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The Complete Guide to Mapping and Optimizing Critical User Journeys

  • Introduction – Product Management Metrics
  • Chapter 1 – Enterprise Product Metrics
  • Chapter 2 – Product Analytics Tools
  • Chapter 3 – Product Metrics Framework
  • Chapter 4 – Adoption Metrics
  • Chapter 5 – User Segmentation
  • Chapter 6 – User Engagement Metrics
  • Chapter 7 – Critical User Journeys
  • Chapter 8 – Product Launch Metrics
  • Chapter 9 – Retention Analysis
  • Chapter 10 – Product Stickiness
  • Chapter 11 – The DAU/MAU Ratio

Struggling to grow your user base? Try mapping out your critical user journeys.

This is the approach that teams at Google and Pinterest use to reignite growth . Critical user journeys enable you to visualize aspects of a user’s experience that impact business revenue and customer satisfaction.

In this guide, you’ll learn what critical user journeys are, how they are used, and how you can create and improve your critical user paths to grow your product.

TL;DR (too long, didn’t read):

  • Critical user journeys are used to reignite growth.
  • They enable you to visualize aspects of the user experience that impact revenue and customer satisfaction.
  • They can be used to drive alignment, decrease churn, and increase customer loyalty.
  • In this article, we spend some time focusing on different types of critical user journeys: high-traffic, high-dollar, and overall evaluation criterion (OEC).
  • The main difference between critical user journeys and user experience maps is the narrowed scope of a critical user journey.
  • Driving user adoption and setting users up for success is paramount to improving a critical user journey.

Summary of key critical user journey concepts

Here is a quick overview of the key concepts.

When are critical user journeys used?

Critical user journeys are typically used to improve the product, enhance product metrics, and create team alignment.

  • Product improvements: When there’s a need to develop a new product, feature, or enhancement, a critical user journey can be used to identify where to focus or promote the improvements.
  • Team and business alignment: Critical user journeys can be used to drive cohesiveness across teams by allowing them to visualize current customer interactions, identifying areas of success and failure.
  • Improving product metrics: A critical user journey map is a great starting point for identifying what influences metrics like activation rates, retention, and churn.

How are critical user journeys used?

Critical user journeys are used to highlight points of friction and moments of delight in an experience. They show the necessary steps a user must take to complete their goal.

Armed with insight into what can negatively and positively impact the journey, you can use a critical user journey to:

  • Improve the user experience: Knowing the main areas of friction in the journey allows you to focus on solutions that fix these pain points.
  • Improve customer satisfaction and revenue: Customers who are satisfied with the experience are more likely to be retained. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95% .
  • Decrease user churn and increase customer loyalty: Optimizing the portions of the user experience that impede users from achieving their goals can lead to repeat business.
  • Drive company and team alignment: Achieving team- and business-wide cohesiveness allows individuals and departments to work toward a common goal, resulting in greater autonomy and productivity.

Types of critical user journeys

As mentioned above, the three main types of critical user journeys are high-traffic, high-dollar, and overall evaluation criterion. Each can benefit your business in a different way, so let’s dive in!

High-traffic critical user journeys

High-traffic user journeys have a high level of user volume (e.g., SaaS landing pages navigating to demo requests) or lots of interactions (e.g., core product features like sending an email or creating a survey).

These are the journeys you’ll want to optimize for the “aha moment”: the point at which a new user realizes the value of your product.

High-dollar critical user journeys

These are the journeys that either generate the highest revenue or put the most revenue at risk. For example, the checkout experience is the touchpoint that likely creates the most revenue for an ecommerce company. Issues with this portion of the product can result in significant risk to this company’s ability to generate revenue.

For a B2B SaaS product, this journey can be the path from a trial sign-up to a subscription.

Overall evaluation criterion (OEC) critical user journeys

The OEC critical user journey, also known as “the one metric that matters most,” focuses on the journey that improves your business OEC. An OEC is a metric that measures user satisfaction and long-term business value.

Ultimately, when you aim to optimize your OEC critical user journey, you’re aiming to increase user satisfaction while delivering long-term business value.

Overall evaluation criterion examples

Overall evaluation criterion examples

The difference between high-dollar and OEC critical user journeys

Let’s examine a real-life example. The team behind Bing, the second-largest search engine in the world, started by focusing its goals on increasing queries per unique user. The Bing team rationalized that more queries per user would result in more ads shown, ultimately increasing revenues.

The result, however, was not what was expected. Focusing solely on high-dollar critical user journeys drove users to execute more searches to find the content they were looking for, thereby decreasing user satisfaction. 

When the team at Bing shifted its focus to sessions per user, the result was an increase in user satisfaction, leading to more revenue.

What can we learn from this example?

Users who return for multiple sessions with your product likely have higher levels of satisfaction, leading to more retention.

When users returned to Bing over multiple sessions, they naturally saw more ads, which led to more revenue for the business unit.

Put another way, the OEC critical user journey drives a balance of user satisfaction and business revenue.

Critical user journeys vs. user experience maps

Critical user journeys and user experience maps are similar in nature, so it’s easy to confuse them. However, there are some key differences between the two to keep in mind before creating a map.

A critical user journey map is tied to a business goal and has a specific focus on a “critical” aspect of a user journey.

A user experience map is more general, visualizing the entire end-to-end journey of an average user. These maps are typically used to create a baseline understanding of user needs and behaviors.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using either, but both should be perceived as tools used for an intended purpose.

Creating critical user journey maps

Mapping a critical user journey can be broken down into five steps:

  • Get stakeholder buy-in
  • Select the journey stage
  • Narrow the scope
  • Identify the “happy path”
  • Map the journey

Let’s get started!

1. Get stakeholder buy-in

Buy-in from stakeholders can lead to a better understanding of how journey maps will impact them and their teams. At times, this can encourage other teams to devote resources to the project, increasing successful outcomes.

Likewise, a critical user journey map may reveal unexpected results, so it’s important to come to consensus with stakeholders on why journey maps are important and which journeys are the best candidates for mapping.

Potential stakeholder teams include product leadership, marketing, sales, customer success, and support.

2. Select the journey stage

Unlike user experience maps, critical user journey maps zero in on an aspect of the journey, focusing on a specific stage of the customer’s lifecycle.

One popular tactic for defining a customer lifecycle is to use acquisition, adoption, retention, and expansion categorization.

Begin by answering the following questions:

  • Are your current goals to improve product engagement, revenue, or the overall user experience? The answer will help you understand which critical user journey to focus on: high-traffic, high-dollar, or OEC.
  • Which stage of the lifecycle has the highest impact on traffic, revenue or user experience?
  • Which stage of the journey impacts your business objectives the most?

3. Narrow the scope

User journeys can be complex, but narrowing your scope can drive clarity.

Consider the number of touchpoints within the journey. If there are more than three, it’s best to narrow your focus to a specific aspect.

As an example, for a new user, you would primarily focus on the critical journey of getting to the “aha moment,” the one where the user realizes your product’s value. On the other hand, a retained customer critical journey may focus on encouraging referrals and discouraging churn.

4. Identify the “happy path”

The “happy path” is an error-free path that your users take to get to their end goal. This is the reason why they chose your product in the first place. 

Here are some quantitative research methods you can use to identify the “happy path”:

  • Funnel analysis allows you to visualize the series of events and steps users take toward a defined goal, like a successful sign-up. In addition, funnel analysis can highlight points of friction, since you will see where along the “happy path” users dropped off.
  • Path analysis , much like funnel analysis, allows you to also visualize the series of events and steps a user takes in your product. However, the steps are not predefined and allow you to discover common user journeys or where users are deviating from your defined “happy path.”
  • Customer surveys used throughout a critical journey enable you to quantify satisfaction ( CSAT ), effort (CES) needed to complete a goal, or loyalty (NPS). These are all important signals to consider when mapping a user’s “happy path.”

5. Map the journey

With stakeholders on the same page and key insight in hand, you’re ready to visualize the critical user journey with a map.

Start with a template that suits your needs. Luckily, there are plenty to pick from. Here are our recommendations:

  • Customer user journey map by Miro
  • Customer user journey template pack by Miro
  • UX journey map template by Nigel for Figma

Customer journey map example in Lucidchart

Customer journey map example in Lucidchart (free download here )

Once you’ve decided on what your map will look like, plot the key actions and events that define your user’s critical journey. Leverage funnel analysis to highlight key pathways and dropoffs. Overlay CSAT, CES, and NPS scores to provide additional context for delight and points of friction in the journey.

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Best practices for creating and improving critical user journey maps

Ready to create your first critical user journey map? Here are a few tips and best practices to help you get started.

Take steps to get stakeholder buy-in

Getting buy-in is easier said than done. Here are some tips that can help:

  • Engage stakeholders (product leadership, marketing, sales, customer success, and support) as early as possible in the process.
  • Provide clarity on how the work affects they stakeholders and connects to what they find important.
  • Provide reassurance by identifying risks and showing how they’ll be mitigated.
  • Set expectations by clearly articulating the goal, what you expected from the stakeholders, and how they’ll benefit

Segmentation and propensity scores

Segmentation and propensity scores can assist in narrowing the focus of your critical user journey maps by reducing the pool of users (or traffic) to analyze.

For example, you could segment traffic from your funnel analysis that has a low propensity for becoming customers. Doing so could be useful in reducing noise from data and making “happy paths” easier to identify.

Understand users and how they define success

To ensure that users can complete their goals, we need to understand their definition of success. Ask each new user what they value and what they’re trying to achieve with your product or specific feature. This will provide insight into their functional goals (e.g., saving time), personal goals (e.g., feeling empowered), and social goals (e.g., impressing the boss).

Utilize the TRUSt framework

To ensure that communication is highly valued, and even welcomed, it’s best to utilize a consistent framework, such as the TRUSt framework :

  • St raightforward

The TRUSt framework provides structure when crafting messages to improve your critical user journeys.

For example, let’s say you’re focused on increasing customer engagement for a new feature. Just follow the steps outlined in the TRUSt framework to develop your messaging strategy:

  • T imely: When is the best time to message customers about the new feature? The message needs to be delivered based on the customer’s timing, not yours.
  • R elevant: Who should receive the message about the new feature? The message needs to be relevant, taking the customer’s usage patterns into account, i.e., it wouldn’t be relevant for a customer already engaged with the feature.
  • U seful: How do you best help your customers with this message? The message must provide value to the customer.
  • S traightforward: How do you ensure that the message is clear, concise, and unobtrusive of the customer’s experience? You wouldn’t want to tarnish the user experience with distracting and convoluted messaging elements.

As you devise a communication strategy to improve your critical user journeys, it’s important to remember the outcome you’re hoping to achieve. The TRUSt framework helps craft communications with a purpose, but implementing quality user experiences will further encourage users to follow a journey.

Implement proven UI design patterns

Standard UI design patterns can be a significant driver of product goals. Here are some examples of powerful design patterns that can help guide users and improve their critical journeys:

  • Welcome message: A considerate welcome message helps set the tone for your product. First impressions count, and this is your chance to greet your new users.
  • Empty states: How your product looks before users fill it with their content is referred to as the “empty state.” They can be confusing for new and existing users, often lacking contextual information. Pre-filling content or providing hints within the empty space can offer reassurance by guiding the user through important steps.

Webflow empty state (source)

  • Inline hints and tips: A subtle but powerful UI pattern, inline hints and tips provide additional information or best practices within elements on the screen. As an example, upon sign-up to Slack, the user is asked to invite teammates. At this stage, a very subtle inline hint shows sample email addresses in the “add teammates by email” field.

Inline hint and tips on Slack

Inline hint and tips on Slack

  • Tooltips: Labels that provide additional context about UI elements, often triggered when hovering over a hotspot or shown as part of a product tour. Tooltips can be effective for explaining complex features or functionality. Conversely, extensive usage of tooltips may be an indicator that your interface is too complex because a well-designed experience should be self-explanatory.
  • In-App Engagements : These are useful for orienting new users and overcoming initial friction after sign-up. In-app engagements get users to take action by pointing out areas of the product that users need to interact with to realize value. An example would be a UI element that drives users toward activating a feature or engaging with a new product release.

In-app engagement example (source)

Provide contextual content and communication

To be most effective, in-app engagements, welcome messages, and tooltips should be triggered contextually and personalized to each user’s actions (e.g., after they activate a feature or hit a specific milestone).

Utilizing the TRUSt framework for contextual communication can increase the likelihood that your message will be valued by minimizing message fatigue.

Use A.I.-powered product feature mapping to eliminate manual work, drive data accuracy and accelerate your time-to-value

Use A.I.-powered product feature mapping to eliminate manual work, drive data accuracy and accelerate your time-to-value.

Dive into deeper adoption and user-retention insights with feature-level analysis to uncover parts of your product that are making the biggest impact

Dive into deeper adoption and user-retention insights with feature-level analysis to uncover parts of your product that are making the biggest impact.

Target users with in-app guides and emails, and then analyze how those engagements move the needle on KPIs

Target users with in-app guides and emails, and then analyze how those engagements move the needle on KPIs.

Critical user journey maps are a core method for visualizing customer interactions, highlighting moments of delight, and identifying points of friction.

Planning user journeys can create team alignment, build customer empathy, and reignite growth by shining a light on where to focus product development efforts.

Double down on user adoption, customer experience, and revenue by mapping and improving your product with critical user journeys.

customer journey happy path

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The complete guide to customer journey stages.

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

What is the customer journey?

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

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

stages of the customer journey

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

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

– McKinsey, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction

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

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

Free Course: Customer Journey Management & Improvement

What are the essential customer journey stages?

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

  • Consideration

5 customer journey stages

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

  • Sale/Purchase

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

Customer journey: Pre-sale

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

Awareness stage

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

Consideration stage

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

Consider the journey

Customer journey: Sale

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

Decision stage

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

Customer journey: Post-sale

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

Retention stage

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

Advocacy stage

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

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

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

Why are the customer journey stages important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you improve each customer journey stage?

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

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

1. Perform customer journey mapping

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

customer journey map example

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

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

2. Listen like you mean it

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

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

Qualtrics in action with sentiment analysis

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

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

3. Get personal

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

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

Qualtrics experience ID

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

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

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

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

Free Course: Customer Journey Management Improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Buyer's Journey 16 min read

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

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Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Recognize pain points and moments of delight

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

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

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

4. Experience the customer journey yourself

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

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

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

5. Visualize your customer journey map

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

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

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

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

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

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The 7 steps of the customer journey

Mapping the customer journey in Miro

table of contents

Customer journey: a quick intro.

In today's competitive marketplace, businesses must understand their customers in-depth to stay ahead. A crucial part of this understanding is the customer journey , which traces the customer's interactions with your brand from their perspective. Mapping this journey provides critical insights into customer needs, behaviors, and pain points, allowing businesses to improve their offerings, services, and overall customer experience. Let's dive into the seven-step process of creating a comprehensive customer journey map.

The importance of customer journey mapping

Understanding the customer journey is vital to improving business performance. A customer journey map provides valuable insights into how customers interact with your brand across various touchpoints, revealing your service's strengths and weaknesses. This holistic view of customer interaction is beneficial in refining your business model and improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Amazon's obsession with customer experience has made it the world's most customer-centric company. Amazon has continually improved its customer experience by meticulously mapping and analyzing customer journeys, resulting in exceptional customer loyalty.

Step 1: Define your personas

A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It should include:

Demographics : Age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and education.

Psychographics : Interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle.

Behavioral Traits : Buying patterns, brand interactions, and product usage.

Needs and Pain Points : What problems are your personas trying to solve? What obstacles do they face?

Motivations and Goals : What drives your personas? What are their aspirations?

Creating detailed customer personas allows you to understand your customers' needs, experiences, behaviors, and pain points.

For example, a persona for a tech company might be 'Tech-Savvy Tim,' a 30-year-old software engineer who values cutting-edge technology and quick, reliable service. Creating personas aids in tailoring the customer journey map to cater to the unique needs of different customer segments.

And remember, personas are not real people but represent your typical or ideal customers.

Step 2: Identify touchpoints

A touchpoint refers to any interaction a customer has with your brand, from viewing a social media ad to contacting your customer service team. Identifying all these touchpoints is essential to understanding the customer journey accurately.

Mapping touchpoints involves documenting every possible customer interaction with your business. It could be divided into pre-purchase (research, reviews), buy (store visit, online checkout), and post-purchase (customer service, follow-up emails) touchpoints. Recognizing these touchpoints allows you to understand how customers move through the sales funnel and identify areas for improvement.

Step 3: Understand customer goals

At each touchpoint, customers have specific goals they aim to achieve. Whether finding product information or seeking assistance with a problem, understanding these goals is crucial to providing a positive customer experience.

Align your business processes with these customer goals. For example, if a goal at the 'research' touchpoint is to compare different products easily, make sure your website has user-friendly comparison features. You increase satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty by aligning with customer goals.

Step 4: Evaluate the customer's emotional journey

Customers are not just logical entities; their emotions significantly impact buying decisions. So, gauging customer emotions at different touchpoints is crucial for creating an empathetic and compelling customer journey.

Consider how customers might feel at each stage. Are they excited when they find your product? Frustrated when they try to navigate your website? Happy when they receive quick and efficient customer service? Understanding and addressing these emotional responses can create a more positive customer experience.

Step 5: Map out the customer path

With personas defined, touchpoints identified, goals understood, and emotions gauged, you can visually represent the customer's path. A customer journey map can take various forms, such as a spreadsheet or a storyboard, but it should always reflect the customer's perspective.

This map should illustrate the customer's path across touchpoints and depict their goals and emotional experiences at each point. Doing this allows you to step into your customers' shoes and see your brand from their perspective, helping you identify gaps in their experience.

Step 6: Identify moments of truth

Moments of truth are critical interactions that significantly impact the customer's perception of your brand. They can be positive (a delightful unboxing experience) or negative (a frustrating return process).

These moments can profoundly influence customer loyalty and your brand image. For example, the first moment of truth in the hospitality industry might be the initial greeting at a hotel. A warm, welcoming greeting can set the tone for a positive stay, while a poor greeting can do the opposite. Identifying and optimizing these moments of truth can significantly impact your customer experience.

Step 7: Optimize the journey

The ultimate goal of creating a customer journey map is to improve the customer experience. Once you've mapped the journey, analyze it for opportunities and weaknesses.

Look at your map holistically, but also drill down into specific touchpoints. Where are customers delighted? Where are they frustrated or confused? Use this analysis to optimize the customer journey. This might involve streamlining the checkout process, improving customer service response times, or enhancing the user interface on your website.

In conclusion, mapping the customer journey is critical for understanding your customers and improving their experience. It involves defining personas, identifying touchpoints, understanding customer goals, evaluating the emotional journey, mapping the path, recalling moments of truth, and optimizing the journey.

Remember, a customer journey map is not a one-time project but an evolving tool. As customer expectations and behaviors change and your business evolves, regularly update and review your map to ensure it accurately reflects the customer journey. By doing so, you'll stay customer-centric, continually improve, and ultimately thrive in today's competitive marketplace.

Discover more

How to create an ideal customer profile

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

Buyer persona vs target audience

How to make a customer journey map?

What is consumer decision-making process?

What is a customer journey map?

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4 Strategies to Simplify the Customer Journey

  • Richard L. Gruner

customer journey happy path

Making things easy is harder than you think.

While it may be tempting to offer your customers a never-ending array of products, customizations, and information, research shows that simplicity is almost always the best option for boosting both company value and customer loyalty. But what does it take to build a customer experience that’s smooth and simple from end to end? In this piece, the author offers four strategies to ensure simplicity is baked into every aspect of the customer’s journey: identify and communicate what simplicity means to your organization, look beyond product development to find ways to simplify throughout the customer journey, embrace internal complexity to achieve external simplicity, and remember that while simplicity is often necessary, it isn’t always the answer.

The modern consumer faces hundreds — if not thousands — of choices every day. What to read. Where to shop. What to buy. And each of those decisions takes a mental toll.

  • RG Richard L. Gruner  holds a PhD in marketing from the University of Melbourne and is Senior Lecturer (A/Prof) at the University of Western Australia. His work has been published in many top ranked peer-reviewed international journals, and he has a professional background in the media industry. One of his main research interests lies at the intersection of consumer psychology and digital tools.  Find out more about Richard’s experience .

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

Aaron Agius

Published: May 04, 2023

Free Customer Journey Template

customer journey happy path

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

Thank you for downloading the offer.

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

person creating a customer journey map

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

Download Now: Free Customer Journey Map Templates

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

Customer journey stages.

  • What is a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

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

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

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

  • Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

customer journey happy path

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

Free Customer Journey Map Template

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

HubSpot customer journey map stages

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

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

Customer journey stages

1. Awareness Stage

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

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

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

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

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

  • Social media
  • Search engines

2. Consideration

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

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

Product marketing content may include:

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

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

  • Your website
  • Conferences

3. Decision Stage

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

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

Decision-stage content may include:

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

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

4. Retention Stage

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

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

Retention-stage strategies may include:

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

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

5. Loyalty Stage

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

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

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

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

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

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

  • Your products

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

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

What is the customer journey map?

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

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

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

What is UX journey mapping?

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

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

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

Why is customer journey mapping important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Buying Process
  • User Actions
  • User Research

1. The Buying Process

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

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

2. Emotions

Customer journey map template service

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

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

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

3. User Actions

customer journey mapping: user actions

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

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

4. User Research

customer journey mapping: user research

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

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

5. Solutions

customer journey mapping: solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer-Journey-map-meeting

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Template

free editable customer journey map template

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

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

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

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

Current State

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Current State Journey Map

Image Source

Day in the Life

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

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Day in the Life

Future State

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Future State Journey Map Example

Service Blueprint

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

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

Customer Journey Map Example: Service Blueprint journey map

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

Hubspot customer journey map examle

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

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

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

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

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

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

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

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

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

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. You can create a new target customer base.

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

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

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

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

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

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

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

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

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

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

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

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

free editable customer journey map template

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

B2B customer journey map example

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

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

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

ecommerce customer journey map example

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

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

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

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

future BTC customer journey map

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

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

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

customer journey map example for retail

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

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

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

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

1. Current State Template

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

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

current state customer journey map template

2. Day in the Life Template

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

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

Get an interactive day in the life template.

day-in-the-life

3. Future State Template

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

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

Get an interactive future state template.

Customer journey map template future state

4. Service Blueprint Template

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

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

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

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

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

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

Customer journey map template service

5. Buyer's Journey Template

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

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Customer journey map template buyer

Charter the Path to Customer Success

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

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

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

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

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Microsimulations Off the Happy Path: Navigating the Wilds of Customer Journeys with Scenario Testing

In today’s highly competitive market, businesses recognize that offering a smooth customer journey is essential for success. However, while most companies focus on the ‘happy path’—the ideal customer journey without any hiccups—it’s equally important to explore and understand the experience when things go wrong. This is where scenario testing becomes crucial.

Scenario testing that strays from the standard customer journey, or ‘ happy path ‘, is a strategy to simulate less common, unexpected, or complex interactions that customers may have with a product or service. It’s a way to prepare for and improve the customer experience, even in less-than-ideal circumstances.

What is the Happy Path?

By understanding and optimizing the happy path, companies can ensure that their systems are designed to meet customer expectations in the most straightforward and efficient manner possible, thereby minimizing operational risks and enhancing overall system resilience.

However, focusing solely on the happy path can leave systems vulnerable to unforeseen issues and threats, highlighting the critical need for comprehensive testing that includes potential deviations and worst-case scenarios. For security and compliance, recognizing and planning for deviations from the happy path is essential to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory requirements. It ensures that security measures are robust, not just under ideal conditions but under stress or attack, and that compliance mechanisms are effective even in non-standard situations. Therefore, while the happy path represents the goal of seamless operation, its true value lies in serving as a benchmark against which the integrity and resilience of systems are tested and improved.

Operational Resilience: Exploring the Realms of What-Ifs

Testing only the happy path is like rehearsing a play in an empty theater; it doesn’t prepare you for the unexpected variables that a live audience brings. Customers are unpredictable, and their journeys are often influenced by a myriad of factors, including personal preferences, external pressures, and technological issues. By not accounting for these variables, businesses risk alienating customers when they encounter problems that haven’t been anticipated and addressed.

In the realm of operational resilience , important service design and the concept of testing off the happy path are critical to ensure organizations can withstand and quickly recover from disruptions.

Important service design involves strategically planning and structuring services to minimize risk and ensure continuity under various scenarios, including those that deviate from ideal conditions. This design philosophy takes into account the complexities and interdependencies of modern operations, aiming to build systems that are not only efficient but also adaptable and robust against unforeseen challenges. Testing off the happy path, or exploring scenarios where things do not go as expected allows organizations to identify potential vulnerabilities and stress points within their operations before they become critical issues.

By rigorously testing how systems behave under conditions of failure, unexpected demand, or external threats, companies can refine their response strategies, enhance their adaptive capabilities, and ensure that even in the face of adversity, critical services remain undisrupted. Together, these practices form the backbone of operational resilience, enabling businesses to maintain service integrity and continuity, protect stakeholders, and sustain performance in an unpredictable world.

Benefits of Scenario Testing Outside the Happy Path

Anticipating the Unexpected: By exploring scenarios where things go wrong, companies can identify potential pain points and proactively devise solutions, thus reducing customer frustration.

Improving Resilience and Adaptability: Testing a wide range of scenarios makes your product or service more robust and capable of handling unexpected challenges, enhancing overall system resilience.

Building Customer Trust: When customers see that a company has anticipated and planned for potential issues, it builds trust in the brand.

Creating Comprehensive Strategies: Scenario testing encourages businesses to think creatively and develop comprehensive strategies that cover more than just the most likely customer interactions.

Enhancing Customer Retention: A well-tested customer journey that accounts for various scenarios can significantly improve customer retention, even when customers stray from the happy path.

Common Challenges of Scenario Testing in Service Design

Resource Allocation: Testing beyond the happy path requires more time, effort, and resources. Companies often struggle with justifying the cost against the perceived rarity of these scenarios.

Complexity in Planning: Anticipating and creating test cases for numerous less-likely scenarios is complex and requires deep understanding of key risks, customers, the market, and your organization.

Data Overload: Collecting and analyzing data from a multitude of scenarios can be overwhelming and may lead to analysis paralysis.

How to Effectively Integrate Scenario Testing in Service Design

Define Your Non-Happy Path Scenarios: Work with customer service, sales, and other front-line employees who understand where things tend to go awry. Use this information to map out potential scenarios.

Create Diverse Customer Personas: Develop personas that reflect a wide variety of users, not just the ideal customer. Test scenarios with these personas to ensure a broad range of experiences are covered.

Use Real-World Testing: Use techniques like Microsimulations with vendors and customers to simulate real-world conditions and obtain authentic feedback from teams outside your organization.

Iterative Testing: Adopt an agile testing methodology that allows for continuous testing and integration of feedback into your business operations.

Analyze and Prioritize: Use data from scenario testing to prioritize issues based on their impact on the customer experience and business goals. Learning Loops can be an essential tool in taking lessons learned forward.

Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Encourage a mindset where every team member is aware that the customer journey can always be improved, and where feedback is actively sought and valued.

Scenario Testing in the Wild

By extending scenario testing beyond the happy path using Microsimulations, businesses not only prepare for the unexpected but also demonstrate their commitment to providing a consistently positive customer experience. It’s an investment in customer satisfaction that can lead to increased loyalty, better word-of-mouth, and ultimately, a stronger bottom line.

Paula Fontana

VP, Global Marketing

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Falling off the Customer Journey Happy Path

customer journey happy path

Building or improving a customer experience creates excitement. Setup a customer journey brainstorming session, with lunch, and your meeting room will be packed. Good and bad ideas will fill the room along with a few hundred stickies.

The Happy Path

Hopefully, the thrill and excitement quickly turn to focused, thoughtful work. Designing a journey can be exciting but it takes focus, research and vision. Most likely your journey will have a Happy Path. A Happy Path is the path of your primary Use Case or reason for the journey. For example, if you have a credit card payment experience, the Happy Path might be customer accessing the site, selecting a payment amount and paying the bill. The Happy Path is the journey you have in the forefront of your mind and often receives the most focus during design.

Falling Off the Happy Path

When your experience is working well, most customers will start and end on the Happy Path. They will select an amount and pay their bill. However, no matter how well you research, test and designed your journey, not all customers will finish on the Happy Path. Hopefully, they will take a short detour and finish anyway, but in some cases, they will not become lost and not finish at all.

There are several reason customers fall off the Happy Path. We all know no two people are exactly alike, so it stands to reason that not everyone will experience or interpret a journey the same way. Customer navigation is heavily influenced by their preferences and past experiences. For example, a customer making a grudge transaction (a necessary, but unpleasant transaction – i.e., taxes) may be more impatient because they are annoyed or more focused because they must complete the transaction. Customer’s navigational speed will play an important part in how much attention they give through your journey. Desktop vs. mobile, colors, complexity, graphics and other factors influence customer navigation. In the end, there are too many factors to control, so some customers will fall off the Happy Path.

How we react to happy path fall out is important

There are several ways that we as digital professional react to customer falling off the path. I am sure many of us have seen teams overact. These teams will see fall out a failure and reprioritize all other efforts to address it. While their zeal may be admirable, they may be wasting resources, focusing on the wrong problem or delaying the release of other important work. Other teams may under react by shrugging-off the fall out as not critical to the success of the experience or achieving a specific KPI. Other teams may experience analysis paralysis – a state where they enjoy studying the problem more than fixing it.

In some cases, teams will make the error of blaming the customer. You may have heard expressions of frustration such as “it is obvious where they should click”, “they must not be paying attention” or even worse comments. This is a mindset that needs to change quickly. We can’t blame the customer, as digital professional, we need to put the onus of a failed journey on ourselves, not the customer. We need to see the customer’s interaction as a logical approach to the journey and environment that we have created for them. Once we see their actions as logical or understandable, we can then focus on how to bring customers back to the Happy Path and the desired end of the journey. This shift is critically important, because if we take responsibility then we empower ourselves to fix the issue… or at least try with an optimistic attitude.

Retuning to the Path by understanding What and Why

Once we get past the disbelief that our journey has flaws, we can begin to move forward. Fortunately, we have several options on how to move forward with next steps, sometimes too many, so we need a goal for our next steps. Understanding the What and the Why is a good method of focusing efforts. The What and the Why seeks to understand exactly what is happening and then to understand why it is happening. Perhaps the best sources of What is happening are data analytics, customer comments and service desk comments. Date analytics are great sources of telling what is happening, where it is happening and often when it is happening. The objectivity of the data and the number of users covered is a critically important. There are times the customer will tell you directly through their comments or comments made to reps. These comments can come in the form of direct, phone, emails, web chats and more.

Armed with knowledge of what is happening, teams can be looking for the Why or root cause of the problem. Data Analytics may not help us with this half of the equation. Talking to customers, reps or simply walking through the experience is the best approach. For example, I once developed a series of four product marketing videos for a Financial Services company. We had tracking on all the videos; we were particularly interested in abandonment rate. The data for three of the four showed that customers abounded at a steady rate from beginning to end. However, with one video we saw a sharp decline at about the three quarters mark. When we looked at the video it was not hard to see or hear what was happening. The video had a section discussing the negative impact of taxes followed by a pause. It was easy to see customer hearing taxes and using the pause as the moment to leave. This was a quick fix and abonnement rates came back to normal.

The above example is an easy one, in many cases speaking with the customer is the best route. This can be done in many ways but speaking to customers directly may be the best since this is about customer experience, so emotions and context will be important.

Designing customer journeys is one of the most exciting parts of working in digital. A great experience requires research and interactions, and in the end, it is unlikely that it will be perfect (impossible really). Customers are unique individuals and they are not always going to follow the Happy Path that we have laid out. But, we can increase the number of Happy Path customers by understanding the What using data analytics and the Why by speaking directly with customers.

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What’s a Customer Onboarding Journey Map and How to Create One

Customer onboarding journey maps take the guesswork out of user onboarding .

With a detailed journey map, you’ll know best to onboard new users, so they experience value and reach activation quickly. You’ll also easily find friction points and optimize the user experience to drive customer success.

This article takes a deep dive into onboarding journey maps. Read along to learn how to create them for your business.

  • A customer onboarding journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a company during onboarding.
  • Customer journey mapping helps to improve the user experience and drive retention. They also increase freemium to premium conversion.
  • A well-crafted customer journey map helps to align teams around common priorities and goals.
  • You can start with the basic elements in a customer journey map template: significant milestones, customer interaction points, emotions, pain points, and solutions.
  • Creating customer journey maps starts with a clear idea of your objectives. Examine your current flow , then find areas of improvement and work towards them.
  • It’s not uncommon to have different target personas. Pick 1-2 that are most relevant and create a fitting onboarding journey map for them. You can visit the others later.
  • Your journey map should cover all important touchpoints in your product, such as opt-in/sign-up forms, welcome emails, product walkthroughs, and customer support.
  • Breaking down your customer journey map into smaller milestones makes the process easier. Milestones to consider: Aha moment, activation, key feature adoption.
  • Checklists are great for keeping users glued to the happy path.
  • Use a minimum viable onboarding (MVO) strategy to shorten the time to value and get users to activation quickly.
  • Study your most loyal customers. Identify how their onboarding went and the features they engage with the most. Try to replicate these on the new customers you’re onboarding.
  • Gamification keeps customers motivated to complete the onboarding process.
  • Provide self-serve resources on your app or website to reduce friction and foster feature adoption.

What is a customer onboarding journey map?

The customer onboarding journey map visually represents a customer’s experience with a company during onboarding. The chart contains the different touchpoints and key actions users take through the onboarding process.

What are the benefits of mapping the customer onboarding process?

Mapping your onboarding process gives you a better understanding of how customers interact with your platform.

It also enables you to analyze and see areas that need to be optimized. Here are the specific benefits you’ll enjoy:

Improve the customer experience and drive retention

Mapping the customer journey and all touchpoints will help you identify user experience issues and optimize the UX. A good user experience will increase your retention as customers will come to love your tool.

Increase the freemium to paid conversion

Utilizing customer journey maps to provide optimal user experience will generally result in higher conversion rates for your paid plans. That’s because many users will choose to upgrade after experiencing the value of your product.

But leaving the process unoptimized could lead to much friction, causing customers to lag.

Align teams around common priorities and goals

Smaller companies tend to excel more at customer success.

The reason is that they’re small and hungry for customers. But as the company grows, different departments emerge, making it hard to align teams.

However, creating a journey map ensures everyone is on the same page on where pain points fit in the grand scheme of things.

What should be included in a customer onboarding journey map?

The customer journey is often non-linear, involving back and forths and different touchpoints. So, it’s best not to look out for a straight A-to-B journey because that rarely happens. Instead, create an onboarding journey map with elements that cater to the customer’s needs at every point.

Here are the elements to include:

Significant milestones in the customer journey

The first step in drafting a journey map is identifying the critical steps customers will take to get maximum value from your product.

Doing this helps you identify and address friction points easily.

Customer interactions across each step of the journey

This is where you detail user actions on your product. Visualize how your ideal customers will visit the website, take a demo, sign up for a free account, etc., and document all the details.

Emotions users experience at each touchpoint

Customers will have mixed emotions as they explore your tool—excitement, relief, frustration, etc.

You want your customers to experience positive emotions each time, so you should optimize for that. Simplifying your onboarding and making it fun will help in this regard.

Pain points and friction customers experience

Still, on feelings, customers experiencing negative emotions during onboarding is a sign that a pain point is present.

Your journey map should include possible pain point areas to enable you to identify where customers may be experiencing those negative feelings.

Solutions to overcome pain points

Don’t stop at identifying pain points. Your team should develop creative solutions that ensure a better user experience and customer satisfaction.

5 steps to create a customer onboarding journey map

You’ve known the elements to include in a customer onboarding map. Now, let’s go through a step-by-step guide for making one for your new customers.

1. Set clear objectives for the onboarding map

Every optimization process requires that you first assess your current state and properly understand what needs to be improved.

So, begin by gathering insights about each part of the existing onboarding journey.

Then proceed to set your objectives based on the areas that need to be improved on. For instance, your goal might be to increase the freemium to premium conversion rate, drive adoption for a specific feature , etc.

Two ways to gather insights:

Tag features and track product usage to understand how users interact with your product.

Use in-app surveys to collect information.

Make sure to track the completion of your goals too. Understanding what the users must do is step one, but in order to help them get there, you’ll need proper tracking.

2. Identify target user personas and define their goals

You may have multiple customer personas with different journeys .

One map won’t cut it for all of them, so pick 1-2 relevant personas and design your first onboarding journey map with them in mind.

Also, survey customers to understand their specific pain points and where you fill in the gaps. You can easily do this with a welcome screen.

3. List all the important touchpoints across the customer onboarding journey

Touchpoints are how your customers interact with your brand through their journey. There are four important touchpoints for new users:

  • Engaging with your sign-up form. Opt-in and sign-up forms are filled by potential customers with a substantial interest in your product. Make the process easy and simple so your customers can quickly get to the next step in their journey.
  • Interacting with welcome emails and follow-up emails. These emails should be short and sweet. Their aim is to set the foundation for a good business-customer relationship and also provide users with useful CTAs, as Airfocus did in the screenshot below:
  • Engaging with product walkthroughs. This is another important touchpoint for new users. Product walkthroughs are interactive and efficient for getting users up to speed with key features. The great thing about walkthroughs is that they’re set up once by the onboarding specialist, and users can go through without needing direct human support.
  • Reaching out to customer support and technical support. Most customers prefer to resolve issues independently, but some cases may arise that need the help of a support agent. Be proactive by providing a contact form or a live chat pop-up and placing these where customers can easily see them. Using the in-app help center is usually a great place.

It goes without saying that your customer support agents should be trained to respond appropriately and provide customers with the best possible experience.

4. Define the essential onboarding process milestones

Break down the whole process into smaller milestones. Create a mini-map for each major milestone, again listing all the emotions, interactions, solutions, etc. Some milestones to consider:

This is where the user first realizes the value of your product.

Users complete the onboarding process and engage with core features. In the Aha moment, it just dawned on them that your tool is what they need.

But activation happens when they’ve actually experienced your product first hand and got a deeper conviction.

Key feature adoption

This milestone is reached when users engage with multiple key features and become proficient in using them.

5. Determine the happy path

The happy or golden path is the ideal path in your product that users take to achieve their goals.

The opposite of this is the unhappy path. It has much friction and doesn’t help users reach the end goal.

Use UX analytics to identify the unhappy paths in your tool and keep users from getting on them.

How to optimize the customer onboarding journey and increase conversions?

Constant improvement is the rule of the game when it comes to SaaS customer onboarding.

This section provides tips to help you optimize your onboarding and convert customers better.

Start by focusing on the minimum viable onboarding

The minimum viable onboarding (MVO) centers on getting users engaged in activities that quickly lead to activation.

MVO is the starting point of optimizing your onboarding flow; nothing else matters without this critical step.

If you’re interested, you can watch our MVO webinar on YouTube for a more detailed explanation.

Segment user personas by their jobs to be done and trigger relevant onboarding flows

You’ve already done user research and identified your user personas and their goals.

Now use that data to group users with similar goals in segments and trigger relevant onboarding experiences. For example, trigger a UI pattern (can be a modal, a tooltip, etc.) with an embedded video tutorial on a specific feature that a particular segment is likely to find useful.

Track goal completions and identify friction points across the journey

Goal tracking lets you see where users drop off on your app.

The insight from this can be used to improve the customer experience at friction points and enable the user to continue their journey smoothly.

Replicate power user’s journeys

Power users are your most engaged and loyal customers . They represent your ideal users, and you can replicate more of them by studying them.

Dive into details and see what onboarding flows and experiences you’ve triggered that led them to convert and retain. For qualitative data, you can invite power users to give detailed feedback on your onboarding program .

Implement their feedback and the insights from your analysis on the rest of your users, turning many more into loyal customers.

Use checklists to keep users on the desired onboarding journey

You must have identified the happy path during your customer onboarding journey map, but left on their own, users can wander into countless unhappy paths.

They’ll experience friction and likely churn.

But checklists come to the rescue. With checklists, you can guide the users through your product, ensuring they stick to the happy path.

Gamify the user experience and celebrate customer milestones

Everyone likes a bit of fun. And what happens when you can weave fun into a serious professional setting? You’ll seize the day!

It’s easy to implement gamification for software apps and improve onboarding.

Simply add fun elements to your UI , acknowledging customer success and rewarding them with cute gifs, emojis, etc., for milestones reached. This will provoke positive emotions and motivate users to reach another milestone.

Offer self-service to remove friction

Self-serve resources reduce friction by making necessary information available at the customer’s fingertip.

All your user has to do when they get stuck is move to the resource center and search for answers using keywords that best describe their situation.

This reduces the workload on your support agents.

It also makes customers happy because there is no more confusion with the product, and they don’t have to wait in line to speak with customer care agents.

And that’s a wrap! Hopefully, you’ve picked up lessons to begin implementing right away. As you go to create (or recreate) your next onboarding journey map, don’t forget to include the five elements discussed earlier. Again, they are:

  • Significant milestones
  • Customer interactions
  • Pain points

Ready to get started with customer journey mapping? Book a demo call with our team to see how Userpilot can help you create customer onboarding journey maps that fit your ideal audience and drive conversions.

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Customer Journey Maps – The what, why, when and how

Customer Journey Mapping is a tool used to define, then visualise the path a user takes as they engage with your organisation, product or service. Think of it like a persona on the move.

In this article, we will explore the real value of creating Customer Journey Maps and discover when and why it would be beneficial to utilize them within your organisation.

Definition: A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. ~ NN Group

But what are Customer Journey Maps?

Customer Journey Maps are one of the many tools a UX professional can call upon to demonstrate how to improve your users experience in relation to your product or service.

They will provide you with a visual representation of your users journey, either from the initial point of contact to the end-goal, or for a section of that experience along the way. You may choose to create a map of the current journey (to find problems), or the aspirational journey (to show how life could/should be). 

By creating a visual time-line, then adding the users goals and actions as they begin to engage, we can start to build up a picture of the path our clients/customers take to get to where they need to be. As we consider what they might think, and how they might feel as they move through this process, we can add their emotions and thoughts into the mix. This in turn, enables us to gain insights as to where we might be falling short, so we can address these pain-points and micro-moments in order to create a delightful experience and a happier user.

Ultimately, this will lead to a more positive perception of your organisation, whilst increasing the return on any marketing spend.

Why would we create a Customer Journey Map? 

Once considered a nice-to-have, Customer Journey Maps are increasingly becoming an essential part of the planning and decision making process for any customer-centered organisation.  

Research conducted by the Aberdeen Group reported that companies who mapped and managed the customer journey successfully, saw on average, a 24.9% increase in revenue from associated marketing campaigns and a 21.2% reduction in service costs (compared to previous year). 

A Customer Journey Mapping exercise will enable you/your team to take a virtual walk in the shoes of your customers. How does your organisation look from their point of view? What are they going though at any given part of the process? What is the experience like for them on a personal level? What delights them and what are their pain-points? Where are the opportunities to improve?

Once created, your Customer Journey Map can be developed into a visual communication of your users experience, enabling you and your people to make decisions with your user front-of-mind. This is a win-win, bringing a joint sense of purpose and clarity internally, whilst making life better/easier for your customers externally. 

What are the benefits of a Customer Journey Mapping session?

A Customer Journey Mapping session will help you to:

  • put the needs of your customers first, so that your organisation can respond to them in the best way possible.
  • define any pain-points and gaps in your customers overall experience, so that they can be addressed and problems can be solved. 
  • enable departments and whole organisations to visualize and understand the bigger picture and where they fit into it.
  • give the people in your organisation a shared sense of clarity regarding needs of your customers. 
  • help your designer make informed design decisions, so that they can help your customers get where they want to go quickly and easily. 
  • help your marketing and communications team create copy that responds to the right questions at the right time, in the right tone.
  • make it easier for your internal teams to find a way to prioritise future work. 
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around ~ Steve Jobs

When is a Customer Journey Map a good idea? 

There are a few different scenarios where you might benefit from Customer Journey Mapping. They include (but are not limited to):

When you are ready to redesign or make incremental improvements to your website or overall marketing strategy.

When we consider a redesign of our website, it’s almost always because the site is ‘dated’ or has become bloated and difficult to navigate. The common approach is to take the existing content, reshuffle it and make it more visually appealing. The new website is launched and we congratulate ourselves on a job well done. At no point in this process, do we stop to get the opinion of people we are actually building the website for. Instead we rely on ‘best practice’ and a bunch of assumptions we have made about our customers.

This is guesswork and can be a dangerous approach, leaving the likelihood of a positive return on your investment to chance. The new site looks great, but may not answer the questions your user came to ask. By trying to  better understand your users and their journey in relation to your product or service, the higher the likelihood that we will collaboratively create an online/digital experience that will meet and hopefully exceed their expectations. 

When you have a known business goal. 

That goal might be to inform decisions about a new website (above), or discover whether a new feature might be helpful. It could also be an external problem, such as working out where support gaps are, or where your customer service/customer communication is lacking. 

When you need to bring a team together. 

As organisations grow beyond a certain size, departmental silos almost always creep into existence. By conducting a Customer Journey Mapping Workshop with stakeholders and staff, you can expect to develop a shared sense of ownership leading to greater collaboration between departments. 

A Customer Journey Mapping Workshop can also be used to define who is responsible for what within your organisation. It will highlight any areas where customer support is lacking, enabling these blind-spots to be uncovered and allocated to the right team.

When you need to find the cause of an existing problem. 

Whilst we can quite easily get our hands on lots of data about our users, working out why they behave in a certain way is a challenge of its own. Customer Journey Mapping can help your team to understand and account for trends in qualitative data. 

Selling to the same customer more than once is almost always cheaper than finding a new customer. If customer retention is a problem for your organisation, a Customer Journey Mapping workshop could help you work out why. 

When you are serving more than one market. 

Your organisation will likely have more than one user persona, especially true if you’re targeting more than one market or demographic. For example you may have customers in B2B and B2C, or local and international students etc. Whilst the thing you’re selling may be essentially the same, the questions, concerns and barriers to entry will be very different for your different user groups. Customer Journey Maps will help you to personalise your marketing and processes to better support each audience. 

So, we’ve covered the what, what and when. Now for the how.

How do you create a Customer Journey Map?

Customer Journey Maps are the output of a Journey Mapping Workshop. There are various ways of conducting the workshop, but the end-goal is generally the same – to gain valuable insights as how you can improve the experience you provide to your customers. 

customer journey happy path

Steps to conducting a successful Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

1. get the right people in the room..

Getting stakeholders involved is essential to your project’s success. One of the many benefits of Journey Mapping is that it can help to unify stakeholders and internal departments at the start of a project.

Making sure that key decision makers (usually senior management), anyone who has direct contact with customers (customer service / sales / marketing) and anyone involved in the delivery of the project (digital teams, communications staff) are on-board from the beginning will offer a distinct advantage.

If you can get an actual customer or two in the room better still. They won’t necessarily need to be involved for all of the workshop, but will most definitely be able to provide valuable insights.

In short, you want both the people that are instrumental in delivering the customer experience, and those who are removed from it but are key influencers in the decision making process.

2. Set the stage.

Once you have the right people in the right place at the right time (not easy but worth the effort!), you can let participants know what to expect. Basic housekeeping always helps people settle in, so let people know when the tea/lunch break is and how long the session/s will run for.

3. Know your goal, decide on a persona.

By this stage you will have already decided whether to create the current journey, aspirational (future) journey, or both, so explain this to your participants. You’ll also need to decide which part of the journey you are hoping to capture as part of this exercise.

It’s not usual for an organisation to be targeting more than one market, so you’ll need to decide which audience/ persona you’re going to be basing your journey map on.

We are trying to discover what your customer needs at any given moment in their journey, so it will help if you’re focussed on a specific character. You can create other maps for other persona’s, but it’s best to focus on one at a time. 

Review what you already know about your customer’s experience, you can collate past research or direct customer feedback. By working out what you know, you can more easily see what you don’t know, and then try to fill in any blanks. 

Customer Journey Map Template Example

4. Create your map.

There are many different variations on the Customer Journey Map. Here is a template that you can download for free. Print it out (as large as you can) and stick it on a wall so everyone can see. 

Define the Key Stages: The Customer Journey Map Template above has 5 key stages: Discovery, Research, Purchase, Delivery and After Sales. These will vary depending on what you offer and which part of the journey you are hoping to map, so decide on these before you begin.

Work out what you’re trying to work out: What are you doing the workshop for? What is it that you are trying to find out? What do you want to know about your user? What do you want to know about the key stages of their journey in relation to your product or service?

An example might be: ‘Collect information to make decisions about the redesign of a NFP website’, or ‘Improve the application process for new students’.

For a website redesign project, you might start by thinking about the tasks that the user came to your site to complete, and add them to the relevant phases of their journey. Next, consider what questions they came to get to answers to and do the same. Note how they interact with your organisation throughout this process.

Start adding content to the map: Using post-it notes, start to add information to the map. You might start by writing each task that the user is trying to complete for the first stage (discovery, our example).

Rinse and repeat as you move through the key stages.

Tip: Using post-its ensures you can change move things around as you worth though the exercise. If you have data (from marketing or other departments), you can use this to help you fill out the post-its. If you have a large group of participants, it’s a good idea to complete the first stage together, then break into smaller groups for each of the remaining key stages. You can bring everyone back together to check everyone is in agreement at the end of this process.

5. Add touchpoints.

Next, being brainstorming a list of touchpoints – moments along the customer’s journey where they make contact with your organisation. Note the channel that each touch-point is made through.   

So thinking about your chosen persona , what are the different moments they interact with you as they move through their journey? How do they interact with your company? They might need to speak with you on the phone, send an online enquiry or talk to someone face to face. Mark these on the map where appropriate in time.

6. Be empathetic – how does your customer feel?

For each phase in the journey, note the mood of your customer. How does the touchpoint make them feel? Are they likely to be concerned, anxious, happy? It’s good if you can explain why that emotion exists in that touchpoint – what is it about that interaction that makes them feel that way?

You will also want to note any weaknesses/opportunities that become apparent. Where in the journey is the customer let-down and how might you turn that into a more positive customer experience.

Now you have a map that represents your customers’ journey. Go back to your initial goals, and see if you can answer the questions you set out to explore. How can you make it easier for customers to do business with you? Make a list of areas where the experience falls short, decide who’s responsibility this is and start to think collectively about your team might be able to turn these problem areas into moments of delight.

Customer journey mapping is designed to help you to better understand your customers by walking in their shoes. Of course we’re going to make assumptions as part of this exercise, but becoming customer-centric in our thinking can have a positive impact long after the workshop has ended . 

Not sure if a Customer Journey Map is the right tool for you?

There are many other ways to learn about the experience you provide your users. You can view an overview of UX tools here . If you need help deciding which is the best strategy for you, get in touch .

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IMAGES

  1. Customer Journey Mapping for B2B

    customer journey happy path

  2. Best Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples

    customer journey happy path

  3. Know your customer with the customer journey

    customer journey happy path

  4. Customer journey map, process of customer buying decision, a road map

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  5. What is a customer journey map?

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  6. Customer Experience Journey Mapping

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COMMENTS

  1. What is the Happy Path in UX and How to Design It?

    The happy path is the ideal, error-free journey the user takes to achieve their goal. It involves completing specific tasks without errors. The golden path, however, is the most engaging, rewarding, and efficient user flow. It is the path of most satisfaction, where the user doesn't just complete tasks but also enjoys a delightful experience.

  2. The Only Guide You'll Ever Need on Happy Path for UX

    TL;DR. UX design merges innovation and empathy, crafting digital platforms that captivate users.; The happy path in UX is the seamless journey a user experiences when navigating a digital product in UX. You can think of it as the best-case scenario where users meet their goals without any barriers. Originally from software testing, the term described the best route an application would take.

  3. Falling off the Customer Journey Happy Path by Steve Hawes

    The Happy Path. Hopefully, the thrill and excitement of creating or enhancing a customer journey quickly turns to focused, thoughtful work. Designing a journey can be exciting, but it takes vision ...

  4. The Complete Guide to Mapping and Optimizing Critical User Journeys

    As an example, for a new user, you would primarily focus on the critical journey of getting to the "aha moment," the one where the user realizes your product's value. On the other hand, a retained customer critical journey may focus on encouraging referrals and discouraging churn. 4. Identify the "happy path".

  5. Customer Journey Stages: The Complete Guide

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

  6. Customer journey mapping: The path to loyalty

    Let's take a look at five steps your team can take to start journey mapping. 1. Find the sweet spot where your customers' goals and your own align. Before you start journey mapping, nail down your business goals. Any marketing and communication you deliver during the customer journey should be focused on helping your brand reach those goals.

  7. How to Build a Customer Experience Roadmap to Improve CX

    Design the customer journey map. Use the data collected to determine the touchpoints and milestones that your users need to achieve for success and identify the happy path. Plan and execute your CX vision. Use the customer journey map to define your customer experience tactics, such as creating an activation playbook, planning customer ...

  8. What Are the 7 Steps to Map a Customer Journey

    Step 1: Define your personas. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It should include: Demographics: Age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and education. Psychographics: Interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle.

  9. Happy Path in UX Design: Defining Smooth User Journeys

    The happy path refers to a user's ideal journey to complete a task without encountering issues. On the other hand, the golden path is often viewed as the most likely positive alternative, a ...

  10. The UX Designer's Guide To Critical User Journey Mapping

    Consider splitting the customer journey map between different milestones to focus on smaller paths that need optimizing. Use UX analytics to find unhappy paths causing a drop-off in user engagement and optimize to put users on the right happy path. The happy path is an error-free path, describing each step the user must take and the ideal outcome.

  11. 4 Strategies to Simplify the Customer Journey

    But what does it take to build a customer experience that's smooth and simple from end to end? In this piece, the author offers four strategies to ensure simplicity is baked into every aspect of ...

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

    It covers the path from customer awareness to becoming a product or service user. In other words, buyers don't wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process to consider, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service. The customer journey refers to your brand's place within the buyer's journey.

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

    Service — when a customer officially becomes your customer. 5. Loyalty — when a customer is loyal to your product over time. 6. Advocacy — when a customer recommends the product to other people. While mapping some parts of the journey can be relatively easy (e.g. anything that happens once your customers have already started using your ...

  14. Off the Happy Path: Navigating the Wilds of Customer Journeys with

    Scenario testing that strays from the standard customer journey, or ' happy path ', is a strategy to simulate less common, unexpected, or complex interactions that customers may have with a product or service. It's a way to prepare for and improve the customer experience, even in less-than-ideal circumstances.

  15. Best Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples

    17. SVG or EPS customer journey mapping stencil. This one's a doozy. Available as an Omnigraph stencil, Visio stencil, EPS, or SVG, this customer journey mapping template is best suited for complex journeys with many touchpoints, or for when you need to provide a lot of visual information to your stakeholders.

  16. UX Design Blunders: Are You Ignoring the 'Unhappy Path'?

    Understanding how users interact with software helps teams recognize and prevent errors through a UX design strategy. For example on a form, the "happy path" is when a user fills in all the ...

  17. Customer journey mapping: a brand experience-focused guide

    The goal of customer journey mapping is to improve the customer experience with your brand. Analyze the customer journey maps you've created for insight into the customer experience and how you can improve it. 6. Take action. Use your newfound insight to develop a better brand experience for each customer persona.

  18. Falling off the Customer Journey Happy Path

    Building or improving a customer experience creates excitement. Setup a customer journey brainstorming session, with lunch, and your meeting room will be packed. Good and bad ideas will fill the room along with a few hundred stickies. The Happy Path Hopefully, the thrill and excitement quickly turn to focused, thoughtful work. Designing a journey can be exciting but it takes focus, research ...

  19. What's a Customer Onboarding Journey Map and How to Create One

    You must have identified the happy path during your customer onboarding journey map, but left on their own, users can wander into countless unhappy paths. They'll experience friction and likely churn. But checklists come to the rescue. With checklists, you can guide the users through your product, ensuring they stick to the happy path.

  20. Customer Journey Maps

    Steps to conducting a successful Customer Journey Mapping Workshop. 1. Get the right people in the room. Getting stakeholders involved is essential to your project's success. One of the many benefits of Journey Mapping is that it can help to unify stakeholders and internal departments at the start of a project.

  21. Customer Experience explained with happy path customer journey

    What is Customer Experience? CX definition.- Happy path customer journey explanation, covering digital and multi-channel, with examples.- Difference between ...

  22. 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 ...

  23. Free and customizable customer journey map templates

    Explore professionally designed customer journey map templates you can customize and share easily from Canva. ... Multi Colored Course Or Membership Journey Path Roadmap Instagram Post. Instagram Post by The Template Tribe. Customer Journey Map Whiteboard in Yellow Blue Green Creative Illustrative Style.

  24. Your path to value with Copilot for Microsoft 365

    Supporting everyone's AI learning journey with Copilot Lab . Creating a clear path to rapid Copilot value . Introducing the Copilot Success Kit . The Copilot Success Kit includes guides and resources to enable organizations to get started with Copilot for Microsoft 365 quickly. Download the full kit or just the resources you need based on your ...

  25. ‎Shamanic Soul Path on the App Store

    Introducing the Shamanic Soul Path App Embark on a transformative journey with the Shamanic Soul Path App, designed to bring ancient wisdom to the modern world. As we navigate the challenges of our times, this app serves as your gateway to Shamanic teachings and practices, providing valuable insights and tools for self-discovery and growth.