canvas customer journey

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

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

1. Awareness Stage

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

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

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

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

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

• Social media
• Search engines

2. Consideration

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

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

Product marketing content may include:

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

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

• Your website
• Conferences

3. Decision Stage

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

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

Decision-stage content may include:

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

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

4. Retention Stage

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

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

Retention-stage strategies may include:

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

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

5. Loyalty Stage

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

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

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

Loyalty-stage strategies may include:

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

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

• Your products

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

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

What is the customer journey map?

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

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

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

What is UX journey mapping?

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

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

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

Why is customer journey mapping important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Buying Process
• User Actions
• User Research

1. The Buying Process

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

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

2. Emotions

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

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

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

3. User Actions

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

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

4. User Research

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

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

5. Solutions

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download a free, editable customer journey map template.

Types of Customer Journey Maps and Examples

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

Current State

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

Image Source

Day in the Life

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

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

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

Future State

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

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

Service Blueprint

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

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

1. Set a goal for the journey map.

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

2. Survey customers to understand their buying journey.

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

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

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

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

4. Consider UX journey mapping for each buyer persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. You can create a new target customer base.

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

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

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

3. You can implement proactive customer service.

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

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

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

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

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Journey Mapping Examples

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

1. HubSpot's Customer Journey Map Templates

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

The offer includes the following:

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

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

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

2. B2B Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

3. Ecommerce Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

4. Future B2C Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

5. Retail Customer Journey Map Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Current State Template

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

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

2. Day in the Life Template

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

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

Get an interactive day in the life template.

3. Future State Template

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

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

Get an interactive future state template.

4. Service Blueprint Template

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

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

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

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

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

Get an interactive service blueprint template.

5. Buyer's Journey Template

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

Get an interactive buyer's journey template.

Charter the Path to Customer Success

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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

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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.

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Account-Based Marketing | Business Strategy | Customer Development Process | Customer Journey | Decision-Making Unit | Digital Marketing | Lead Generation | Market Research | Marketing and Sales | Marketing Strategy

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5 best practices to create a customer journey canvas

Did you know that 74% of Dutch consumers are more likely to order at a webshop after they've had a positive experience with customer service? This insight is a result of a survey by Trengo that took place among 1000+ consumers. It shows us that good customer service is essential for the growth of your business.

If you optimize your service in every stage of the customer journey, you can turn a one-time customer into a returning one.

A Customer Journey Canvas plays an essential role in creating a better customer experience. The canvas helps you to align your customer service with your customer's needs in every stage of the customer journey.

In this article, we share five best practices you can use to create a Customer Journey Canvas.

What is a Customer Journey Canvas?

A Customer Journey Canvas gives you an overview of your customer's needs. It provides you and your customer service team with action points for your customer service teams in different stages of the customer journey. With a Customer Journey Canvas, you'll make sure that your customers get what they need during every stage of their journey.

The canvas gives you the following insights:

• Customer needs: what are the basic needs of your customer at every stage? Write it down from your customer's perspective.
• Key moment: what does this exact moment look like for your customer? You can add screenshots of your webshop or the communication channels they have to use in this stage.
• Actions: how can your team offer the best service at every stage?

Five best practices per stage of the customer journey

With the following five best practices you can get the most out of the customer journey canvas.

Stage 1. Awareness

In the first stage of the customer journey, your customer is aware of a problem or challenge and is looking for information that will help them. You can look at the Awareness stage as the first impression the customer has of your company.

Let's take an example: Mark would like to start running but has been struggling with severe back pain for years. He's looking for sports shoes that provide good support. That's why he searches Google for 'best sports shoes to avoid back pain'.

It's now up to you to convince Mark that you understand his problem best and want to solve it.

Best practice

Mark probably has a lot of questions. Such as:

• What makes a sports shoe provide good support?
• Should the sole of a sports shoe be flexible or not?
• Why can a good sports shoe make a difference when it comes to back pain?

To get these questions answered, he will start doing online research on your website and other online sports sellers. This research will also cover this stage. However, the customer may still have questions regarding an interesting article on your website.

In this case,  live chat  is the best channel to use. Live chat is easily accessible for the first contact. You can answer the questions that Mark has at the exact time he is asking them. This means you should respond quickly. You can use tools like chatbots, quick- and auto-replies to support you with that.

Stage 2. Consideration

In this stage, Mark is aware of the different options he has. He'll start doing more in-depth research on pricing, reviews, competitors, and product details. He may list the webshops that have the best delivery times and return policies.

It's now up to your team to get ready with answers to these questions.

Mark is looking for more in-depth information. The best way to offer this is by creating a  help center  with answers to frequently asked questions.

Mark may have the following questions:

• What is the shipping time?
• What does the return process look like?
• How can I follow my order status?

In this stage, it's important to monitor your  social media . More and more customers are asking questions via Instagram or Facebook. Be active on your channels, and answer questions or clarify uncertainties. This way, you come across as a professional and engaged brand.

Stage 3. Decision

In this stage, Mark is ready to make his choice. He added the sports shoes to his cart.  Ka-ching!

But, wait...

It turns out, 46.1% of cart abandonments occur at the payment stage. This can happen at the following moments:

• At the checkout login (37.4%)
• Once Mark sees shipping costs (35.7%)
• When Mark needs to enter their billing address (20.9%)
• When Mark needs to enter their shipping or delivery address (20%)

It can go wrong for different reasons. Maybe the customer doesn't like to share personal information, the discount coupon doesn't work, or the preferred shipping date is missing.

At this point, it's up to your team to offer fast service and reach out with proactive support.

In this stage, Mark needs fast support to finish up his order. If you're not there to help, you might lose him as a customer.

Make sure that your customer service team is available via:

• Live chat: this is the fastest way for support. All Mark needs to do is click on the chat widget to start a conversation.

Tip: you can automate your live chat by setting up a chatbot. But when you do, make sure your customer can still choose a real-life agent over the chatbot.

• Phone: by picking up the phone, Mark is sure he'll receive an answer immediately.
• Email: has Mark already abandoned his cart? You can send him a follow-up email. Emails sent within 3 hours after the customer's visit have an open rate of 40% and a click-through rate of 20%.

Stage 4. Retention

Awesome. Mark has bought his sports shoes in your webshop. Good job. But will he remain a customer in  the long run ?

This stage might be the most important one of the entire customer journey. By doubling down on customer retention, you increase your customer lifetime value and boost your revenue. That's why you should try your best to gain trust and build a long-term customer relationship.

It's time to send Mark an email asking for feedback about his purchase. You can think of the following questions:

• It's been a week since you received your sports shoes. We are curious about your experience. How many extra miles did you run?
• Thanks for purchasing the sports shoes. How did you experience your purchase?

In addition to asking these questions, you can refer to a feedback form so Mark can help other runners finding the perfect sports shoes as well.

For building a customer relationship, it is important to stay in touch. Encourage your customer to follow you on social media . It's the perfect place to share tips on product usage and maintenance.

Stage 5. Advocacy

In this last stage, you'll make Mark an active advocate for your brand. You want him to tell everyone about his shopping experience and amazing sports shoes.

So, how do you get him to this stage?

Easy. If you've offered good service during the whole customer journey, chances are he is more than willing to give you something in return. All you have to do is ask.

You can send Mark an email including one of these messages:

• Hi Mark! Thanks for your feedback. We're glad to hear that you love your new shoes. You would make us very happy if you share your experience on Instagram using #newshoes. Chances are, you'll spot your picture on our website during your next visit. 📸 We hope to see you soon!
• Hi Mark. We're glad to hear the sports shoes fit you very nicely. Did you already share your experience with your friends? This discount code gives you and your friends 10% off on your next purchase. 💸Enjoy your day.

Start creating a Customer Journey Canvas

You can start with creating a Customer Journey Canvas right away by downloading this free template :

Customer Journey Canvas - Trengo Download

If you would like to get the most out of this canvas, I suggest you look into multichannel customer service as well. This way, you'll find out which channels there are and how to connect them all in one inbox.

Table of Contents

More great articles.

De klant komt in de moderne economie steeds centraler te staan. Maar hoe zet je als bedrijf nu een goede klantenservice op?

These are the 10 best customer service tools that every business needs to make sure their customers get the experience they deserve.

Met behulp van deze customer experience software tools analyseer en verbeter je de ervaring van je klanten.

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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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.

• Transcript loading…

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 Canvas Tutorial

Service design may come across as something intangible but the Customer Journey Canvas allows you to put your thoughts into words or diagrams in a structured manner. Once you fill up every aspect of the canvas, you will see everything coming together, just like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. A concept cafe is used as an example in the given Customer Journey Canvas. The first stage of service design is to plan how the service will be marketed and predict the reactions.

Pre-Service Period

Advertisement/public relations:.

Thinking about the core differences between advertisement and public relations campaign will help you make a decision on how you want people to perceive your upcoming services. Advertisements give you control over the creative direction and content of your message but your intended consumers know you are trying to sell to them. On the other hand, a successful PR campaign will gain the trust and attention of the consumers since they perceive the message as an independent, third party review of your upcoming service. The downside is that you have no control over how people are going to write about your services. Another marketing element to consider is if you plan to tap into both print media and the internet for your marketing campaign. Most companies tend to go both routes in order to reach out to a larger audience. In the example, the idea of having a short film that expounds on the cafe’s unique concept is an effective way to capture attention without advertising blatantly.

Social Media:

Twitter and Facebook are the leading social media platforms. You can go beyond these and release updates on your services on social media platforms that are related to your niche.

Word of Mouth:

Think in both the positive and negative context. Imagine yourself as the customer. If you are pleased with the services, which aspects are you likely to be satisfied with? What will you tell your friends and family? In contrast, if you are unhappy with the service, what is likely to have gone wrong? By anticipating these reactions, you can try to further fine-tune your service.

Past Experiences:

It can be hard to fill up this column if you are launching a whole new, unheard of service but you can trace it back to the inception of the service. Was something lacking in a service which customers often complain about, thus inspiring you to create a service to fulfill the needs?

Expectations:

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer who hears of the service. How would you react and what expectations you have in mind? Understanding customer expectations means that you can set well-defined goals.

New Customer Journey Canvas

Service Period

Service journey:.

The service journey details the entire experience of the customer from his arrival to departure. As you can see from the example, the three major touchpoints are: the entrance where the customer gets greeted by the staff and leaves his more bulky belongings, the place where he settles down to order from the menu, and when he exits the cafe. Your service journey may be a lot more detailed but one thing to keep in mind is that the touchpoint may not necessarily involve an interaction with the service staff.

Experiences:

As always, the evaluation of the service will lead to the conclusion of customer experience.

Post Service Period

Customer relationship management:.

CRM can manifest itself as a software or a system aimed at building a relationship with customers and maintaining it. A successful CRM model is imperative to the success of the business. Depending on your industry, your CRM model will differ but the three major aspects to consider remain the same. They are: 1) People Everyone in the company needs to breathe and live the CRM initiative. Customer service representatives are usually at the forefront of the initiative since they have direct contact with customers. 2) Process You should always ask yourself how a particular process can be streamlined to better serve the customer. Companies may often find themselves going back to review this aspect repeatedly because new situations always crop up to reveal a lapse in the service. 3) Technology Does the company have the technology to support its CRM initiative? This can be in the form of having a software to capture the personal data of customers so they can be sent updates on the service. The system should provide the management valuable insight into the demographic profile and preferences of their customers so they can add a personal touch to the service.

Social Media, Word of Mouth:

These two sections are pretty self-explanatory. Providing a social media platform means that customers will use it as a feedback channel to communicate their experiences and feelings towards the service. The response on the social media platform is likely to reflect the general word of mouth sentiments.

Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction:

As you list out what customers were satisfied and dissatisfied with, it is time to compare it with the customer expectations you have penned down during the first stage. Do the sentimentsmatch up with the expectations? A disparity is a telltale sign that the management need to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate the entire service design.

The customer journey canvas is a clear overview of the entire service design process. You are likely to refer to it again and again because there are always improvements to be made and problems to be solved. An element of surprise is always possible. When it presents itself to you as a challenge to your business, the customer journey canvas helps you to clearly identify how the problem is related to the service design process. This will helps you stay focused and work on resolving the problem systematically.

The next level

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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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Design a better business

Linking the Customer Journey to your Business Model Canvas

March 30 by Erik van der Pluijm

Sometimes it can be difficult to specify the channels and customer relationships building blocks of the business model canvas. When you get stuck there, it can help to look at the customer journey for new ideas and clarity. There is a link between the business model canvas and the customer journey.

Don’t build your business model inside-out.

Especially when you’re working on a business idea from within an existing business or business model it can be tempting to think inside-out, with potentially disastrous results. The customer journey is a tool that helps you step into the shoes of the customer to prevent just that.

To build your customer journey start by imagining what the life of the customer is like. What is the problem the customer is trying to solve? How are they solving it today? What are they happy or frustrated about? Mapping this out will give you a number of (hypothetical) touch points to validate in the real world. These touch points are moments in the customer’s life where they are experiencing a problem, taking action, or planning their next steps. Going out of the building or doing a customer safari will tell you if the touch points you mapped are the ones that actually show up in your customer’s experience.

The link to the business model canvas: Channels

In the business model canvas, the building block ‘channels’ describes the ways your customers learn about your product or service, and how they receive their product or service. Usually, we will find ‘website’ or ‘advertising’ here, and those definitely could work – but then they have to also show up in your customer journey!

If you want to use a website as a channel, you better understand how and why customers visit that website first. How are you going to make sure that they do? What ideas and tricks do you have to influence their behaviour? Besides, looking at the customer journey, there may be smarter, less obvious ways to reach your customers. Looking through the customer journey in this way will help you better understand your channels.

The customer journey is a great way to map out the process where your customers become aware of the problem, look for a solution (hopefully yours!), and finally, make a purchase.

wait, there is more: customer relationships

Finally, looking at the customer relationships, the customer journey can help you as well.  As soon as you understand the problem your customer has very well (and that means, understanding it in the terms in which the customer experiences it) it is possible to build a relationship around that – and that relationship also needs touch points.

When and where are you going to communicate with your customer? When and where can you grow the relationship?

It is more important to fall in love with the problem than with the solution.

Too often, businesses assume that in order for them to communicate to (not ‘with’!) their customers, they can freely add new touch points in the customer’s life: emails, notifications, and phone calls. Often those extra touch points are scheduled at times when the customer is definitely not in the mood or in the opportunity to do anything with them.

But, it doesn’t have to be like that. What if you would be able to take touch points that the customer already is used to and cares about and trigger communication at that moment? And, what if you can identify down time or idle time and use that to ask for feedback? Or if you can tell when the customer is delighted and interact at that time? Going over your customer journey with that in mind can certainly give you better ideas for the way in which your business creates and maintains relationships with your customer.

The way in which Nespresso built a very successful business model, without (initially) bringing their product to supermarkets, was for a very large part supported by the relationship they have with their customer – and the relationship their customer has with coffee. They removed a (very obvious) touch point in supermarkets, where the mood and reference frame of the customer may be unsuitable for them to decide to buy much more expensive coffee, and replaced it by another, more personal touchpoint, where the customer feels special.

Ideas like the one Nespresso came up with are much easier to find if you start looking at the relationship from the customer’s perspective, while staring at the ‘customer relationships’ building block of the business model canvas will probably make you come up with more pedestrian solutions.

Keep track of your customer journey, it will keep bringing value

Building and maintaining an accurate customer journey (backed up by real world evidence) is a vital tool to find new possibilities in your business model – not only in terms of ideas but also in terms of quality of execution.

Keeping track of the behaviours customers actually follow will keep informing your business model!

By Erik van der Pluijm - Designer

Erik is the owner of Pitchlab and Tech Perform Lead at Growth Tribe Academy. He is passionate about visual thinking and making complex things simple. He mixes design, code and strategy, using his experience from art and design, artificial intelligence, computer games, and the startup scene.

More blogposts

Strategic storytelling: bridging ideation and scaling.

January 17 by Maarten van Lieshout

When people think of running a business or working together, the last thing they would think of is storytelling as a major driver for the success of the business or the success of a team. Often time when we start a new project, the team is assembled <What should you look for when assembling a […]

Why the Business Model of Santa Claus is so successful

December 21 by Patrick van der Pijl

The business model of Santa Claus is an age-old business model over 200 years old. Santa is a legendary figure originating in West Christian culture who is said to bring gifts to the homes of well-behaved children on Christmas Eve. Santa Claus is generally depicted as a portly, joyous, white-bearded man, wearing a red coat […]

A journey to success with Design Thinking

December 20

Enexis is one of the 7 network operators in the Netherlands. The most important task of a network operator is to install and maintain the energy network in the Netherlands. Enexis carried out a survey among its employees, resulting in eight different personas. We as ISS wanted to start providing a service experience for those […]

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Customer Journey Benefits: What they are + Top 10

Many companies are looking for ways to analyze their current sales process to get more sales. A Customer Journey Map  (CJM) is a method that allows companies to view the sales process from the customer’s perspective to find out what they are doing well and how they can improve their sales model. In this article, we take a look at what customer journey benefits of mapping are and the ten benefits of this strategy.

If you are interested in using a new strategy to overhaul your sales process so that you can increase customer engagement and drive sales, you may want to consider applying a customer journey mapping.

LEARN ABOUT: Perfect Customer-First Strategy

What is a Customer Journey?

Customer Journey is a process used to describe the different stages a customer goes through to purchase a product or service. The five most common stages a customer goes through during this process are:

• Awareness: This refers to when a potential consumer first becomes aware of your product through various advertisements or word of mouth. Here they recognize they might need your product or service.
• Consideration: Through customer testimonials, blog posts, and social media, consumers compare and decide if your product is better than similar products and if they would like to buy what they need through your company.
• Purchase: Ultimately, customers decide whether to buy from your company or use another company’s products based on their research.
• Retention: In this stage, it is key that your company has a customer success team to give a post-sales service. This could translate into actions such as offering resources for free to your clients, having a customer loyalty program in place and touching base with your customer to see if everything is working well with them and your product.     
• Customer advocacy : If you’ve done well in previous steps of the customer journey , when you send a customer satisfaction survey, there’s a good chance for your customers to post positive reviews or recommend their products to others, so the customer journey cycle continues. 

You can represent the five stages, or similar ones, on a map that you can use as a visual representation of the buying process during various touchpoints, such as social media, your website, or even a phone call. 

It shows customer interactions and pain points throughout the buying process, so the business can better understand what it’s doing well to engage customers and what it can do to improve.

If you like reading about the benefits of customer journey, you might find it interesting to learn about how to create a customer journey canvas

10 Customer Journey Benefits for Mapping

If you still find yourself second-guessing the idea of implementing a customer journey, here’s a list of 7 benefits that will bring you using this tool at work: 

• Empathize with your customers

Using a customer journey map allows you to shift perspective and see what the sales experience is like from the customer’s point of view rather than from the sales perspective. You can understand their point of view more clearly and see what led them to choose your product or why they chose a different brand. Consider using this data to improve the consumer experience in the future, and adapt your sales and marketing methods as needed.

• Get a consistent view of your journey

Sometimes departments have different information about a customer’s experience. A customer journey map provides all departments with consistent information about the customer’s journey with your business. This allows sales, marketing, and all teams involved in the sales process to have a clear view of the interactions a buyer has with your company and provides them with the same information, which can help them work together toward the goal. a common way to produce more sales.

• Identify gaps in service or communications

You can more easily spot service gaps in your current sales and marketing systems by using a journey map. For example, you may discover that you don’t have a way to instantly communicate with potential consumers on your website and that has caused some to look elsewhere. This may lead you to make changes to your website to include an instant messaging tool that allows potential customers to talk to you about questions they may have. This little addition to your sales strategy creates an added convenience for some customers and may convince them to buy from you.

• Predict customer behavior

Journey maps can predict customer behavior as they move through the different stages of the sales funnel. You can use these patterns to predict which type of prospect is most likely to convert. Knowing your audience can help you decide what you can do to move them forward in the sales process. Some customers would like to speak with a representative. Others might prefer a less direct approach and appreciate newsletters or blog posts related to your products. Consider using maps to effectively predict what your customers need during their stage in the process, and strive to offer those solutions.

• Improve the customer journey

Using the map allows you to understand if customers have a pleasant experience when interacting with your business. You can determine specific aspects of your current sales process that customers seem to like and what processes you can improve to make their experience more enjoyable. 

Using tools like QuestionPro CX can help you collect valuable data to modify customer journeys in a positive way and facilitate their engagement with your brand.

If you like reading about how to improve your customer journey, you might find it interesting to learn about why is it important to have a customer experience management platform .

• Provide a visual aid to stakeholders

A visual aid, such as a customer journey map, can be helpful in conveying your current sales process to company stakeholders. You can present them through presentations, brochures, or roadmap software. Concepts like the customer journey can be much easier to interpret with a visual element like the map, and stakeholders may be more willing to provide monetary means to help implement solutions to improve their current processes.

• Eliminate department silos

An organizational silo refers to the different departments in a company that operates independently and typically do not share information with each other. This prevents departments from having all the knowledge they need to improve the customer experience. Establishing customer journey maps allows you to see how departments work together.

For example, you may find that some prospects were more engaged when they first looked at your product and then less engaged when they started researching your competitor’s brands. This shows that the marketing team and the sales team could have worked together more proactively to come up with strategies to successfully nurture their leads in order to move them through the sales funnel analysis . Information from journey maps can be used to collaborate across teams and address customer needs using the knowledge and skills of multiple departments.

• View the experience from the customer’s perspective

Understanding the customer’s perspective is important because you can learn more about their emotional experience as they go through the stages of the sales process. You can use the data to correlate how they felt during their experience, and then take action to alter the key points of the journey to make it more enjoyable for future consumers. For example, you can determine which visual aids on your website have led to the most conversions and add similar content and alter or remove content that wasn’t contributing to customer journey satisfaction.

• Improve your content marketing strategy

Since the customer experience is different based on their interests, values ​​and motivations, it is important to create personalized marketing content for each demographic group. By charting the progression of each customer’s journey, you can understand which marketing strategies some customers prefer over others. Based on that information, you can choose different marketing strategies for each demographic.

For example, potential customers who like to use social media during their customer journey may prefer to shop for products using a data-driven visual commerce platform, which allows shopping tags to be added to images on different social media platforms. Users click on an image and can instantly purchase that product. Instead, some customers may prefer to speak with a representative on the phone before deciding to buy something. A user journey map gives you the opportunity to identify the needs of each customer so that you can tailor the marketing experience to each of them.

• Create a more seamless experience

Another advantage of the customer journey map is that you can pinpoint the areas where you may want more touchpoints . A touchpoint is any interaction your customer might have with your product, such as a testimonial, blog review, or paid advertisement. By understanding how customers navigate the sales journey using touchpoints, you can determine where you can add or remove touchpoints to make the overall experience smoother for the consumer. Areas, where you could include more customer interactions, include nurturing emails or pay-per-click ads.

Keeping a better track of all your customer journey touchpoints is not an easy task, that’s why using a customer journey dashboard is advisable to view and action consumer information easily.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Decision Journey

How to make the most out of your customer journey strategy?

While it is important to have in place a CJM, the truth is that most of the benefits mentioned above can only be seen when you bring theory to action. If you really want to leverage your CJM, you need tools that enable you to get actionable insights. 

QuestionPro CX is a customer experience management platform that provides businesses with powerful tools to boost customer retention and advocacy such as surveys creation and deployment, a closed-loop feedback system, sentiment analysis, segmentation and workflow settings, and more!

At QuestionPro CX we offer you the best tools to monitor the customer journey benefits in your organization. Contact us! We would love to team up with you to help you achieve better customer experiences!

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• INNOVATION SCAN

Canvas Toolkits that You Can Use Today

The business model canvas is a tool that helps you to formulate a better business model. this model has inspired others to design their own canvases. for example, revelx uses canvases that are specifically tailored to companies that want to grow..

When the Swiss Alexander Osterwalder wrote his doctoral thesis, his thesis supervisor, Yves Pigneur, was asking himself the question how a business model could be simplified to only one page. “The goal, however, wasn’t to come up with a business plan,” as Osterwalder would later explain . “The actual question was rather how to model a business model.”

Enter the Business Model Canvas

This idea resulted in the now famous Business Model Canvas: a method to design a business model by including it in a graphical diagram. Decision-makers in a company can print this model on a large sheet of paper and fill in the boxes. This process will help them to better understand how their business delivers value.

The process of filling in the print-out results in the same creativity as a brainstorm but has the extra advantage of a structured approach. As Osterwalder summarized it in the above-cited interview:

“[O]ne works a lot more efficient when using a tool. I always do the analogy: If I give you a nail and tell you to hammer it into the wall with your bare hand, you will realize right away that this doesn’t make any sense. In business it is the same thing. We don’t use tools, but rather try again and again to hammer this nail into the wall with our bare hands.”

I agree completely! Tools such as the Business Model Canvas are powerful tools. That is why we deploy our own canvases at RevelX which are specifically tailored to businesses that want to innovate and/or grow.

Growth Experiment Canvas

Let’s begin with the Growth Experiment Canvas. We use this to help clients who want to design a growth strategy.

We invite the participants in our workshops to fill in the following boxes:

• Growth Objectives: What are the short-term growth objectives you wish to realize?
• Key Metrics: For each growth objective, what are the key metrics to measure success?
• Key Targets: For each growth objective and metric, what are the current and target values?
• Growth Team: Who is in your multi-disciplinary growth team? How much time can they contribute to experimenting each week?
• Key Stakeholders: Who are the key stakeholders inside and outside your organization that you need to involve, inform, and/or manage?
• Tools / software: What tools and software do you need to conduct your experiments? To which existing platforms do you need data access?
• Experiment budget: What is the monthly experiment budget you need to conduct your experiments? Includes: tools, ad-spend, agency fees, etc.?
• Awareness: What are the experiments creating initial awareness of your brand/offerings with your audience(s)?
• Acquisition: What are the experiments contributing to initial interest from and engagement with your audience(s)?
• Activation: What are the experiments activating your audience(s): sign-up, trial, initial contact, and interaction.
• Revenue: What are the experiments facilitating the sale/transaction and increasing conversion?
• Retention: What are the experiments motivating customers to come back, buy again, cross-sell and/or up-sell?
• Referral: What are the experiments boosting loyalty, advocacy, and referral to others?

Persona Canvas

Another canvas inspired by Osterwalder is the Persona Canvas. We use this model to help our clients better understand their customers. As you should know, in marketing, a persona is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of consumers in order to help to guide decisions about the customer journey .

So, to better understand your customer, you have to create a persona. The canvas offers the following traits that you have to fill in:

• Demographics
• Personality
• Motivations
• Preferred channels
• Key reason to buy
• Deal-breaker

Customer Journey Canvas

If you know your ideal customer, the next step is to delineate her customer journey. To accomplish this, we use the Customer Journey Canvas which consists of 3 parts:

• Search Journey: All customer journey steps related to awareness, research. and consideration;
• Buy Journey: All customer journey steps related to configuration, purchase, and fulfillment;
• Use Journey: All customer journey steps related to use/experience, service, and retention.

Do You Want to Play with Us?

Each and every time that we use these canvases at RevelX workshops, I am delighted to see the enthusiastic reactions of participants. There are many great ideas in most organizations; the canvases give those the chance to come to fruition resulting in smiling faces.

So, print our canvases on large sheets of paper and get started! Need help? Play the DISRUPTR game with us.

René Jongen

Specialist in top line growth. Supports both corporates that are under a lot of commercial pressure and businesses that are looking for ways to accelerate their growth. Technical physicist. Builds on psychology and neuro-marketing insights.

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Customer Journey Map Canvas

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

Create converting customer journeys

A customer's journey is one of the key items any business should be interested in. 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. 

• An empty template on Miro
• A downloadable PDF for you to fill in with your business' customer journey
• A guided example of one customer journey

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Downloadable PDF

Guided example

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Customer Journey Canvas

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• 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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