customer journey map template visio

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How to create a customer journey map in visio.

Are you struggling to understand your customers’ journey? Do you want to improve customer satisfaction and retention? Look no further, as this article will guide you through the process of creating a customer journey map using Visio. Unlock the power of visualization and gain valuable insights into your customers’ experience today.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a graphical depiction of the customer’s experience across all interactions with a company or brand. It visually depicts the customer’s actions, feelings, and thoughts throughout their entire journey, offering valuable insights for enhancing the overall experience.

Fact: Developing a customer journey map can result in a 54% increase in return on marketing investment.

Why Is a Customer Journey Map Important?

A customer journey map is crucial as it offers valuable insights into the customer’s experience, identifies pain points, and highlights opportunities for improvement. By visualizing the customer’s interactions, businesses can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Understanding ‘why is a customer journey map important?’ allows companies to align their processes with customer needs, leading to enhanced product development and service delivery.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map in Visio?

Creating a customer journey map is a powerful tool for understanding and improving the customer experience. In this section, we will guide you through the process of creating a customer journey map using Visio. We will cover the key steps, from gathering information and defining your goals, to identifying your customer persona and mapping out the touchpoints. We will also discuss how to determine the customer’s emotions and actions at each touchpoint and how to visually represent the journey map in Visio. By the end, you will have a comprehensive guide for creating a customer journey map that can help enhance your business’ customer experience.

1. Gather Information and Define Your Goals

• Research: Collect data on customer interactions, pain points, and preferences to inform the journey map.
• Goal Setting: Clearly define objectives for creating the customer journey map, such as enhancing customer satisfaction or streamlining processes.

2. Identify Your Customer Persona

• Research: Gather data on customer demographics, behaviors, and preferences.
• Create Personas: Develop fictional characters representing various customer segments, including your customer persona.
• Identify Needs: Outline the goals, pain points, and motivations of your customer persona.
• Validate: Use surveys, interviews, or market research to confirm the accuracy of your customer persona.

Pro-tip: Consider using storytelling techniques to humanize and bring your customer persona to life, making it relatable and memorable for your team.

3. Map Out the Touchpoints

• Identify touchpoints across the customer journey, including initial contact, purchase, and post-sale interactions.
• Utilize customer feedback and data to pinpoint all touchpoints, ensuring a comprehensive map.
• Consider both digital and physical touchpoints, such as website visits and in-store experiences.
• Detail customer actions and emotions at each touchpoint to gain insight into their journey.
• Regularly update the touchpoint map to reflect changes in customer behavior and interaction channels.

When redesigning a retail store’s customer journey, we carefully mapped out all touchpoints to enhance the overall shopping experience. By focusing on important touchpoints like product discovery and checkout , we successfully improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Determine the Customer’s Emotions and Actions at Each Touchpoint

• Listen to customer feedback by conducting surveys, interviews, and analyzing social media interactions.
• Utilize data analytics tools to track customer behavior, identifying patterns in their emotions and actions.
• Map out touchpoints to understand where specific emotions and actions are likely to occur, using customer journey mapping software.
• Engage with frontline staff to gather insights on customer interactions and emotions experienced during touchpoints.
• Utilize customer journey mapping software to visually represent the customer’s emotions and actions at each touchpoint.

5. Create the Journey Map in Visio

• Launch Visio: Open Visio and select the type of diagram you want to create – for a customer journey map, choose the ‘Basic Flowchart’ template.
• Add Shapes: Drag and drop shapes onto the canvas to represent touchpoints and actions at each stage of the customer journey.
• Label Touchpoints: Add text to label each touchpoint and include customer emotions or actions at these stages.
• Connect Shapes: Use arrows or connectors to link the touchpoints and indicate the flow of the customer journey.
• Create the Journey Map in Visio: Review the map for accuracy and completeness, then save the file in your preferred format.

What Are the Key Elements of a Customer Journey Map?

To effectively map out the customer journey, it is crucial to understand the key elements that make up a comprehensive customer journey map. These elements are essential in creating a holistic view of the customer’s experience, from their perspective. In this section, we will discuss the three key elements of a customer journey map: customer personas, touchpoints, and emotions and actions. By understanding these elements, you can create a detailed and accurate representation of the customer journey and identify areas for improvement.

1. Customer Persona

• Research: Gather data on demographics, behavior, and needs of your target audience.
• Create Profiles: Develop detailed customer personas based on the collected data, including names, images, and personal details.
• Segmentation: Classify customer personas into groups sharing similar characteristics.
• Validation: Verify the accuracy of customer personas through customer interviews and feedback.

2. Touchpoints

• Identify key touchpoints in the customer journey, such as website visits, social media interactions, and customer service inquiries.
• Map out the sequence of touchpoints to understand the customer’s interactions and experiences at each stage.
• Analyze customer behavior, emotions, and actions at each touchpoint to gain insights into their satisfaction and pain points.
• Use the data collected from touchpoints to optimize and improve the overall customer journey and experience.

3. Emotions and Actions

• Identify emotional triggers at each touchpoint.
• Map customer actions and reactions at each touchpoint.
• Analyze customer sentiment and behavior for valuable insights.

Pro-tip: When mapping emotions and actions, be sure to utilize customer feedback and data analytics to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer interactions.

How Can You Use a Customer Journey Map?

Once you have created a customer journey map using Visio, you may wonder how to best utilize this valuable tool. In this section, we will explore the various ways in which a customer journey map can be utilized to improve business operations and enhance the overall customer experience. From identifying pain points to aligning departments and teams, a customer journey map can provide valuable insights and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, we will discuss how this tool can aid in creating targeted marketing strategies to better reach and engage your target audience.

1. Improve Customer Experience

• Personalized Interactions: Enhance the customer experience by tailoring interactions based on their preferences and past behavior.
• Seamless Omni-channel Experience: Ensure a consistent and seamless experience across all touchpoints, including online, in-store, and customer support.
• Effective Issue Resolution: Streamline processes to swiftly resolve any customer concerns, building trust and satisfaction.
• Proactive Communication: Anticipate and fulfill customer needs by providing proactive updates and assistance.
• Ongoing Feedback Mechanism: Continuously gather and act on customer feedback to improve and refine their experience.

2. Identify Pain Points and Opportunities for Improvement

• Identify various pain points experienced by customers at different touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Recognize opportunities for improvement by analyzing customer feedback, complaints, and suggestions.
• Document the identified pain points and opportunities for improvement in order to prioritize and effectively address them.

3. Align Departments and Teams

• Communicate the customer journey map to all departments and teams involved in the customer experience.
• Encourage cross-departmental collaboration to align departments and teams, address pain points, and enhance touchpoints.
• Ensure that each team understands its role in delivering a seamless customer experience and is aligned with the customer journey map.
• Provide training and resources to support teams in aligning their efforts with the customer journey map and delivering an exceptional customer experience.

True history: In 2007, Apple revolutionized customer experience with the launch of the iPhone by aligning departments and teams, setting a new standard in the tech industry.

4. Create Targeted Marketing Strategies

• Conduct Market Research: Gather data on target demographics, preferences, and behaviors.
• Segment Your Audience: Divide customers into groups based on similarities.
• Create Compelling Messaging: Tailor content to resonate with each audience segment, using targeted marketing strategies.
• Utilize Multi-Channel Approach: Engage customers through various platforms and mediums, incorporating personalized marketing techniques.

Did you know? Personalized marketing can lead to a 10% boost in sales revenue .

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Featured Visio templates and diagrams

Visio is a diagraming tool that makes it easy and intuitive to create flowcharts, diagrams, org charts, floor plans, engineering designs, and more by using modern templates with the familiar Office experience. On this page, you can access some of the top templates and sample diagrams available in Visio, or request ones that you want.

To see the hundreds of templates and sample diagrams available, you can open a template in the Visio app or in Visio for the web.

Note:  Don't have Visio yet? Compare plans and pricing or sign up for a Visio trial .

Click a category name to see the related templates and diagrams: 

Floor plans

Software and database   Azure | AWS

Engineering

Computer block diagram

A block diagram template for a block diagram of a computer.

Property buying flow

A flowchart diagram that details the steps for buying a property.

Basic flowchart

A vertical flowchart best used for top-down processes or systems that involve hierarchies, or have many component processes.

Cross-functional flowchart

A cross-functional flowchart best used for a process that includes tasks shared across roles or functions.

BPMN cross-functional chart

Show the relationship between a process and the organizational or functional units in a HR Process flow. This is a Level 2 BPMN Workflow.

Basic home network

Best used to design a home network with wired and wireless devices in different rooms.

Office network plan

A basic network template for a small office or team's network diagram.

Star network diagram

A detailed network topology for a star network diagram.

Detailed network

A detailed network diagram best used to show a corporate network for a medium-sized enterprise.

Ethernet LAN diagram

Create detailed physical, logical, and network architecture diagrams using a comprehensive set of network and computer equipment shapes.

Use this template to create detailed and accurate floor and building plans.

Social-distancing floor plan, U.S.

Floor plan with social distancing features (U.S.)

Social-distancing floor plan, Metric

Floor plan with social distancing features (Metric)

Software and database

SDLC waterfall process

A process diagram for a waterfall process model of a software development life cycle.

UML class with interface

UML class diagram best used to show a system in which a class has composition and aggregation relationships

Basic UML sequence

A basic UML sequence diagram best used to show how parts of a simple system interact with each other

Basic UML use case

A basic UML use case diagram best used to show a user's interactions with events and processes.

Basic UML communication

UML communication diagram that shows the interactions between lifelines that use sequenced messages.

Basic UML component

UML component diagram to show components, ports, interfaces and the relationships between them

Login-registry activity

Use this UML diagram to show login-registry activity.

Basic UML deployment

Use this diagram to show the architecture of a software deployment.

UML state: ATM

Use this diagram to design a state diagram that shows how an automated teller machine responds to a user.

UML database for employees

Use this diagram to design an employee database for an organization.

Bank Account database

Chen's database diagram of a bank account

Jenkins Server on Azure

On-prem AD domains with Azure AD

Integrating On-premises Active Directory domains with Azure AD

Dev-Test deployment for PaaS

A dev-test deployment for testing PaaS solutions

Chef Automate Architecture on AWS

AWS template: Chef Automate Architecture

Git to S3 Webhooks

AWS template: Git to S3 Webhooks

AWS template: SAP using SIOS

Expanded block timeline

Best used to track milestones, events, tasks, and phases over a period of time. Also used to create Product Roadmaps.

Organizational chart

Organizational chart best used to show hierarchy levels and reporting relationships, in an attractive, modern format.

Hierarchical organization chart

Create an organization chart with a multi-level hierarchy. Try different layouts that fit your diagram into a printable space.

Basic auditing

A basic auditing diagram best used for a simple process that must satisfy a decision point to complete.

Credit approval process

A cross-functional flowchart for a credit approval process.

HR Management System

Crow's foot diagram of a Human Resources management system.

Inventory management

Crow's foot diagram of an Inventory management system.

Construction management

Chen's diagram of a Construction management organization.

Theater booking process

This flowchart template shows the steps for purchasing theater tickets from an online service and how different actions affect the user's Web experience.

Marketing mix

A diagram template that can be used to create marketing strategies that influence customers to purchase a company's products.

Basic electrical

A basic engineering electrical diagram best used to draw an electronic circuit that can include semiconductor devices.

SDL game process

A Specification and Description Language diagram template for an SDL game process.

Display languages supported in the Visio desktop app

This page lists all the templates and sample diagrams available with Visio in Microsoft 365. For each category, there is a button you can click that opens the template or sample with its stencils and shapes—right in Visio so that you can get started trying it out.

Click a category name to go to a list of related templates and samples:

Basic diagrams

Block diagrams.

Business Matrix diagrams

Cycle diagrams

Process diagrams, pyramid diagrams, venn diagrams.

Basic Diagram Template

Contains basic geometric shapes, arrow shapes, decorative and graph shapes for making a general diagram.

Financial Ratios

Looks at five elements: liquidity, working capital, asset usage, efficiency, and profitability ratios.

Hub and Spoke Model

Illustrates the distribution model based on a hub with supporting regional distribution nodes. 

Marketing Mix

Illustrates multiple aspects of a marketing program centered on the target market. 

Product Development

Illustrates a five-phase model of development: strategy, design, development, testing, and support.

Sales Funnel

Funnel diagram illustrated with icons and callouts.

Recruitment Process

Illustrates four steps in an organization's recruitment process for a job opening.

PESTLE Analysis

Analyze a business or an industry on six factors: political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental.

Business Model Canvas

Map out the nine major components of your business. This canvas gives a bird’s eye view of your entire business and is useful for strategizing. 

5 Why's, diagram 1

"Five why's analysis" is an iterative technique for root-cause analysis. 

4 P's Marketing Mix

Convey a marketing strategy by identifying four essential factors that are necessary for marketing the good or service.

Value Chain

Visualize all activities that a company undertakes to deliver a good or service to market.

Strategy Diamond

Concisely illustrates an organization’s overall strategy, highlighting five key components. It can be used as a checklist for a healthy strategy.

Porter's Five Forces, diagram 1

Analyze an industry’s attractiveness, or evaluate a company’s competitive environment.

Porter's Five Forces, diagram 2

Analyze an industry’s attractiveness or evaluate a company’s competitive environment.

5 Why's, diagram 2

5 Why's, diagram 3

5 Why's, diagram 4

Block Diagram Template

Contains 2-D and 3-D shapes and directional lines for feedback loops and annotated functional decomposition, data structure, hierarchical, signal flow, and data flow block diagrams.

Block Diagram of a Computer

This diagram can be used to illustrate elements of a computer system.

Content Marketing Strategy Block Diagram

Manage your content through multiple stages.

Integrated Marketing Strategy Block Diagram

Helps align and coordinate marketing channels and assets in a coherent strategy.

IOT Security Architecture Block

Layers of security analysis.

Porter's Analysis Block Diagram

Identifies an industry's structure to determine a corporate strategy.

Flow of a Research Paper 

Blocks and connectors show the process of writing a research paper.

Periodic Table

Color-coded 3D blocks represent elements from the modern periodic table.

Sci-Fi Periodic Table

Windows NT Architecture

Illustrates all layers in the Windows NT architecture.

Business Matrix

Business Matrix Template

Contains business matrix diagrams that shows relationships between concepts across two or more dimensions. Create 2x2, 3x3 matrix, SWOT analysis, Ansoff matrix, BCG matrix, position maps, Quadrant analysis diagrams, or illustrate concepts across axes.

Contains a growth-share matrix to help an organization analyze its business units. Also known as "product portfolio matrix".

Ansoff Matrix

Contains a marketing planning tool which usually aids a business in determining its product and market growth. 

SWOT 1 Analysis

One of four sample diagrams that allows a business to undertake an analysis to identify its internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threats.

SWOT 2 Analysis

The second of four sample diagrams that allows a business to undertake an analysis to identify its internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threats.

SWOT 3 Analysis

The third of four sample diagrams that allows a business to undertake an analysis to identify its internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threats.

SWOT 4 Analysis

The fourth of four sample diagrams that allows a business to undertake an analysis to identify its internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threats.

Cycle Diagram Template

Represents a sequence of stages, tasks, or events in a circular flow. Contains circular, radial, target, circular segments, pie segments, loops and other cyclic diagram shapes.

Product Lifecycle

Covers four stages in the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

Deming Cycle

The Deming Cycle is a model for continuous improvement of quality in four stages.

Water Cycle Concept Map

Shows the continuous circulation of water in the Earth-atmosphere system.

Plan, Do, Check, Act

An interactive problem-solving strategy for improving processes and implementing change.

Customer Lifecycle

Illustrates the stages of customer lifecycle management.

Business Account Management

Illustrates eight key elements of a business account.

Digital Media: getting customers

Stages of customer acquisition—from communication to conversion.

Flowchart Template

Create flowcharts, top-down diagrams, information tracking diagrams, process planning diagrams, and structure prediction diagrams. Contains connectors and links.

Purchase Order

Demonstrates a purchase-order flow for a product.

Medical Patient Process

Flowchart illustrating the process of admitting a person for medical care. 

Environmental Clearance Flowchart

Flowchart illustrating the evaluation process for mitigating an environmental issue. 

Theater Booking Process

Property Buying Flowchart

Vertical Flowchart

Basic flowchart oriented vertically. 

Human Resources Management Process

Full process for seeking job candidates (internal and external) for an open position.

Customer Support

Illustrates the workflow for a customer support team working to solve a customer problem.

Audit Process flowchart

Demonstrates an end-to-end audit-process flow.

Candidate Background Check

Describes the entire process of performing background checks for job candidates.

Hardware and Software Development

Describes the flow of the hardware or software development process.

Inspect Materials flowchart

Shows how material inspection process flows.

Medical Assistance flowchart

Describes the process of getting medical assistance in a hospital.

Teaching Structure Flowchart

Demonstrates a flowchart for scheduling a teacher's class schedule.

Sales Quote diagram

Flowchart that describes the sales quote process.

Business-to-Business Sales

Flowchart showing the process of pitching an idea to a client in business-to-business sales.

Online Shopping Process

Flowchart shapes and connectors show the process of ordering a product on an e-commerce website.

Software Design Algorithm

Flowchart shapes and connectors demonstrating how to prototype a software project.

Accident Scene Assessment

Flowchart demonstrating the steps in assessing an accident scene.

Project Finance Management

Flowchart showing the process of managing the finances of a project.

Process Steps Template

Shapes for illustrating the steps in any sequential process. 

SDLC Waterfall Process

The waterfall model illustrates the software development process in a linear sequential flow.

Tuckman's Model

The Tuckman model is an approach to team development that helps develop strategies to move toward its goals.

Five-Step Decision Making Process

Illustration of fundamental steps in the decision-making process.

Organizational Communication Plan

Covers aspects of a communication plan: audience, type of message, delivery method, schedule, and spokesperson.

Job Application Process

Process diagram illustrating the steps for a job applicant and hiring process.

Jersey-making Process

Process diagram that shows how a sports jersey is made, in 8 steps.

Let's Bake a Cake

Shows the process of baking a cake, including the ingredients and various stages of mixing, baking, and decoration—illustrated as a cake.

Cardio and Core Workout

Covers a 30-minutes workout set of cardio and core exercises.

Pizza Delivery Process 

Shows the delivery process from the store to the customer—illustrated in the shape of a pizza.

Patient Care Process

Shows the process involved in patient care, from diagnosis to post-surgery evaluation.

Milestones to home ownership 

Shows the steps and milestones involved in buying a house with a home loan.

Pyramid Diagram Template

Pyramid diagrams use triangular, pyramidal or conical shapes to show proportional, interconnected, hierarchical relationships.

Marketing Strategy Diagram

A sample pyramid diagram that represents aspects of a business marketing strategy. 

Funnel Diagram

Funnel diagrams can be used to represent different stages of a process and to identify potential problem areas.

Hierarchy of Needs Diagram

A sample pyramid diagram that represents Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 

Website Visitor Trend

An example of a pyramid diagram. This one shows data about categories of visitors to a web site. 

Segmented Pyramid

A segmented pyramid diagram can show proportional, interconnected or containment relationships.

Stepped Pyramid Diagram

Pyramid diagrams can be used to present a step-by-step progression or to break down the structure of something into meaningful parts.

Venn Diagram Template

Venn diagrams use overlapping shapes to depict possible logical relationships between two or more sets. Organize information, show associations, similarities, unions, intersections, differences, containments, complements across logical sets.

What is Data Science?

Venn diagram describing data science as an intersection of technology, statistics, and business.

Desirability Feasibility Viability

This framework attempts to balance what is desirable from a customer point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.

People, Process, and Technology

Illustrates three elements of organizational transformation.

The disciplines of User Experience design

Illustrates the inter-relationships of the many elements of user experience design.

Brand Effectiveness diagram

Five factors for measuring brand effectiveness.

Visio for the web: FAQ  

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

Did you know 70% of online shoppers abandoned their carts in 2022? Why would someone spend time adding products to their cart just to fall off the customer journey map at the last second?

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

What is a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, customer journey stages.

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

In other words, buyers don’t wake up and decide to buy on a whim. They go through a process of considering, evaluating, and purchasing a new product or service.

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

These templates can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams learn more about your company’s buyer persona. This will improve your product and customer experience.

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

Questionnaires and user testing are great ways to obtain valuable customer feedback. The important thing is to only contact actual customers or prospects.

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

For example, if I were to view a display ad, interact with an employee, reach a 404 error, or leave a Google review, all of those interactions would be considered a customer touchpoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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

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8 Steps for Customer Journey Mapping (+ Examples & Templates)

Jeff Previte | September 17, 2020 | Buyer's Journey | 16 min read

Quick Links

• 1.   What it is
• 2.   Benefits
• 3.   Return on Investment
• 4.   Elements
• 5.   Steps
• 6.   Examples
• 7.   Free Templates
• 8.   Mapping Tools

How to Develop a Customer Journey Map

• 1.  Determine Your Objectives For Creating the Map.
• 2.  Conduct Research.
• 3.  Target Customer Personas.
• 4.  List Out the Touch Points Your Customers Interact With.
• 5.  Decide Which Elements You Want to Show on Your Map.
• 6.  Take Inventory of the Resources You Have.
• 7.  Try Out the Customer Journey For Yourself.
• 8.  Adapt Your Journey Depending on Your Results.

The customer is everything, so creating a customer journey map is a no brainer.

As Sam Walton says, “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Customers are the center of your entire business model, which is what makes  the flywheel framework   so impactful. When you understand their journey, you can refine every aspect of your business around the customer experience at every touchpoint.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Essentially, a customer journey map helps you visualize the whole process a customer goes through, from their initial touchpoint throughout their entire lifecycle as they strive to achieve a specific goal.

The map shows where customers enter your marketing and sales cycle, then how they find success with your products or services. And if they’re not successful, this map shows you where to help them find success.

The Benefits of Creating a Customer Journey Map

Everyone in your organization benefits from customer journey maps. In the big picture, they ensure alignment throughout the company, with a customer-focused perspective. This continuous focus on the customer is essential to building an effective flywheel framework .

Your map can be shared with every team. And it should be shared throughout – your customer’s experience impacts everyone.

Let’s look at how each part of your flywheel – marketing, sales, and service – benefits from a customer journey map.

Advantages for Marketing

The inbound marketing philosophy is founded on a simple idea: delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. With a customer journey map handy, your marketing team can identify opportunities to deliver relevant content to each of your customers.

They can map content so each user interacting with your brand gets exactly what they’re looking for at each stage of their journey – awareness, consideration, and decision.

Advantages for Sales

Your sales team can review customer journey maps to uncover opportunities they might be overlooking. It also helps better allocate resources and sales tools at each stage of the sales process.

For example, you might find that sales is struggling to make prospects aware of their real pain points . This might call for more targeted sales content or a new sales engagement strategy altogether. These insights ultimately help speed up sales cycles.

Advantages for Service

Your service team can visualize their touchpoints when they review your customer journey map. Plus, the map can detail specific pain points based on real customer experiences.

Ultimately, this tool empowers your service team to be more proactive in addressing customer problems, which in turn lead to delight (and hopefully referrals and positive word of mouth).

Bottom line: Your entire organization can find opportunities for collaboration throughout the customer experience to ensure consistency in each of their valuable interactions.

And the potential ROI of customer journey maps is real and impressive.

The Astounding ROI of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer centricity is not just a buzzword in the business lexicon. It’s a business strategy that paves the road for sustainable growth.

And building these maps takes all the guesswork out of determining how to put your customer in the center of every aspect of your business. But when you use this tool to guide your team strategies, you yield amazing results.

The Aberdeen Group conducted research on companies that use a formal customer journey management program. What they found is remarkable.

Here are a few noteworthy stats that highlight the financial benefit of mapping:

54 percent greater return on marketing investment

This is not surprising when you consider how the insights from mapping make conducting targeted content marketing initiatives much easier.

3.5 times greater revenue from customer referrals

Simply put, when you invest energy and resources at every customer touchpoint, you’re bound to turn happy customers into promoters of your brand.

18 times faster average sales cycle

Your sales team has a better perspective on the entire cycle, showing them where and how to engage in a more meaningful way.

56 percent more cross- and up-sell revenue

Mapping paves the road for consistently delighted customers, who are open to buying more from you.

Elements of Effective Customer Journey Maps

Let’s state the obvious here: not all customer journey maps are good or helpful. You can’t simply throw one together without any preparation.

Here are the elements you need to get started:

Clear Objectives

Your map should have a specific goal. Maybe you want to better align sales and marketing. Perhaps you want the map to help your service team better support customers.

Whatever your goal is, make it clear before you get started. This will make it easier for you to mold your map into a format that best suits your objectives. 

Buyer Persona

Remember, you’re building your map from a customer perspective, not an internal perspective. If you’re building from an internal view, your map will use business processes and teams as the foundation of the journey.

Instead, you need to use the customer’s point of view as a foundation, and to fully understand their point of view, you need detailed buyer personas .

Outline a customer’s motivations, pain points, goals, and considerations to lay the foundation. You can build out detailed personas and develop in-depth maps using data from several sources, including:

• Customer surveys
• Customer reviews
• Website analytics
• Customer interviews

Onstage and Offstage Details

Successful maps define the difference between onstage and offstage elements at every touchpoint. Onstage elements refer to things that are visible to customers, and offstage elements are things going on that customers can’t see.

Some maps use graphics to indicate this distinction, like a line that denotes customer visibility. This distinction helps you see what how operations are separate from what the customer is actually experiencing.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

As with every business strategy, you need metrics to analyze in order to gauge performance. Common metrics used for customer journey maps include customer satisfaction measures, net promoter score (NPS) , and the like.

These KPIs should align directly with your objective. So if you're aiming to boost referrals by 20 percent, you would likely be analyzing NPS. 

8 Steps of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is easier when you break it down into smaller steps that align with your goals. Here are some common steps you can take when mapping your customer journey:

1. Determine Your Objectives For Creating the Map.

You can't begin to create your customer journey map until you ask yourself why you need one in the first place. Who is the map about? What experience should your map follow? What goals do you have for this map? 

These questions suggest that you need buyer personas to help guide and direct your customer journey map to them. Buyer personas are made up customers that represent your real customers demographics and psychographics. 

2. Conduct Research.

The best way to conduct research for your buyer personas and customer journey map is to create a questionnaire for your customers and prospects. This way, they can provide feedback based on their experience and you can gain more demographic information such as age and their general location. 

Some of the questions you may ask your customers and prospects include:

• How did you learn about our company?
• What solutions do you hope our company can provide you?
• How long have you interacted with our website?
• Have you ever purchased anything from our website before?
• How easy is it to navigate our website on a scale of 1-10?
• Have you ever interacted with our customer support?
• What attracted you to our website?
• How long do you typically spend on our website?

HubSpot has a great tool that helps you to create buyer personas with the data you collect from customer feedback. 

3. Target Customer Personas.

Next, you need to hone in on one or two buyer personas to create a more accurate customer journey map. If you use too many buyer personas, the less likely it is for your customer journey map to reflect one specific customer's route while engaging with your business. 

This is why you should select the customer persona that is most common. Compare and contrast these personas until you find the right one to map. You can always create separate customer journey maps for your other personas later on. 

4. List Out the Touch Points Your Customers Interact With.

Touch points are the different places that allow your customers to interact with you. Write a list of all the touch points your customers currently use along with the ones you want them to use. Doing so gives you insight into your customers actions. 

Maybe your customers don't access more than one or two of the touch points on your website. This could mean that they are leaving your site early for some reason. If they are using many more touch points than you expect, it may be an indicator that your site's navigation is too complicated. 

Knowing and understanding your touch points is a good way to gain an understanding of the objectives and ease of your customer journeys. 

The touch points you have extend to other online channels besides your site. Make sure you know all of your touch points so you can track them. This includes social media, email marketing, and paid ads. 

Verify your touch points by double-checking your analytics to make sure you know where your traffic is coming from. Then determine the actions your customers perform through each touchpoint, the emotional driver or motivation for your customers actions, and the obstacles and pain points they may encounter through each touch point. 

5. Decide Which Elements You Want to Show on Your Map.

There are four types of customer journey maps you may choose from. These four types are:

Day in the Life

Current state.

This type is the most frequently used customer journey map. This map displays the thoughts, actions, and emotions your customers experience during their interaction with your company. This customer journey map helps you to improve the customer journey continually.

Future State

This customer journey map is based on your predictions about the customers' future actions, emotions, and thoughts in regards to your company. With the future state type, you assess the current state your customers are in to determine where you would like your customers to go.

This type of map is good for displaying your vision and it helps you see your objectives clearly.

Service Blueprint 

This map type starts with the basic structure of one of the previously listed maps. Next, you are supposed to layer on different factors that are responsible for delivering customer experience.

These factors may be things like processes, technology, policies, and people. The service blueprint map type is best for finding the core causes of customer journeys. 

6. Take Inventory of the Resources You Have.

Your customer journey map will likely touch on several areas of your business. You will need to highlight all of the resources that go into the customer journey and experience. This means you must know what resources you have and the ones you may need to contribute to the customer's journey.

For instance, you may include the flaws your content marketing team may have when it comes to your SEO rankings. This may allow you to notice that your team doesn't have the proper SEO tools. You can add these new SEO tools to your map to predict how they'll impact your content strategy and customer touch points to drive value. 

7. Try Out the Customer Journey For Yourself.

Mapping out your customer journey doesn't mean there is nothing else to do. You must analyze the results and follow the journey yourself. Trying the journey out for yourself involves following your map step by step and going through all of the touch points to find gaps. 

Some lingering questions you may want to ask yourself after your map is finished are:

• How many people click on links to your website and then exit before making a purchase?
• How can you help your customers better?

Your analysis of the results from your customer journey map will help you to identify the unmet needs of your customers. This helps you to ensure that your customers are able to find solutions to their problems with your customers help. 

8. Adapt Your Journey Depending on Your Results.

The analysis you make by mapping and following your journey will give you a better idea of what adaptations you need to make to your website and your other marketing efforts. You can then make the necessary changes to help you meet your goals and objectives.

Your map isn't something that you complete and never look at it again. You should be consistently looking at your customer journey map to identify new opportunities to give your customers a better experience. You can analyze your customer journey map quarterly and after you add new products or services to see how the journey has changed. 

Customer Journey Map Examples and Templates

This can feel like an abstract concept, but when you see what customer journey maps look like, it makes a lot more sense. But here’s the thing – there are many different versions of customer journey maps.

Your company’s customer journey map will be unique to your business, so keep that in mind as you build yours. But in the meantime, here are a couple of customer journey map examples to spark your inspiration.

Stellar Customer Journey Map Examples

Lancôme’s brand experience journey.

This leading luxury cosmetics company built a map to visualize the brand experience their customers have through various touchpoints. 

Source: Behance

As you can see, this map walks through important aspects of the customer experience. At the top, you can see each stage of the journey: from the customers looking up what they need, to searching options, to ordering, and ending with their purchase.

Underneath the journey stages, they included emotional responses, like excited, confused, and love. They also map out common questions throughout the journey and reactions after they receive their items.

At the bottom, they make notes for their team, recommending various tactics, like offering promotions and encouraging bloggers to post reviews.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Traveling Student Experience

The prestigious university created a map to address a specific problem – their Visit CMU website only offered a few resources that did not meet student needs.

Source: Iris Tong Wu

Their maps captured the experiences of students and acted as an excellent visual tool to detail touchpoints and disconnects that proved problematic for students.

They used a couple maps to sketch out wireframes and build a better digital experience to better support people visiting their campus.

Templates to Consider Using

As you can imagine, the possibilities for mapping your customer experience are endless. There are so many different ways to build out your map, which means you have great opportunities to find what works best for your business.

Here are a few common customer journey map templates.

This map follows the daily routine of your customer.

This map helps you pinpoint exactly what times of the day your company can best support your customer. 

Buyer's Journey

This template follows the basic three stage process and lays out the awareness, consideration, and decision stage.

With their journey in mind, your teams can step into the customer's shoes at every stage. As you walk in their shoes, you can find touchpoints where certain teams can interact with them. 

This template is helpful because it helps everyone in your organization to consider the goals of your customers. What is their desired state after buying from you and how can you empower them to reach this state? 

This template is great for conditioning your team to be future-oriented with customers. They want to help customers succeed, and this shows how to help them get there. 

Your customer journey map can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. One thing to keep in mind: don't overthink your format. 

There are a ton of intricate, colorful, well designed maps out there. Don't get too concerned with finding your perfect format. Just stick to the main goal you set and build a map to get started. It might evolve over time, and that's ok. 

Looking for a simple template? We've got one!

Download our Customer Journey Map Template here!  ➡️➡️➡️➡️

The important thing to do is to start mapping. Fortunately, there are some great tools for this. 

5 Customer Journey Mapping Tools You Need to Try

1. microsoft visio.

One of the most popular tools for creating flowcharts and diagrams, Microsoft Visio is a great solution. It's part of the Microsoft Office suite, and it's incredibly user friendly. Overall, this is a great place to start for beginners because you can make your maps as simple or as complex as you want with this tool.

The value proposition statement on  Gliffy's homepage  says it all: this company takes visual communication seriously. This tool is a little more simplistic compared to others, but it does the trick. And it comes with user friendly templates and even integrates with Atlassian apps, making collaborating as easy as one click. 

Smaply is made specifically for mapping out customer experiences, so it has all the features you need to jump right into your first map. One of the coolest features is the persona creator, giving you all you need to know about your customer just a click away. 

4. Touchpoint Dashboard

Touchpoint Dashboard is excellent for teams of all sizes. It incorporates images, storyboards, and data attributes. Plus, the story mode makes it easy to deliver an engaging presentation of the maps you create. 

5. IBM Journey Designer

One of the best tools for collaboration, IBM Journey Designer is a top choice. Break down the silos so marketing, sales, and service can work together on journey mapping in near real time. 

The customer journey map is your best tool for aligning your entire organization around the most important piece of your business: the customer. 

Jeff Previte

I am a Content Manager at Bluleadz. I enjoy spending time outdoors -- camping, hiking, hammocking, and everything in between. I also love reading, writing, and learning how to play guitar.

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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.

Table of Contents

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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How To Create a Customer Journey Map: Free Template

• Published on January 4, 2022
• Reading time 9 min read
• Views 10.62k

Wouldn’t it be great if customers recognized your product’s value proposition from the moment they first experienced your brand? Alas, that’s not the world we live in. These days, when so many things compete for your customer’s or prospect’s time and attention, customer journey mapping is a must.  Let’s explore the what, why, and how of customer journey mapping. We’ll also share a customer journey map template for mobile marketers to get you started. Table of Contents

What Is Customer Journey Mapping?

Benefits of customer journey mapping.

• How to Create a Customer Journey Map in 7 Steps

Customer Journey Mapping Tools

Customer journey map template, customer journey mapping levels up your user experience.

• The problems your customers and prospects are trying to solve
• The motives that drive their decision-making processes
• Their experiences along different customer life cycle touchpoints
• Roadblocks or areas of friction that might cause resistance

The main goal of a customer journey map is to form a better understanding of how your customer experiences your brand and its products and services. But it goes beyond that.  When you create a visual outline of your customer’s journey across different channels and touchpoints, that roadmap informs your brand strategy in a way that ultimately levels up your customer experience .

You Retain Customers By Delivering an Experience That Matches Their Expectations

Are your business goals aligned with your customer’s goals? If you don’t understand your customer’s perspectives, needs, and pain points, you won’t be able to meet them in a way that builds loyalty . Customer journey mapping challenges you to empathize with your customer so you can deliver an experience that matches their expectations.

You Can Optimize for Omnichannel Engagement

Your customers experience your brand across multiple channels: advertising,  marketing, sales, and customer service, to name a few. They may interact with your website, but also with your app or social media accounts. Journey mapping helps your team ensure that all of those channels work collaboratively to create a seamless user experience. Read our guide to omnichannel marketing to learn more.

You Can Make Informed Marketing and Business Decisions

Without a customer journey map, you’re flying blind. That’s why investing time in understanding and empathizing with the people who use your products and services is the surest path to customer engagement , conversion, and retention.

You Can Find and Eliminate Roadblocks

Customer journey mapping can help you uncover anything that might be hurting retention . By reviewing customer behavioral analytics , you can find points of frustration, like a too-slow website or a confusing app interface, and remedy them to improve customer experience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map: Example 

Step 1: Decide On Your Objectives

Where do your business goals and your customers’ needs align? That’s the magical sweet spot you need to optimize for. Begin the customer journey mapping process by finding that meeting point and writing it down. 

Step 2: Create User Personas

Now, let’s humanize your users by creating user personas. After all, the customers using your product or service are real people with real needs and problems. User personas are semi-fictitious characters that represent your target customers. You create these personas by using real customer behavior intel and researching the needs and goals of people who interact with your brand. Check out our guide to creating user personas for inspiration. 

Step 3: List the Touchpoints

Now it’s time to take note of the important places on your website or in your app where your customers interact with your brand. For example, an e-commerce site might trace the touchpoints that lead a potential buyer from their product pages to their shopping cart to checkout. It might look something like this:

• Website: Landing page
• Website: Product page
• Website: Shopping cart
• Website: Checkout
• Email: Purchase confirmation
• Email: Shipping notification

We’ve simplified this, but you may have other steps — an abandoned shopping cart email or shipment delivery notification, for example — along the way. Pro Tip: Don’t get bogged down in the details. It’s not necessary to include every little detail. Focus on the big moments that get you closest to your business goals. 

Step 4: List the Actions Your Customer Takes

Touchpoints are like milestones. They’re the significant markers your customers reach on their journey. Actions are the steps that get them from one touchpoint to another.  Here’s an example. If your customer reaches your landing page, what actions will they take to get them to an individual product page? Those actions could be something like clicking on a specific product category or performing a search for an item by name.  Pro Tip: Listing actions can help you identify points in the customer journey where your customers have to take multiple steps to get from one objective to another. Can you find areas where you can simplify and reduce the number of steps it takes for a customer to reach the next milestone? 

Step 5: Identify the Highs and Lows of Your Customer’s Journey

Now, take the customer journey yourself. Look for potential pain points. Is a page loading too slowly? Is something hard to find in your app interface? Where might your customer encounter an obstacle that results in a negative experience? Don’t forget to make note of potential moments of surprise and delight. Maybe your customer was drawn to your brand by a fun social media campaign. That’s a win! Once you’ve made note of the highs and lows, you can examine them for opportunities. Maybe customers who were enticed by your brand on social media became frustrated when they landed on your mobile website because it loaded too slowly.  Bingo! You’ve found a roadblock on your customer’s journey. Remove the obstacle, and you’ll improve the customer experience. 

Step 6: Track User Emotions

At each point of interaction, consider and note the emotional state your user might be in. Use your analytics tools to analyze your customers’ behavior and make an educated guess about their emotional response.  Maybe a behavioral analytics tool showed you that your customers tend to drop off when they encounter a pop-up. It doesn’t take much thought to come to the conclusion that your customer felt annoyed. Or maybe you’ve discovered that a high percentage of your users have taken you up on your free download — that’s a moment of delight.

Step 7: Map the Customer Journey

Now that you’ve gathered information, you’re ready to create your customer journey map. Create a visual representation of the data you’ve gathered as you complete these steps. You can start simply with a customer journey template if you prefer, or develop a map through a more robust process. Some marketing analytics software such as CMSes and engagement and retention suites like CleverTap already include customer journey mapping tools . These tools allow you to use data to construct your campaigns easily on a visual canvas. 

Your customer journey map could be as simple as a freehand drawing or even a bunch of sticky notes stuck to a wall. But while there’s nothing wrong with a lo-fi approach, the better your customer journey map, the easier it will be to share it with your team so everyone’s on board as you hone your marketing strategy. If you’d like to step up your customer journey mapping process, there are a number of free and paid design tools available, including:

• Microsoft Visio

CleverTap’s customer engagement and retention platform includes Journeys, a visual campaign builder that allows you to:

• Use a virtual canvas to create omnichannel messaging campaigns
• Identify and segment your users to pinpoint your audience
• Create personalized campaigns based on user behavior, location, and life cycle stage with a simple drag-and-drop interface
• Get a live view of how users flow through each stage of your campaign in real time

See how today’s top brands use CleverTap to drive long-term growth and retention

Schedule a Demo Now!

• customer journey map template
• Customer journeys
• user journey map

Customer Journey Map Template

Map your customer journey and help your customers successfully get from A to B. Understand the reasoning behind their choices and design the best product experience and meet your customer's needs.

Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies

About the Customer Journey Map Template

A customer journey map, also known as a user journey map, is a visual representation of how customers experience your brand and company across all its touchpoints. In a customer journey map template, interactions are placed in a pre-made timeline to map out the user flow.

Since customers are the backbone of your business, it is important to understand their pain points, desires and needs so that you can create a customer-centric experience for them.

Many teams use customer journey mapping tools to visually represent customers' thought processes and emotions from their initial interaction until the end goal. This practice enables businesses to assess whether they are meeting their objectives. Doing so can improve their conversion rates and enhance the overall customer experience.

How to use Miro’s customer journey map template

Here are 6 steps to create a successful CJM using the customer journey mapping template. In each section, we will dive a little deeper, but remember, every customer journey map is different, so you may spend more time on one step compared to another.

1. Set clear objectives for the map

Identify your goal for the map. Identifying your ideal outcome will help set the foundations for a successful project.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

Why are you making a customer journey map?

Who is it specifically about?

What experience is it based upon?

Based on this, you may want to create a buyer persona. This is a fictitious customer with all their demographics and psychographics representing your average customer. Having a clear persona is helpful in reminding you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map toward them.

2. Identify your user personas and define their goals

Use the Game-Changer container on the template to identify your persona.

Answer these three questions:

What are their key goals and needs?

What do they struggle with most?

What tasks do they have?

Conduct user research to help you in this process. Survey customers to understand their buying journey, or ask the sales team or customer service representatives for feedback or the most frequently asked questions. You would want to hear the experience of people who are interested in your product and who have interacted with it to understand their pain points and what can be done to improve.

3. Highlight target customer personas

Once you’ve discovered all the different buyer personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow the list down and select one or two to focus on.

A customer journey map is a specific journey one customer takes, so having too many personas on one map will not be a precise indication of their journey and not a reflection of their true experience.

4. Identify all possible customer touchpoints

Based on your research, you can now use this information to map out all the possible customer touchpoints your customer will face. Use the User Journey Map Template to add the outcomes you want your customer to achieve, and then map all the steps they need to take in order to achieve these outcomes.

List out all of the touchpoints your customer currently has, and then make another list of where you would like your customers to have additional touchpoints. Then check if there are any overlaps.

This step is vital as it can show you whether you have too few or too many touchpoints and gives you a rough idea of your current customer journey experience.

Touch points are not limited to just your website. Look at other areas such as:

Social media channels

Email marketing

3rd party reviews or mentions

Pro Tip:  Run a quick Google search of your business and identify all the pages that mention your brand. Verify this using Google Analytics to see what brings in the most traffic.

This step is very important as it can help you understand things like, are the lack of touchpoints the reason why my customers are turning away? If there are more than expected, are they getting too overwhelmed?

5. Build the customer journey map and try it yourself!

Once you have gathered all the necessary information and identified all the touchpoints your customer will experience, it will finally be time to start building your own customer journey map.

Ensure that you note down every point your customer will touch your business. Remember to add their actions, needs, pains, and feelings to your customer journey map.

Creating the map alone isn’t the end of the process. You will need to go through the journey yourself and analyze the results. By going through the journey first-hand, you will see the areas where expectations might not have been met.

For each persona, go through every journey from beginning to end and take notes.

6. Adjust as needed

Once you have gone through each persona map, you will get a clearer understanding of what your customers are experiencing.

Ensure that all the needs are met and pain points are addressed. No matter how big or small the changes are, every single change has an impact. And this small impact could be the deciding factor for purchase, signup, or download.

Add all the opportunities and improvements you could introduce to your User Journey Map Template . Brainstorm with your team ideas to implement changes, and make sure you assign the right team members to each process.

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What should be included in a customer journey map template?

Every customer journey map will be different. No map is linear, so it is okay not to have a direct A to B Journey. Below we have compiled a number of points that may be included in a customer journey map template:

1. Significant milestones

In order to begin with a successful customer journey map, it is important to draft a path your customer will be journeying through to reach your business’s goal. This step is also useful as you can preemptively identify potential hiccups that might ensue here.

2. User engagement

This element is where you map out the details of how your customer will interact with your site or product. Think of how you would like this to be in order for you to achieve your goal.

3. Emotions

As we seek positive experiences, it is also important to ensure our customers feel relief, excitement, and happiness. Therefore, to mitigate any negative emotions, ensure you have a clear and concise process with appropriate branding to avoid creating negative opinions.

4. Pain Points

When your customers are experiencing a negative emotion, there is a reason why. Adding pain points to your customer journey map will help you identify the reasons behind them and come up with a solution to fix them.

5. Solutions

And finally, add solutions. Once you and your team have identified the pain points, brainstorm and implement solutions to improve your user experience.

How do I use a customer journey map template?

You can create your CJM with Miro’s free Customer Journey Map Template and customize it according to your brand or product needs. When using your own CJM template, remember to define the scope, what touchpoints you want to analyze, and who inside your organization has ownership of which step.

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

Using a user journey map template can be key to better understanding your customers. Customer journey mapping puts you and your team in the mind of the customer and helps you to visualize what they are experiencing at each stage and touchpoint with your business or product. Outlining the stages of interaction, while keeping the customer front and center, allows you to identify any pain points that could be improved. This will better not only the customer experience but will help with customer retention in the long run.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

A touchpoint in a customer journey map is an instance where your customer can form an opinion of your business. Touchpoints can be found in places where your business comes in direct contact with potential or existing customers. A display ad, an interaction with an employee, a 404 error, and even a Google review can be considered a customer touchpoint. Your brand exists beyond your website and marketing materials, so it’s important that the different types of touch points are considered in your customer journey map because they can help uncover opportunities for improvement in the buying journey.

How often should you update your customer journey map?

Your map should be a constant work-in-progress. Reviewing it on a monthly or quarterly basis will help you to identify gaps and opportunities for streamlining your customer journey further. Use your data analytics along with customer feedback to check for any roadblocks. It would also be helpful to schedule regular meetings to analyze any changes that might affect the customer journey.

Do all businesses need a customer journey map?

Customer journey mapping is important for businesses of all sizes. From SMBs to Enterprise. It is also important for all functions. From sales and marketing to customer service. There is no one size fits all for customer journey maps. Therefore, it is important to take time to personalise your own customer journey map to fully understand your own process and identify your own pain points.

Get started with this template right now.

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Plenty of calendars help you focus on the day-to-day deadlines. With this one, it’s all about the big picture. Borrowing from the grid structure of 12-month wall calendars, this template shows you your projects, commitments, and goals one full year at a time. So you and your team can prepare to hunker down during busy periods, move things around as needed, and celebrate your progress. And getting started is so easy—just name your calendar’s color-coded streams and drag stickies onto the start date.

Buyer Persona Template

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You have an ideal customer: The group (or few groups) of people who will buy and love your product or service. But to reach that ideal customer, your entire team or company has to align on who that is. Buyer personas give you a simple but creative way to get that done. These semi-fictional representations of your current and potential customers can help you shape your product offering, weed out the “bad apples,” and tailor your marketing strategies for serious success.

Innovation Matrix Template

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Customer Journey Map

Visualize the customer experience. work together to gain insights that lead to better decisions about development priorities using customer journey maps, what is a customer journey map, steps to build a customer journey map, 5 stages of a customer journey, buyer journey vs customer journey, customer journey maps in smartdraw, customer journey map examples, with smartdraw, you can create many different types of diagrams, charts, and visuals.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of your customer's interactions with your product or services from awareness to consideration, purchase, and more. Once you understand your customer's journey, you can be more empathetic to their needs and make sure your marketing, sales, and product development efforts are aligned to make that path smooth and impactful.

What are the Steps to Building a Customer Journey Map?

Step 1. Clearly define your buyer persona and customers.

Step 2. Define the stages of the customer journey. For example: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

Step 3. Make a list of customer touchpoints where a customer will interact with your brand. Some may be under your control like your advertising, email marketing, and sales team interactions and some will come from third parties like social media, reviews, and influencers.

Step 4. Collect data and analyze feedback. What's the sentiment of the customer at these touchpoints? Are they happy, curious, excited, concerned, or frustrated?

Step 5. Note pain points.

Step 6. Identify opportunities for improvement.

What are the 5 Stages of a Customer Journey?

A typical customer journey is usually described in 5 distinct stages, but you can add to or reduce this to meet your specific business model or industry. In general, the stages are supposed to describe a unique phase in the customer journey that will help you understand the customer's behavior, pain points, and motivations during that step. It can help you optimize your product and sales and marketing strategies.

The most common stages are described as:

• Awareness. Customer recognizes a problem or need they have and seeks to better understand it.
• Consideration. Customer understands their problem and researches differnt solutions.
• Purchase or Decision. Customer identifies the correct solution for their needs.
• Retention. Customer considers renewing their license or buying more products.
• Advocacy. Customer is willing to share their positive experience both within their organization and with strangers in the form of reviews and case studies.

Other names for these 5 stages:

5 Es: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Entend

5 Cs: Connection, Cultivation, Consideration, Conversion, and Continuation

5 As: Awareness, Appeal, Ask, Act, and Advocate

Some also add stages like support, evaluation, onboarding, and usage.

What is a Difference Between a Buyer Journey Map and a Customer Journey?

A buyer journey consists of only the first three of the stages mentioned above: awareness, consideration, and decision, and it does not extend past the purchase decision. A customer journey map looks at the journey more completely and includes what happens after conversion and considers both retention and advocacy or willingness to extend or grow a license.

What is the Difference Between Journey Mapping and Story Mapping?

A customer journey map is from the perspective of your customer: the recognition of their needs and problems and the search and decision making that leads them to become your customer. A story map would focus on your product or service and how it delivers what the customer is looking for.

How to Make a Customer Journey Map in SmartDraw

Step 1. Start with a customer journey map template

The template will contain a matrix of columns and rows. The columns will represent the stages in your customer journey. you can easily customize these stages to your industry. Rename the existing stages or add or remove columns.

The rows represet touchpoints, feelings, and opportunities. You can also customize these if you want and add additional rows as needed.

Step 2. Add touchpoints under each stage

Add sticky notes or cards to represent touchpoints for each stage. Drag and drop them from the attached symbol library and type to customize them. Touchpoints may include doing a Google search, watching a YouTube video, reading a post from a co-worker on LinkedIn, and so on.

Step 3. Add the sentiment associated with touchpoints

Analyze the customer sentiment associated with these touchpoints. Were your customers frustrated waiting to hear back after a demo request? Did they encounter an error while trying to buy? Did they see a negative review while considering your services?

Step 4. Add opportunities for improvement

Your customers feelings at each stage should make it easy to identify their pain points and lead you to opportunities for improvement. Add cards for where you think you can improve their experience with your brand. Maybe you need to support a new method of payment on your buy path. Maybe you need to make sure your support staff follows up and helps onboard new customers.

Check out these customer journey maps created with SmartDraw:

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Blog / Journey Tools

11 Customer Journey Mapping Tools to Navigate & Analyze User Experiences

• February 29, 2024

Table of Contents

Understanding your customers can be challenging when dealing with a vast amount of unstructured data.

On average, businesses source their customer data from 28 different channels and house it in 17 different applications. This data may help to gain insights about their customer experience and meet their expectations, but a lack of control over siloed data fails to serve the purpose.

That’s where data visualization comes into play.

Using customer journey mapping tools, you get a comprehensive view of how your customers interact with your brand and identify the different touchpoints and conversion paths they take to convert. More importantly, you can put all your collected customer data into use by visualizing it into customer journey maps without having to navigate through different platforms.

We’ve compiled a list of 11 customer journey mapping tools to help you get started and create the most accurate and data-backed maps to help with your marketing decisions.

Key Takeaways

Optimize the customer journey with real-time analytics

Visually understand the customer journey from start to finish- and how it can be improved

1. Funnelytics

Funnelytics is a customer journey mapping tool that uses whiteboard technology to help you draw your entire customer journey on a canvas.

“ I am able to show my clients exactly how their funnel will look in a clean visual way. This is a great sales tool. ” – Sam K .

Integrations with top analytics software allow for real-time, in-depth sales funnel data on an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. You can present this data visually to your clients and stakeholders with ease, which is very handy for agencies.

Even better, using funnel simulations, you can forecast the results of your funnel plan before implementing it. This allows you to test out the probability of success vs failure for every approach you take, and an opportunity to optimize for best results.

The learning curve to start with Funnelytics can be a little steep for people who are new to creating visual maps to track and understand customer journeys. This is why our team created a great resource in our vault of funnels (essentially templates.) You can import these funnels into your builder easily, which will jumpstart your project whether you’re a beginner or a visualization veteran.

Moreover, you’ll enjoy our onboarding process, where we help you get acquainted with the tool while also offering clients optimization workshops and same-day support to get you unstuck whenever you need.

“ Tracking multiple traffic sources across multiple domains is not easy. This is why I use Funnelytics. ” — Quentin P.

Understand your user flow with Funnelytics

We help performance-driven marketing teams plan and improve the customer journey at every level

Pricing : $199–$999 per month

Key features :

• Highly intuitive.
• Easy-to-use interface with visual drag-and-drop features for easy mapping and customer journey tracking .
• The traffic explorer feature allows you to map backward.

Smaply is a customer journey mapping platform that allows you to centralize and digitize your customer experience insights. Its simple drag-and-drop features help you visualize different types of data to review your customer experience and identify key friction points.

You can see a lot of customer data at once in Smaply, because it displays multiple channels and customer journeys simultaneously. This allows you to show the differences between the two tracks for better decision-making.

Smaply also offers customizable templates that can be duplicated and re-used and collaboration features, which allow sharing of customer journey insights to the team in real-time.

A downside to Smaply is that its users find the cost on the higher end compared to the features it offers, which can be off-putting for those with tighter budgets.

Pricing : $0 – $29 EUR per month, offers custom pricing

• Simple drag-and-drop editor
• Feedback mode and sharing to help with collaboration
• Customizable templates

3. Custellence

Custellence allows you and your team to collaborate and combine your customer journey efforts into a single dashboard. It helps you create your customer journey map in minutes, which allows you to present a strong customer case and get a buy-in from stakeholders.

With Custellence, you can create elaborate customer journey maps, easily share them with your teams, and collaborate with them on your workspace. Like Smaply, it offers a stack of templates you can adapt and tailor for your own purposes.

However, when it comes to adapting the tool for more complex journey maps, many users find it difficult to apply customer journeys for different use cases.

Pricing : $0 to $34 per member per month, offers custom pricing

• Churn management
• Intuitive, lane-based interface,
• Flexible map structure

4. UXPressia

UXPressia is more of an all-in-one tool that helps you create customer journey maps, user personas and impact maps—that means all your customer experience assets stay in one place. See statuses, tags, and ownerships of each journey map you create and visualize everything from the big picture to the micro journeys.

This makes it easier to align your team and stakeholders from different parts of your organization for better collaboration. You can create designer-quality journey maps and tweak them to present to different people, which can save you a lot of time and effort.

Moreover, you can embed website, product, or service prototypes, marketing presentations, survey results, etc. into your journey map so you don’t leave out any crucial information.

Given the vast variety of features UXPressia offers, it can be a little clunky and complex, which often bugs users looking for simpler solutions.

Pricing : $0 to $36 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• 100+ free customer journey mapping templates
• User roles and teams for access control
• Version history
• Branding elements to help you stay on brand always

5. Lucidchart

Lucidchart is a visual whiteboard tool that allows teams to collaborate seamlessly—from initial ideas to successful delivery. This tool’s user-friendly interface and diverse tools make it easy to create diagrams.

Unlike tools like Funnelytics, it’s not specifically designed for mapping customer journeys around marketing and sales funnels. It’s more of a general intelligent diagramming tool that helps you assemble funnel maps, customer journeys, and flow charts.

However, that makes it suitable for any team for different purposes—the marketing team can create elaborate funnel maps while the design team can create flowcharts for their processes.

As a general-purpose tool, Lucidchart lacks several advanced features compared to its competitors, making it less of a versatile option for users looking for high-end functionalities.

Pricing : $0 to $9 per user per month, also offers custom pricing

• Virtual whiteboard to bring your ideas to life
• Intelligent diagramming to visualize complex data
• Cloud visualization to optimize your cloud environments

Figma is more of a general-purpose design tool that has different modes with different purposes—development, design, whiteboard, and prototyping—all in one platform. It’s mainly an all-in-one tool for product teams to create, test, and ship better products faster and more efficiently.

While the prototyping mode helps you create realistic prototypes to test the interactive experience before launching, the FigJam (whiteboard) is the one you can use to create your customer journey mapping while collaborating with your team on an intuitive interface.

However, one of the limitations of this tool is the lack of advanced prototyping features, which can be a challenge for those looking to build complex customer journey maps.

Pricing : $0 to $75 per editor per month

• Easy collaboration allowing brainstorming and working on complex workflows.
• Open sessions that allow you to invite anyone for 24 hours.
• Live audio calls on the board.
• Timer and voting options.

Miro is a multi-purpose online collaborative whiteboard that can be used to build funnel maps, plan marketing campaigns, develop a roadmap, and more.

It allows distributed teams to come together, work on a common goal and manage the processes throughout different lifecycle stages.

The interactive and easy-to-use whiteboard platform allows you to strategize new initiatives while considering your customers’ needs and designing customer-centric solutions.

Miro offers six core capabilities to help you with a layout to get started under different scenarios such as process mapping, workshop collaboration, product development workflows, etc. However, users find it difficult to follow through, considering its vast range of features and workflows.

Pricing : $0 to $16 per user per month, custom pricing also available

• Miro Assist to help you automatically generate mind maps, diagrams, and codes for you.
• Multiple solutions include mind mapping, flowcharts, wireframing, process mapping, technical diagramming, and more.
• Easy to collaborate

8. Visual Paradigm

Visual Paradigm is a development tool suite consisting of design, analysis, and management tools to help you manage your projects. Its customer journey mapping tool allows you to study customer experience and illustrate customer relationships with your brand.

The interface you get on creating a new customer journey map isn’t very intuitive, and some might find it pretty basic compared to other tools mentioned in this list. However, fewer features and simplicity mean the tool is easy to learn and grasp, and you can create simple customer journey mapping within minutes.

Pricing : $6 to $89 per month

• Visual modeling
• Business analysis and design
• Drag-and-drop editor

Sketch is another multi-purpose collaborative tool like Miro that markets itself as the complete design platform. It’s available as a web app and a Mac app. While you can build websites, icons, apps, illustrations, and design systems using Sketch, you can use its prototyping feature for customer journey research and mapping.

It comes with a powerful vector editor and built-in prototyping, so it’s easy to create stunning journey maps. It also allows you to collaborate with your team using its workspace feature, where you can share designs and prototypes and offer feedback.

Since it’s not specific to customer journey mapping or sales funnel, many advanced features are lacking. To get started, you’ll need to build your journey maps from scratch without the support of dedicated templates.

Pricing : Starting from $10 per month

• Powerful vector editing
• Easy, intuitive prototyping
• Shared Libraries, styles, and components
• Reusable design templates

10. Flowmapp

Flowmapp is a UX design platform popular among startups, agencies, designers, developers, and other teams. Though it’s specifically designed for end-to-end website design and development, it can be easily used for creating customer journey maps with its prototyping and wireframing features.

Using its pre-made templates, workspaces, and collaboration features, you can create stunning customer journey maps while keeping everyone on your team on the same page.

One of the main drawbacks of this tool is that it doesn’t offer a customization feature for adding specific elements to the journey map. For example, information from the SERP will be added as a text block, not a screenshot.

Pricing : $0 to $126 per month

• Visual sitemaps
• Prototyping tools with many templates
• Import and export diagrams

11.  Microsoft Visio

A diagram and flowchart tool by Microsoft, Visio helps you visualize your ideas with dozens of ready-to-use templates and thousands of customizable shapes. You can either choose to purchase Visio directly or get it as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription.

You can create flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, network diagrams, customer journey maps, and more with Visio and its simple user interface. You get all the latest diagramming features such as layers, containers, validation reports, shape sheets & drawing explorer, which allows you to create elaborate journey maps.

Some users find the pricing more costly than its competitors, which can affect those with budget constraints.

Pricing : $5 to $530 per month

• Easy to set up and use
• Workflow automation
• Comprehensive template library

How to choose the right customer journey mapping tool

With these many options, making a choice can be overwhelming. You need to consider your business requirements and the following factors.

• Visual/design capabilities : You should be able to design your customer journey maps in the way you desire—be it flowcharts, value ladders, or elaborate mindmaps.
• Intuitive/easy-to-use platform : You and your team should find it easy to navigate through and put the tool to proper use for creating and analyzing journey maps.
• Collaborative capabilities: The tool should allow you to invite your team members to collaborate and leave comments and feedback.
• Integrations with other tools : You need a customer journey mapping tool with integration capabilities to collect data from multiple platforms.
• Templates : You also need multiple templates to save time on creating maps.
• Customer pain point and journey optimization analytics: Your tool should offer detailed insights into the friction points in the customer journey. For example, in Funnelytics, you can analyze page insights in an elaborate form, which acts as an excellent heatmap alternative .
• Segmentation features : You should be able to segment journey maps into different groups based on the journey stage, touchpoint, channel, etc.
• Customer success team powered by experts : Access to customer support whenever you’re stuck is an absolute must.

Map your customer journey with real-time data

Customer journey mapping is a fun and extensive process that offers great insights into customer behavior and thought process, and Funnelytics is an excellent choice for a mapping tool.

We’ve put it as number one on the list because it connects whiteboarding technology to the user’s data. This allows you to map customer journeys, visually see how well they perform using split testing across the customer journey , and identify what portions of the journey or product to optimize. Moreover, it’s excellent for visual learners—you can visually see how people get to their site, move across pages, and where they drop. This allows for continuous improvement.

Funnelytics also has:

• A thorough onboarding process
• Customer journey experts who host optimization workshops
• Same-day support, as well as weekly live sessions where users can ask platform or strategy questions.

Learn more about customer journey tracking through Funnelytics’ blog , or get started today .

Implement your ideas faster with Funnelytics

Our visual platform makes it easy to see where customers need the most help in their journey

● What does customer journey mapping software do?

● what features do you need in a customer journey mapping software, ● why is a customer journey visualization platform a must-have.

Related resources

Sales Funnel vs. Customer Journey: What are the Differences?

Cracking the Code: Funnel Reporting for Marketers

The Customer Lifecycle Journey: What it is and How to Use it to Create Repeat Customers

9 Best Funnel Tracking Software Tools to Streamline Your Sales Success

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Each template is assigned a language and purpose, and you can filter the gallery by these values to make the template you're looking for easier to find. You can view details about any listed template by selecting it in the list.

You can establish your own collection of custom templates to meet the needs of your organization. Also, the only way to create a copy of an existing customer journey is to first save it as a template, and then create a new journey based on that template.

Save an existing customer journey as a template

If you've created a customer journey structure that you think you'd like to use again as a starting point for future campaigns, then you can save your journey as a template. Once your template is created, you'll be able to select it from the template browser each time you create a new journey.

When you save an existing customer journey as a template, the pipeline structure, all tile settings, and all journey settings are saved in the template. Depending on how you want to use it, it might make sense to edit the template after you save it to clear some of the settings that you'll most likely want to customize for each new journey (such as the specific email messages assigned to the email tiles).

To save an existing customer journey as a template:

Go to Customer Insights - Journeys > Marketing execution > Customer journeys .

Open your existing customer journey.

Select Save as template on the command bar.

A quick-create form opens at the side of the window.

Make the following settings:

• Name : Specify a name for the template. Users will see this name when selecting the template from the template gallery on creating a new journey.
• Owner : Specify the user that owns the template (by default, this will be you). This can affect which other users will be able to see and use the template.
• Purpose : Select the word that best describes how and where to use this template. Users can filter the template gallery based on this value to make it easier to find in the right template.
• Target : Choose whether this template should target contacts or accounts . This value is taken from the current customer journey that you are saving as a template.
• Language : Choose the language the template is in. Users can filter the template gallery based on this value to make it easier to find in the right template.
• Description : Enter a brief description of the template and what it's for. This description is shown in the template gallery when a template is selected.
• Is recurring : Choose whether the template should create a recurring journey or not. This value is taken from the current customer journey that you are saving as a template.

Select Save and Close to create your template.

Create a new template from scratch

If you are planning for future, not yet existing, customer journeys, then you can create templates from scratch rather than starting from an existing customer journey.

To create a template from scratch:

Go to Customer Insights - Journeys > Marketing templates > Journey templates .

Select New on the command bar.

Set up the template and make all settings just as you would a standard customer journey .

Save your template when you're done.

Edit, delete, or deactivate an existing template

If you've got a template that you don't use anymore, then you can remove it from your system to keep it from cluttering up your template gallery. You might choose to hide the template by making it inactive, or to delete it permanently. You can also edit any existing template if you've discovered an error or your needs have changed.

To edit or delete an existing template:

• To delete a template, mark it in the list by selecting any part of the row other than the template name. Then select Delete on the command bar. The template is permanently deleted.
• To deactivate a template, mark it in the list by selecting any part of the row other than the template name. Then select Deactivate on the command bar. The template will no longer be shown in the gallery but can still be reactivated if you need it again.
• To edit a template, select the relevant template name in the list to open the standard customer journey editor. Make the required settings and then save.

To reactivate an inactive template:

Open the system-view selector and switch to the Inactive customer journey templates view.

Mark the template that you want to reactivate by selecting any part of the row other than the template name. Then select Activate on the command bar. This moves the selected template back to the Active customer journey templates system view and will also make it available in the customer journey template gallery.

Additional resources

• Behance Mobile

Customer Journey Map Template + Stencils

This template and stencil can be used to quickly create a customer journey map or service blueprint using the findings from your research. The st Read More

Creative fields.

Interaction Design

Storyboarding

• customer experience
• Customer Journey Map
• Customer Experience Map
• Product Vision
• Story telling
• Customer Research
• User research
• journey map
• Service Blueprint
• service blue print
• Service design

Attribution, Non-commercial

• Design process
• SaaS business
• Product design
• Design team

Visualize Like a Pro. Top Customer Journey Mapping Tools

mins to read

Whether you are building a new product, developing extra features, or finding ways to improve your retention rates, a customer journey map is a great tool. As a design agency , we know well how valuable can be an insight from a customer journey map that is based on good research.

Creating a customer journey map requires previous research, analysis, interviews. After that you are left with loads of information that is hard to present to the team. Here you can see the best tools that can help you visualize the map and make it a pretty picture that you would really enjoy analyzing.

Customer Journey Map (CJM). Why Does It Matter?

Through the customer journey map , you can truly empathize with your users. It shows not only how people interact with the product, but also what they feel and desire. The graph shows clearly the moments of truth that make you lose or acquire clients.

Before you start working on a customer journey map, think of a concrete problem that you want to address. Make sure to include real customers in the process, do not rely on your team to provide all the information about clients’ feelings, desires, and actions.

Once you’ve gathered the information, you start thinking of a way to visualize it. The tools are various: we’ll start with the most basic ones and go on with the software created exclusively for customer journey maps visualization.

Building Customer Journey Map Using Tools That Are at Hand

Craft tools.

Let’s say that you plan a workshop with your team and customers to create a customer journey map. You expect to end up with a beautiful color scheme, where everything is crystal clear. There are plenty of tools for that, as you will see below. However, when you are working live with a group of people who are probably unfamiliar with those tools, a good old whiteboard and stickers can be your best choice.

Start building the stages of the journey during live sessions using hand-made materials. You can use this template to structure your ideas. Later, when the content is ready, you can make a pretty digital version to work with in the future.

Computer Programs

The customer journey map does not always have to be that huge graph with illustrations and icons. You can build a cjm using just Excel : if you are more of a text person than an illustration person, that would work just fine. Here is a simple customer journey map by Nielsen Norman Group, made in spreadsheets.

You can create a customer journey map in (almost) any visual editor that you know: Adobe Illustrator, XD, Figma, Sketch, etc. There are some free customer journey templates that give you a prepared set of elements to fill in with your data. Check out this template for Adobe XD .

You can also try free customer journey map templates for Sketch . And if you want to go really fancy, use this interactive template for Figma . The clickable elements allow you to fit in lots of data and metrics, including numerous personas and integrating user flows. 

Customer Journey Map Software. Web Apps

There is a bunch of software made specifically for creating customer journey maps. They allow you to use pre-made templates, visual elements to get a result that looks put-together without thinking too much of design. We’ll give you a brief overview of the most popular and useful customer journey map tools, both paid and free.

With UXPressia you can build customer journey maps, personas, and impact maps. You can choose one of many templates for any type of product – from coffee stores to online banking apps . Also, a separate template for employee journey maps is worth notice: remember that employee experience directly influences the customer experience. The app has a high rank on review websites and got the Best Value award from Capterra among Customer Journey Mapping Tools Software (2020).

UXPressia offers a free version with limited functionality and a paid one for $24 a month. The paid version allows many team members to work on the project at a time.

With Smaply, you can create a customer journey map from scratch or use one of the templates based on different types of cjms: service blueprint, communication journey, empathy journey map, and comparison between different personas. The interface is clean and minimalist. The template is black and white and basic, so adding the right colors and visual effects is up to you.

Smaply is another cloud-based tool. Other than visualizing customer journey maps, you can create personas, and stakeholders maps. The price is $25/month, and a free trial is available.

Custellence

The distinct feature of Custellence is that it emphasizes the use of the customer journey map as a change plan. You can mark right away what needs to be removed or created: great feature to remind you that cjm is about finding weak points and improving, not just visualization of data.

The templates are very detailed and each is tailored for a specific kind of business. Take a look at this template for customer journey map of retail: numerous lines, and each of them has a few sub-lanes to make your map as detailed as possible.

This is a web app and the price is higher than the competitors’. The free version allows you to make only one map without exporting it. Paid plans start at $30/month.

Miro is a very versatile tool, suitable not only for customer journey maps, but also for agile, retrospectives, mood boards, and many more. Miro is a digital whiteboard.

The website offers various templates for different uses. They are rather basic (like an actual whiteboard), but the service gives lots of possibilities for customizing. In our agency , we use Miro often for visualizing customer journey maps, as it has a perfect balance of the default instruments and the flexibility of their use.

The software is cloud-based. If you would use it only for customer journey maps, the free version with 3 boards would probably be enough. If you decide to use it for other projects, it is only $10/month and has many integration options.

Take a look at this template to see what your cjm may look like in Miro.

Visio is a diagram-building tool by Microsoft. Paid options start at $5 per month (only web app) and go up to $15 per month (web and desktop app). The service is built on Microsoft cloud, and the desktop version is not available for Mac.

Apart from customer journey maps, Visio is great for flowcharts, Gantt charts, and all sorts of diagrams. See this template for Visio .

Like Visio, Gliffy is suitable for workflows and diagrams as well as customer journey maps. The templates are rather basic and to make a detailed cjm, you have to add parameters and metrics on your own.

The paid version is $7.99 per month (cheaper if you purchase it for a team). The free version allows only a limited amount of graphs. Also note that the documents created in the free version are public, so if you need privacy, opt for another version.

Comparison Table

Collecting Feedback Software

A simple customer journey map is built based on research and interviews with users. However, if you want to go further with collecting data, test the insights of your cjm, and see how the changes work, you may need special software that helps collecting and analyzing feedback.

In this article, we focus on the tools for visualization, but if you are serious about improving customer experience, check out Clarabridge and CXsuite.

There are a bunch of tools for visualization of customer journey maps, apart from the few ones listed in this article. Some of those you already have at hand. Some you’ve used numerous times before with different objectives. We have collected some good examples of customer journey maps so you can see which one works best for your type of business.

Experts in customer journey mapping claim that the pretty picture is not the main focus, rather it is the process that drives changes. However, a nice visualization is always a plus.

Now that you know more about your customers, learn how to make them happier with these 6 strategies for customer success .

Masha Panchenko

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Customer journey map

This basic customer journey map template can help you:

• Visualize the journey a customer takes with a product or service.
• Map out different customer touchpoints.
• Collaborate with colleagues.

Open this template to view a detailed example of a basic customer journey map that you can customize to your use case.

Related templates

User story map with swimlanes.

Warehouse floor plan

Office layout by dept. and OS

User persona card

Service Design Show

Make Business Human

How to create a Customer Journey Map in 30 minutes or less

Journey Mapping for Busy People

Published in: Journey Mapping / Last update: July 2020

I get it. You need a customer journey map, and you need one now .

Whether you're new to customer journey mapping and just want to get a quick taste for what this is all about...

Or you're a veteran with a team meeting tomorrow, and you don't want to show up empty handed...

Sometimes, you just don't have the time to go through every stage of the journey mapping process. And frankly, sometimes you don't need to.

This article will help you create a journey map in 30 minutes or less and make sure you don't skip the key steps.

Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.

Ready? Let's do this!

A Journey Mapping bootcamp

Here is a bit of context to put the journey map you're going to create into perspective.

If you're really in a hurry and want to start mapping right now, just scroll down to the next section and come back here later.

To get a journey map out in half an hour, you're going to skip a lot of steps in the process. It's just going to be the bare essentials.

You're going to skip important questions like: Why am I creating this journey map ( here are 5 smart reasons )? For whom am I creating it? What are we going to do with it once it's there?

Usually, my strong advice is to not skip these questions. Go slow to go fast is the best approach in most journey mapping scenarios. But hey, sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.

So, can you even realistically create a valuable customer journey map in 30 minutes?

Or will it just be a waste of your time in the end?

To answer this, you must keep in mind that customer journey mapping should always be an ongoing activity as explained in the Practical Guide .

But there's always a starting point in this ongoing activity. Let this starting point be the map that you're going to create now.

This journey map is going to be your Shitty First Draft (SFD). And SFDs are super useful as long as you know that they're SFDs. 🙂

This SFD is going to primarily purge what's in your head already. It’s a brain dump.

We do this because it's much easier to talk about your customer journey when it's in front of you rather than hidden in your head.

Pro tip: Add the letters SFD to the title of your map, e.g., "Going through the checkout journey map (SFD)." It sparks curiosity. When people start asking questions about it, you'll get the chance to explain what it is.

Which journey mapping tool should I use?

The other question we need to answer before we start mapping is: Which tool should we use?

This question is critical because if we pick the wrong tool, we'll never be able to create a journey map in 30 minutes.

So here is my take:

If you're already using a professional journey mapping tool like Custellence, UXPressia or Smaply, go ahead and use that.

Otherwise, just stick with the trusted sticky notes. For an SFD, these are more than adequate.

Just don't go with tools like PowerPoint, InDesign or Visio, even if you have secret ninja skills.

What about using a premade journey map template ?

Yes, templates can be really helpful if you're short on time.

We've discussed quite a few journey map templates in this overview.

There's just a big caveat to using templates: The template has to be really simple and contain just a few elements. If not, you'll lose yourself in the details while the clock is ticking.

So, your template will most likely be so simple that you can just as well create the structure yourself.

Step 1: Map the stages

Let’s use getting a haircut at the local barbershop as our example journey.

Photo by Guus Baggermans on Unsplash

The first thing we're going to do is create our Customer Lifecycle lane and divide our journey into 3 stages: 1) before, 2) during and 3) after the service encounter.

These 3 stages will be the uppermost lane in our map.

That's enough for now. You can always expand and elaborate later.

Start your map with the Customer Lifecycle lane

Step 2: Map the activities & situations.

Now we're going to add a second lane below the stages lane we've just created.

In this second lane, we're going to map Customer Activities & Situations. These are basically what your customer is doing in the different stages of the journey.

The first card you're going to add is the moment of interaction with your service.

In our example this could be something like: sitting in the chair and chatting with the barber.

You add this card to your map below the during stage. It should be exactly in the middle of your map.

Add your first activities card below the during stage (click to enlarge)

From this first card, we're going to work our way back. We do this by naming 3–5 moments that happen before this interaction.

It could be moments like:

• Getting invited to speak at a conference
• Thinking about getting a haircut
• Booking the appointment
• Checking if there are no delays through WhatsApp
• Taking the bike to the barber

The examples above all fall into the before stage of the journey.

We could just as well define some moments in the during stage that happen before the actual haircut, for instance, waiting in the shop for the barber to be ready. But I never arrive early at my barber... 😉

About 3 to 5 cards in the before stage is enough for now

After this, we're going to repeat the process. This time, look forward in the journey and name 3–5 moments in the experience:

• Paying the bill
• Feeling the leftover hair itching
• Receiving compliments from your spouse

Naming moments that happen further on in the journey can be a bit more challenging. For now, just make sure you have at least 1 customer activity mapped in the after stage. Again, you'll be able to expand later.

Your journey map should look similar to the image below.

The completed Customer Activities and Situations lane (click to enlarge)

Pro tip: You'll get major bonus points when you create a quick drawing for each moment instead of just describing it in text.

If you're still not quite sure what you should add to this lane, take a look at A Practical Customer Journey Mapping Guide for CX Professionals , which covers this more in depth.

Step 3: Map the needs.

We're on Step 3 in the process: mapping the Customer Needs.

This should be quite straightforward, if you know the customer going through the journey well enough.

Hint: You probably don't, even if you think you do. Really, do some research.

But since I'm mapping my own journey to the barbershop in this example, I can probably say a thing or two about my needs.

In real journey mapping projects, you are never your own customer. Even if you are. Promise me you won't make this mistake.

Did you add the third layer in your map called Customer Needs ? Good!

Below each customer activity, try to write down the most important need in that moment.

Write down these needs regardless of whether this need is currently fulfilled by your service or not . This is very important.

Let's go back to the barbershop, shall we?

I'm someone who highly values a personal approach during the service, but I hate inefficiencies in the process leading up to it.

So, going over the customer activities we mapped in Step 2, we could describe my needs as follows:

• I want to book this appointment in 2 minutes, on my own schedule. Even if it's 11:00 p.m. and I'm already half asleep, thinking about that upcoming conference.
• The day of the appointment, I want to know up front if there are any delays so I can plan my trip accordingly. Waiting at the barbershop isn't my favorite pastime.
• When I come through the door, I like to feel recognized as a customer. Even though they cut and shave dozens of clients (and I'm certainly not their biggest), a "Hi, Marc, good to see you back!" means a lot.
• It's nice when during the cut the barber and I can continue talking about the topics we discussed last time, rather than going over the weather or vacation plans.

As you can see, we have not described a need for every card in the customer activity lane. That's okay for now.

Our goal here is to capture the needs that stand out and are typical for me as a customer.

At this point, our journey map looks like the image below.

Mapping the customer needs onto activities and situations (click to enlarge)

You might be thinking: But how can I describe the customer needs in the stage when I haven't done the research? Excellent point. Thanks for bringing this up!

The answer is simple.

When we have 30 minutes to create a journey map, we're going to make a lot of assumptions based on our prior experience.

My tip here is to be very explicit about the assumptions you make.

Pro tip: You could add scores ranging from 1–10 to each customer need card, defining how strongly this customer need is based on research.

A score of 1 means that it's a total assumption. A 10 means that you have a big stack of customer interviews that support this need.

If you want to learn more about how to define good customer needs, head over to the Practical Guide .

Step 4: Map the experience.

The final lane of information we're going to add is Customer Experience.

This customer experience layer is the iconic curved line that you (should) see in every journey map.

In this lane we're going to map how satisfied or unsatisfied the customer is at each moment in the journey.

This is going to be sort of a benchmark on how well our service is performing in terms of fulfilling the needs of our customer.

Let's go over each moment in the Customer Activities & Situations lane and think about the actual service we are providing.

How does our service at that specific moment stack up to the customer needs we've identified in the previous step?

If we think that we're doing a good job of satisfying the needs, we add a point high on the curved line. If we think we’re failing to do so, it's a low point on the line.

Do this for at least 3–5 moments in the journey. Try to pick the moments that are most important to your customer.

Finally, mark as neutral those moments for which we haven't yet described a customer need.

How will we know if we're doing a good job? For now, we'll have to make assumptions again.

Once we move to version 2.0 of this SFD, we're going to back up our claims with some proper user research.

Going over the needs in our visit to the barbershop, these would be some of the highlights regarding the customer experience:

• This barber allows me to book the appointment through an online system. I'm happy.
• They send a reminder and updates through WhatsApp on the day of the appointment. This reduces the risk that I'll be waiting in the shop.
• The barber greets me by name and recalls our previous chat. I’m not sure how he remembers since I only visit once every 4–6 weeks. Maybe he keeps a secret diary.

These are all moments where I'm really satisfied with the service. And to be honest, for me, there's not a single moment in this journey where I'm truly unsatisfied.

So, our Customer Experience lane looks something like this now:

The Customer Experience is visualised as a curved lane in the journey map (click to enlarge)

Now comes the final and critical step in our journey mapping process.

We need to go over the moments where we've highlighted the customer experience with either a very satisfied or unsatisfied customer.

Now describe why our customer is satisfied or unsatisfied at that specific moment.

To find the answer to this question, we must go back to the Customer Needs.

In the barbershop example, booking the appointment online caters to my need for efficiency, as do the reminders through WhatsApp.

Hearing my name the moment I walk through the door makes me feel at home and plays on the personal touch that I value.

When we fail to describe the reason why our customer is satisfied or unsatisfied, our Customer Experience lane will just be a pretty curved line without much business value.

Again, we've skipped a lot of steps. But this is one step you can't do without.

Our final customer journey map now looks like this:

Every journey map should have these fundamental elements

3, 2...1, stop the ⏰!!

What can I do with this journey map?

Congratulations on making it this far! You've just taken a very important step in your journey mapping journey.

Now comes the big question: What can you do with a journey map that you've created in 30 minutes (or less)?

You've actually got a few good options:

• Use the journey map as a conversation tool to gather input and get feedback from the people around you.
• It's a great way to check your assumptions and see if there's already some internal research data available on this journey.
• Connect the customer journey to your business . Start adding the internal systems and processes to the journey map in a backstage lane.
• Use the map as a starting point to get stakeholders thinking about the needs of customers rather than internal processes.

I'm sure that you'll find other useful applications for your SFD.

It was Dennis Boyle (employee #4 at IDEO) who said: " Never go to a meeting without a prototype ."

So, remember that it's always better to bring a shitty first draft to your next meeting than just some ideas.

Do I need to create a persona or customer profile first?

Creating an "anonymous" journey map is one of the most common journey mapping mistakes .

And when you think about it, you can't have a customer journey without a customer.

In our journey mapping process, we didn’t have the time to create a customer profile, persona, or empathy map.

But we of course had a customer in mind the whole time. We couldn't have described the customer needs otherwise, right?

These customer needs already paint a picture of this customer, albeit a very crude one.

Deeply understanding the customer who is going through the journey is a key factor in getting value out of your map.

We only skipped this step due to our very strict time constraints.

So, now that we're done with our SFD, spend another 15 minutes to describe your customer in a basic empathy map .

Miro.com is a nice tool to quickly create an Empathy Map

Just like with our journey map, the goal with this empathy map is not to be complete.

The goal is to get our assumptions about who the customer is out of our heads and onto paper so that we can have a more structured conversation.

Creating Assumption-based Journey Maps

I'd argue that user research is the most important thing in the journey mapping process (and I'm not the only one as you'll see in the video below).

And still, we've created a journey map based on assumptions. What's going on?

Assumption-based maps can actually be very useful in order to get resources for user research.

Imagine that you have to explain to your manager that you want to conduct some interviews or do a field study before creating the journey map.

You know that even if you think you know who your customers are and what they need, you probably don't. Even if you've been with the company for 10 years.

Your manager, on the other hand, might feel that there's already enough knowledge within the organization.

But you want to literally point to the customer journey and start asking questions like: Do we really know what happens in this part? How confident are we about how the customer feels at this moment?

With a tangible map, it becomes much easier to agree on the current blind spots and make your case to invest in some proper user research.

When creating an assumption-based journey map, you just have to be very mindful about the assumptions you make.

Pro tip: Make your assumptions explicit by assigning a confidence score to each card in the map.

And don't forget that user research isn't just a way to validate your assumptions. It's also a way to explore and discover customer needs that you didn't see before.

Check out this video to learn more about how much research you need to create meaningful journey maps.

Recommended Next Steps

Congratulations! You've just taken a very important step toward putting customers at the heart of your organization.

What's next? Start using the map!

Share it with people. Get feedback. Have discussions about the contents.

As you start having these conversations, you'll see that there's still much to explore and improve.

You'll run into questions like:

Which journey should I map first? And which customer should I pick? Where does the journey start and end?

These are questions that you'll need to answer in order to take your journey maps to the next level.

Check out the Customer Journey Mapping Essentials Masterclass , which will get you up to speed on these questions in no time.

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• Customer Journey Map Templates

Get started with free templates to visualize customers' end to end journey. Understand key interactions of your product and share with your teammates with ease.

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Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Create customer journey maps to analyze the purchase path of your customers with the templates and examples of the online editor edit.org.

Create a map to analyze, understand and communicate your customer's customer journey with editable online templates from Edit.org

What is a Customer Journey Map?

It is a visual scheme that serves to visualize the steps that your clients follow from when they discover your product or service until they are regular clients and even recommend it to other people.

It is very useful to see what contact points there are and therefore take them into account for possible analysis and improvement.

A Customer Journey Map consists of 3 very important initial phases (plus 2 other phases after the acquisition of your products or contracting your services):

• Awareness (discovery). It is the moment when the potential customers discovers the existence of your product or service, which solves their problem or responds to their need.
• Consideration. It is the phase in which the person evaluates and compares your proposal.
• Acquisition (decides to purchase or not). It is the stage where he buys your product or hire your service (or decides not to and you lose this sales opportunity).
• Service (experience) or consumption. The customer makes use or consumes what is purchased.
• Loyalty or Advocady (retention and recommendation). The consumer repeats his experience, he is a satisfied customer and also prescribes your products and services to others like him.

Create a Customer Journey to analyze the contact points with your customers

Would you like to improve the shopping experience of your customers? Creating a Customer Journey Map will help you to be more aware of how many points of interaction with your company there are in each phase, with the aim of optimizing, modifying, eliminating or taking the appropriate action, with the objective to improve sales or the customer or user experience (UX).

The visualization of this map is a representation of the touchpoints with your company, and can be positive or generate friction.

To register the customers feedback for each touchpoint of the map is very practical to detect areas for improvement.

Do you want to create your own Customer Journey? Use the templates of our graphic editor to create how many versions you need for your startup or business. We explain as below.

How to design an editable journey map

In a few minutes you can have your own personalized Customer Journey downloaded to your device.

Follow these steps:

• Click on any image in this article to enter the editor
• Select the Customer Journey Map template you want to edit
• Customize the touchpoints and its text fields
• Save changes online
• Download your free custom graphic in JPG, PNG or PDF

Use editable Customer Journey templates to improve your marketing

What is a Customer Journey Map for? The key to this diagram is that you can activate it, it is to decide, it is a reflection of reality and therefore you can do tests by modifying the contact points.

We recommend that you make a new version every time you make a change in your company. Measuring the results will let you know which version works best. For example, you can create satisfaction surveys, or measure the results of sales conversion or even the evaluation of the consumer experience and thus know if it is improving or not.

Enter now the online editor and create your personalized Customer Journey Map for your business.

See the designs