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What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

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

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of using customer journey maps

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

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

Improved customer support

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

Effective marketing tactics

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

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

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

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

Product advancements or service improvements

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

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

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

A customer-focused mindset

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

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

Step 1. Set your focus

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

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Perform user research

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

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

Get a free Heyday demo

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

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

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

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

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

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

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

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

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

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

Types of customer journey maps

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

Current state

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

Future state

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

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

Day-in-the-life

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

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

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

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

Empathy maps

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

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

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

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

Buyer Persona:

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

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

What are their struggles?

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

What tasks do they have?

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

Opportunities:

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

Action Plan:

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

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

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

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Digital customer journeys: from awareness to advocacy.

13 min read Just understanding a customer’s needs and wants is no longer enough. You need to know not only what they think and feel about every online interaction with your product, but also what they might do in the future. This is where digital customer journey mapping comes into play.

Customers expect not only a high-quality digital experience ; they also expect to be treated as individuals. Their online experience must be personalized, relevant, and tailored to their wants, needs and interests. And where customers have high expectations , it follows that they have low tolerance for a below-par experience.

Now, more than ever, customers will abandon a purchase or a brand with a single click if they’re not happy, and move onto another brand that seamlessly delivers what they want. A recent study from the XM Institute asked large organizations to evaluate the quality of the experiences they deliver across different channels. Less than 30% rated any of their digital experiences as “good” or “very good”.

Modern customers are digital kangaroos, able to hop from brand to brand and product to product, on any device. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your brand’s path to purchase is as easy as possible, to stop them from hopping off to a competitor.

How do you do this? With digital customer journey mapping.

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

What is a digital customer journey?

This is the path to purchase and retention – from first noticing the product to buying and using it. The journey combines all the touchpoints (i.e. points of interaction with your business) a customer has, and collects consumer data, transaction information, cross-device browsing history, and customer service interactions. There are five stages in the digital customer journey:

• Awareness: this is the point at which a customer notices your product . Awareness can come from a multitude of channels: social media and word of mouth from friends, influencers and brand advocates, search engine suggestions, adverts, marketing emails, blogs, SMS, apps, loyalty programs, and affiliate marketing.
• Consideration: A customer likes what they’ve seen, so they start to think about and research the product. They’ll visit your website, engage with a chatbot, sign up for free trials, demos, webinars, look at discounts, and check online reviews and testimonials.
• Purchase: To buy online, customers will create an account (or log into their existing one), fill their shopping cart, may be upsold or cross-sold, apply discounts, choose an electronic payment option, check out, and leave a review about the purchase.
• Experience: This is how well the order is fulfilled, and includes: shipping and delivery, tracking, online help center, support content (FAQs, instructions and assembly guides), chatbots and assisted chat, guarantees, follow-up emails and social media interactions.
• Loyalty: Loyalty programs , personalized rewards, newsletters, and social media interaction are all well and good. But creating an emotional connection with the customer, and ensuring they receive the value they expect from the brand is the new approach to loyalty: is the product good quality? Did the customer receive good support ?

What exactly is a digital customer journey map?

When you map out the digital journey graphically, including all the devices, and touchpoints your customer interacts with, you’ll understand how they make decisions, connect and interact with your brand. You can also identify and rectify any pain points that make the customer experience less than seamless.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

• You’ll walk in your customers’ (virtual) shoes : Employees sometimes find it difficult to empathize or understand the customer’s perspective. They may try to second guess what customers are feeling, rather than experiencing the journey themselves. By collecting feedback at touchpoints along the journey, the customer can express how they are feeling (frustrated? Happy? Disappointed? Cared for?) and employees can jump in to solve issues and make the customer experience smoother and more enjoyable.
• The whole company will work together: All too often, organizations work in silos: not only communication silos (when different teams don’t speak to each other) but also system and data silos that hold customer information that’s specific only to that part of the journey.  It’s the lack of a 360 view of the customer and seamless sharing of insight that creates this fragmented experience. With a customer journey map and centralized customer information, everyone, across all departments, knows where they fit in and what their role is in delivering a seamless experience.
•   You’ll inform your content marketing and content creation: Customers buy more if your content is relevant and targeted to them. Your customer journey map will help you build a full 360° picture of your customers: demographics , behavior , and psychographics , so you can target new and returning buyers.
• You’ll be able to predict customer behavior: Not only will journey mapping give you valuable insight into customers’ wants, needs, feelings, actions and aspirations, you’ll also be able to use the data to predict and influence how customers will behave.
• You’ll be able to identify gaps: when you map out each stage of the journey, and then map out your existing processes, you can not only uncover gaps, but also identify what your highest value journey touchpoints are. Without mapping, you could be focusing on optimizing touchpoints that are not really that influential, while missing a more important point.

Creating your digital customer journey map

The first thing to understand is that you have no control over a customer’s journey. A customer will go where they like, on whichever device or platform they choose, negotiating the touchpoints to achieve their goal of a satisfactory purchase. Your role is to build an omnichannel framework that anticipates where they are going to go and supports their goal.

• Base it on your sales funnel:  You will probably have the basis for your digital customer journey already – your online sales funnel (awareness, interest, decision, action). Use this as a guideline to define how many touchpoints your customers have, and how each interaction funnels into the next.
• Put your customer hat on: Walk through all the stages of your sales funnel as a customer would, noting the touchpoints. What social media would they interact with? Does your website have the right information? How easy is your booking process? How helpful are the after sales people? Is the loyalty scheme attractive? Would you be happy to recommend your own product ?
• Customize your touchpoints: You know which social media platform attracts most customers, how to respond to reviews so your business demonstrates it cares about customers, how your purchase process works, how good your aftersales team is, and how you reward loyal customers. These are the touchpoints that are specific to your company. When you bolt them onto your customer journey map and collect feedback about each of them, you’ll be able to see if they are performing as well as you think they are.
• Create personas: As companies scale, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of individual customers. This is where personas come in: these are fictitious customer types based on real customers, using demographic and psychographic profiles that include age, gender, socioeconomic background, lifestyle, interests, opinions, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. Each persona travels along their customer journey in a slightly different way, enabling a company to recognize the differences and cater to every type of customer.
• Use customer journey mapping software: Customer journey solutions are now so sophisticated that they can give real-time visualizations of your customers moving towards purchase and beyond, capturing their online interactions with your brand. AI-enabled software will flag any touchpoint where customers are struggling and highlight any places where they drop out. Not only can you jump in and fix the problems, you can also measure the impact that improving the customer experience at those points has on the company’s bottom line.

Data you can collect with digital customer journey mapping

These are just some of the types of data you can collect along your digital customer journey. When you feed all these into a single platform for analysis, you’ll be able to see how they relate to each other, and where they have knock-on effects.

• Web-browsing data: Every time someone clicks onto your website, you can track their activity on the site and see how they are interacting with your brand. You can also see what devices they are using to access your site.
• Mobile app data: If a customer is using your mobile app, they already have a degree of loyalty. Mobile apps yield more customer information from profiles, sign-ins, and location.
• Sales data: You can track a customer’s purchase history and shopping habits over time. Do they buy immediately, leave items in their shopping cart, or abandon their cart periodically? Don’t forget sales that didn’t happen – finding out why not is valuable for understanding what needs to improve.
• Advertising data: Who has clicked through to your site from an advertisement? This data will give you information about customers who are just starting out on their journey with you. You can marry advertising data with sales data to test the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
• Loyalty data: Your best customers are usually those in your loyalty program. By analyzing who they are and how they use your brand, you’ll be able to target people just like them.
• Survey data: Want to know what customers think of your brand? Ask them. Sending surveys at touchpoints along the customer journey can give you quality information about what’s working and what’s not.
• Social media listening: Increasingly, customers interact with brands through social media. Understanding the nature of this interaction can help develop your social, as well as general marketing strategies .
• Aftersales data: Information from your customer services department can reveal a wide range of issues: product quality, delivery reliability, areas that need product support. How customers are treated after they’ve made a purchase is pivotal to whether they become loyal, or not.

What about B2B digital customer journey mapping?

Whether you’re selling B2C or B2B, the main principles of journey mapping are the same. After all, although you are trading with companies, you are still selling to people within those companies – there are just more of them, and your feedback processes will need to be a little different.

When you map B2B journeys , you need to bear the following in mind:

• More types of people are involved in a B2B journey than a B2C one: Therefore, you’ll need to create more customer personas. For example, if you’re supplying an online finance platform, you will have to deal with the CIO, executives, managers, tech personnel and the call center assistants. All these people are your customers, segmented by persona.
• B2B customers are more valuable: Building business relationships can take years of investment, and if you lose a business customer, you might lose a lot of revenue as a result. You’ll need to prioritize and segment your customer personas by business value: the CIO has more purchasing power than a single call center assistant, for example.
• B2B customer feedback is different: Because much B2B is built on personal interaction and recommendation, business people often know each other. It’s more acceptable to pick up the phone and talk through a problem than send out a generic survey. Your feedback techniques will have to be much more personalized to each of your B2B customers, so that they feel heard, and still special.

An example of a customer journey map template

The brands that thrive in this new reality are those that understand what customers want in digital and take action to deliver the experiences they expect. Here’s a customer journey template for you to start mapping out your digital journey.

To learn more about customer journey management take a look at our free online course below:

Free course: Customer journey management & improvement

Related resources

Customer Journey

Consumer Decision Journey 14 min read

Customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, customer journey analytics 13 min read, how to create a customer journey map 22 min read, request demo.

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4 Strategies to Simplify the Customer Journey

• Richard L. Gruner

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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10 Best Customer Journey Mapping Software Tools in 2024

Senior Content Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

Understanding your team’s needs and customer expectations is critical to running a successful business. One way to achieve this understanding is by mapping out their journey, from their first interaction to their final purchase, and yes, there are tools to automate this process and make it way easier!

This article will explore customer journey mapping tools and outline our top 10 of the crop, each with unique features and benefits. Keep reading to find the perfect software to enhance your customer engagement efforts.

What are Customer Journey Mapping Tools?

2. custellence, 4. lucidchart, 5. visual paradigm, 6. uxpressia, 9. flowmapp, 10. microsoft visio, what to look for in customer journey mapping tools.

A customer journey mapping tool is a software application or platform that helps businesses create visual representations of customer touchpoints and experiences. Customer journey mapping involves understanding and documenting a customer’s various interactions with a business, from their initial awareness and engagement to the final purchase or onboarding and post-purchase experience.

The best customer journey mapping tool typically provides user-friendly interfaces that let businesses create visual diagrams on digital Whiteboards or Mind Maps of the customer journey. These journey maps often include different stages or phases of the customer’s experience and other aspects such as awareness, consideration, decision-making, purchase, and post-purchase.

Within each stage, the user journey map tool allows the user to define and outline specific touchpoints, interactions, channels, and emotions the customer may experience.

Mastering the customer journey mapping process helps you make sense of customer data, gain insights and identify areas for improving your average customer’s experience.

10 Best Customer Journey Mapping Software to Use in 2024

Are you tired of hearing about the essence of mapping your customer journey but unsure where to start? Fear not, as we are about to give you “the tea” on the best customer journey mapping software for you to get started.

Our top 10 picks for customer journey mapping tools include the following:

ClickUp is an excellent customer journey mapping tool that lets you create the best visual workflow representations with its whiteboard feature and mind map maker. These features help you outline and view the various touchpoints of your customer lifecycle, from awareness to conversion, repeat purchases, churn, and more.

ClickUp also offers multiple customer journey map templates , so you don’t have to create yours from scratch. Create detailed workflows and approval processes with Mind Maps so you can easily create dependencies for each step.

ClickUp key features

• ClickUp’s Whiteboard : ClickUp has a whiteboard feature that allows individuals and teams to visualize ideas, improve communication and create unique CRM workflows to improve customer journeys
• Mind Map Maker : ClickUp’s Mind Mapping feature helps create dynamic visual outlines and flowcharts for ideas, projects, or existing tasks
• Customizable templates : ClickUp provides templates for multiple use cases, including creating project roadmaps and customer journey maps – so you have a base to start from
• Custom views : Choose between 15+ different views for task management, journey mapping, diagramming, or through custom Gantt charts

ClickUp limitations

• ClickUp has a ton of customizations, so it can be a little difficult to learn it all right away

ClickUp pricing

• Free Forever
• Unlimited: $7/month per user 
• Business: $12/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom pricing available–if you need software to handle your business, contact Sales to help set you up when you are ready

ClickUp customer ratings

• G2 : 4.7/5 (6,700+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.7/5 (3,600+ reviews)

Custellence is a customer journey mapping tool that helps teams and organizations understand and improve customer experiences. With its simple drag-and-drop functionality and real-time collaboration features, Custellance lets users create customer journey maps in minutes, get buy-in from stakeholders, increase customer engagement, and drive customer-centered change.

Custellence best features

• Unique image collection
• Flexible journey map structure
• Curated icons
• Broad color palette
• Multiple templates for a quick start
• Enables export to PNG, CSV, or PDF versions
• Commenting feature for seamless collaboration
• Ability to choose your preferred code system

Custellence limitations

• Text updates sometimes take a while
• No free offer to create customer journey maps from templates

Custellence pricing

• Standard : $0 
• Professional : $30/month per user
• Enterprise : Custom pricing

Custellence ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (5+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.3/5 (10+ reviews)

Smaply is one of this list’s top customer journey mapping tools because it helps create visually appealing journey maps and facilitates customer feedback tools for real-time online collaboration.

On Smaply, teams can collaborate on different maps, exchange customer feedback and visualize customer experience insights.

Smaply best features

• Online and offline collaboration features with an intuitive interface
• Drag and drop editor for detailed journey maps
• GDPR compliant
• High data security
• No credit card required

Smaply limitations

• Not enough persona templates
• No rewind button

Smaply pricing

• Free: 0 eur/month per user
• Basic: 19 eur/month per user
• Pro: 29 eur/month per user
• Enterprise: Contact Smaply for pricing

Smaply ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.6/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.4/5 (15+ reviews)

Lucidchart is an intelligent diagramming software that can create customer journey and stakeholder maps. It allows teams to efficiently and collaboratively build visual presentations of complex processes , systems, and ideas.

With Lucidchart, you can easily create journey maps to understand how customers find, buy and use your products – and improve them to capture more revenue.

Lucidchart best features

• Data linking
• Auto-visualization
• Integration options like Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and more.
• Visualization filters to highlight specific customer journeys
• Automatic cloud documentation to save and share customer personas

Lucidchart limitations

• Sometimes lags when working on large, complex diagrams with multiple elements
• Steep learning curve, unlike many alternatives
• Low-resolution exports
• Some users’ pain points are with the limited brand icons, images, and shapes to illustrate user journey maps
• Importing external graphics is complicated and sometimes impossible

Lucidchart pricing

• Individual: $7.95/ month per user
• Team: $9/month per user
• Enterprise: Contact Lucidchart for pricing

Lucidchart ratings & reviews

• G2 : 4.6/5 (2300+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (1900+ reviews)

Check out these Lucidchart alternatives!

Visual Paradigm is a suite of agile project tools for boosting productivity. The platform offers visual modeling and diagramming features that can be used to build journey maps and gain insight into customer emotions as they interact with your brand.

Visual Paradigm has several diagram types for conducting user research and building more precise visual representations of customer behaviors and journey maps.

Visual Paradigm best features

• Customer experience design tool
• Process map designer to highlight customer touchpoints
• Online diagram tool for detailed customer and stakeholder maps
• Report generation for customer journeys
• Textual analysis
• Mind mapping tool for customer journey maps
• Project publisher
• Infographics and diagram maker
• Drag-and-drop diagram editor for simple journey mapping

Visual Paradigm limitations

• Diagram connections can be complicated for some when building customer journey maps
• Some users found the app’s shortcuts sometimes don’t work
• Lacks some of the collaborative features users are looking for

Visual Paradigm pricing

• Modeler: $6/month per user
• Standard: $19/month per user
• Professional: $35/month per user
• Enterprise: $89/month per user

Visual Paradigm ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.5/5 (2+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.2/5 (15+ reviews

UXPressia is a visual collaboration software for creating not just customer journey maps but user personas and impact maps as well. The software enables real-time collaboration and offers customer experience courses to help individuals and teams perform better.

UXPressia best features

• High-quality exports with custom branding
• 70+ customer journey maps, personas, and impact map templates
• Interactive online courses
• Online persona creator to highlight pain points
• Experience graph
• Integrated web analytics to detail the customer experience
• File attachments
• Presentation mode to display journey maps online

UXPressia limitations

• Some users felt constrained by limited features and unintuitive workflow
• No Jira or Confluence integration can make it difficult for users with that software in their workflow
• Steep learning curve for some users creating customer journey maps

UXPressia pricing

• Starter : $16/month per user
• Pro : $36/month per user
• Enterprise : Contact UXPressia for pricing

UXPressia ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (10+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (70+ reviews)

Sketch enables users to create different designs for their projects. With its robust features, like copy and paste, image editing and adjustments, library management, and more, Sketch can build journey maps across customer touchpoints.

Recently, the journey map company introduced an experimental feature menu for users to try unreleased features and share feedback before launch.

Sketch best features

• Available on multiple platforms – MacOS and web
• Advanced vector editing with its mapping tool
• Reusable design templates
• Intuitive prototyping
• Shared libraries
• Solo design or real-time collaboration
• Customizable toolbars

Sketch limitations

• Mapping tool is not available on iPad, which makes it tough for on-the-go Mac users
• It takes time to learn the full of the journey mapping capabilities
• Doesn’t work on Windows devices

Sketch pricing

• Standard: $12/month per editor
• Business: $20/month per editor

Sketch ratings & reviews

• G2 : 4.5/5 (1,100+ reviews)
• Capterra : 4.6/5 (750+ reviews)

Figma is a collaborative interface design software famous for its prototyping capabilities. With Figma, individuals and teams can create designs from scratch, including customer journey maps that can be used to visualize and improve customer satisfaction.

This customer experience and journey mapping tool stands out in this list because it offers a whiteboarding function for freehand wireframing and designing. Figma is targeted at user interface/experience (UI/UX) design rather than customer journey mapping, unlike many other tools on this list.

Figma best features

• Modern pen tool
• Plugins for automating tasks and improving workflows
• Flexible styles
• Accessible libraries
• Unlimited viewers
• Easy export to share the customer experience with your team

Figma limitations

• Not available offline, which can be difficult if you’re traveling where there’s spotty wifi
• It can be difficult to find resources in the community section
• Some users felt there weren’t enough image manipulation options—especially when creating customer journey maps

Figma pricing

• Figma professional : $12/month per editor
• Figma organization : $45/month per editor

Figma ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (800+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (600+ reviews)

One of the leading UX tools for web design workflows , FlowMapp allows individuals and teams to create and iterate sitemaps. It also offers features that track the status and comments/ongoing conversations about each design.

FlowMapp’s design functionalities come in handy for customer experience management, journey mapping, and the creation of customer personas.

FlowMapp best features

• Intuitive sitemaps for visualizing team workflows
• Flowchart diagrams for user journey and website planning
• User flow diagrams for planning a better customer journey and improved user experiences
• Ability to share, transfer, or archive projects or customer experience logs
• Drag and drop interface

FlowMapp limitations

• Inflexible nodes and templates compared to alternatives
• No separate input field specifically for search engine results page (SERP) information
• Some users struggled to navigate between projects
• Not enough integrations for some journey mapping tool users

FlowMapp pricing

• Pro : $18/month per user
• Team : $54/month for up to five team members
• Agency : $180/month for an unlimited number of team members

FlowMapp ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (80+ reviews)
• Capterra: Unavailable

Microsoft Visio uses stencils, premade templates, starter diagrams, and flowcharts to help customer journey managers and individuals looking to create easy-to-understand visuals.

With Visio, you can create, edit, and collaborate in Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft Visio best features

• Built-in templates for flowchart creation
• Organization chart
• Export and import functionality
• Highly customizable diagrams and graphics

Microsoft Visio limitation

• Difficulty with linking elements and sharing large files
• Limited collaboration options
• Does not integrate well with various wireframe programs
• Incompatible with tools outside the Microsoft Suite

Microsoft Visio pricing

• Visio plan 1: $5/month per user
• Visio plan 2: $15/month per user

Microsoft Visio ratings & reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (600+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (3000+ reviews)

Customer journey mapping software is indispensable for businesses that want to enhance their customer experiences. When selecting a customer journey mapping software, it is crucial to consider the following:

• Multi-channel journey mapping : Your customer journey mapping software should support multi-channel mapping, allowing you to capture and analyze interactions across different channels, including websites, mobile apps, social media, physical stores, call centers, and more.
• Data integration and automation : Look for software that seamlessly integrates with other data sources, such as CRM and project management systems, marketing automation platforms, or analytics tools. This integration lets you gather real-time data and automate the mapping process, saving time and improving the accuracy of the information.
• Collaboration and sharing features : The software should facilitate collaboration among team members, allowing them to work simultaneously, leave comments, and track changes.
• Analytics and metrics tracking : Look for customer journey maps with built-in analytics and metrics tracking capabilities to measure the effectiveness of your customer journey initiatives. It should allow you to set and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer experience and other relevant metrics.
• Scalability and flexibility : You want journey mapping tools that can manage large datasets, support complex customer journeys, and adapt to changing business needs. Look for customizable features that allow you to tailor the software to match your specific requirements, ensuring flexibility and long-term usability.
• Customer support and training : Evaluate the level of customer support and training the software vendor provides. That includes assets like comprehensive documentation , tutorials, and training resources to assist users in maximizing the software’s potential. 

A customer journey mapping tool with the right blend of these features will help you gain valuable customer insights, improve user satisfaction, and drive sustainable business growth.

ClickUp—Your Best Customer Journey Mapping Software

ClickUp is the best customer experience management and journey mapping software out there. It’s like having a super-smart assistant who knows your customer’s ins and outs.

Say goodbye to the headache of manually organizing customer data, and hello to a tool that makes your customer analytics process so much easier.

Try ClickUp’s customer journey map template today .

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Customer Journey Visualization: How to Perform It + 3 Tools to Try

10 min read

Want to conduct customer journey visualization but not sure what’s the best way to do it?

This article shows you a step-by-step process for collecting customer data and creating easy-to-understand visual maps.

• A customer journey map represents the steps users take when interacting with your brand. Understanding these steps and the motivations behind them enables you to support customers in succeeding with your tool.

Customer journey visualization is the process of taking information from the customer journey map and representing it in a visually compelling way.

Benefits of customer journey mapping:

• Tailor marketing campaigns to the customer’s buying process.
• Build data-driven product roadmaps .
• Enhance customer experience.
• Improve free trial to paid conversion .
• Increase loyalty and revenue growth .

Key components to include when mapping the customer’s journey:

• Customer journey stages .
• User emotions .
• User actions .
• Proposed solution.

Stages included in the buyer journey

• Awareness stage
• Consideration stage
• Decision stage
• Activation stage
• Adoption stage
• Renewal stage
• Expansion stage
• Loyalty stage

Step-by-step guide for visualizing the customer journey:

• Identify your buyer persona .
• Segment your users with an in-app welcome survey .
• Identify key journey stages with path analysis .
• Spot customer touchpoints with heatmaps and session recordings .
• Find features that increase customer engagement and retention .
• Collect user feedback to tap into customer emotions .
• Visualize the journey with a customer journey map template .

Best practices to use when creating customer journey maps:

• Keep the visuals simple for all stakeholders .
• Use consistent symbols and colors .
• Iterate and continually update your journey maps .

Three journey mapping tools to improve the customer experience:

• Userpilot – Best data analysis tool to track user journeys.
• Miro – Best tool for customer journey map templates.
• UXPressia – Best for UX research into the customer’s journey.

Ready to create a customer journey visualization? Book a demo now to start collecting data with Userpilot .

Try Userpilot and Take Your Customer Experience to the Next Level

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What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation that illustrates the steps your customers go through when engaging with your brand. It also outlines their motivations, actions, and pain points at every stage.

The main purpose of a customer journey map is to provide a clear picture of all customer interactions with your business, from their initial contact to long-term retention.

What is customer journey visualization?

This helps understand complex customer interactions through diagrams, charts, or other graphical formats so all stakeholders can quickly glance through and grasp the emotions , needs , and goals at each customer touchpoint.

Benefits of customer journey mapping

A customer journey map that clearly outlines user activity at each journey stage has tons of benefits, including the following:

• Create targeted marketing campaigns : Journey maps reveal what motivates customers at different points—their needs, questions, and pain points. This lets you tailor messaging and offers to be most relevant where potential customers are in the buyer’s journey.
• Build data-driven product roadmaps : A customer journey map helps you understand which features move users to the next stage of the customer journey. This allows you to optimize your roadmaps and make product improvements based on real user needs.
• Enhance user experience : Positive customer experience is an easy way to stand out in a competitive landscape. The data from customer mapping enables you to deliver an improved user experience .
• Improve free trial to paid conversion : Understanding the journey from a free trial to a paid subscription helps identify the critical moments and factors influencing a customer’s decision to upgrade. This helps improve your trial conversion funnel and win more users.
• Increase loyalty and revenue growth : Customer journey mapping also enhances post-purchase experiences to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty . This allows you to take actions that foster stronger relationships, encourage repeat business , and generate more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.

What’s included in a customer journey map?

Customer journey maps can vary in complexity and detail but typically include the following key components:

• Customer journey stages : The major phases your customer goes through (e.g., awareness, consideration, activation, adoption, renewal).
• User emotions : How the customer feels at each stage—excited, frustrated, satisfied, etc. Understanding emotions adds depth to your customer journey visualization.
• User actions : What the customer does at each stage (e.g., visits the website, books a demo, engages with key activation features during onboarding, and so on).
• Proposed solution : Ideas for improving specific areas of the customer journey and addressing pain points .

Stages included in a customer journey

Each customer journey stage represents a unique mindset and set of objectives that, when understood, will help funnel users smoothly till they become paying and loyal users. Let’s go over the key journey stages :

• Awareness stage : The potential customer becomes aware of a problem or need and begins seeking general information, not necessarily focused on your product.
• Consideration stage : In this second stage of the buyer’s journey, potential customers begin actively researching for potential solutions. Using channels like friends, search engines, and social media, they compare different products, assessing features , benefits, and pricing to determine what best meets their needs.
• Decision stage : After their research, the customer makes a decision by booking a demo call , signing up for your free version , or going straight for the paid plan.
• Activation stage : The new user experiences your product’s core value for the first time and sees reasons to continue engaging.
• Adoption stage : After successful activation , the user incorporates your product into their workflow and continues using it regularly.
• Renewal stage : This is where the customer decides to renew their accounts to increase the ROI of using your product.
• Expansion stage : Here, the customer purchases add-ons, upgrades their accounts , or increases their usage. This signifies trust in your company and the value it provides.
• Loyalty stage : The loyalty stage is the holy grail of the SaaS customer journey. Customers in this stage not only expand and repeatedly renew their accounts but also advocate for you through word of mouth or social media.

Step-by-step guide for visualizing the customer journey

Customer journey visualization involves several steps, each contributing to a comprehensive view of the customer’s path from initial engagement to loyalty. Here’s how to approach it:

1. Identify your customer persona

The first step is to define the persona you wish to visualize—note that the customer journey will be slightly different for each of your customer personas because they have varying needs and goals.

Once you’ve decided on the persona to visualize, the next step is to list what you already know about them . This includes their pain points, goals, jobs to be done, and any relevant information you wish to add.

Here’s a template you can use:

2. Segment your users with an in-app welcome survey

Use a welcome survey to collect important data about new users. Keep the survey short and focus on asking questions about their company size, the end user’s role in the company, and their main use cases.

How is this important to the customer journey mapping process?

The data from your welcome survey helps segment users based on their needs, preferences, and initial impressions, allowing you to create more detailed and personalized customer journeys.

3. Identify key journey stages with path analysis

Define the goal(s) for each customer journey (e.g., activation of XYZ feature). Then, implement path analysis to find all the paths users take to achieve that goal. Filter through the noise to identify the shortest path and highlight all the stages involved.

For example, a path analysis can help you identify which features drive adoption by monitoring users’ journey from signing up to becoming paying customers.

You can track all the pages they visit or the events they conduct to understand key conversion drivers.

4. Spot customer touchpoints with heatmaps and session recordings

Heatmaps provide a visual representation of user actions on your website or app in terms of UI clicks and hovers so you can identify high-engagement areas.

Session recordings perform a similar function but are even more insightful as they provide video recordings of user clicks , scrolls, zoom-ins, and other mouse movements.

Combining these two customer analytics lets you identify the key touchpoints at each user journey stage.

5. Find features that drive engagement and retention

Use trend analysis to find popular features at every journey stage. This report highlights features that are visited most often in a given period so you can gain insights into key user problems and what solutions work best for them.

You can pair your trends report with cohorts analysis to find which features drive retention and loyalty.

These highly-used features likely fulfill a core need, address a significant pain point, or provide exceptional value. Identifying them helps you map out the moments of delight in the customer journey.

6. Collect user feedback to tap into customer emotions

Feedback surveys help you hear from the horse’s mouth. By asking the right questions, you can identify customer pain points and motivations at each journey stage.

For this survey, you want to prioritize open-ended questions over close-ended ones so users can freely express themselves.

For example, asking a question like “What are the top challenges your company is facing?” allows the respondents to think and provide detailed feedback .

7. Visualize the journey with a customer journey map template

With all the data and insights you collected from the previous steps, it’s time to visualize it. Use a customer journey map template to consolidate the customer data you’ve collected.

Examples of what to include:

• Customer journey stages
• Customer touchpoints
• User emotions
• User actions
• Opportunities

Here’s a customer journey map template from Miro you can use:

Best practices to use when creating customer journey maps

Follow these best practices to ensure your customer journey map is clear, actionable , and remains relevant over time.

Keep the visual representation simple

Your visualization should have just enough data for all stakeholders to understand user motivations . The map will lose its impact as a quick reference tool if it’s too cluttered or complex.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Don’t use product jargon.
• Use illustrations to make it easy to visualize user feelings/emotions.
• Limit the detail level and attach summaries of each journey.

Use consistent symbols and colors

You’ll likely be working on multiple customer journeys across different user personas .

It’s easy to mix things up, so develop a visual key to represent different journey stages, touchpoints, emotions, and pain points .

Iterate and continually update your journey maps

Customer needs and preferences keep changing over time, so update the visualization based on new insights regularly.

Aim to conduct periodic data analytics to keep tabs on changes in the customer experience and track user behavior .

3 journey mapping tools to improve the customer experience

Below are three of the best customer journey mapping tools and what they help you accomplish.

1. Userpilot – Best data analysis tool to track user journeys

Userpilot is a product growth tool with powerful customer behavior analytics.

The platform lets you visualize customer journeys and create in-app experiences to improve your customer experience.

Relevant features:

• Funnel analysis : Visualize how users progress through each customer journey stage. The funnel analysis report shows friction points and areas where users move smoothly.
• Analytics reports : Dig into customer behavior data and uncover insights to facilitate better customer journey visualization with trend reports , cohort analysis , user paths , and heatmap analysis.
• Analytics dashboards : View all key data points from a single location with the analytics dashboard . There are different dashboards to choose from such as the product usage and core feature engagement dashboards. You can also build custom dashboards.
• Feature usage reports : Tag any feature of your choice and track all user interactions associated with it without having to involve your dev team.
• In-app surveys : From simple quantitative surveys to more in-depth, open-ended questions, Userpilot has several survey templates to make feedback collection easy.

2. Miro – Best tool for customer journey map templates

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboarding platform that enables teams to work more effectively, from brainstorming with digital sticky notes to planning and managing agile workflows.

Features that help with customer journey visualization include:

• Collaborative online whiteboards : Create and share customer journey maps in a visual and interactive environment. The workspace is flexible, allowing you to freely arrange text, shapes, and images to fit your visualization needs.
• Templates and frameworks : Access pre-built templates, including customer journey maps, to quickly start projects.
• Integration : Seamlessly integrate with tools such as Slack, Asana, and Google Drive to enhance team collaboration.

3. UXPressia – Best for UX research into the customer’s journey

UXPressia is a specialized platform dedicated to customer experience management, offering tools for customer journey mapping, persona creation, and impact mapping.

Here’s how it helps with customer journey visualization:

• Templates for customer journey mapping : Access a variety of industry-specific templates and customer journey mapping examples to streamline your mapping process with a user-friendly interface.
• Persona creation : Create personas by incorporating demographics, needs , and pain points to better understand the customer experience.
• Impact mapping : Identify and visualize the impact of different touchpoints on the customer’s experience and satisfaction.

By visualizing the steps users take to become loyal customers, you’ll spot ways to optimize your product and convert more customers.

Ready to begin? Book a Userpilot demo to access behavior analytics and user feedback for effective customer journey visualization.

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Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

Published: August 15, 2023

When creating the ultimate digital customer experience, no business is complete without a solid online presence. In fact, 65% of consumers said their experience on a website or app is "very important" in their decision to recommend a brand.

Anymore, though, it's not enough to simply launch a site and call it a day. You need to craft a digital customer experience that's engaging, user-friendly, and delightful for your audience.

Not sure where to start? Consider this your guide to digital customer experience — what it is, why it matters, recent trends, and how you can apply it to your business.

Table of Contents

What is digital customer experience?

The importance of a good digital customer experience strategy, digital customer experience vs. customer experience, digital customer experience best practices, digital customer experience trends.

• Digital Customer Experience Examples

Digital customer experience, or digital CX, refers to the total online interactions a customer has with your brand. Most interactions take place on your website or app. Yet other channels like social media, email, and live chat also play a role in how customers connect with your brand online.

Creating a delightful online experience with your product or service has become increasingly important.

Any number of competitors can meet the needs of your target audience, but if they look forward to interacting with you, they won't look to anyone else.

Digital CX touchpoints, such as chatbots and online forms, are just the beginning of a larger experience structure.

A thorough and thoughtful customer experience strategy gives you more control over how customers perceive your company.

It also helps you discover what your audience enjoys and dislikes about their experiences so you can actively improve, attracting return customers back to see what's new while also delighting new leads.

For example, those new leads should be able to easily navigate through the content on your website and understand why they should purchase from you.

Returning customers should have access to customer success and support features built into your app's user interface.

In addition to reaching consumers where they are in the customer journey, a seamless digital experience is crucial when it comes to customer satisfaction.

In a recent survey, FullStory found that 74% of customers expect companies to use existing technologies in new ways to create better experiences. What's more, 75% of customers expect optimal experiences through new technologies.

A good digital CX strategy can help you do just that.

It lets you anticipate and map out how users move across your online channels. Plus, good digital CX facilitates a cohesive experience that nurtures customers through every stage of your flywheel .

As part of HubSpot's "Gain Grow Retain" podcast series, Gainsight Customer Success Evangelist Dan Steinman joined the show to discuss digital customer success.

Listen below to hear Steinman discuss the importance of digital CX for your business.

Digital customer experience is a key component of customer experience.

We know that customer experience, or CX, is the impression you've left on your customers throughout their entire journey with your brand. CX is a combination of customers' interactions with your people and your products.

Think of digital CX as the online arm of your company's CX strategy. It's the digital mediums your customers use to interact with those people and products. And, the perception they take away based on their experience.

Now that we've introduced you to the concept, let's review some best practices you can use to optimize digital CX at your company.

• Know your audience.
• Create an omnichannel customer experience.
• Pay attention to mobile experiences.
• Adopt analytics.
• Collect customer feedback.
• Conduct user testing.
• Think like a futurist.

1. Know your audience.

Before creating a digital experience that your customers will love, you have to know who your customers are .

Buyer personas are a great way to understand who is buying your product and why. Personas make it easier to tailor your digital CX strategy to meet your target audience's specific needs and desires.

Collecting online forms from potential leads is the best way to let people interested in your offering introduce themselves and their needs.

Commonalities among answers on initial forms can help you better understand how you are first perceived. They can even indicate what you can provide in the future to meet more of your customers' needs.

Crafting, tracking, and revising the customer journey from beginning to end is critical for building excellent CX.

Mapping out the customer journey can help you determine which digital touchpoints are most important for your customers so you can optimize those points.

Luckily, there are advanced marketing reporting tools specifically tailored to help you develop your digital customer experience.

2. Create an omni-channel customer experience.

Omni-channel experiences generate customer delight by providing more communication options for your targets. To meet them there, you must know where your customers are .

Customers want to engage with a business through the platform that they're comfortable using.

Being forced to learn and work with an interface that is unfamiliar because the company hasn't gotten its digital ducks in a row? That's a negative customer experience you can avoid.

So how do you build something better for your customers? Multichannel is faster and easier at first to simply get a presence where your customers are, but your real goal should be an omni-channel experience.

The key differences between a multichannel and an omni-channel strategy are data syncing and CX continuity .

Image source

The more channels you support, the happier your customers will be, making them more likely to buy from your company again. But it's not enough anymore to simply exist on multiple channels.

Omnichannel CX ensures those channels speak to each other so that valuable customer details aren't lost in the spaces between platforms. Think of it like the notes in a customer account.

They allow later reps to review the customer's history with your brand.

These insights help reps craft a more personal, meaningful, and informed interaction.

In the same way, data syncing between channels creates that omnichannel experience where customers can recognize that your business has it together and is ready to effectively help them wherever they are, whatever the issue.

Plus, an omnichannel strategy ensures you're creating a more consistent customer experience. CX continuity is something most customers couldn't define but can absolutely sense.

When experiences with various digital mediums are dissimilar for your customers, the continuity of your brand is noticeably disrupted. That disjointed experience feels unreliable, reducing customer confidence.

When you engage customers on the mediums they're already using — and create a seamless experience between those mediums — it's much easier and more pleasant for users to interact with you and the content you work so hard to create.

3. Pay attention to mobile experiences.

Whether you have a detailed website or a handy app, it's important to focus on the mobile experience. After all, over 90% of the global internet population uses a mobile device to go online.

That's because smartphones allow customers to compare companies while they shop. They can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors before they make a purchase.

If your website or app doesn't seem to fit their needs, chances are your products won't either.

When designing your digital customer experience, make sure it's mobile responsive. That means when it's displayed on a tablet or phone, the interface automatically adjusts to the smaller screen.

This dramatically affects the user experience and makes it much easier to navigate through your content.

4. Adopt analytics.

Like any other part of your business, you should be actively looking for new ways to improve your digital strategy. Fortunately, that's easier to do if you have reporting tools that monitor your digital customer experience.

For example, there's software available, such as Google Analytics and Apple's App Analytics , to track the features and pages that customers use most and help your team identify points of friction within the app or website.

With analytics, you can pinpoint where leads are abandoning purchases and can work proactively to prevent churn.

Or, for returning customers, you can review their favorite tools and adjust your page navigation so they're easier to find when users revisit your site.

Outside of your website or app, you can also measure other aspects of your digital CX. If you use email, you can identify ways to better personalize your outreach approach to improve open rates.

Or, if your brand is on social media, you can monitor brand sentiment and track engagement to further optimize your content.

Understanding how customers engage with your offers helps your team effectively refine your digital CX strategy.

5. Collect customer feedback.

Another way you can gather information is by asking customers for their feedback. Have them complete a survey after using your website or app and ask if they would recommend it to their peers.

You can use a Net Promoter Score, or NPS, survey to gather both qualitative and quantitative data on your digital customer experience. This should give you a good idea of how customers are reacting to your content.

Sample survey questions may include:

• On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?
• Which product/service features do you value and use the most?
• How can we improve your experience on our app?

6. Conduct user testing.

User testing is another way to determine how much customers enjoy using your digital properties.

In this environment, a select group of customers is asked to test your product. Then, they provide feedback on specific aspects of the user experience.

This gives you the chance to tweak your website or app before releasing it to the rest of your customer base.

While there are a few different types of user tests, the most popular one is usability testing .

Usability tests assess how easy it is to use and navigate your product. Participants are asked to perform a simple task. Then, they're evaluated on their ability to complete it.

This shows your development team how user-friendly your website or app is.

7. Think like a futurist.

The digital world is changing at a breakneck pace — literally overnight in the case of Open AI's ChatGPT, which took the world by storm on November 30th, 2022 — which was a Wednesday.

What is your company doing to improve customer experience next Wednesday?

The future develops one day at a time, so you need to think about your CX strategy like a living thing that grows and changes quickly.

Your digital CX strategy in 2023 may look a lot different when 2024 rolls around — nobody would be surprised if you find you need to pivot more than once.

As technology advances, trends will emerge and influence customer perception.

Pay close attention to those trends and how your target customers respond to them, be bold enough to try to create some trends yourself, and be prepared to evolve what digital CX looks like for your business.

Speaking of trends, let's review a few digital trends that businesses are following (so far) in 2023.

• Improvements in AI
• Increased Number of Chatbots
• Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities
• More Focus on Predictive Analytics
• New Augmented Reality Tools
• Personalized Customer Experiences
• Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

1. Improvements in AI

When we think of artificial intelligence (AI), we often think of sentient robots that mimic human actions.

While these ideas make for excellent sci-fi villains, they aren't accurate representations of how AI is used in modern business, even with the recent warp forward in AI Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Most AI is used to automate business functions that assist employees. This saves hundreds or thousands of hours. AI can also help personalize experiences for the customer.

One of the best-proven ways AI helps improve the customer and employee experience is to incorporate AI into email newsletters.

Companies can send identical messages to their entire customer base that come across as personal, genuine, and sincere.

To accomplish this without burdening employees with hand-customizing thousands of emails, they use AI to pull data from the CRM and personalize each message with the customer's information.

This makes the email look and feel like it was written specifically for that person.

AI continues to develop in leaps and bounds, so you should expect lots of new features to appear in your marketplace over the next few months — and strap in because the next few years will be wild.

We know that changing this fast can drive some fear, but right now, one of the best ways to stay competitive is to take advantage of these improvements in AI.

At HubSpot, we're excited about this new wave of technology and are rolling out new AI features, including Content Assistant and ChatSpot .

Customers crave personalized experiences, and AI offers incredible opportunities to deliver to users what they want and need in the digital space.

2. Increased Number of Chatbots

Chatbots are about to explode in the retail space in North America and Europe because of how financially accessible NLP has become for medium and small businesses due to ChatGPT.

In the past, bots were very limited and could only perform a predetermined series of actions. This made for dull customer experiences that often did not provide the needed solutions.

There's still a lingering stigma that chatbots are just talkative phone trees that lead nowhere until you ask for a human being to speak with.

The good news is that chatbots are improving along with AI like a tide raising the ship. Juniper Research forecasts that global retail spend on chatbots will increase by 470% over the next five years.

This spending trend will significantly reduce the pressure on customer support teams to answer routine questions.

What's more, these automated systems companies are investing in can perform another layer of routine operations, such as opening tickets and assigning them to the proper representatives that can actually address that customer's issue.

With bots, support agents can refocus their time and energy on complex or time-sensitive cases that are more likely to result in customer churn. Chatbots were predicted to save businesses 2.5 billion hours by 2023 — and that was before the quantum leap in natural language processing in late 2022.

Like your overall digital CX strategy, chatbots can't simply be set up and left to do the work.

They require a hand at the helm to determine how to improve the customer experience at critical points along that journey to help the chatbot grow more useful to those customers, giving them the best possible experience.

When you can, spend a few minutes with this video that remains at the heart of the chatbot wave and provides guidance on using chatbots for your business.

3. Enhanced Self-Service Capabilities

Customers don't want to wait long (or at all) for support if they don't have to. More companies are focused on finding ways to help customers quickly help themselves.

In addition to chatbots, this may include:

• Knowledge bases. These searchable databases allow customers to find resources about your products and answers to FAQs. This makes the information-seeking process faster for customers. Plus, it releases some of the burden on your customer service team.
• Workflow automation. This involves setting up self-operating processes that run manual tasks, saving time and resources. For example, a customer requests a return on your website. An email is automatically triggered to send them the return label, rather than waiting for a customer service rep.

4. More Focus on Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics determine how customers will react to changes in your business. These reports help business leaders understand customer behavior and the company's role in their customers' lives.

As AI and machine learning continue to improve, we can expect predictive analytics to become a fundamental tool used by companies with a digital presence.

These reports will be built into the internal user interface and updated with the most recent customer data. That way, business leaders will have all the information they need to confidently make decisions for their company.

5. New Augmented Reality Tools

Augmented reality (AR) presents fun new opportunities to improve digital customer experience. If you're unfamiliar with AR, it's a technology that supplements real images with digital elements, such as graphics or text overlays.

Here's an example from the NFL's Carolina Panthers.

There's a lot of potential for the use of AR in customer service. For example, some brands have used it to supplement in-person customer experience by displaying product information as customers shop.

When a customer is in the store, they might use their smart device to scan a product and see data such as customer reviews and product details.

This reduces friction during the buying process, making it easier for customers to find the product or service that's right for them.

Another popular AR trend is the "try-as-you-buy" experience. If your company operates mostly online, you can let customers test out your products by using an AR version on their computer.

That way, customers can avoid the hassle of buying your product or asking for a sample only to return it a few weeks later.

6. Personalized Customer Experiences

According to research, 70% of consumers would willingly provide personal data if they knew it was being used to improve their experience.

This means customers are willing to give you information. In return, they ask that you meet them where they are in their customer journey.

One great way to personalize the shopping experience for a customer is to send them an email with product recommendations based on their recent browsing or purchase history.

It communicates to your customers that you are using data to help them, making it easier for them to find what they want and need.

As you continue to collect customer data, it will be easier to create personalized customer experiences.

Not only will you have a stronger understanding of your customer base, but you'll also have the technology needed to distribute content effectively.

What's more, you'll be able to automate this personalization to maintain a delightful customer experience as your business grows.

7. Emphasis on Data Security and Privacy

With all of this data comes great responsibility.

Yes, customers are willing to share their data with you. But they expect it to be protected and used for the right reasons. Data breaches and security compromises push customers away from your brand.

Make sure you're up to date on the latest privacy laws and regulations that affect the way you do business with your customers.

Developing and maintaining trust is critical in any relationship, so be sure you are doing your due diligence to protect sensitive information entrusted to you.

• Warby Parker's Virtual Try-On
• Apple's Omni-Channel Experience
• UNICEF's Chatbot for Societal Change

1. Warby Parker's Virtual Try-On

Warby Parker is a retailer of low-cost, quality prescription eyewear, sunglasses, and contact lenses.

If you're interested in buying a pair, the WP app lets you virtually "try on" the frames before buying them using AR technology — all from the comfort of your couch.

They cleverly harnessed the mobile experience after noticing that people would come to their stores and take pictures of themselves in different frames.

They'd share those photos with friends and loved ones, gathering opinions and having a good laugh.

Warby Parker embraced this shopping behavior that developed with the rise of camera phones and folded it into the customer experience to delight their shoppers with something fun and new.

They were uniquely positioned in 2020 because they were already helping their customers shop from home using AR on mobile devices.

They had prioritized meeting their customers where they were both at home and on mobile, where 90% of users accessed the internet, and it worked out in their favor.

Loads of companies got on board with the AR shopping trend because it was a natural fit for their customers and their products.

Consider makeup shopping during a pandemic. Sharing lipstick samples at the store went from questionably hygienic to being perceived as a blatant health hazard.

Embracing AR, makeup retailers built digital customer experiences where their shoppers could upload a picture and see various shades on themselves from the comfort and safety of home — with a low-friction path to checkout if done well.

What we like: Warby Parker's digital customer experience strategy of embracing AR created more value than the obvious. These virtual shopping opportunities offer customers access to more products than can be kept on hand in store.

Even more meaningfully, they improve access for customers with mobility challenges and low-income customers who don't have ready access to transportation.

More people than ever now have access to the low-cost prescription eyewear they need, thanks to Warby Parker’s choice to think like futurists.

2. Apple's Omni-Channel Experience

Apple is a greatexample of a company that has created a seamless digital customer experience based on the customer's data.

Through iCloud, customers always have access to their data — like messages, photos, and contacts — and this is true regardless of which Apple device they're using.

It goes beyond Apple devices as well. Simply signing into iCloud from any device with an internet signal lets them access their digital storage.

This has made each iCloud user's digital life fit more harmoniously with their physical life in ways that affect connectivity and culture.

Consider one service they offer: AirDrop. Once upon a time, you had to store a file on a single, physical device.

Sharing it was a multi-step process that could be tripped up by file size, your recipient not having the right program, and other tedious problems of mismatched technology.

So much friction just trying to share a file — all while sitting right there at the same table! Oof.

With two AirDrop-enabled devices, you can just choose a file to send and tap AirDrop. It automatically transfers to the other nearby device, and you can move on with your idea sharing and projects much faster.

Pro tip: Some folks use digital storage far more than others, so Apple's iCloud storage comes in various sizes and prices. Their goal is to provide what people need to maintain their own continuity of experience.

3. UNICEF's Chatbot for Societal Change

Chatbots and touchstones of the digital customer experience are being used in innovative new ways to build better real-life experiences.

UNICEF re-directs the last step in the digital CX process — continually adapting and improving the customer experience. They take that idea and apply it to societal problems in the real world.

U-Report is a chatbot-based polling system created by UNICEF that asks questions about social issues, and those who sign up and reply are called U-Reporters.

Critical feedback is collected from these under-served populations worldwide, most often from young people in developing countries.

It's strange to think of U-Reporters as customers, but they are the target population served by UNICEF.

UNICEF provides communication access points on several digital platforms to meet their target populations where they are. U-Report gives these populations a voice that can finally be heard via a digital experience.

UNICEF then uses the feedback to inform its policy recommendations. These recommendations are presented to regional leadership, helping people in power understand and improve societal issues where they have enough influence to help.

What we like: Retail companies and non-profit organizations alike are getting more creative with using chatbots. This is at the heart of thinking like a futurist for the sake of those you serve — creating trends above and beyond.

Bringing It Back to Business

Customers want access to your brand whenever and wherever they decide they're ready to interact. Right now, digital channels are the place to be.

Whatever you're in the business of, prepare to be responsive to change. Be bold, get creative, and prioritize finding new and innovative ways to delight those you serve by continually optimizing your digital customer experience.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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How the best companies in the world are reinventing their customer experience

Imagine seeing an ad for a jacket you’ve had your eye on. It’s on sale! You rush to the store, but when you arrive you’re stopped at the entrance and asked to show your frequent shopper card. You don’t have one, so you’re shunted off to a special counter where you waste a few minutes filling out forms.

Finally inside, you find the jacket. It’s amazing, and they have it in your size, but where do you pay for it? You wander the store for several minutes until eventually you find the register, hidden away in a corner.

No self-respecting retailer would ever allow such a scenario, right? Except many retailers do just this — with their online experience.

We often work with large advertisers to assess their online and offline customer experiences. We met one large retailer that required customers to create an account before they could browse products. Meanwhile, in user testing for another retailer, one customer took two and a half minutes to find the buy button on its mobile site. This is a huge problem, given that many online shoppers will abandon their carts after even just a few seconds of delay.

At a time when competition is just a click away and magical experiences are the norm, too many companies are using their marketing budgets to bring customers to their online stores, only to frustrate them with a poorly designed experience.

Fortunately, creating a great customer experience is easier than you might think. One retailer we recently worked with increased revenue per online customer by 59%, just by following this simple framework.

Nail the basics

Creating a great online customer experience starts with getting the basics right. Experiences should be

• Frictionless . Eliminate any barriers that make discovering, researching, and buying products challenging. A frictionless experience encompasses product organization, pricing and availability, navigation, ease of checkout, and payment.
• Fast . This isn’t just about speed, but also relevance, ease of navigation, accessibility, and a consistent look and feel.
• Personalized . Make every customer feel unique by offering curated product lists, premium options, and geographic or affinity-based personalization.
• Helpful . Offer substitutions for unavailable products, relevant recommendations, and surprising — and hopefully delightful — ideas.
• Consistent . Make shopping and discovery completely portable and consistent. Customers should be able to pick up on one channel where they left off on the other.

The process to assess these basics is simple: Walk in your customers’ shoes. Start by recruiting six to eight customers. Even this small number of customers is sufficient to identify the majority of user experience issues.

Then, ask these customers to complete a set of tasks that involve researching, browsing, buying, creating returns — the typical tasks that constitute 80% of the digital experience.

Finally, gather qualitative and quantitative feedback. Qualitative feedback should include videos of the customer going through the steps and the frustration they may have experienced. Quantitative feedback includes scoring against the factors above, rating each as poor, acceptable, or good.

Once you’ve done that for your own site, repeat the process for the customer experiences of your most important competitors.

Western Union is a good example of these principles in action. In early 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it had to close all of its stores and go online. But its digital experience wasn’t good enough. So it added new support and wayfinding tools, and expanded its services with new methods of sending funds and real-time digital account payouts. It also introduced options to carry out transactions on the phone. As a result, its app was one of the most downloaded of its peer set in 2020.

Reinvent the customer experience

It’s difficult to design a single experience that meets the needs of every customer. In most instances, it makes sense to segment your customers by value and concentrate on the most valuable groups, but depending on your business strategy, you might choose to segment based on demographics, needs, or how a particular segment values the product.

Walgreens asked itself: What would the business look like if we were a well-funded startup with the opportunity to build the business from scratch, with the sole objective of creating a superior customer experience? That led to the realization that, while customers wanted personal advice from pharmacists, it didn’t need to be given in person.

So it developed a new service called “Pharmacy Chat,” which allows customers to access trusted experts through the Walgreens website and app — anytime, anywhere. When they’re in stores, customers can get personalized advice from store associates who are helped by tablets. These new services have helped make customers who shop both online and in store six times more valuable than those who only shop in stores.

Find new ways to help by looking globally and stealing with pride

With the first two steps in place, the next thing to do is look for new ways to bring magic to your customers. A good approach is to cast a wide net, looking for ideas beyond your geography and industry.

China is an excellent source of innovative ideas. The Chinese e-commerce market is worth more than $2 trillion annually, led by players such as Taobao , Douyin, Pinduoduo , and JD.com . These companies are constantly creating new ways to engage with customers, such as social commerce and live commerce.

A good approach is to look for ideas beyond your geography and industry.

Social commerce allows shoppers to get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services, and make purchases using social media. It now accounts for 12% of e-commerce in China . Live commerce combines live video streaming with ads that allow viewers to buy items featured in the video.

The idea is already spreading beyond China. Nordstrom, for example, launched a live-stream channel in March, filling a gap for online customers who were missing the human elements of shopping.

Let’s return to that awesome jacket we were struggling to buy at the start. This time, imagine an effortless customer experience where it is fast to shop and check out. This is the experience offered by the best brands in the world. Following these simple steps will make sure you can keep up with — or maybe even surpass — them.

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The 10 best customer journey mapping tools to grow your business

Now you know the importance of building a customer journey map—you’ve nailed down your why, and maybe even started on your how.

Last updated

Reading time.

Customer journey mapping tools  are your vehicle to building a data-driven customer journey map (CJM). In this chapter, we’ll walk you through three categories of tools, and how to choose the right tool(s) for your business to improve your workflow .

What are customer journey mapping tools?

Customer journey mapping tools—also known as user journey mapping tools— are  digital tools that collect and present quantitative and qualitative data about how users interact with your product or website  so you can better understand your buyer persona.

They tell you where your visitors came from (in the world or on the web), how they behave on your website, and gather feedback directly from users.

The more complicated the customer journey, the more data you need to map it out. The right mix of customer journey mapping (CJM) tools can give you data from multiple customer touchpoints and channels.

3 types of customer journey mapping software to create a better user experience

Customers will interact differently with your site or app depending on what part of the journey they’re in. Since the journey map includes everything from awareness—when they saw your ad on Facebook, for example—to onboarding and using your product, the data you rely on to guide your map will vary at each stage.

Here are three types of CJM tools that will give you the data you need:

Traditional website and behavior analytics tools

Tools to visualize your customer journey map

Voice of the customer tools for user feedback

3 website and behavior analytics tools for customer journey mapping

Analytics tools give you insight into who your customers are and how they behave on your website.

Traditional website analytics tools give you quantitative data  around traffic and demographic metrics like  bounces and bounce rate ,  new and returning users , and  goal conversion rates .

Behavior analytics tools  give you qualitative insight  into how users actually experience your website, and how they behave during their customer journey .  You can find out where they spend time on individual pages, what buttons they click (or don’t click), and pinpoint where they exit from the funnel.

While traditional analytics tools tell you about the customer’s journey  to  your website, behavior analytics tools show where their attention goes after they’ve arrived.

Both types of analytics tools—quantitative and qualitative—work together to help you identify usability issues in your customer journey and highlight customer experience improvement opportunities.

Here are three popular analytics tools used by marketing and UX professionals:

What it is:  to put it simply, Hotjar (hi there! 👋) helps you gain insights into customer behavior. Tools like  heatmaps ,  session recordings , surveys, and our Feedback widget give you data and feedback about how users experience your site throughout their journey.

How it’s used:  Heatmaps and Session Recordings show you how users behave—where they click and scroll, where they get stuck, and the actions they take as they navigate from page to page.

Insights from Hotjar will help you prioritize how you build and fix your website to provide a better customer journey, which can ultimately help you increase conversions and improve customer satisfaction.

When to use it:  Hotjar complements  tools like Google Analytics , providing more understanding into customer engagement and behavior on your website.

Discover how visitors are experiencing your site

Use Hotjar to gather data and insights into the customer journey so you can make the right changes at the right time for your visitors.

2. Google Analytics

What it is:  traffic analytics tool from Google

How it’s used:  Google Analytics (GA) tracks and measures website traffic metrics, like bounce and exit rates, goal conversions, sources of traffic, and user demographics.

When to use it:  most website owners use Google Analytics—there are other analytics tools out there, but GA is the golden standard.

GA tells you how much traffic your website gets, where it comes from, and helps you understand which channels convert best. You can also see what your most popular landing pages are, and where people are exiting from your website.

Pro tip:  traditional analytics and behavior analytics tools work best as a team. 🤜🤛  Combining Hotjar and Google Analytics  helps you to paint a more complete picture of your customers’ journey through your site.

What it is:  a no-code product analytics tool

How it’s used:  Heap gives you customer data on how people use your product, tracking every stage of the customer journey.

When to use it:  when you’re looking for journey pain points in your product, and need data that’ll help you make decisions around increasing retention and reducing customer churn. Heap helps you understand which customer segment your users come from, and gives you more granular insight into the customer journey.

The 4 best tools to visualize your customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how customers interact with and experience your website, products, or business across multiple touchpoints. Classic customer journey mapping tools are the flowchart builders: the digital versions of your sticky notes , only these can be saved in the cloud, shared with your team, and turned into a remote-work-friendly collaborative experience.

Once you’ve collected data about your users from analytics tools, Customer Success and Sales teams, and anyone else who interacts with your users, you’ll have enough information to map out the user journey.

When you have the flowchart mapped out, it’ll be easier to:

Identify all customer touchpoints

Find opportunities to build customer loyalty

Visualize which touchpoints belong to each part of the funnel

See which pathways can be simplified

Create clearer CTAs and paths for navigating to the next step

Here are four tools to create visual and intuitive maps:

What it is:  an online whiteboard

How it’s used:  Miro is particularly great for  remote teams  that want to put their thoughts onto a shared, digital whiteboard. The software lets you create a board from scratch—so you can still use your sticky note strategy, just digitally—or use one of their pre-made templates.

When to use it:  you can use Hotjar  heatmaps  together with Miro to bring the heatmaps and analytics to life. This helps ensure you and your team are making data-driven decisions. Use it the same way as you’d use a whiteboard, for wireframing, diagramming, or planning your roadmap.

2. UXPressia

What it is:  a customer journey maps for the design-conscious

How it’s used: UXPressia’s main functionality is to create customer journey maps. If you need a little more than a whiteboard, UXPressia helps you create consistently good-looking CJMs for your customer personas. It’s intuitive and beautiful, for those who want to build maps that impress. You can easily see the customer touchpoints and customize the maps to your own brand.

When to use it:  when you need a clean design and a tool that lets multiple stakeholders across different departments contribute data. Very useful for when you need real-time collaboration capabilities. UXPressia is also a good option if you're looking for a customer journey map template to help you get started.

What it is:  a mapping tool for the complex customer journey

How it’s used: Smaply is a great tool for understanding channel usage and backstage processes. It lets you create a repository of customer insights, including images, PDF files, and even audio files to link all together and get a full overview of the customer journey. Plus, it integrates with project management tools like Jira.

When to use it:  when you have a complex customer journey and you want to keep everything in one, easy-to-navigate place.

What it is:  a simple online diagramming solution

How it’s used:  Gliffy is a collaborative tool that lets you draw out very large diagrams. You can drag and drop shapes from their library and give feedback, and it integrates with Google Drive. It stores past versions and tracks changes, so you can always go back, and it’s fast and easy to use.

When to use it:  when you don’t need a fancy customer journey mapping tool, but something simple but versatile to get your ideas ‘on paper’.

3 voice of the customer tools for user feedback

Voice of the customer (VoC) tools help you understand your customers' needs and capture what they're really feeling and thinking about your business or product, in their own words . Getting all of this together helps you get raw, authentic feedback about how they perceive you at every stage of the journey.

Here are three customer feedback tools to help you understand your users:

What it is:  Hotjar (hello again! 👋) gives you insights into customer behavior with analytics and feedback tools like heatmaps, session recordings,  surveys , and a  visual feedback  widget.

How it’s used:  Heatmaps and Session Recordings show you  what  and  how ; Surveys and Feedback tools help you understand  why . Place a survey or feedback widget on any page to ask customers what they think about their experience on your site, and give them the opportunity to share their unique perspective. With the Slackintegration, you and your team members are notified about new responses in real time.

When to use it:  when you want to understand your users’ motivations—their  drivers, barriers, and hooks —ask them! Hotjar lets you choose where you place your Surveys and Feedback widget, so you can get feedback when and where it’s most important.

Pro tip:  the way you ask a question determines what kind of answer you’ll get.  Open-ended questions  will give you more qualitative data (and can be answered in detail), while closed-ended questions (think ‘yes/no’ questions) can help you create charts based on quantitative data.

Before you set up an on-site survey, know what information you want to get from your visitors—and how you’re going to use it—so you can ask questions that’ll get you the data you need.

2. Clarabridge

What it is:  an AI-powered feedback analytics tool

How it’s used : Clarabridge uses AI-powered text analytics to collect what people have said about your brand or business from every possible source, and analyze how they feel about you.

When to use it:  when you want to know how people really feel about your brand and business, and what the general sentiment is. Use Clarabridge when there are people already talking about your company: either on your website (through chats and surveys), or off of your site (like on social media platforms).

3. InMoment

What it is:  experience-intelligence (IX), AI-powered feedback

How it’s used:  getting better feedback from users.

When to use it:  when you want a simple way to get deeper and more meaningful VoC feedback from customers. InMoment’s AI-powered bot nudges your users to give more information. If you ask them about their experience, and they say ‘good’, InMoment prompts them further: ‘What was good?’ It also offers social monitoring and gathers meaningful feedback about what your customers are saying about you.

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

The right tool depends on a few things: the complexity of your customer journey, the maturity of your understanding of the journey, the structure of your team, and why you’re mapping the customer journey—that is, what you want to learn from it.

The most important part isn’t really the tool you pick, it’s how you use it and what you do with the insights.

In the next chapter we’ll dig deeper into  why you need customer journey mapping tools  in the first place, and how specific features can help you accomplish your goals.

CJM tips and how-tos

Previous chapter

CJM tools: features and how to choose

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Credit Cards > Reviews

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey℠ Visa® Card review 2024: Don’t stop believing in industry-leading travel rewards for an under-$100 annual fee

Stella Shon

Robin Saks Frankel

“Verified by an expert” means that this article has been thoroughly reviewed and evaluated for accuracy.

Grace Pilling

Published 6:20 a.m. UTC March 20, 2024

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Wells Fargo has made its official debut in the travel rewards scene with a brand-new credit card — and an improved loyalty program to boot.

As the more sophisticated sibling to the no-annual-fee Wells Fargo Autograph℠ Card , the new Wells Fargo Autograph Journey℠ Visa® Card * The information for the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey℠ Visa® Card has been collected independently by Blueprint. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer. comes with a $95 annual fee and impressive earnings across all things travel. While the card is only available at select Wells Fargo branches starting March 9, 2024, it will soon be available nationwide (and online) on March 20, 2024.

We’ll dive deeper into the card’s offerings and its key differentiators from the competition in our full Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card review.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card basics

• Annual fee: $95.
• Welcome bonus: 60,000 points after spending $4,000 in purchases in the first three months of account opening.
• Rewards: 5 points per $1 on hotels, 4 points per $1 on airlines, 3 points per $1 on other travel and dining and 1 point per $1 on other purchases.
• APR: 21.24%, 26.24%, or 29.99% variable APR on purchases and balance transfers. An intro balance transfer fee of either $5 or 3% of the amount of each transfer, whichever is greater, applies for 120 days from account opening. After that, a fee of up to 5% for each balance transfer, with a minimum of $5, applies.
• Recommended credit score: Good to excellent.
• Does the card offer preapproval? No, but the issuer does offer pre-qualification.
• Other benefits: $50 annual statement credit for airfare purchases, trip cancellation and interruption protection, travel and emergency assistance services, secondary auto rental collision damage waiver, lost luggage baggage reimbursement, access to roadside dispatch, travel accident insurance and cellphone protection.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card review

In an era where we’re continuing to see issuers increase their annual fees, the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey is easy on the eyes (and your wallet) with a down-to-earth $95 annual fee.

This metal card is a fantastic traveler’s card as it gives you the freedom to book flights, hotels, or other travel-related activities and earn bonus rewards virtually anywhere you go. This is an important differentiator, as many rewards cards require you to use a specific travel portal in order to earn bonus points or miles.

For instance, the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey offers a $50 annual statement credit for airfare purchases which can be easily used at virtually any airline of your choice. The ever-popular Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card — with an identical annual fee — also offers a $50 statement credit, but it can only be used when booking hotel stays specifically through Chase Travel.

With the initial list of six transfer partners, Wells Fargo is entering the competitive travel rewards space. While its programs are limited for now, we can expect to see more value added as Wells Fargo signaled in a press release their plans to introduce more travel partnerships down the line. For now, there’s still tremendous value to be found with airlines spanning all three major airline alliances (Oneworld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance) and one hotel program.

While this credit card may not give you access to airport lounges, airline upgrades or other swanky travel benefits, it’s an economical choice for travelers solely focused on making the most of their trip expenses.

The Wells Fargo Autograph Journey is also one of the best credit cards in case of a rainy day, as it offers complimentary travel protections with high coverages, including trip cancellation and interruption insurance (up to $15,000 limit), lost luggage reimbursement (up to $3,000 limit), and cellphone coverage (up to $1,000 limit with a $25 deductible). These underrated benefits make the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey even more valuable for the frequent traveler. Overall, it’s a welcome addition to the travel cards arena, with plenty of value for a reasonable annual fee.

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Wells Fargo Autograph℠ Card

Welcome bonus.

• Earn 20,000 bonus points when you spend $1,000 in purchases in the first 3 months – that’s a $200 cash redemption value.

Regular APR

Credit score.

Credit Score ranges are based on FICO® credit scoring. This is just one scoring method and a credit card issuer may use another method when considering your application. These are provided as guidelines only and approval is not guaranteed.

Editor’s Take

• Generous rewards rate across a wide range of categories.
• No annual fee.
• Introductory APR period on purchases.
• Minimal cardholder perks compared to other cards.
• Potentially high purchase APR after the introductory period.
• Lacks an intro APR period on balance transfers.

Card Details

• Select “Apply Now” to take advantage of this specific offer and learn more about product features, terms and conditions.
• Earn unlimited 3X points on the things that really add up – like restaurants, travel, gas stations, transit, popular streaming services, and phone plans. Plus, earn 1X points on other purchases.
• $0 annual fee.
• 0% intro APR for 12 months from account opening on purchases. 20.24%, 25.24%, or 29.99% variable APR thereafter.
• Up to $600 of cell phone protection against damage or theft. Subject to a $25 deductible.
• Redeem your rewards points for travel, gift cards, or statement credits. Or shop at millions of online stores and redeem your rewards when you check out with PayPal.
• Find tickets to top sports and entertainment events, book travel, make dinner reservations and more with your complimentary 24/7 Visa Signature® Concierge.
• Complimentary travel insurance protections built into the card: Get peace of mind with trip cancellation and interruption protection, lost luggage reimbursement, access to travel and emergency assistance services and more.
• Maximize your rewards on all travel purchases: With its high rewards rates on booking not limited to the issuer’s travel site this card can help you rack up a large haul of points.
• Easy-to-use $50 airfare credit: Whether you’re buying airfare or paying for seat assignments and checked luggage, cardholders will enjoy an annual $50 statement credit for eligible purchases.
• Travel transfer partners are limited for now : There are currently five airline and one hotel loyalty partners, but Wells Fargo says to expect more to come shortly.
• No bonus points on other popular everyday categories: While this card offers generous points on dining, it comes with a fairly standard flat rate on all other purchases such as gas, groceries and other everyday spending.
• No elite travel perks: The main event with this card is its points potential. There’s no lounge passes or elite status boosts with hotel or car rental programs like you might find with more premium travel cards.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card rewards

The Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card earns an outstanding 5 points per $1 on hotels, 4 points per $1 on airlines, 3 points per $1 on other travel and dining and 1 point per $1 on other purchases. There’s no limit to the amount of rewards you can earn, and you’re not limited to using a travel portal to earn these points — unlike other competing cards.

The introductory welcome bonus is 60,000 points after spending $4,000 in purchases in the first three months of account opening. At the bare minimum, these points are worth $600 but could be maximized even further by leveraging Wells Fargo’s new transfer partners.

Starting April 4, 2024, cardholders will be able to transfer points to these select partners: Aer Lingus AerClub, Air France-KLM Flying Blue, Avianca LifeMiles, British Airways Executive Club, Choice Privileges, and Iberia Plus. All points will transfer at a 1:1 rate, with the exception of Choice Privileges, where cardholders can transfer 1 Wells Fargo point and earn 2 Choice hotel points.

Points are worth a flat 1 cent apiece otherwise for several other redemption options:

• Redeem to account.
• Redeem to account automatically ($25 increments).
• PayPal Pay with Rewards.
• Gift cards (minimum $10).
• Redeem for purchases on statement credit (minimum $1).
• Wells Fargo travel portal bookings.

Using government data and other publicly available information, we estimate that a household in the U.S. that would be in the market for this card has around $25,087 in annual expenses that can be charged to a credit card. Here’s how our sample household’s rewards could break down:

Our sample cardholder earned 40,945 rewards points annually, which is worth $409.45 when redeeming to your Wells Fargo account, gift cards, or even travel bookings through Wells Fargo’s portal. However, price-conscious fliers know you can receive exceptional value from travel transfer partners. Here are a few examples of ways to maximize Wells Fargo’s transfer partners:

• Book flights between the East Coast and Madrid, Spain, in business, for just 34,000 Iberia Avios and $280 in taxes and fees.
• Book flights between the West Coast and Hawaii, in economy, for just 16,000 British Airways Avios and $5.60 in taxes and fees.
• Book hotel nights at thousands of properties worldwide starting at 8,000 Choice Privileges points.

In all three examples above, you’d achieve way greater value than redeeming your points at a flat rate of 1 cent apiece. This is why it’s nice to have the flexibility of transfer partnerships to take your rewards even further.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card perks

The Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card comes with some of the best-in-class travel protections offered by any card — even those that charge much higher annual fees. That’s because it’s branded as a Visa Signature card, which grants important coverages that could potentially save you money on a wide range of things.

You’ll get access to Visa Signature® concierge services, the Visa Signature Luxury Hotel Collection with extra perks, and emergency cash disbursement and card replacement. Other travel coverages include trip cancellation and interruption protection, travel and emergency assistance services, auto rental collision damage waiver (secondary coverage in the U.S.), lost luggage baggage reimbursement, roadside dispatch, and travel accident insurance.

Notably, Autograph Journey cardholders can get reimbursed up to $15,000 for lodging, flights, and activities if the trip is interrupted for a covered reason due to trip cancellation and interruption coverage, which is one of the highest limits we’ve seen on any travel card.

Last but not least, the Autograph Journey is a natural fit for those who hold other eligible Wells Fargo cards as you’ll be able to pool the rewards. This can be a lucrative rewards strategy if you pair the Autograph Journey with the Wells Fargo Active Cash® Card , which earns 2% cash rewards on purchases. All the rewards can be combined and used to book travel, either directly through Wells Fargo or by transferring to one of its airline or hotel partners.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card drawbacks

While the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card comes with top-tier travel protections, it falls short in terms of everyday coverages. We’d expect to see things like purchase protection or extended warranty, which are offered by competing cards and catered more to everyday scenarios. That said, cellphone protection is a valuable perk to have, so the importance of these benefits will depend on your lifestyle needs.

It’s also worth noting that the auto collision damage waiver provides secondary coverage in the U.S., meaning the benefit won’t kick in until you pay the deductible from any other rental car insurance you may have. The Autograph Journey’s similarly-priced competitor, the Chase Sapphire Preferred, offers primary auto rental coverage.

How the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card compares to other travel cards 

Wells fargo autograph journey card vs. chase sapphire preferred.

The Chase Sapphire Preferred is well-known for its rewarding perks for a $95 annual fee. If you’re deciding between the two $95-annual-fee cards, pay close attention to the earning rates. The Chase Sapphire Preferred is more suitable for everyday purchases, as it offers 5 points per $1 on travel purchased through Chase Ultimate Rewards®, 3 points per $1 on dining, select streaming services, and online grocery purchases (excluding Walmart, Target and wholesale clubs), 2 points per $1 on all other travel purchases and 1 point per $1 on all other purchases. On the other hand, the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey Card is a better earner for travel purchases.

Another notable difference between the two cards is that with the Chase Sapphire Preferred card you can redeem your points to book travel through Chase for 25% more value. So, 60,000 points will be worth $725 when used this way. Chase Ultimate Rewards® is one of the most powerful rewards currencies as it can be transferred 1:1 to over a dozen airline and hotel partners, with domestic airline partners like United MileagePlus and Southwest Rapid Rewards. The better choice for you will depend on if you value the redemption options on the Sapphire Preferred more than enhanced earning opportunities on the Autograph Journey.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card vs. Wells Fargo Autograph℠ Card

For those staunchly opposed to annual fees, the Wells Fargo Autograph Card is the foundational level travel card in the Wells Fargo Rewards program. With no annual fee, the card is a fantastic earner across diverse categories, earning 3 points per $1 at restaurants, travel, gas stations, transit, popular streaming services and phone plans and 1 point per $1 on other purchases.

The Wells Fargo Autograph card is also one of the best no-annual-fee cards for travel on the market, between its broad elevated rewards categories and the ability for users to transfer their points to Wells Fargo’s airline and hotel partners. But frequent travelers will likely get more value out of the high rewards on travel offered by the Autograph Journey, even with its $95 annual fee.

Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card vs. Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card * The information for the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card has been collected independently by Blueprint. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer.

There are several travel cards with $95 annual fees, and the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card * The information for the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card has been collected independently by Blueprint. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer. is another one from a major competing bank . This Capital One card offers the benefit of simple rewards: 5 miles per $1 on hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel and purchases through Capital One Entertainment and 2 miles per $1 on other purchases.

Capital One miles can be transferred to more than a dozen airline and hotel transfer partners, which includes some overlap to British Airways Avios, Avianca LifeMiles, among others. These miles can also be redeemed for any travel purchased within the past 90 days on your statement credit at a rate of 1 cent apiece.

Is the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card worth it?

The Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card is one of the best new travel cards to hit the market. The $95 annual fee is justifiable after considering the $50 annual statement credit for airfare purchases. Not to mention, frequent travelers can accrue a pile of points in no time by leveraging the rewards rate on their trip expenses. Hopefully, we’ll see Wells Fargo continue improving its transfer partner roster, which will add even more value to the new Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card.

The Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card is right for you if:

• You’re a frequent traveler who flies often and stays at hotels regularly and you want a card that won’t break your budget.
• You want access to robust travel protections and cellphone protection — perks that are often found on more premium rewards cards.
• You’re an existing Wells Fargo customer and want to level up your rewards game with access to new transfer partners.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Wells Fargo, like most issuers, doesn’t disclose the requirements for approval. However, as a rewards card, the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card likely requires a good or better credit score , which FICO defines as starting at 670 or higher.

Starting April 4, 2024, Wells Fargo Autograph Journey and Wells Fargo Autograph cardholders will be able to transfer their points to Aer Lingus AerClub, Air France-KLM Flying Blue, Avianca LifeMiles, British Airways Executive Club, Choice Privileges and Iberia Plus.

The credit card application can be approved instantly, but a decision could take up to five to seven business days to be mailed to you. 

On March 9, 2024, you can start to apply for the card at select Wells Fargo branches. It will be available online and in-person nationwide starting March 20, 2024.

*The information for the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card and Wells Fargo Autograph Journey℠ Visa® Card has been collected independently by Blueprint. The card details on this page have not been reviewed or provided by the card issuer.

Blueprint is an independent publisher and comparison service, not an investment advisor. The information provided is for educational purposes only and we encourage you to seek personalized advice from qualified professionals regarding specific financial decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Blueprint has an advertiser disclosure policy . The opinions, analyses, reviews or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the Blueprint editorial staff alone. Blueprint adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. The information is accurate as of the publish date, but always check the provider’s website for the most current information.

Stella Shon is a freelance writer that connects the dots between personal finance and travel. Her work has appeared in The Points Guy, ValuePenguin and MoneyUnder30, and she's been interviewed by The New York Times, CNBC and more.

Robin Saks Frankel is a credit cards lead editor at USA TODAY Blueprint. Previously, she was a credit cards and personal finance deputy editor for Forbes Advisor. She has also covered credit cards and related content for other national web publications including NerdWallet, Bankrate and HerMoney. She's been featured as a personal finance expert in outlets including CNBC, Business Insider, CBS Marketplace, NASDAQ's Trade Talks and has appeared on or contributed to The New York Times, Fox News, CBS Radio, ABC Radio, NPR, International Business Times and NBC, ABC and CBS TV affiliates nationwide. She holds an M.S. in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University. Follow her on Twitter at @robinsaks.

Grace Pilling is a deputy editor for credit cards at USA TODAY Blueprint. She believes credit cards are the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure tools of the financial world and gets excited about helping people discover the best credit card strategy for their unique goals. Prior to joining Blueprint, Grace worked on and led personal finance teams at Bankrate, CreditCards.com, MoneyUnder30 and MoneyGeek. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and writing and a diploma in editing and publishing.

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