journey?

When you have a clear answer to this question, figuring out what you need to visualize in your journey map becomes much easier.

The Customer Journey is a story with a beginning, middle and end, which describes how a customer (the lead character) tries to achieve a desired goal (the destination).

When your lead character isn't a customer but rather an employee, user or patient, then the customer journey becomes an employee journey, user journey or patient journey.

The Customer Journey is an evolving story

Now, here's the thing that makes customer journeys so powerful... 

This way of reasoning helps you see how your services fit into the bigger story—how they can help the lead character achieve their desired goal.

This is essentially what "outside-in thinking” or "customer-centricity" is all about.

The Relationship Between Customer Journey, Customer Journey Map, and Customer Journey Mapping

It's time to bring together the 3 elements we've discussed and see how they relate to each other.

We can summarize it this way:

  • The Customer Journey is the evolving story .
  • Customer Journey Mapping is the ongoing activity of capturing, documenting and envisioning the story.
  • The Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the story.

Looking for more?

I hope that you found this article helpful and that it gave you some clarity.

There's of course much more to be learned about journey maps and journey mapping.

The relationship between Customer Journey Mapping, the Customer Journey and the Customer Journey Map

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When and how to create customer journey maps.

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July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

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

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

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

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

customer journey mapping betekenis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

customer journey map example

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

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

Benefits of client journey mapping

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

  • Gaining a deeper understanding of your customers 

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

  • Getting a single view of your customer within the organization

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

  • Breaking corporate and cross-department silos 

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

team work in customer journey mapping

  • Improving customer experience, retention, and loyalty

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

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

  • Better conversion and targeting of your target customers

Sometimes, it makes sense to focus on a specific segment or, talking journey mapping terms, specific personas. Customer journey insights will help you with this endeavor by giving you a glimpse into these people’s minds and ensuring the higher effectiveness of your marketing.

journey mapping helps understand target customers

How to build a customer journey map

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

We’ll be using our CJM Online tool along the way for two reasons. Because it’s easy to use and lets you create a CJM fairly quickly without wasting time setting up the environment. Oh, and there's a Personas building tool that comes with it 😉

UXPressia training video

We’ll take a pizza restaurant as an example of business and learn how to make a customer journey map together.

Step 1: Define your persona

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

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

eva-pizzeria-customer-journey-map

Step 2: Set customer journey stages

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

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

💡 Expert tips: 

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

Step 3: Define journey map sections

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Set customer goals

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

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

Eva's goals on customer journey map

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

Step 5: Define touchpoints

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

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

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

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

touchpoints on a customer journey map

Step 6: Processes and channels

Processes and channels

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

adding channels to a CJM

Step 7: Problems and ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Problems and ideas

Step 8: Emotional graph

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

emotional graph on a customer journey map

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

Step ?: Be Creative!

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

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

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

storyboards

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

charts in UXPressia

  • Video and document sections for journey-related videos and documentation (e.g., an annual marketing report).
  • Personas section for visualizing different personas’ interactions within the same journey.

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

The section with persona’s questions

Customer journey map examples

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

  • Example 1: a mobile user journey

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

mobile user journey example

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

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

customer journey mapping betekenis

  • Example 3: a digital customer journey

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

customer journey mapping betekenis

A customer journey mapping checklist

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

  • Do research

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

  • Define your customer persona(s)

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

  • Specify journey map stages

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

  • Decide on the map sections

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

  • Set customer goals for each stage

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

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

Consider both online and offline interactions.

  • Map out processes and channels

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

  • Highlight problems and look for opportunities

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

  • Add details about the emotional experience

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

  • Use more sections

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

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

The free guide to download

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

Related posts

The post was originally written in 2017.

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How to create an impact map in 7 easy steps: A complete guide + examples

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

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

Arthur McCay

Hello, Karim!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The differences come from the names.

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

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

Makes sense? 🙂

Saleh

Thank you for this,

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

Katerina Kondrenko

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

Good luck and happy customers!

Shreya

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

Sofia Grigoreva

Hi Shreya, glad you liked the article!

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

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

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

emlak uzmanı

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

Rok Software

Thank you for sharing, it was something I researched.

Hi Rok! Happy mapping 🙂

The data-driven approach to elevating a customer journey

Strategic Management Insight

Customer Journey Map

Customer journey map

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

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

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

Customer Journey Map

What is a Customer Journey Map

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

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

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

Customer journey

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

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

Importance of customer journey map

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

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

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

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

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

Customer journey map for smartphone ordering

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

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

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

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

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

CJM for a broadband provider

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

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

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

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

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

Components of a customer journey map

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

A CJM consists of the following key elements:

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

Optionally, they could also include:

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

Creating a customer journey map

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

1. Set objectives

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

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

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

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

2. Collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

3. Distill customer segments into personas and define their goals

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

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

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

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

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

4. Identify touchpoints

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

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

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

5. Construct an empathy map

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

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

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

empathy map for a customer

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

6. Map the customer journey

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

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

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

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

LEGO Group’s “experience wheel

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

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

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

Steps to extract maximum value from CJMs

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

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

1. Share widely

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

Involve internal stakeholders throughout the CJM process

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

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

Highlight key strengths

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

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

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

Use the organization’s native language

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

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

Bring customer data to life

Engaging presentation techniques can bring CJMs to life.

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

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

2. Act on insights

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

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

Exercise and expand executive support

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

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

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

Identify broken moments of truth

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

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

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

Framework for identifying broken moments of truth

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

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

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

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

The Kano Model

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

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

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

Prioritize opportunities based on value to the company

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

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

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

Matrix For Prioritizing Customer Experience Improvements

3. Sustain learnings over time

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

Assign long-term ownership

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

Monitor customer feedback and organizational progress over time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Map: What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it Important?

Why You Need a Customer Journey Map

Learn how customer journey mapping helps businesses understand their buyers' journeys and create more personalised customer experiences.

customer journey mapping betekenis

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On the surface, customer journeys may seem simple – you offer a product and someone buys it. But look more closely and it’s easy to see that the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex.

Customers use messaging apps, email, phone calls, websites, and various other channels to communicate with businesses. All these touchpoints create increasingly complex customer journeys, making it more difficult to always ensure a great customer experience. But customer experience is more important than ever. According to 2020 global research from Salesforce,

  • 80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.
  • 69% of Gen X customers prioritise convenience over brand loyalty
  • 91% of customers agree that a positive customer experience makes them more likely to purchase again

Customer expectations are undoubtedly undergoing a major transformation . How can brands meet these expectations and ensure every customer journey is smooth?

One excellent way to understand and optimise the customer experience is a process called customer journey mapping .

Approach your customers their way with a personalised customer journey

See how our B2B marketing automation can help you increase leads, boost sales, be more productive – and transform your business.

customer journey mapping betekenis

Your customer’s journey – in pictures

A customer journey map is a visual picture of the customer or user journey. It helps you tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across social media, email, livechat, and any other channels they might use. 

Mapping the customer journey ensures that you are not missing out on the chance to interact with your customer at any stage.This process also helps business leaders gain insights into common customer pain points. With these insights, businesses can deliver more optimised and personalised customer experiences.

Creating a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping (also called user journey mapping) is the process of creating a customer journey map. Doing this helps businesses see things from the customer’s perspective and where they can improve. First, all the possible customer touchpoints are mapped out. Touchpoints include websites, social channels, or interactions with the marketing and sales teams.

User journeys are then created across these various touchpoints for each buyer persona. For example, a millennial buyer persona may typically become aware of a product on social media, research it on the mobile version of your site, and finally make a purchase on a laptop.

The customer experience at each touchpoint should be included in your customer journey map. This can include what action the customer needs to take and how your brand responds.

Why customer journey mapping matters

Customer journey mapping is important, because it is a strategic approach to better understand customer expectations. It is also crucial for optimising the customer experience. 

Customer journey mapping is just as important for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as it is for larger companies. Customer expectations are changing for all businesses, regardless of size. Customers demand an omni-channel approach to customer service, marketing, and sales.

One of the most important aspects of the customer experience is personalisation. Recent research found that 52% expect their offers to always be personalised . Customer journey mapping allows SMBs to create personalised experiences across all touchpoints – for every individual, across all channels.

Mapping the customer journey has a host of benefits such as:

  • Allowing you to optimise the customer onboarding process
  • Checking customer expectations against the experience they actually receive
  • Understanding the differences in buyer personas as they move from prospect to conversion through the buying funnel
  • Creating a logical order to your buyer journey

However, the biggest benefit of customer journey mapping is simply understanding your customers more. The better you understand their expectations, the more you can tailor the customer experience to their needs.

How does customer journey mapping enable omnichannel marketing and customer service?

Today’s consumers want a highly personalised experience and this includes your marketing and customer service efforts. This interconnected approach is called omni-channel marketing and omni-channel customer service.

In terms of marketing, customer journey mapping can target one prospect across multiple touchpoints. For example, a customer who browses a product on a website can be retargeted with a social media ad later on.

To offer the best possible customer experience, omni-channel marketing is often backed up by omni-channel customer service . This is where the customer can receive customer support across any channel, such as on social media, messenger apps , or live chat. Again, customer journey mapping can allow your customer service team to better understand the customer experience and improve their ability to resolve issues.

How can I optimise my customer journey map?

Mapping out many different customer journeys across many different buyer personas can be quite time-consuming. Once you have mapped them out, you still need a way to offer a personalised omni-channel customer experience.

If you’re serious about customer journey mapping, you need to invest in software that can help. Customer journey mapping tools are typically part of marketing automation software like Pardot . These allow you to easily create customised journeys and automate marketing actions. This takes your marketing automation efforts to the next level.

Check out a demo of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s powerful marketing automation software built on the world’s #1 CRM.

This post originally appeared in the U.K.-version of the Salesforce blog .

  • What is a Customer Journey Map?

A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience a customer has with a brand. It outlines touchpoints and interactions, helping businesses enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Explore Salesforce solutions for optimising your customer journey today.

  • How do you create a customer journey map?

Here are the steps:

1) Identify customer touchpoints and interactions across their lifecycle. 

2) Gather data, analyse feedback, and collaborate cross-functionally. 

3) Leverage Salesforce’s tools to streamline the process and design effective journey maps for improved customer experiences.

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Learn / Guides / Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Why mapping the customer journey is so important for improving CX

Today’s savvy, well-informed buyers want an excellent customer experience (CX) every single time they interact with your product and brand.

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) helps you deeply understand every aspect of your users’ experience to help you act on your insights to boost conversions, customer satisfaction and retention—and keep up with your competitors.

Last updated

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Our comprehensive guide of the ten most important benefits of customer journey mapping will talk you through why mapping the buyer journey is so crucial, who should map out the customer journey, and which challenges to look out for. 

Want to understand how customers really interact with your site?

Hotjar’s PX insights tools let you experience the customer journey through their eyes. 

10 reasons you need to map your customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers interact with your brand, website, and product across different stages—from external touchpoints like social media, ads, and events, to internal touchpoints like website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding processes.  

#Hotjar’s pen-and-Post-its customer journey map explored customers’ key actions and questions as well as their happy moments and pain points

To understand your users’ experiences, desires, and pain points, do customer journey map research by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from customer interviews, surveys, and product experience (PX) insights tools. A data-informed customer journey map helps you understand your users' jobs to be done as they engage with your site or product—and what they’re thinking and feeling as they navigate.

Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers. 

1. Walk in your customers’ shoes

Collecting real-world insights helps you dig deep into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience. A strong customer journey mapping process lets you challenge your assumptions—you’ll see customers don’t always act or think how you expect . 

Understanding where users struggle to complete actions, get frustrated, or drop off helps you prioritize website and product improvements to give them a smoother experience. Maybe that’s changing the position of CTAs, or adapting your navigation architecture so important information is easy to find. 

If you build a culture of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, all stakeholders can see your brand from the customer perspective (outside-in) as well as the business perspective (inside-out) . 

A customer journey map enables you to observe sales experiences from the customer's perspective rather than the sales perspective. You can see why they chose your product or a different brand and understand their point of view more effectively.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings let you see exactly how customers navigate your site. Understand which areas they gravitate to, which they avoid, and where they get blocked or drop off.

#Hotjar Session Recordings are a great way to remotely research how people engage with your site as part of their customer journey.

Hotjar Session Recordings show you how users experience your page to improve low-performing touchpoints 

2. Identify unmet user needs

A strong understanding of customer needs across different interactions lets you identify gaps in the journey and offer additional touchpoints or improve existing ones, which means no more guesswork.  

Mapping out how customers navigate your site or app lets you pinpoint blockers, where they’re trying to engage but can’t, or where completing an action takes too much effort. 

Increase your awareness of customer needs to minimize frustrations by providing the right information and features at specific stages for a better user experience (UX). For example, if you see customers struggling with onboarding touchpoints, you can deliver an explanatory video or pop-up tooltip exactly when they need it. Or if they’re caught in an endless help-page loop, you can update your pages to provide the most relevant information at key points in the website journey.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Observe tools to see where user needs aren’t being met. Heatmaps show you whether key information, CTAs, and contact forms are optimally positioned so visitors can find them at the right point in their customer journey. If not, you can easily modify your layout for a better experience.

#Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

3. Understand complex journeys across several customer touchpoints

The average customer uses multiple channels to research and interact with brands. This creates highly complex, non-linear journeys with several customer touchpoints .  

Touchpoints also vary by customer: maybe Gen Zers typically come to your website from social media and seek out video content, while Gen Xers might be more likely to arrive directly from Google searches and want written content and comparison charts before they buy.  

For B2B businesses, multiple decision-makers are also often involved—and they all have different ways of conducting research and choosing a solution.

This complexity makes creating an excellent customer experience across the board difficult. 

Customer journey mapping visualizes all these different experiences in one place—showing you exactly what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage so you can provide the right information at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.

#Rail Europe’s customer journey map shows the complexity of its multi-channel customer journey

4. Visualize emotions, not just actions

Buyer journeys are often emotional, but it’s hard to turn feelings into concrete data, and it’s even harder to imagine what your customers will actually feel when designing your product and site. 

A well-researched customer journey map helps you visualize what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing: the key to understanding their deepest needs and providing a better service. Gathering insights on customer emotions—and acting on them—helps customers feel you ‘get’ them and builds brand trust.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings go beyond tracking basic user behavior analytics to show you where users are ‘rage-clicking’ or u-turning because they’re not getting the response they expect when they click on site elements. You can even filter to see specific recordings of customers who told you they were dissatisfied/satisfied.

Hotjar's Ask tools— Surveys and Feedback widgets—also let you gather feedback on what customers are feeling as they take certain actions.

01 Different Feedback widgets that ask users to rate their UX and satisfaction score

Hotjar’s tool stack gives you insights and user feedback ‘in the wild’

5. Create personalized experiences

Personalization is key to great customer experience, even with self-serve products, because customers value brands that understand their unique needs.

Mapping lets you dig deeper into user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints. 

For example: 

Create targeted landing pages with use cases for different customer segments

Show relevant social media ads to potential customers browsing online

Provide personalized support over multiple channels 

Improve onboarding by tailoring the process to each customer

Customize the post-onboarding experience so users can adapt your product to their exact needs, boosting adoption

#Knowing what customers are looking for allows this ecommerce site to personalize users’ home pages and show them selected products, ads, and offers

6. Align cross-functional stakeholders

Mapping the customer journey works best with perspectives from UX, marketing, product, sales, customer service and success, shipping, management, and other teams. This can mean getting different roles physically in a room together, or collecting their feedback to understand how they interact with your customer. These diverse insights help speed up the process of solving customer journey issues—so users see improvements faster. 

#Customer journey mapping gets diverse teams on the same page

This kind of cross-functional collaboration gets multiple teams on the same page and gives all stakeholders a holistic, coherent view of the customer experience.

Aligning different teams reduces politics and guesswork around what the customer wants and clarifies areas of ownership, accountability, and points of hand-off between teams. This makes it easier to keep tabs on where a customer is in their journey at any one time—and creates a smoother, more coherent interaction with your brand.

Behind every messed-up implementation is a fundamental mis- or non-alignment on customer journey outcomes. Mapping exposes gaps in customer-focused thinking, areas of functional misalignment, and organization change challenges…all of which traditional IT people are poor at, and IT vendors don't care about. The first step in resolution is realization. Mapping brings people together to a point where they understand the challenges.

7. Improve ROI and cost-effectiveness by creating satisfied customers

Between paid ads, marketing, and sales, customer acquisition is costly—so retaining customers is important to help boost your return on investment (ROI). 

Customer journey mapping provides you with opportunities to improve onboarding and features adoption, which increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and product advocacy.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar Heatmaps to spot technical issues that prevent users from signing up for a trial, or identify points when ecommerce customers abandon their shopping carts , which boosts conversions and revenue generation. 

8. Get a competitive edge 

Mapping tells you exactly how you can improve your customer experience to make your product stand out from the competition. CJMs also reveal product strategy opportunities to differentiate your brand by identifying new ways to provide customers with additional value.

These product experience and user insights help your brand stay relevant, adapt your product and business model as customer needs change, and gain a competitive edge in a moment where having a great product is no longer enough on its own. 

Crucially, mapping helps you identify your ‘halo’ customers—the group that, when you land them, makes everyone else sit up and take notice—as well as influencers and early adopters. That’s the first step in learning how to attract more of them.

#When you know what your customers want, you can provide additional value—for example, by letting selected users be the first to hear about new releases

More customer success for more customers is the most important outcome of strategy and the ROI from any investment in the business. If you can’t describe how this additional success will happen, or what will bring additional customers, I’d say your strategy is a bit light on specifics, risking its credibility and, ultimately, successful execution. Mapping at the value chain level helps bring coherency to a strategy.

9. Improve marketing and product-led growth

Many companies assume the customer journey starts when someone lands on their website or blog. In reality, it starts way before that—often with the customer searching for solutions or doing research in professional groups or community forums. 

Mapping the journey from start to finish helps you get to know your users, be a part of their conversations, and create content for all stages of the buyer journey that help convert visitors into paying customers. This process is particularly valuable for businesses with long, complex buyer journeys and high-value products, like the SaaS or B2B customer journey . 

Building a CJM also reduces guesswork and helps you validate ideas—from identifying the right channels, messaging, positioning, and content to building credibility and trust with customers.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar to see where users get blocked—and use the information you glean to make your product itself more intuitive, user-friendly, and well-positioned for growth. The goal here is to make your product (and the user journey within it) so good that it starts to act as its own marketing channel and practically sells itself, which is every team's dream.

10. Minimize future roadblocks

Customer journey mapping requires some time and effort up front, but it increases efficiency and saves resources later on. 

Conduct customer interviews and use PX insights tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data and minimize customer roadblocks further down the line, which ultimately helps reduce assumptions across your team and lets you anticipate challenges so you can prevent them.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Ask tools—like Surveys and Feedback —to gather quantitative and qualitative insights relevant to specific pages on your site, as users are browsing them. This gives you voice-of-the-customer feedback as to why customers are dropping off in the buyer journey, which elements confuse them or get ignored, and what’s stopping them from continuing or converting. 

#The Hotjar question bank makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys

The Hotjar question bank makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys 

Who should map the customer journey? 

Every company, no matter its size or niche, can benefit from mapping the customer journey. Customer journey mapping is particularly useful for giving startups and SMEs a competitive edge. 

Aligning yourself more closely with your customers by getting to know and understand their needs and blockers will allow your company to give customers exactly what they want and differentiate you from the competition. 

If you don’t understand how and why your customers are choosing you, it’s going to be extremely difficult to attract and retain more customers.

What are the challenges of customer journey mapping? 

Customer journey mapping can be a quick and easy process—take a look at our guide to creating a CJM in 2.5 days —but it comes with some challenges: 

You need a strong understanding of all your customer profiles and user groups to avoid leaving anyone out. Don’t rely on assumptions: run customer interviews and collect user feedback to inform your user personas and map.

Multiple teams usually need to be involved, which isn’t always easy to organize: get everyone on the same page and share your product experience insights with Hotjar's Slack integration . To get executive teams on board, prepare a presentation outlining the benefits of customer journey mapping and how their involvement will help.   

It can be frustrating if you don’t have the resources and staffing to immediately act on the insights revealed by customer journey mapping. However, a strong customer journey map will help you see what to prioritize, and can even help you get buy-in for more resources to make changes.

It can be hard to collect enough data for a thorough CJM, but using Hotjar's PX insights tools makes customer journey map research easy by helping teams understand the online user journey on a granular level

Customer journey mapping is a continuous process 

Mapping the customer journey tells you exactly how users interact with your brand, website, and product at different touchpoints—and what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling at each stage. 

Your CJM is a living record. Refer back to it regularly during every stage of your product's design, testing, and launch to make sure you’re delivering what your customers really want and need. 

This crucial process will help you understand and improve the customer experience, creating customer delight , and boosting adoption and loyalty.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping benefits

What is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is the process of gathering user data and insights from surveys, interviews, and product experience (PX) insights tools. Teams then use their findings to create a visual representation of how customers interact with their brand, website, or product at different touchpoints. 

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Customer journey mapping is important to better understand your customers. By visualizing their actions, thoughts, emotions, and challenges, as they interact with your business, you can make changes to improve their experience. 

What are the steps in customer journey mapping?

The steps in customer journey mapping include:

Collecting customer feedback from surveys or interviews

Collecting insights from customer-facing teams 

Using product experience (PX) insights tools to understand how users interact with your website or digital product 

Creating an empathy map

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) that showcases all the above insights

Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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  1. Customer Journey maken in 5 stappen? Verbeter je online marketing!

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  2. The Customer Journey Mapping Guide to Getting Started

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  3. Getting Off The Beaten Path With Your Customer Journey Mapping

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  4. Customer Journey Management

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  5. Het geheim: de customer journey

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  6. 5 (+5) Tips To Start Mapping The Digital Customer Journey

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VIDEO

  1. Customer journey mapping

  2. Customer journey mapping| Digital marketing NZ

COMMENTS

  1. Wat is customer journey mapping?

    Een customer journey map is een visuele weergave van alle interacties die een klant met een merk of product heeft. Door elk contactmoment - van het eerste contact tot de aankoop en langdurige loyaliteit - in kaart te brengen, krijgt je organisatie waardevolle actiegerichte inzichten in het gedrag van je klanten.

  2. Customer Journey (2024): Uitleg en Voorbeelden [+ Template]

    Een customer journey map is een visualisatie van de ervaring van een klant met een bedrijf, product of dienst. Het begint wanneer de klant zich voor het eerst bewust wordt van een behoefte en eindigt bij de mate van loyaliteit. De kaart volgt alle contactmomenten die de klant met een merk heeft, zowel online als offline.

  3. Customer journey map maken

    Kies de contactpunten die de customer journey met je merk nauwkeurig weergeven. Nadat je je contactpunten hebt gedefinieerd, kun je ze gaan ordenen op je customer journey map. 4. Breng de huidige situatie in kaart. Schets wat volgens jou de huidige status is van de customer journey, de huidige customer experience.

  4. Customer Journey Mapping 101: Definition, Template & Tips

    Customer journey vs process flow. Understanding customer perspective, behavior, attitudes, and the on-stage and off-stage is essential to successfully create a customer journey map - otherwise, all you have is a process flow. If you just write down the touchpoints where the customer is interacting with your brand, you're typically missing up to 40% of the entire customer journey.

  5. What Is Customer Journey Mapping and Why Is It Important?

    Customer journey mapping (also called user journey mapping) is the process of creating a customer journey map, a visual story of your customers' interactions with your brand. This exercise helps businesses step into their customer's shoes and see their business from the customer's perspective. It allows you to gain insights into common ...

  6. Customer Journey Map: Everything You Need To Know

    A customer journey map helps you gain a better understanding of your customers so you can spot and avoid potential concerns, make better business decisions and improve customer retention. The map ...

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

    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 ...

  8. What is Customer Journey Mapping?

    Customer journey mapping is needed to give an overview of a customer service operation's success. It offers objective insights into the end-to-end process, allowing companies to detect deviations between desired and actual experience, understand how customers interact with a brand and learn whether the shopping journey is logically ordered.

  9. Customer Journey Map: Definition & Process

    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 ...

  10. Customer Journey Mapping

    A customer journey map is a visual representation of the stages or milestones a customer goes through with your company. As such, customer journey maps are an essential tool for building customer empathy throughout your entire organization. This lesson will go through why customer journey mapping is so important, best practices to creating them, and examples of maps in various industries.

  11. What is a Customer Journey Map? Definition, Importance, Examples, and

    A Customer Journey Map serves as a dynamic visualization, illustrating the intricate pathway customers traverse when engaging with your product or service. Unlike mere records of tangible actions, our Customer Journey Map meticulously captures the nuances of customer assumptions, motivations, and emotions at every interaction.

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

    Customer Support Blueprint Template. Each of these templates can help organizations gain new insights on their customers 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.

  13. Customer Journey Map: Definition with Examples

    Customer Journey Map Definition. A customer journey map, also known as a customer experience map, is a visual representation that outlines the various steps and touchpoints a customer goes through when interacting with a company, product, or service. It chronologically represents each step of interaction the customer takes with your business.

  14. What is Customer Journey Mapping? Simply explained

    Customer Journey Mapping is the ongoing activity of making the steps a customer goes through in order to achieve a specific goal explicit, in a visualization that looks like a map, including the needs and emotions of the customer throughout the entire process. A very important part of the journey mapping process is gathering the actual data ...

  15. Create a Customer Journey Map (Free Templates, Tips)

    Map out your customer journey. Start mapping the current or future states of your customer journey in a template you've chosen from Canva. Organize in the diagram all the insights and touchpoints you've gathered and listed as a team earlier. You can arrange them in the most visually appealing way you can think of.

  16. PDF THE ULTIMATE GUIDE Customer journey mapping

    A customer journey map is a visual representation of customers' processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions and relationship with an organization. It helps you understand the steps customers take - the ones you see, and don't - when they interact with your business. Customer journey mapping helps you look for the ...

  17. Customer Journey Maps: When and How to Create Them

    See below for diagram annotations. Zone A: The lens provides constraints for the map by assigning (1) a persona ("who") and (2) the scenario to be examined ("what"). Zone B: The heart of the map is the visualized experience, usually aligned across (3) chunkable phases of the journey. The (4) actions, (5) thoughts, and (6) emotional ...

  18. What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it Important?

    Customer journey mapping (also called user journey mapping) is the process of creating a customer journey map, a visual story of your customer's interactions with your brand. This exercise helps businesses step into their customer's shoes and see their business from the customer's perspective. It allows you to gain insights into common ...

  19. How to Create a Customer Journey Map

    Example 1: a mobile user journey. This user journey map template covers the digital experience of the persona who discovers a new mobile app, installs it, and uses the app for some time before deleting it. Open a full-size image in a new tab. Example 2: a client journey map for a corporate bank.

  20. Customer journey mapping for product managers

    1. Visualizing the user experience. Customer journey mapping provides a tangible way to measure and understand the customer experience, which can often be somewhat abstract and challenging to grasp fully. By visualizing this entire process, product managers receive a clear and comprehensive view of the product from the user's perspective.

  21. Customer Journey Map: The Definitive Guide

    Image adapted from Mapping Experiences by James Kalbach [1] What is a Customer Journey Map. A Customer Journey Map (CJM) belongs to a class of diagrams called Alignment Diagrams [2] that help visualize the story of interaction between individuals and an organization.. They visually illustrate an individual customer's needs, the series of interactions that are necessary to fulfill those needs ...

  22. Customer Journey Map: What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it

    A customer journey map is a visual picture of the customer or user journey. It helps you tell the story of your customers' experiences with your brand across social media, email, livechat, and any other channels they might use. Mapping the customer journey ensures that you are not missing out on the chance to interact with your customer at ...

  23. 10 Major Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

    Let's take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers. 1. Walk in your customers' shoes. Collecting real-world insights helps you dig deep into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience.