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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Canvas Explained

Mapping out a customer journey canvas is the best way to understand how to meet the customer’s needs. A basic way to diagram this is by using a customer journey . The customer journey canvas helps make things real. If you want to map out the different stages in the customer journey and the related user experience, keep reading to learn how to best use a customer journey canvas.

What Is a Customer Journey Canvas?

A customer journey canvas is a board that documents the user’s journey through your product/service. It is similar to a storyboard and maps out your user’s journey through different stages and emotions.

Customer journey canvases are similar to Customer Journey Map s but diagram elements on the surface level before diving deeper. In this template, you use sticky notes to build out customers experience and develop an understanding of areas where customer satisfaction is achieved.

How to Build a Customer Journey Canvas

Customer journeys are a straightforward way to define your customer’s journey and main expectations. In doing this, there are a couple of necessary stages you need to incorporate to accurately display their customer experience . We’ve gathered them here so you can build your own customer journey canvas.

Target Persona

The first stage in creating a customer journey canvas highlights the user persona you are targeting. Defining your persona is vital because it will narrow what you focus on, the user’s goals, and how you will meet them.  The persona can help you identify and empathize with a customer segment. Start with individual clients you know, not generic customer segments.

LEARN ABOUT: Customer Journey Mapping Tools

If you have a predefined persona, you can insert it here, and if you need to create one, you can use a persona map.

The stages section is where you list each stage in the customer’s journey as they interact with your products and services. These stages should be very descriptive and record the user’s actions in their route to completion.

These stages should be critical in the journey but also to the customer. If there is a misalignment between what is important to the customer and what is emphasized in the product, this is a place you need to rethink your journey.

Customer Needs

The customer needs section is very important and asks you to specify what the customer requires from this stage of their interaction. This will mainly manifest in their actions, and it’s essential to look at what they do concerning their needs.

Additionally, two things are critical to emphasize when analyzing customer needs: intention and expectation.

Customer intention is not only the actions they take en route to completion but the reasons behind their actions. What motivates each action? Why do they do what they do?

When you analyze intention, you must also consider expectations. When the user does something, what result are they expecting? Does this line up with their intentions?

Addressing intention and expectation is vital to breaking down the customer’s needs.

• Customer Experience

Lastly, based on the stages and needs, you must analyze the customer’s overall experience. This process is mainly an emotional analysis, stating if they are happy, neutral, or dissatisfied.  This real customer data is usually gathered through user research and product feedback.

After you map out this data, you will know where your customer is happy with the product and what pieces require improvement. Understanding this information is key to building a successful and trustworthy brand, and using a customer journey is the first step in that journey.

Customer Journey Canvas Template

Below we are providing you with a template that can serve as an example for you to start creating your own Customer Journey Map and identify the points to improve at each point of contact with the customer.

Download the customer journey canvas here

Customer Journey Canvas Tips

If you haven’t mapped out a customer journey, doing so can feel daunting. Follow these tips to make sure you create a practical customer journey canvas.

Do Your Research

Doing research is the core of everything that follows in a customer journey canvas. You cannot simply map out what you think the customer experiences. You need to know, from them, what the customer feels and goes through in order to address their needs adequately.

When creating a customer journey canvas, don’t skimp on your research.

Focus on a Persona

When creating a journey map, it can be easy to slip up and focus on a broad user base. For it to be effective, you have to do just the opposite.

Instead of focusing on a large group of users, it’s usually more effective to target a specific persona and alleviate their issues. Unless you have a large group of users expressing similar concerns, it’s usually best to start narrow and expand from there.

Try Mapping Your Assumptions

If you’re struggling to focus your map on your persona, it might be because your assumptions are getting in the way. As we previously mentioned, it’s dangerous to create these maps based on assumptions because they will rarely be accurate.

If this is the case, try creating another row for your personal/shared assumptions.  This will help you compare them to the actual customer’s point of view and identify any discrepancies.

Don’t Stop at Customer Needs

The canvas stops here, but the optimization shouldn’t. After you’ve identified what the customer needs and where their experience is lacking, ensure that you conduct a brainstorming session to make each stage better. This can be done on the same board or as a different exercise, but each effectively creates the next steps for auditing your customer journey.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

If you need to audit your customer experience, a customer journey canvas is the perfect first step. To learn more about journey mapping , check out our other articles about improving CX.

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Top 5 Customer Journey Mapping Tools (+ Templates)

As the digital world continues to change, you must know more about your customer's journey. Customer Journey maps help you see and analyze how customers interact with your brand. You can improve marketing strategies and customer experiences using them. Let's explore customer journey mapping tools and top templates that you can use to understand customer behavior better and create customer-centric products and services.

A customer journey map is a visual storyline of a customer's experience with a brand—from initial contact to long-term engagement. Such maps are crucial for you to understand and improve customer interactions. With the right tools, creating these maps becomes easier and more effective. 

Explore the top five customer journey mapping tools and templates to streamline your design efforts and elevate the customer experience.

But first, let’s get into some basics. 

Why Use a Customer Journey Map?

Customer journey maps serve a specific purpose : to show customers' paths with your brand. They reveal insights into customer interactions. Let’s understand how customer journey maps contribute to a more customer-centric business approach.

Matt Snyder, Head of Product and Design at Hivewire, discusses the power of journey mapping.

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1. Enhance Customer Understanding

Creating a journey map fosters a deep understanding of your customers. You see their experience through their eyes. This insight helps you create a customer experience design and tailor services to their needs, which will ultimately lead to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Identify Pain Points

Mapping the customer journey highlights areas where customers face challenges. You can work on solutions as you identify these pain points. 

3. Boost Cross-Functional Collaboration

Journey maps bring various teams together, from marketing to product development . This collaboration ensures a cohesive strategy. It can enhance the consistency and quality of customer interactions across all touchpoints.

4. Informed Decisions Based on Real Data

Teams create customer journey maps based on real user data. This helps all stakeholders make informed, strategic decisions that are aligned to ensure a better match between what customers want and what the business offers.

5. Foster Innovation

Journey maps inspire innovation in customer experience. They reveal opportunities and spark new ideas that could lead to breakthroughs in brand engagement. This innovation shapes how you connect with your audience.

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Creating a journey map is a strategic process that unveils how customers interact with your brand. It provides a detailed overview of their experience, from initial contact to post-purchase engagement. This section guides you through the essential steps to craft a comprehensive customer journey map.

Define Your Map’s Business Goal : Determine the purpose of the map and its target audience. Focus on specific user experiences it aims to address.

Conduct Research : Gather data on customer experiences across all touchpoints. Collect statistical and anecdotal evidence using customer interviews , surveys , and social media insights.

Whether it’s an interview or a survey , the quality of the results depends on the quality of the questions. Watch William Hudson, UX expert and Author, discuss how to write good questions. 

Review Touchpoints and Channels : Identify all customer touchpoints and channels. Customers may make online bill payments or do other work through your app. 

Make a Persona : Create a customer persona where you understand customer actions, thoughts, feelings, and needs. You must identify barriers and annoyances.

Sketch the Journey : Combine all elements, including touchpoints, timescale, and persona. Illustrate the customer's path through these elements. Note down their emotions at each stage.

Iterate and Refine : Continuously improve your sketch with the aim of an ideal representation of the customer journey.

Share with Stakeholders : Ensure all stakeholders understand the map’s significance. It helps you enhance customer experiences and benefit the organization.

Tools and Software for Customer Journey Mapping

The right tools for customer journey mapping can make a significant difference. We’ll discuss the top five tools and provide a starter template for each tool to help you get started. This synergy ensures you extract maximum value from the tool and its accompanying template. Let's explore some of the top options available.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

© ClickUp, Fair Use

ClickUp stands out for crafting outstanding customer journey maps. You can visualize your workflow using its whiteboard tool and mind map creator. These tools allow you to map out every stage of your customer's journey, including awareness, purchase, repeat buying, and churn.

Additionally, ClickUp provides a variety of pre-made templates for customer journey maps. This saves time and effort. The Mind Maps feature lets you set up detailed workflows and approval processes. It simplifies the task of assigning dependencies for each step.

Best Features

Whiteboard to visualize ideas.

Mind Map Maker for dynamic outlines and flowcharts.

Customizable templates for different use cases.

Variety of views for task management and journey mapping.

Limitations

Numerous customizations can be overwhelming. 

A steep learning curve for new users.

Free Forever plan.

Unlimited: $7/month per user.

Business: $12/month per user.

Enterprise: Custom pricing.

ClickUp’s Customer Journey Map Template

ClickUp's customer journey map template helps teams visualize the customer's path. It allows teams to track actions, touchpoints, and experiences for strategic improvements. This tool fosters collaboration, as team leads can oversee the journey for a seamless customer experience from awareness to conversion.

Get the template

© Miro, Fair Use

Miro is a versatile digital whiteboarding platform. It excels in facilitating remote collaboration across teams. You can use Miro for brainstorming , project planning, and customer journey mapping. Its intuitive interface and extensive template library make it a popular choice.

Expansive template library for various use cases.

Real-time collaboration tools for product teams and cross-functional stakeholders. 

Integration with popular apps like Slack, Microsoft Team and Jira.

Infinite Canvas offers vast space for mapping complex journeys.

New users may find using Mitro overwhelming due to its extensive features.

Occasional lag with larger boards or when many users collaborate.

Limited customization options in templates.

Basic: Free with limited features.

Starter: $8/month per user.

Business: $16/month per user.

Enterprise: Custom pricing for comprehensive needs.

Miro’s Customer Journey Map Template

This Miro template features a comprehensive customer journey map. It helps teams capture key goals, struggles, actions, touchpoints, and customer feelings. Miro enables collaborative editing and brainstorming to support the process. It makes the mapping exercise highly interactive and efficient.

3. Figjam by Figma

© Figma, Fair Use

Figjam by Figma is an excellent tool for collaborative interface design and prototyping . It lets people and teams create designs from scratch, including customer journey maps. 

This tool has a free whiteboarding feature. It's great for sketching designs and wireframes . While mainly for UI / UX design , it stands differently than other customer journey mapping tools.

Modern pen tool for precise design.

Plugins for automating tasks.

Flexible styles and accessible libraries.

Easy export options for sharing designs.

No offline accessibility .

Difficulty in finding specific resources in the community section.

Limited image manipulation options when you create customer journey maps.

Free plan available.

Professional: $12/month per editor.

Organization: $45/month per editor.

Enterprise: $75/month per editor. 

Figjam by Figma’s Customer Journey Map Template

This FigJam template includes a profile section that ensures teams focus on the user. Key sections capture user actions, goals, emotions, opportunities, and challenges. You can document the learnings at the end and add insights for future strategies.

4. Lucidchart

© Lucidchart, Fair Use

Lucidchart is an advanced diagramming tool that creates customer journey maps. It enables teams to collaborate and visualize complex processes, systems, and customer interactions. 

Integrates data into diagrams for dynamic mapping.

Generates visual representations from data.

Compatible with Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack, and more.

Visualization filters to highlight specific parts of the customer journey.

Saves and shares customer personas and journey maps.

Performance lags with large, complex diagrams.

Steep learning curve compared to simpler alternatives.

Issues with low-resolution exports.

Free: $0, offers basic features.

Individual: $7.95/month per user for more advanced capabilities.

Team: $9/month per user, designed for team collaboration.

Enterprise: Custom pricing, suitable for larger organizations with specific needs.

Lucidchart’s Customer Journey Map Template

The Lucidchart template features a persona profile, scenarios , and expectations. Lucidchart offers tools like shape libraries, text formatting options, and diagram key creation for a clear, structured journey visualization in the template.

5. UXpressia

©UXpressia, Fair Use

UXpressia is a leading UX tool for creating customer journey maps, personas, and impact journey maps. It enables individuals and teams to collaborate in real-time. Also, UXpressia offers interactive online courses to help teams with their journey-mapping initiatives. 

It has 70+ customer journey maps, personas, and impact map templates. 

It has a big list of features to make small and big/complex journey maps.

Comes with integrated web analytics to detail the customer experience.

Its presentation mode displays journey maps online.

Allows exports with custom branding.

Limited features and unintuitive workflow

Steep learning curve

Starter: $16/month per user

Pro: $36/month per user

Enterprise: Contact the UXPressia sales team for pricing

UXpressia’s Customer Journey Map Template

UXpressia offers a blank canvas for a customer journey map segmented into stages like Aware, Join, Use, Develop, and Leave. It's structured to define user goals , processes, channels, problems, and experiences. The design encourages adding personas for tailored journey mapping. You can change the positioning of stages and add different colors to each stage. 

Design Your Own Customer Journey Map

 Use this five-step approach to map your customer’s experience:

Add a Persona : You can create a persona representing a typical customer. Add detailed information about this persona at the top of the map. Include their demographics and characteristics relevant to the journey.

Add Phases : Divide the customer experience into key segments or phases. Each phase column will include the persona's thoughts and actions later.

Add Actions : Next, detail the actions and thoughts of the persona in each phase based on user research findings.

Add Trends : Here, you include quantitative measures that show how the experience changes over time. These could be survey results or any relevant data that suggests fluctuations in the journey.

Add Narrative Facts : This step uses qualitative and quantitative elements from user research. You can add quotes from the persona or significant data points explaining the highs and lows in the journey. You may include any roadblocks the customer faces.

You can use the IxDF Customer Journey Map Template as a handy reference to quickly design your map.

This template helps you map crucial parts of the customer journey to make informed design decisions. It keeps the process simple and uses standard data representation methods.

Customer journey maps don’t need to follow a specific format; you can tailor them to suit your project. Here’s another example, along with a blank template to inspire your map.

The Take Away

Customer journey maps help teams understand the customer's experience and reveal pain points, emotions, and interactions.  Use these maps to: 

Understand customer experiences to tailor strategies for each stage of their journey.

Consider customer emotions and pain points as significant influencers in their decision-making.

As a visual tool to capture these insights and guide business strategies.

To optimize customer experiences or identify new business opportunities.

These insights help you create a delightful and compelling customer journey.

Where to Learn More

The topic Customer Journey Map: Definition & Process .

Take our course Journey Mapping

Read Hubspot’s Whitepaper on the Customer Journey Map

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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.

Leverage color coding.

Color is a powerful design element that can help you group like ideas. You can assign different hues to the stages of your customer journey or to certain touchpoints. This helps you organize information visually and draw attention to the most important parts of your map.

Avoid clutter to create balance.

To reiterate, everyone skims. And just like you want to avoid too much text, you want to avoid a page filled with color, icons, words, and other elements. Adequate whitespace will help keep your document organized.

Maintain consistency.

Your customer journey map should be consistent throughout. Pick a font family, color palette, and font sizes. Then, make sure you follow these guidelines throughout your journey map. Bonus points if your elements align with your company branding.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot’s Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

• Buyer’s Journey Template.
• Current State Template.
• Lead Nurturing Mapping Template.
• Future State Template.
• A Day in the Customer’s Life Template.
• Customer Churn Mapping Template.
• Customer Support Blueprint Template.

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

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

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

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

3 Steps of a successful Customer Journey Map – free template included

This post is also available in: German

If you’re in the 50% of the organizations planning to invest more in customer experience innovations, the first step is identifying the key touchpoints on your customer’s journey. Once you’ve identified those touchpoints, you can analyze each of them, identifying room for improvement to ultimately boost your customer retention.

Understanding the customer journey becomes much easier when laid out visually . This is where a customer journey map template comes into play. Use our free template and read on for a simple guide on how to complete it online.

What is the Customer Journey? [2023 updated]

A customer journey is a roadmap that highlights all the experiences a customer has when interacting with your company. This journey documents the full experience of being a customer. It starts with initial awareness all the way through to post-purchase retention and every side-step, backtrack and hurdle in between.

Generating a positive customer experience boils down to ensuring that they have an equally positive experience at every moment. Just one negative experience can undo other positive experiences throughout the journey.

What is a customer journey map?

The customer journey map is a visual story-telling aid that maps the experience of customers. Gain a better understanding of the buying experience by visualizing it through the eyes of your customers.

Use the map to illustrate the customer’s attitudes and feelings at each touchpoint. This information can be sourced from customer satisfaction surveys, customer support tickets and emails, product or feature requests, group discussions, or from staff who deal with customers regularly.

How to create a customer journey map using a template

There are a few important steps you need to take before you start filling in the template, to ensure your map is as accurate as possible.

Use template

Step 1: Information Gathering

Gather information you’ve already gathered through user research or feedback surveys. If you find that your data is lacking, delay your mapping until you have collected some more relevant, complete data through surveys or staff feedback.

This data is used to:

• Identify the main touchpoints at each of the five stages
• Gain preliminary insights and feedback
• Create a list of actions performed by your customer at each stage

Step 2: Create a user persona

A user persona is a fictional character that represents the goals and behaviors of your average user. If you haven’t created one yet, t his article will guide you through the process. You should include basic demographic information, as well as a description of their needs and goals, uses of your products, and pain points.

Step 3: Begin mapping

Now it’s time to open the customer journey map template and begin filling it in.

Sections of the customer journey map template

We’ve created a simple, easy-to-use collaborative template that you can use to create your own customer journey map.

The template is broken down into the five key stages on the customer journey:

• Awareness: advertising, social media, blogs, and emails.
• Consideration: website, FAQs, sales
• Acquisition: homepage layout, customer service, product range, photography quality, 
• Service: personalization, chat-bot interactions, load speed, payment options, packaging, postage, product quality and price.
• Retention: product quality, follow-up offers, loyalty memberships, returns process, reviews.

Pro tip: Run a quick Google search of your business to see all the pages that mention you. Then check your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.

Within each of these stages, you should consider the following questions in order to fully understand your customers.

Customer goals

What do users want to accomplish in this stage?

Customer actions

Describe which actions users need to do to reach the goals.

Touchpoints and channels

How do users get information to make a decision or reach goals?

Customer thoughts

What are users thinking or expecting during these actions?

Overall customer experience

What are the users’ feelings in this stage? (e.g.: happy, frustrated)

Pain points

What are the problems or negative experiences that users are facing in this stage?

Opportunities to improve

How can we help users to reach the goal? Identify opportunities that could be improved or insights.

Understanding the typical customer journey and being able to communicate it visually will greatly improve not only the experience of the customer but also your products and services.

Example of a customer journey map

Using the customer journey map template, we’ve created an example of the typical customer journey in an e-commerce store. Check it out below and use it to inspire your customer journey.

Now you’ve created your customer journey map in Conceptboard, share it with your marketing and sales departments, customer service staff, managers and key stakeholders. Anyone who is involved with customers has the ability to act on this information to improve your customers experience .

Keep learning

If you’re interested in learning more about customer experience, read about the Customer Persona ,  Customer Empathy Map and the Value Proposition canvas .

Conceptboard is the perfect canvas for your team to collaborate together on, wherever you are in the world. Give it a try for free today.

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5 Comments . Leave new

Thank you. Customer Journey map is great tool. How can I get this map as template in Conceptboard?

Hi there, I am glad you found this article very useful! Unfortunately, I cannot make this board public, so you cannot use this as a template. Definitely a good idea to keep in mind for future articles. Thanks!

I just wanted to let you know that this board can now be found as a template. Check out the Mapping out a Customer Journey: Part 2 + Template blog post and find the template! Try it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks a lot for posting this. I found this very informative. Excellent job.

Very insightful as well as reflective. Well said and very helpful tips.! Thank you so much!

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Customer Journey Map (2024): How-to & Examples [+ Template]

Home » Customer Journey Map   | 🕑 

Gust de Backer

November 10, 2023.

The Customer Journey is the process your customers go through with your company. This then covers the first to last interaction someone has with your company.

Many companies do not have a map of how their customers orient, what they care about or when the company comes into the potential buyer’s mind.

Not having enough mapping of the Customer Journey puts you at risk of having, perhaps unknowingly, negative touchpoints with your (potential) customer.

I’m going to show you:

• What the Customer Journey is
• How to create your Customer Journey
• And what good examples of a Customer Journey are

Let’s get started…

Table of Contents

What is the Customer Journey?

The Customer Journey is the process that maps every interaction with your brand:

The first interaction someone has with your brand is the beginning of the Customer Journey. If you find yourself in a niche market, it can also be interesting to map interactions with your niche.

The Customer Journey for B2B and B2C often looks quite different:

The Customer Journey is relevant to any business, but particularly important for companies that:

• Are customer-centric
• Want to improve customer satisfaction
• Want to increase sales

In general, you often see in companies that the marketing department is responsible for ensuring that (potential) customers have a positive experience with the brand.

A nice trend you see is that marketing/growth teams are becoming more responsible for the entire funnel rather than just reaching and bringing in new customers.

7 Stages of the Customer Journey

There are different models you can use to map out the Customer Journey, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing:

Keep in mind the different roles of the Decision-making Unit , but essentially there are 7 steps you can include in the Customer Journey….

Your (potential) customer can have 2 types of needs:

• Latent need : the person does not yet know he needs something. If you are going to buy a car you are not yet directly concerned with insurance.
• Concrete need : the person knows they have a certain need, here it is important to be visible with your brand. For example, think of buying a phone when your old one is broken.

Every Customer Journey basically starts with a certain need.

In practice, you can encounter 5 types of customers in this:

• Unaware : don’t realize they have a problem or need.
• Problem Aware : realize they have a problem or need.
• Solution Aware : they know there are solutions to their problem or need, but they don’t know you.
• Product Aware : they know you, but haven’t bought you yet.
• Most Aware : brand ambassadors.

2. Orientation

The orientation process has changed a lot in recent years thanks to digitalization, which makes it extra important to map it out using research.

You want to be visible with your brand at least in the orientation phase so that you will eventually be included in the consideration phase .

Some examples of behavior in the orientation phase:

• Concrete keywords in search engines
• Asking acquaintances for their opinions
• Checking out inspiration platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok or Instagram

3. Consideration

In the consideration phase, we examine which option from the orientation phase best meets the customer’s wishes and needs.

Here it is important to know which decision criteria weigh most heavily for the customer; this should be properly researched.

Some examples of decision criteria:

• Brand awareness

4. Decision

In the decision phase, a product or service from a specific vendor is actually chosen.

There are a number of things that make it easier for the customer to choose your product or service:

• Make it easy to compare
• Provide a good selection in different options
• Offer a good deal, make sure your customer can’t say no
• Provide a smooth payment process
• Increase engagement in your brand by providing valuable content, offers and support

Provide as few distractions as possible during the decision phase, people who are still Googling “[company name] discount code” from the checkout want to be convinced to convert.

5. Delivery

After someone has become a customer, a product or service will need to be delivered.

Here the first moments of evaluation will be whether someone actually made the right choice to choose your company, product or service.

• Make sure you deliver on time and that your product arrives in the right condition or that your service is of high quality.
• Give clear instructions on how to use or what the added value of the service is.
• Provide good support if the customer experiences problems in using your product or service.

In the use phase it is important that customers get the most out of your product or service and that they really see the added value .

You can stimulate this in a number of ways:

• Include tutorials
• Measuring and communicating impact
• Aftersales phone call

This is the ultimate evaluation moment ; if your product or service did not help the customer well, there is little chance that they will make a repeat purchase or become a brand ambassador .

In any case, it is important to prevent people from talking badly about your brand, so make sure that in the earlier stages you already make sure that people who are not ideal customers for you are excluded and that you make sure that customers see the added value of your product or service.

It is 5 to 7 times cheaper to retain a customer than to bring in a new customer. This is precisely why it is so important to encourage loyalty.

Loyalty can be expressed in the number of repeat purchases or upsells a customer eventually makes with you. You can encourage this by offering valuable content, offers and support.

The goal is for people to remain loyal to your brand and not switch to a competitor or go out of business in the first place.

There are different forms of loyalty:

• Transactional Loyalty : getting customers to make repeat purchases by giving offers.
• Social Loyalty : interacting with your customers on social media, for example.
• Engagement Loyalty : you reward people who engage with you where you can receive points for subscribing to a newsletter, for example.
• Emotional Loyalty : if your brand is positively aligned with your customer’s emotions, you can’t get this kind of loyalty with offers. In this, you want to make people feel part of something.
• Behavioral Loyalty : a level of loyalty in which you want to make customers do something like buy higher volumes where you give a third product for free after buying 2 products.
• Advocacy Loyalty : you are going to reward people who recommend others to become customers of your brand.

Customer Journey Mapping

Download the Customer Journey Canvas:

Good choice! Check your e-mail for the resources...

How do you complete the Customer Journey Canvas?

Once you know who all is in your Decision-making Unit, you can start creating personas and empathy maps so you can better understand the behaviors, needs, problems and wants of those individuals.

Determine what questions you would like to have answered after doing your Customer Journey Mapping research. Some common questions are: – When do you experience X? – On a scale of 1 – 10, how much would you like a solution to X? – How much are you willing to pay for a solution on X? – How would you orient yourself to a solution for X? – What brands would you consider in a solution for X? – What should a solution for X satisfy you in? – How would you go about determining if the solution was effective?

The threshold in terms of time and cost is often somewhat lower for quantitative research than for qualitative research. In it, you can gather good insights about your target audience from a helicopter perspective. Consider, for example: – Questionnaire – Post-purchase survey – Exit-intent Survey – Search volume

Once you have a high-level validated understanding of your target audience, you can begin to supplement your findings at a detailed level using qualitative research. Consider: – Customer interviews – User tests – Screen recordings

If you have made your Customer Journey Map comprehensible, you have gathered many insights on which you can improve your Customer Journey. To prevent it from becoming a dusty document that is no longer looked at, it is important to determine follow-up actions and evaluate them accordingly.

Common mistakes

There are a number of mistakes that you often see passed in Customer Journey Mapping:

• Based on assumptions : often you see that a Customer Journey is completely based on assumptions and not on validated research.
• Wrong scope : critically determine in advance where you want your Customer Journey to begin and end otherwise you quickly lose focus and overview.
• No customer perspective : reason the Customer Journey from your persona or customer and not from your company.
• Inside-out : if you start from how you do it as a company you are not customer-centric and there is going to be a mismatch in how the customer experiences something and how your company does it. Make sure your Customer Journey is actually completed from the customer’s perspective.
• Stakeholders : it is important to involve all relevant stakeholders so that you start creating support for the Customer Journey.
• End goal : the Customer Journey is not an end goal, but a starting point. It is something that will continuously play out and needs to be changed.

And now you…

Now you’re armed with enough knowledge to start visualizing your Customer Journey.

I’m curious, what has been the biggest insight for you in understanding your target audience?

Let me know in a comment.

P.S. if you would like additional help you can email me at [email protected]

Frequently Asked Questions

The 7 steps of the Customer Journey are: need, orientation, consideration, decision, delivery, use and loyalty.

A customer journey is a term used in marketing and customer experience management to describe the path a customer takes through the stages of awareness, consideration, purchase and use of a product or service. The term can also be used to describe the path a potential customer takes.

A customer journey map is a visualization of a customer’s experience with a company, product or service. It begins when the customer first becomes aware of a need and ends at the level of loyalty. The map tracks all the contact moments the customer has with a brand, both online and offline. Customer journey maps can help companies understand where they need to make improvements to provide a better experience for their customers.

The Customer Journey for every business is different. It is important to research for your business what the most ideal customer journey is, in doing so you want to validate all assumptions.

I try to help business surpass their growth ceiling with my content.

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Customer Journey Map

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How to make a customer journey map?

Why make a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping is a powerful tool for visualizing your customers' experience. It enables you to empathize with your customers and set them up for success. But for the uninitiated, customer journey mapping can seem intimidating, time-consuming, or even useless. We’re here to tell you it’s far from that. With the right guidance, you can use customer journey map tools to form a foundational part of your business.

Let’s be real: modern customers expect a guaranteed high-quality experience. According to  a study  conducted by customer strategist and researcher Esteban Kolsky, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers regularly complains – and the rest simply stop doing business with the company altogether. Ultimately, around 91% of unhappy customers will simply leave without a complaint. That means your business can be missing out on the valuable feedback you need to correct mistakes that are costing you customers. 

This finding underlines just how crucial it is for companies to map their customer journeys. Simply put, by creating a  CJM , you are likely to unearth issues you might not hear about directly from the customers themselves. That kind of information can be beneficial to your company’s bottom line. Let’s talk about how to make a customer journey map that’s valuable to your organization – and not a waste of time.

Before you get started

If you’re thinking about creating a customer journey map without a specific, measurable goal in mind ... stop. Back up and pause a minute. Consider the reason you need a CJM at all. You’re going to need to spend some time articulating the challenges your team faces, so you can more efficiently seek answers in your CJM. 

CJMs are especially useful in scenarios like these:

You have a customer churn problem you’re looking to understand and solve. 

You’re trying to understand the buying patterns of different personas.

Your company is shifting approaches (e.g. from a bottoms-up to top-down, inside-out to outside-in, etc.). 

You’re about to release a new product or service.  

You’re looking to assign team resources to specific touchpoints within the journey.

Write down the problem or reason you need a CJM first, then consider what kind of business goal you’re looking to achieve. 

Customer journey maps are great for:

Identifying ways to engage or reach customers

Unearthing and addressing internal inefficiencies

Increasing conversions and ROI

We recommend making sure you’re setting measurable goals for your map before you get started. You can always adjust as you learn new things from your map, but it’s important to have an actual objective and KPI.

Common business KPIs to consider are:

Customer satisfaction scores

Retention or churn rates

Preliminary Customer Journey Mapping Work

Before you host a customer journey mapping workshop, it’s important to understand who needs to be involved, what tools you’ll be using to make your map, and what technology you’ll need to host your workshop.  Here are a few important steps to take before making your customer journey map. 

Map out your stakeholders

Your internal stakeholders are the people who will be impacted by the results of your customer journey map the most. Be sure to identify them before you get started, so you know who should be invited to your mapping workshop. Learn more in  The Complete Stakeholder Mapping Guide .

Set up your CJM Canvas

Many teams prefer to use pen and paper to create their journey map, and remote teams need digital tools. Regardless of how you host your workshop, you’re going to need to digitize your map at some point to share it across your organization.  Miro is a perfect visual canvas to use for your map – and a great tool when you don’t have the luxury of being in the same place as your team. Get started by opening up a board, and adding the templates you’ll need for your mapping exercise. 

Now, with your digital canvas open, write down your goals and objectives on the board for the team to review during your workshop. You can even create a quick introductory presentation on a few slides to talk through at the beginning of your workshop. 

Decide which CJM angle to take

There are different ways to structure your map, depending on your goal. Here are four common ways you can map your customer journey.

Current state : When you think of a CJM, you’re probably thinking of a current state map. These maps articulate the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience while interacting with your brand. Use current state maps to improve the customer journey.

Day-in-the-life : These maps illustrate the actions, thoughts, and emotions your customers experience during their daily activities – regardless of whether they involve your brand. Use these types of maps to gain a broader understanding of who your customers are and to expand possible applications of your product.

Future state : As the name suggests, future state maps allow you to visualize how your customers will experience future actions, thoughts, and emotions when interacting with your brand. Use these aspirational maps to illustrate your vision for your organization’s future.

Service blueprint : To create a service blueprint, start with a simplified version of one of the other types of maps. Then add in the factors that contribute to the customer’s experience of your brand—including people, technologies, processes, and policies. Use service blueprints to identify concrete steps you must take to achieve your desired customer journey in the future. For this, you may want to consider adding another template to your board.

Once you’re ready to get started, share the Miro board with your stakeholder team and get ready for your kickoff meeting.

Running your CJM workshop

Now that you’ve invited your stakeholders and shared your workshop board, it’s time to get started. When running a customer journey mapping workshop, we recommend breaking it out into a few specific chunks:

The setup. Kick the meeting off by engaging your team with ice breakers, then present the goals and objectives of the session.

The persona exercise. First, start by identifying your target customer and understanding their point of view. This is about building empathy. 

Mapping the customer journey. Now’s when you list out the touchpoints of your customer’s experience with your company. 

Testing. Once you’ve mapped out the journey, go through it yourself to better empathize with the customer and understand the hurdles they may face/

Iterate on the map. Once you start to notice gaps, or opportunities for improvement, test out ways you can iterate on and improve the map. 

After the session, make sure you gather the key insights you found during the exercise and share them with the team. This will help you form plans and align on next steps. 

Now let’s dive into each of these areas. 

Start the meeting with an icebreaker

Ice breakers are a great way to get everyone involved feeling loosened up, engaged, and ready to go. Try this  Ice Breaker Template  for a quick, fun exercise at the beginning of the meeting.

Present the CJM’s purpose & goals

Now it’s time to kick off the customer journey map exercise. Start by speaking to the purpose and goals you’ve identified for the map. It’s important to make sure your team understands what you’re trying to accomplish, or else you run the risk of the session getting off track. 

Create personas 

Now for your first official team exercise. Drawing on your objectives, start to create personas. Personas are snapshots of ideal customers. They allow you to visualize the individuals who benefit from your products or services. When you’re mapping out your customer journey, it’s important to visualize who the customer is – and that’s where personas can help.

Try to build as exhaustive a picture of your customer as you can. If you have demographic and psychographic data, include that in your personas. You might find it useful to send out a questionnaire to customers or prospects ahead of time to get their feedback on your products or services. Include questions like:

How did you hear about our company?

What comes to mind when you think of our brand?

How do you use our product?

How often do you use our product?

What goals do you want to achieve with our company?

Have you ever made a purchase with us? If so, why did you decide to purchase?

Have you ever interacted with our site intending to make a purchase but did not follow through? If so, what stopped you?

What can we do to improve your experience with our site?

How can we make it easier for you to purchase and use our products?

Remember, the goal of customer journey mapping is to center on the customer’s perspective and empathize with their experience of your product. The more complete your persona is, the more useful a tool your customer journey map will be.

List customer touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the places where your customers can interact with your brand. Think of them as signposts along a road. Drawing on your research, list all the touchpoints your customers and prospects use when visiting your site, as well as those you think they should be using.

It’s important to document the gap between touchpoints they are using and touchpoints you intend for them to use, because that helps you draw conclusions about the actions of your customers. Are they using fewer touchpoints than expected? More? This could mean your site is too complicated, or some obstacle is causing them to leave earlier than you might want.

When you’re building a list of touchpoints, be sure to include paid ads, email marketing, and third-party review sites or mentions. You can also access your Google Analytics and look at the Behavior Flow report which shows how users navigate between different pages on your site.

Test the customer journey

You’re not quite done! Next, test-drive the map yourself. Work through the CJM and see if you can start answering some questions you posed before you started mapping. How can you make it easier for customers to buy your product? How many people bounce once they click onto your site? If you’ve thoroughly built out the map, you should be able to answer these questions.

Test driving the map is important for a few reasons: For one, you want to make sure it accurately represents the customer’s journey. That ensures you’re in a good place to start making decisions based on your analysis of the map. Moreover, you want anyone from the organization to be able to use your map to perform their own analyses. Testing out the CJM transforms your map from a thought experiment into a practical tool.

Map resources you have and those you’ll need

As you’re mapping, you’ll become aware of missing pieces in the customer journey. Since your map touches on nearly every aspect of your business, you’ll quickly be able to take stock of what you’re missing. As you develop the map and get clarity on those missing parts, keep a running list of resources you have and those you’ll need to improve the customer’s journey.

Like many teams, your team might like to add those resources and tools into the map to predict how they might impact your business and drive revenue. Fleshing out the map with these added components will make it easier to get buy-in and augment parts of the customer’s journey.

Iterate on your map

After you’ve tested the map, you can start to make changes to your customer journey. And each time you do, you can also adjust the map. A customer journey map is powerful partly because it’s a living document. Review it on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep up the momentum, identify gaps as they arise, and further streamline and improve your customer journey.

Gathering and sharing insights

Now that you’ve completed your mapping exercise, make sure to list out key insights and takeaways so your team can align on what to do next. You can create a specific section on your board, or send takeaways out via email after the meeting. 

Discover more

Service blueprint vs. journey map

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer experience vs. customer journey map

What is consumer decision-making process?

Buyer journey vs customer journey

The 7 steps of the customer journey

What is service blueprint?

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Create a new Customer Journey Canvas

This tool supports the audit of existing services and covers not only the period of time associated with the encounter but also the pre-service and post-service phases of the journey. Customer journey maps are typically focused on the front stage encounter from the customer’s point-of-view but as an audit it’d be great to see a complementary version demonstrating the connections with the back stage supporting processes.

If you want to try it out without entering your email address, please use our public Customer Journey Demo Canvas for a first impression.

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More about the Customer Journey Canvas

Service Design Thinking is an upcoming term that will be (or already is) going viral among businesses. The name is pretty self explanatory—it basically refers to the process of brainstorming and designing services. The Customer Journey Canvas is a template to facilitate this process. The big deal about service design thinking is that it can help a business to stand out from its competitors by offering value-added services that will heighten customer satisfaction and develop brand loyalty. As a consumer, you might have come across both retailers selling the same product at the same price. What makes you patronize one shop over the other? The answer likely lies in the different services offered! As a service provider, a Customer Journey Canvas is a handy tool to have if you want to have an overview of your service processes and generate ideas to refine them. Service Design Thinking spans across the three stages of customer journey: Pre-Service Period, Service Period and Post-Service Period.

Pre-Service Period

At this stage, you can clearly state down how and through which channels you want to market your service. You can also think about the following: 1) With social media being an integral part of many people's lives, how can you make use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread awareness about your service? Can your targeted clientele access information about your new service offerings through these channels? 2) Predict what your customers have to say about your service to their families and friends. Market research can provide you a good idea of the various sentiments customers have on similar services or service providers based on their past experiences. This helps you to have a clear overview of the misgivings consumers have about such services and what your business can do differently. This stage concludes with you penning down the likely expectations your customers have towards your service. ADVERTISEMENT/PUBLIC RELATIONS: SOCIAL MEDIA: Were you able to garner any information about the products and services on Social Media? If yes, on what platforms were such information available and how relevant were they to informing your decision making process? WORD-OF-MOUTH: Did you get to hear about the company from family, friends, colleagues or relatives? If you did, what were their various opinions on the quality of the products and services they received? PAST EXPERIENCES: How did they rate the products and services received compared to other available products and services?

Service Period:

The mapping of the customer service journey is a major component of the second stage of Service Design Thinking. From the very second your customer steps into the store, he or she will encounter touchpoints (places of interaction between the customer and service) that will contribute to their final evaluation of your service. For example, during a typical grocery trip, the cashier will likely be the last touchpoint of the customer service journey. How the cashier treats the customer will affect the impression the latter have towards the company. Prior to this, there are also other touchpoint which will shape the entire shopping experience. The second stage will culminate in the evaluation of the individual experiences customers have with the provided service. What are your thoughts on all the different moments of interaction between you and the company, right from the moment you decided to initiate contact with a representative about the offered products and services, up to the moment you completed your purchase. What was your initial means of communication with the company and how can it be improved? How was the response rate and how concise were the replies you received as regards your requests? How were you treated during the period of purchase and how were the deliverables compared with your expectations? Do not hesitate to include all the lapses and notable incidents you encountered, both positive and negative.

Post Service Period

No business can go without reflections and evaluations of their services. How are they being perceived by the customers? Did the service provider follow-up with the customers? After-sales services are particularly powerful because they can impact and influence the customer's perception in a positive way if he or she has a negative impression previously. This is a good opportunity for the service provider to display genuine interest and sincerity in ensuring a pleasant experience for the customer. At this final stage, you will identify the general social media comments customers have about your services. Do they talk negatively or positively about their experiences with the service to people around them? This will lead to the customer's final assessment of his satisfaction level as he made comparisons to his initial expectations. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT: How was your experience after the purchase? Were you further contacted for check-up/follow up? How did the interaction go? SOCIAL MEDIA: Did you come across testimonials of the products and services on Social Media? On what platforms did you see them and were they mostly positive or negative reviews. WORD-OF-MOUTH: Were you involved or did you overhear conversations about the products and services? How did those conversations go and what were their individual thoughts and experiences on the deliverables and quality of service. In what ways do they believe that the quality of service can be improved on? EXPECTATIONS: When you first heard of the products and services, what attracted you and compelled you to initiate contact? What were your expectations on the products and services? EXPERIENCES: From the moment you made contact with the company up to the time you eventually made a purchase, how can you rate your overall experience? How do you rate the quality of the responses received and the attitude of the company representatives? SATISFACTION/DISSATISFACTION: How would you rate the quality of the product/service? Was it below par, up to par or beyond your expectations? How did it compare to similar offerings from other companies?

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

When and how to create customer journey maps.

July 31, 2016 2016-07-31

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In This Article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer journey map template

Think critically about your users' needs and motivations

Use the customer journey map template to better understand customer touchpoints, needs, motivations, and obstacles by illustrating the customer journey from start to finish. When possible, use this map to document and summarize interviews and observations with real people rather than relying on your hunches or assumptions.

Customer journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s experience with a brand, product, or service. Journey maps often include key steps a customer takes, their interactions, goals, positive moments, negative moments, and more.

Journey maps are crucial for understanding the customer experience, allowing teams to understand what pain points users or customer experience, create better solutions for the end-user, reduce frustrations, and make areas of opportunity clear from the onset.

Customer journey maps help teams:

• Step into a customer’s shoes and understand their perspective
• Gain empathy to understand customer needs, perceptions, and overall experience
• Identify problems and roadblocks that a customer may experience
• Align with other team members and stakeholders to solve cross-functional problems

How to use the customer journey map template

Follow these step-by-step instructions to build a robust customer journey map from the template.

1. Establish your customer scenario

Choose a customer persona or segment that you want to understand, and decide on a specific scenario that your customer would find themselves in (i.e.: browsing, booking, attending, and rating a local city tour).

If possible, choose a user persona informed by customer data and user research. This prevents teams from making incorrect assumptions and ensures that your target audience benefit from any changes in the customer journey.

2. Define the steps your customer or buyer persona takes

What steps does the customer persona take during the scenario you defined? List out each step and describe any smaller steps that are involved. Think about what someone may experience during this step and what the desired future-state of that experience would be. 

Dig Deep: For each of the following sections, ask the following questions:

• Entice : How does somebody initially become aware of this process? Where is the starting point?
• Enter : What do potential customers experience as they begin the step or process?
• Engage : In the core moments in the process, what happens?
• Exit : What do people typically experience as the process ends?
• Extend : What happens after the experience is over?

3. List the different interactions customers might have

Mention what interactions users face during each step of the process. This includes the people they see or talk to, where they are, and the digital touchpoints or physical influences used to move them into the funnel.

This could be anything from learning about a new product from a promoted social media post, to contacting customer support for an issue the user faces. Keep in mind that interactions and touchpoints can and should be different depending on where someone found you, or how they got to your website. 

4. Think about the customer’s goals and motivations

Step into the customer's shoes. For each step, what is the customer's primary goal or motivation? What can you do to fulfill their needs? For an emphasis on how your customer or user is feeling during the journey, an empathy map can help you tap into their thoughts and emotions.

5. Highlight the customer’s positive moments

List the steps users found enjoyable, productive, or motivating. Take inspiration from positive moments to improve weak areas. Positive moments can help you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and how to communicate with them on other channels.

6. Consider a customer’s negative moments

List which steps the user found frustrating, angering, or time-consuming. Identifying pain points, in particular, helps to make changes and improve the user experience.

For more instructions, check out our guide to creating customer journey maps .

Tips for creating better customer journey maps

• Use market research to guide your assumptions : Conduct surveys or interviews that ask customers how they came to learn about your company and how they interact with your brand. You may be surprised. Real customer interactions will make your journey map more accurate and successful.
• Revisit and optimize the customer journey map : Your customer journey map will likely need to be updated and adjusted over time. Just as customers' wants, needs, and expectations change, so must your strategy.
• Share the customer journey map with involved stakeholders : The user journey will likely span multiple efforts in your organization, so be sure to let stakeholders know if they can help make the buyer journey more customer-focused. ‍
• Get real customer feedback : While you should be creating your customer journey map based on interviews and real-world data, try validating your assumptions by getting feedback from a customer on how accurate the user experience matches the different stages in your finished map.

How to create a Customer journey map template

Get started with this template right now.

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Customer journey map template frequently asked questions

What is a customer journey map, what are some benefits of customer journey mapping, when would you want to create a customer journey map.

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Customer Journey Canvas

Introduction.

The Customer Journey is a tool to help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve. How does this problem or opportunity show up in their lives? How do they experience it? How do they interact with you?

How To Use the Customer Journey Canvas

Mapping this journey will provide you with insights into how customers experience a product or service, as well as how they might be better served or even delighted. This is especially true when co-creating the journey together with your customers or when validating your assumptions with them. What are the circumstances? How do customers feel throughout? What are the moments when the experience can best be improved?

Customer journeys are not linear. A customer can jump from one phase to another depending on many factors. They interact with some touchpoints and miss out others. It is your job, as a designer, to understand the moments when customers engage so that you can design better experiences for them in the future. This tool helps in looking at your products and services through the lens of the customers.

Of course, no customer journey is totally complete or made without assumptions. Mapping the customer journey is based on the knowledge and insights of your team. This tool simply helps you understand and explore from the customer’s point of view.

The customer journey canvas helps make things real. Through the mapping exercise you can identify where customers get stuck, where they have great experiences, and why. One outcome of using this tool with your team will be the so-called low hanging fruit that you can deliver on immediately. Once you have co-created and assembled the customer journey maps, you can add real customer data gathered through customer safaris, interviews, and feedback. This will enable you to make informed decisions based on reality.

The customer journey is relevant for everyone. Everyone on the team, and in your company, must understand what your customers experience, how they feel, what they struggle with, and how you can improve the experience. The underlying goal: to solve our customers’ problems and make them happy.

Tool Overview

Persona Start with defining the Customer Personas that you are creating the journey for. Be specific (e.g., name, age, occupation, skills, interests).

Touch Points What are the different moments of interaction with the customer (e.g., in a shop, online, via webinar, by phone, mail, or in contracts)? Some moments may be important to the customer, but are currently not touch points: map these moments as well! The customer is the primary focus.

Mood What is the customer’s mood at that very moment? Are they happy, frustrated, angry? What in the moment makes it so?

Timeline and Stages Define at least 5 moments in the journey. What is the timespan? What is the step-by-step experience for the customer? How much time has passed in the journey? Don’t overcomplicate: test with customers to see what to adapt.

Customer Needs What is the job the customer wants to get done in each of the stages? For example, if your customer seeks to identify the company they want to work with, we need to understand the various touch points. What are the questions customers have at each point?

Step-by-step guide

1 before you start.

Arrange for a comfortable environment. Definitely not a meeting room. Create a creative athmosphere and have plenty of colorful materials and magazines at the ready.

• Arrange a relaxed, positive and private environment
• Have markers (fine tip) and paper for everybody
• Print or draw the canvas on a big sheet of paper
• Have plenty of sticky notes and markers ready
• Allow yourself 45 minutes of undisturbed time

2 Define your Customer

To make a good customer journey, you need to define who it is for. Who is the customer you are going to follow? And easy way to do this is by using the persona canvas. You don't want to specify generic customer segments here, but start from specific customers, that you know. This will help enrich the journey. Generalizing it comes later.

3 Map the Journey

With the team, come up with moments in the journey of your customer. Think from that customer's perspective. His or her goal in life is not to buy your product or use your service, that is (usually) a means to an end. What end is that? How do they experience the problem you are trying to solve? And do they really experience it? What do they currently do to deal with that problem?

While you are defining moments for the customer, try to place them in an order. That could be a short interval, for example a day in the life of the customer, or a longer duration. The goal is to find the meaningful moments for the customer first, and then to look for the touchpoints where your product or service comes into the picture.

An easy way to build moments is to think of what happened first (what would be the movie frame for that moment?) and then to proceed what the customer thinks or feels, and ultimately what their needs are. Make sure it's their needs, don't sneak your product back in!

4 Challenge your Assumptions

Now that you have mapped out a lot of moments, it's time to challenge assumptions. So far, almost everything you have done is an assumption, starting from what you know about the customer, and going all the way to their needs in specific moments. Some of these assumptions are more impactful than others. They need to be checked before you start building product ideas on top of them. To do this, you need to go out of the building, and run experiments.

Show your journey to actual or potential customers, and see if they recognize themselves. What is their journey? Map it out with them. Once you have done that, you will start to see patterns and learn what the actual needs are that they have. Sometimes they may not even know it themselves!

5 Hack: Online Safari

In the age of the Internet it would be silly not to take an online safari. There are several tricks for getting a quick idea of what people are actually doing online. Take a look at your own user forum or that of a competitor. What are people complaining about? What conversations are they having? Use Twitter to get in touch with people that write about similar products. What kind of pictures do they post on social media? Are there any video blogs or YouTube channels that cover similar topics? How popular are they? What trends can you find there? You can get a lot of information in a very short amount time if you start following some online leads!

6 Hack: Do it yourself!

It pays to step into your customer’s shoes for a while. If you really want to understand your customers and their preferences, slip into their shoes, do what they do, and shop where they shop. We learned this trick from an expert retail food marketer. If you’re interested in understanding what attracts customers, go to the stores they shop at, observe them, and start pulling things off the shelf that attract you. Compare what you bought with what you see in customer’s shopping carts. You’ll likely find customer segments that stick together and look for similar qualities in the things they buy. Best of all, you’ll quickly learn what attracts customers to your competition.

7 Hack: Be the Barista

When you really want to surprise your customers and put them into a different state of mind, consider going the extra mile. Find (or build) a nice coffee cart and add to it everything you need to get people talking. Making the rounds in a place where your customers hang out is guaranteed to put a smile on their faces. You’d be surprised at what people tell their barista! What we’re actually saying: be a perfect host(ess) and facilitate the interaction.

8 Check your Customer Journey

Check the following items to see if you have worked enough on the Customer Journey.

• Is the persona you used specific enough?
• Is the journey complete? are there any moments missing?
• Ask yourself where the journey really starts and ends. Are there moments before and after?
• You can't think of moments you left out

9 Next Steps

• Use what you learned to inform your point of view.
• Go back and check your design criteria .
• Use the knowledge to work on new value propositions .

Additional Resources

  design a better business ( patrick van der pijl, justin lokitz, lisa kay solomon, maarten van lieshout, erik van der pluijm ),   contagious - why things catch on ( jonah berger ),   hooked ( nir eyal ),   made to stick ( dan heath and chip heath ),   the mom test ( rob fitzpatrick ), you may also like, experiment cheat sheet.

A free overview of 25 Validation Experiment Recipes from WRKSHP.tools.

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Customer Experience

Why and how to create a Customer Journey Map - Download free template

13 Feb, 2017

Customer Journey Map

Start mapping your customers' journey with this easy-to-use template.

Emmi Tervala

Business development

Customer Journey Mapping has been around for some time now, but many companies are not taking full advantage of the business opportunities a well-thought-out Customer Journey Map can bring. When choosing a template for your business’ needs, it’s critical to think about what you want to achieve with this exercise and if you have the resources to implement the changes.

Mapping customer journeys should always aim for business impact. Creating a customer journey map might feel like something that is fairly easy and even fun to do but it should not be taken lightly. Finding a pretty template and putting it up on the wall does not help you run your business - and customer journey maps should, first and foremost, be tools for customer-centric business management.

A customer journey map can be a powerful tool to help you visualise and clarify current or future states of customer experience in all stages of the customership. It's the next step after you have defined the buyer personas for your business, but make sure all actions are based on the Customer Experience Strategy you have established. A comprehensive customer journey map consists of customer actions, motives and experiences but also of organisational activities and roles that are responsible for these activities. Concentrating merely on optimising individual touchpoints is a route to failure, as stated in this blog post

Unfortunately, most of the available customer journey map templates represent only the customer side, which is why we decided to create an all-encompassing template targeting specifically those items that have a business impact. The key is to include the organisational side of your business into the mapping and nurture the interactions between your company and customers. In addition to organisational roles and activities, we recommend adding metrics, goals and KPIs to mappings in order to make the customer journey map more actionable. For reference, take a look at Mari Silvennoinen’s post about measuring customer experience - it’ll give you an idea of how to add the above-mentioned attributes to your company’s customer journey.

To make your first Customer Journey Map exercise as easy as possible, we have used an online grocery store as an example case to help you grasp the essence of the mapping tool. It’s important that you adjust the template based on the unique needs of your company and the goal you have set. So take a minute to ask yourself what do you want to achieve with this map and then get cracking!

You can download the online grocery store example and the editable Customer Journey Map template with short instructions by filling the form below.

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Get your copy of the Customer Journey Map template. By mapping your business' customer journeys you'll be able to pinpoint pain spots and areas of success, both for your customers and within your organisation. 

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Customer Journey Canvas

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To download Customer Journey Canvas today just enter your email address!

• Description

The Customer Journey canvas is a tool to help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve according to Design a Better Business .

It helps you answer questions such as How does this problem or opportunity show up in their lives? How do they experience it? How do they interact with you?

They also explain that mapping this journey will provide you with insights into how customers experience a product or service, as well as how they might be better served or even delighted. This is especially true when co-creating the journey together with your customers or when validating your assumptions with them. What are the circumstances? How do customers feel throughout? What are the moments when the experience can best be improved?

Customer journeys are not linear. A customer can jump from one phase to another depending on many factors. They interact with some touchpoints and miss out others. It is your job, as a designer, to understand the moments when customers engage so that you can design better experiences for them in the future. This tool helps in looking at your products and services through the lens of the customers.

Canvanizer explains that the customer journey canvas tool supports the audit of existing services and covers not only the period of time associated with the encounter but also the pre-service and post-service phases of the journey. Customer journey maps are typically focused on the front stage encounter from the customer’s point-of-view but as an audit it’d be great to see a complementary version demonstrating the connections with the back stage supporting processes.

And Brucey Industrial Marketing states that they like it because it allows a business to go beyond identifying a customer need, to defining their customer’s changing needs at each key moment (stage) of the overall journey. Businesses can then identify how best to connect with and support their customers throughout the journey.

Of course, no customer journey canvas is totally complete or made without assumptions. Mapping the customer journey is based on the knowledge and insights of your team. This tool simply helps you understand and explore from the customer’s point of view.

The customer journey canvas helps make things real. Through the mapping exercise you can identify where customers get stuck, where they have great experiences, and why. One outcome of using this tool with your team will be the so-called low hanging fruit that you can deliver on immediately. Once you have co-created and assembled the customer journey maps, you can add real customer data gathered through customer safaris, interviews, and feedback. This will enable you to make informed decisions based on reality.

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