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Fixing Customer Pain Points Using Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps are a valuable tool that can help improve customer satisfaction by understanding the needs of customers and how the company can address them. One important use of the customer journey mapping process is the ability to identify customer pain points in order to eliminate them.

In this post I examine what a customer pain point is and how to use your customer journey map to identify and eliminate it.

Process Pain Point Examples

Review service tickets and other tracking systems, rank pain points by customer value.

What are Pain Points in The Customer Journey Map?

Customer Pain Points are the issues and problems that customers face in dealing with your organisation. They can arise at any point of the customer journey from prospect to customer and even ex-customer.

It’s important to reduce and/or eliminate pain points for customers because they reduce customer loyalty and goodwill, thereby contributing to poorer business outcomes.

They also tend to increase overall business costs through the need to correct issues that customers experience at a Pain Point.

Examples of Customer Pain Points

There are as many pain points as there are businesses but most organisations recognise four main types:

• Financial Pain Points : where the cost is exceeding the customer’s ability to pay or there are lower cost alternatives.
• Productivity Pain Points : Anytime you make a customer expend more time or they are delayed in achieving their goals you have a productivity pain point.
• Process Pain Points : cause issues when customers try to use your products or services or interact with your business.
• Support Pain Points : are issues in your support processes that cause customers issues.

This is not an exhaustive list – just a few examples so you know what to look for in your company.

Productivity Pain Point Examples

• Being on hold for too long – one Genroe client determined that 180 secs on hold was the tipping point between not a pain point and pain point.
• Not having enough staff to service chat requests – so customers are left waiting
• Difficult to use or confusing user interfaces to software systems – causing mis-steps and extra time to use your system.
• Inconsistent responses from staff to customer questions meaning customers have to ask and re-ask the same question until they receive a consistent answer.
• Having to call back to get resolution to questions – Another Genroe client identified needing to be re-contacted to complete resolutions was a key pain point for their customers.
• Inaccurate or confusing invoicing, especially where the invoices are delivered over the duration of a project.

How to Identify Customer Pain Points Using Customer Journey Maps

Having run your customer journey mapping workshop and created your customer journey map, you’re ready to start identifying and prioritising customer pain points.

It’s not enough to guess where customers might have a problem. You need reliable data to make a determination. Here is how to collect that data.

Instrument the Customer Journey Map with Transactional Customer Feedback

Transactional customer feedback can provide a wealth of customer pain information because it focuses on the touchpoints in your customer journey.

The simplest approach is to conduct a Net Promoter Score feedback survey at each of the touch points and then compare the scores. 

Some journey mapping software is able to show customer feedback information live on the map, which is an excellent way to visualise pain points.

Review Complaints

Not all customers who have a pain point complain, so complaints is not a 100% reliable source of information. However, if a customer does complain it is likely to be an important pain point for them, and probably other customers who do not formally complain.

Review all of your complaints and match them back to your customer journey map. This data is likely to amplify the transactional customer feedback you have already collected.

Be a Customer

Sometimes the simple approaches are the best. If possible, try to mystery shop your organisation’s sales and operations processes.

If you find a pain point or difficulty on the customer journey you can be sure your real customers are having the same issue.

Just a small caution: make sure you perform the mystery shopping without revealing your identity.

Once, in our customer experience consulting business, a senior manager at the bank we were working with, stated they never had problems with any of their products. There were no pain points in the business.

It turned out that his assistant was performing all of the senior manager’s banking tasks. You can imagine the sort of service the senior manager was receiving – it certainly was not like that of regular customers.

Anytime a customer has to contact you to fix a problem or understand how to use your software it’s likely to be a pain point of some type.

Review help desk ticketing systems for common questions and problems that users experience. 

Prioritise Customer Pain Points

Having identified the pain points the next step is to prioritise action. This can be done in a couple of ways.

Rank Pain Points by NPS

We’ve covered this above, but if you are measuring NPS, or other customer experience metric , along the customer journey simply use it to rank the relative “pain” at each of the touchpoints.

The lower the score the higher the relative pain.

It’s simple effective and allows you to track progress across the customer journey.

In the real world, not all customers are created equal. Customers who contribute more profit are more important to the business and, unfortunately, their feedback should receive more focus.

Take your pain point list and rank it by customer lifetime value . Even if your not sure of exact value – use a proxy such as revenue to perform the ranking.

Taking Action to Fix Pain Points

Starting with your highest priority pain points determine how to reduce or eliminate them from your customer experience.

Collect additional data about the issue by:

• Interviewing unhappy customers
• Reading the comments in customer feedback systems
• Interviewing front line staff – they often already understand the issue and what causes it 

Use a good quality root cause analysis approach to understand what causes the pain point and how to prevent it from occurring in the future.

Then take action to resolve the issue.

• Customer Journey Mapping

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Customer journey mapping in 2 and 1/2 days

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

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

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

On this page:

What is a customer journey map?

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping for your business

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

Start mapping your customer journey

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

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

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

Mapping the customer journey: narrow vs. wide focus

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

Each type of customer journey map has its advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1: preliminary customer journey mapping work

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

Final ½ day: wrap up and share your results

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

On your first day, you have three essential tasks:

Define the goal and scope of your CJM

Collect customer data and insights

Invite your team to a customer journey mapping workshop

Step 1: define the goal and scope of your CJM

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: collect customer data and insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn where and why users drop off with Funnels

Visualize interactions on key pages with Heatmaps

Capture visitor sessions across your website with Recordings

Run on-site polls with Surveys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: prepare all your materials 

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

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

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

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

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

Actions your customers take

Questions they might have

Happy moments they experience

Pain points they experience

Tech limits they might encounter

Opportunities that arise

Step 2: run the workshop

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

Introduction [🕒 5–10 min]

Introduce yourself and your participants to one another

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

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

Empathy mapping exercise [🕒 30 min]

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

Have all participants take turns presenting their empathy map

Facilitate group discussions where interesting points of agreement or disagreement appear

Customer journey mapping [🕒 60 min]

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

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

Wrap up [🕒 5 min]

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

Final half-day: wrap up and share

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

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

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

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

4 benefits of customer journey mapping

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

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

Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

Create cross-team alignment around the business

Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

1. Visualize customer pain points, motivations, and drivers

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create cross-team alignment around the business

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remove internal silos and clarify areas of ownership

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

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

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

4. Make improvements and convert more visitors into customers

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

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

Shaheema (right) working on a customer journey map

Collect the right data to create an effective customer journey map

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

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

Start mapping your customer journey today

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

FAQs about customer journey mapping

How do i create a customer journey map.

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

What are the benefits of customer journey mapping?

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

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

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

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

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How to create an effective user journey map

No matter what you’re working on, the key to customer satisfaction and business growth is understanding your users. A user journey map helps you uncover pain points, explore the touchpoints from their perspective, and learn how to improve your product.

Imagine you just launched a new ecommerce platform. Shoppers fill their carts with products, but they abandon their carts before checkout. With a user journey map, you can pinpoint where the customer experience is going wrong, and how to enable more successful checkouts.

Read on to find out:

• What is a user journey map, and how it captures user flows and customer touchpoints
• Benefits of user journey mapping to refine UX design and reach business goals
• How to make user journey maps in five steps, using FigJam’s user journey map template

What is a user journey map?

Think about the path a user takes to explore your product or website. How would you design the best way to get there? User journey maps (or user experience maps) help team members and stakeholders align on user needs throughout the design process, starting with user research. As you trace users' steps through your user flows, notice: Where do users get lost, backtrack, or drop off?

User journey maps help you flag pain points and churn, so your team can see where the user experience may be confusing or frustrating for your audience. Then you can use your map to identify key customer touchpoints and find opportunities for optimization.

How to read a user journey map

Most user journey maps are flowcharts or grids showing the user experience from end to end. Consider this real-life journey map example of a freelancing app from Figma's design community. The journey starts with a buyer persona needing freelance services, and a freelancer looking for a gig. Ideally, the journey ends with service delivery and payment—but customer pain points could interrupt the flow.

Start your user journey map with FigJam

5 key user journey map phases.

Take a look at another Figma community user journey template , which uses a simple grid. Columns capture the five key stages of the user journey: awareness, consideration, decision, purchase, and retention (see below). Rows show customer experiences across these stages—their thoughts, feelings, and pain points. These experiences are rated as good, neutral, and bad.

To see how this works, consider a practical example. Suppose a new pet parent wants to learn how to train their puppy and discovers your dog-training app. Here's how you might map out the five key user journey stages:

• Awareness. The user sees a puppy-training video on social media with a link to your product website. They're intrigued—a positive experience.
• Consideration. The user visits your product website to preview your app. If they can't find a video preview easily, this could be a neutral or negative experience.
• Decision. The user clicks on a link to the app store and reads reviews of your app and compares it to others. They might think your app reviews are good, but your price is high—a negative or neutral experience.
• Purchase. The user buys your app and completes the onboarding process. If this process is smooth, it's a positive experience. If not, the customer experience could turn negative at this point.
• Retention. The user receives follow-up emails featuring premium puppy-training services or special offers. Depending on their perception of these emails, the experience can range from good (helpful support) to bad (too much spam).

2 types of user journey maps—and when to use them

User journey maps are helpful across the product design and development process, especially at two crucial moments: during product development and for UX troubleshooting. These scenarios call for different user journey maps: current-state and future-state.

Current-state user journey maps

A current-state user journey map shows existing customer interactions with your product. It gives you a snapshot of what's happening, and pinpoints how to enhance the user experience.

Take the puppy training app, for example. A current-state customer journey map might reveal that users are abandoning their shopping carts before making in-app purchases. Look at it from your customers' point of view: Maybe they aren't convinced their credit cards will be secure or the shipping address workflow takes too long. These pain points show where you might tweak functionality to boost user experience and build customer loyalty.

Future-state user journey maps

A future-state user journey map is like a vision board : it shows the ideal customer journey, supported by exceptional customer experiences. Sketch out your best guesses about user behavior on an ideal journey, then put them to the test with usability testing. Once you've identified your north star, you can explore new product or site features that will optimize user experience.

How to make a user journey map in 5 steps

To start user journey mapping, follow this step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define user personas and goals.

Gather user research and data like demographics, psychographics, and shopping behavior to create detailed customer personas representing your target audience.  In your dog-training app example, one key demographic may be parents. What’s their goal? It isn't necessarily "hire a puppy trainer"—it could be "teach kids how to interact with a puppy."

Step 2: Identify customer touch points.

Locate the points along the user journey where the user encounters or interacts with your product. In the dog training app example, touchpoints might include social media videos, app website, app store category search (e.g., pets), app reviews, app store checkout, in-app onboarding, and app customer support.

Step 3: Visualize journey phases.

Create a visual representation of user journey phases across key touchpoints with user flow diagrams , flowcharts , or storyboards .

Step 4: Capture user actions and responses.

For each journey stage, capture the user story: at this juncture, what are they doing, thinking, and feeling ? This could be simple, such as: "Potential customer feels frustrated when the product image takes too long to load."

Step 5: Validate and iterate.

Finally, show your map to real users. Get honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t with user testing , website metrics , or surveys . To use the dog-training app example, you might ask users: Are they interested in subscribing to premium how-to video content by a professional dog trainer? Apply user feedback to refine your map and ensure it reflects customer needs.

Jumpstart your user journey map with FigJam

Lead your team's user journey mapping effort with FigJam, the online collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, designing, and idea-sharing. Choose a user journey map template from Figma's design community as your guide. With Figma's drag-and-drop design features, you can quickly produce your own professional, presentation-ready user journey map.

Pro tip: Use a service blueprint template to capture behind-the-scenes processes that support the user journey, bridging the gap between user experience and service delivery.

Ready to improve UX with user journey mapping?

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Customer Journey Mapping

Journey mapping helps you visualize how customers experience your product or service, and how they feel along the way. Scroll to step 6 for a real-life example from one of our product teams!

USE THIS PLAY TO...

Understand the customer journey from a specific persona's perspective so that you can design a better experience.

Running the play

Depending on how many touchpoints along the customer journey you're mapping, you might break the journey into stages and tackle each stage in pairs.

Sticky notes

Whiteboards.io Template

Define the map's scope (15 min)

Ideally, customer journey mapping focuses on the experience of a single persona  in a single scenario with a single goal. Else, the journey map will be too generic, and you'll miss out on opportunities for new insights and questions. You may need to pause creating a customer journey map until you have defined your customer personas . Your personas should be informed by  customer interviews , as well as data wherever possible.

Saying that, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! Sometimes a team just needs to get started, and you can agree to revisit with more rigor in  a few months' time. Once scope is agreed on, check your invite list to make sure you've got people who know the details of what customers experience when using your product or service.

Set the stage (5 min)

It's really important that your group understands the user  persona  and the goal driving their journey. Decide on or recap with your group the target persona and the scope of the journey being explored in your session. Make sure to pre-share required reading with the team at least a week ahead of your session to make sure everyone understands the persona, scope of the journey, and has a chance to delve deeper into research and data where needed. Even better- invite the team to run or attend the customer interviews to hear from customers first hand!

E.g. "We're going to focus on the Alana persona. Alana's role is project manager, and her goal is to find a scalable way for her team to share their knowledge so they spend less time explaining things over email. We're going to map out what it's like for Alana to evaluate Confluence for this purpose, from the point where she clicks that TRY button, to the point where she decides to buy it – or not."

Build a customer back-story (10 min)

Have the group use sticky notes to post up reasons why your target persona would be on this journey in the first place. Odds are, you'll get a range of responses: everything from high-level goals, to pain points, to requested features or services. Group similar ideas and groom the stickies so you can design a story from them.

These narratives should be inspired by actual customer interviews. But each team member will also bring a different perspective to the table that helps to broaden the lens.

Take a look at the example provided in the call out of this section. This back story starts with the pain points – the reasons why Alana would be wanting something like Confluence in the first place.

• E.g., "Her team's knowledge is in silos"

Then it basically has a list of requirements – what Alana is looking for in a product to solve the bottom pain points. This is essentially a mental shopping list for the group to refer to when mapping out the customer journey.

• E.g., "Provide structure"

Then it has the outcomes – goals that Alana wants to achieve by using the product

• E.g., "To keep my team focused on their work instead of distracted by unnecessary emails and shoulder-taps"

And finally the highest-level goal for her and her team.

• E.g., "Improve team efficiency"

Round off the back story by getting someone to say out loud what they think the overall story so far is, highlighting the main goals the customer has. This ensures a shared understanding that will inform the journey mapping, and improve the chances that your team will map it from the persona's point of view (not their own).

• E.g., "Alana and her team are frustrated by having to spend so much time explaining their work to each other, and to stakeholders. They want a way to share their knowledge, and organize it so it's easy for people outside their team to find, so they can focus more energy on the tasks at hand."

For example...

Here's a backstory the Confluence team created. 

Map what the customer thinks and feels (30-60 min)

With the target persona, back story, and destination in place, it's time to walk a mile in their shoes. Show participants how to get going by writing the first thing that the persona does on a sticky note. The whole group can then grab stickies and markers and continue plotting the journey one action at a time.

This can also include questions and decisions! If the journey branches based on the answers or choices, have one participant map out each path. Keep in mind that the purpose of this Play is to build empathy for, and a shared understanding of the customer for the team. In order to do this, we focus on mapping the  current state of one discrete end to end journey, and looking for opportunities for improvement.

To do a more comprehensive discovery and inform strategy, you will need to go deeper on researching and designing these journey maps, which will need to split up over multiple sessions. Take a look at the variation below for tipes on how to design a completely new customer journey.

Use different color sticky notes for actions, questions, decisions, etc. so it's easier to see each element when you look at the whole map.

For each action on the customer journey, capture which channels are used for the interactions. Depending on your context, channels might include a website, phone, email, postal mail, face-to-face, and/or social media.

It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "frontstage" (what the customer experiences) versus "backstage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

Journey mapping can open up rich discussion, but try to avoid delving into the wrong sort of detail. The idea is to explore the journey and mine it for opportunities to improve the experience instead of coming up with solutions on the spot. It's important not only to keep the conversation on track, but also to create an artefact that can be easily referenced in the future. Use expands or footnotes in the Confluence template to capture any additional context while keeping the overview stable.

Try to be the commentator, not the critic. And remember: you're there to call out what’s going on for the persona, not explain what’s going on with internal systems and processes.

To get more granular on the 'backstage' processes required to provide the 'frontstage' customer value, consider using Confluence Whiteboard's Service Blueprint template as a next step to follow up on this Play.

ANTI-PATTERN

Your map has heaps of branches and loops.

Your scope is probably too high-level. Map a specific journey that focuses on a specific task, rather than mapping how a customer might explore for the first time.

Map the pain points (10-30 min)

"Ok, show me where it hurts." Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. Where is there frustration? Errors? Bottlenecks? Things not working as expected?

For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or work-around. Even worse: does it cause the persona to abandon their journey entirely?

Chart a sentiment line (15 min)

(Optional, but totally worth it.) Plot the persona's sentiment in an area under your journey map, so that you can see how their emotional experience changes with each touchpoint. Look for things like:

• Areas of sawtooth sentiment – going up and down a lot is pretty common, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting for the persona.
• Rapid drops – this indicates large gaps in expectations, and frustration.
• Troughs – these indicate opportunities for lifting overall sentiments.
• Positive peaks – can you design an experience that lifts them even higher? Can you delight the persona and inspire them to recommend you?

Remember that pain points don't always cause immediate drops in customer sentiment. Sometimes some friction may even buold trust (consider requiring verification for example). A pain point early in the journey might also result in negative feelings later on, as experiences accumulate. 

Having customers in the session to help validate and challenge the journey map means you'll be more confident what comes out of this session. 

Analyse the big picture (15 min)

As a group, stand back from the journey map and discuss trends and patterns in the experience.

• Where are the areas of greatest confusion/frustration?
• Where is the journey falling short of expectations?
• Are there any new un-met needs that have come up for the user type?
• Are there areas in the process being needlessly complicated or duplicated? Are there lots of emails being sent that aren’t actually useful? 

Then, discuss areas of opportunity to improve the experience. E.g., are there areas in the process where seven steps could be reduced to three? Is that verification email actually needed?

You can use quantitative data to validate the impact of the various opportunity areas identified. A particular step may well be a customer experience that falls short, but how many of your customers are actually effected by that step? Might you be better off as a team focused on another higher impact opportunity?

Here's a user onboarding jouney map our Engaging First Impressions team created.

Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.

MAP A FUTURE STATE

Instead of mapping the current experience, map out an experience you haven't delivered yet. You can map one that simply improves on existing pain points, or design an absolutely visionary amazeballs awesome experience!

Just make sure to always base your ideas on real customer interviews and data. When designing a totally new customer journey, it can also be interesting to map competitor or peer customer journeys to find inspiration. Working on a personalised service? How do they do it in grocery? What about fashion? Finance?

After the mapping session, create a stakeholder summary. What pain points have the highest impact to customers' evaluation, adoption and usage of our products? What opportunities are there, and which teams should know about them? What is your action plan to resolve these pain points? Keep it at a summary level for a fast share out of key takeaways.

For a broader audience, or to allow stakeholders to go deeper, you could also create a write-up of your analysis and recommendations you came up with, notes captured, photos of the group and the artefacts created on a Confluence page. A great way of sharing this information is in a video walk through of the journey map. Loom is a great tool for this as viewers can comment on specific stages of the journey. This can be a great way to inspire change in your organization and provide a model for customer-centric design practices.

KEEP IT REAL

Now that you have interviewed your customers and created your customer journey map, circle back to your customers and validate! And yes: you might learn that your entire map is invalid and have to start again from scratch. (Better to find that out now, versus after you've delivered the journey!) Major initiatives typically make multiple journey maps to capture the needs of multiple personas, and often iterate on each map. Remember not to set and forget. Journeys are rapidly disrupted, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer's reality will enable your team to pivot (and get results!) faster when needed.

Related Plays

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Creating User Journey Maps: A Guide

User journey maps help you harness empathy to gain valuable insights about your customers and your product.

One of the biggest skills you’ll leverage as a UI/UX designer is your ability to empathize with the people using the products you design. Creating user journey maps can help you harness that empathy and transform it into valuable insights about your customers and product. Let’s take a closer look at what a user journey map is and why it’s an important tool in the UX designer’s toolbox.

What is a user journey map?

A user journey map gives a visual representation of a customer’s experience. This visualization might cover a customer’s entire relationship with a brand or focus on a select experience they might have while interacting with an app or website. No matter the type, user journey maps serve as a useful tool for understanding user needs and pain points and ultimately optimizing user experience (UX). 

Get started in UX: Google UX Design Professional Certificate

Why create user journey maps?

The main job of a UX designer is to make products intuitive, functional, and enjoyable to use. By creating a user journey map, you’re thinking about a product from a potential customer’s point of view. This can help in several ways.

User journey maps foster a user-centric mentality . You’ll focus on how a user might think and feel while using your product, as well as what goals they’re trying to achieve and what obstacles they might face along the way.

User journey maps create a shared vision for your company . This visualization can serve as a point of reference for different team members and stakeholders throughout the product development process. 

User journey maps can uncover blind spots . Taking the time to map out how a user interacts with your product (and how they feel doing so) may reveal design flaws or new opportunities you hadn’t considered. 

Still not convinced? Listen to Michael, an interaction designer at Google, explain the importance of user-centric design.

Types of journey maps

Journey maps can be as unique and creative as the products you’re designing. While there’s not one boilerplate template for a user journey, you will find a few main types of these maps. 

A UX journey map focuses on the user experience of a specific product, typically an app or website. With these types of maps, you can gain insight into how a customer interacts with your software and what they might find helpful or frustrating. This in turn helps you design software that’s simpler and easier to use.

A sales journey map follows the buyer’s journey through its typical stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Marketing teams can use these maps to evaluate how customers interact with a brand across multiple communication channels to maximize sales.

A customer experience journey map offers a high-level view of a customer-brand relationship across time. A current-state customer journey map focuses on current customer interactions (and how they can be improved). Future-state customer journey maps can drive innovation by imagining new customer experiences. 

Elements of a user journey map

As you begin to map out user journeys, you’ll likely find ways to customize your maps to your particular company, product, and customer base. Search for user maps on the web, and you’ll find a range of creative examples. But take a closer look and you’ll find that many of these maps have a few elements in common.

Persona: What segment of users are you trying to understand (current or target)?

Scenario: What interaction are you trying to map out (real or anticipated)? 

Stages of the journey: What are the high-level phases of the scenario? 

User actions: What actions can the user take in each stage of the journey?

User emotions and thoughts: What is the user’s emotional state as they move through the stages? What are they thinking in each stage?

Opportunities: Where can you improve the UX of your product or connect with your customer in a more effective way?

Internal ownership: Which team or team member will be responsible for enacting these changes?

Read more: 9 Essential Skills for UX Designers

How to create a user journey map

We’ve outlined what a user journey map is, why you might want to create one, and what elements you should include. Now let’s go through the basic steps to create your own user journey map.

1. Define the scope.

Creating a helpful user journey map starts with defining your goals. Are you mapping the journey of a new target user across the entire buyer’s journey? Or are you seeking to make a transaction on an app—transferring money for example—more intuitive? Being clear on your goals now can help give you more relevant insights once your map is complete.  

Read more: What Is Scope Creep? Keeping Your Project Focused

2. Build user personas.

Typically, you’ll want a different map for each unique user type. Not all your customers will have the same needs (or the same ways of going about meeting those needs). Think about who your users are, and create a customer persona for each segment. This often starts with user research. Customer interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, and even prior customer feedback can help you develop these personas and better understand the customer perspective. User personas are sometimes referred to as buyer personas.

3. Define user goals, expectations, and pain points.

Once you have a better idea of who your target user is, spend some time thinking about what they want. What problem do prospective customers have that your product or service can solve? What expectations might they have as they begin their journey? What problems might they face, or what about your product might cause them frustration? How can your product or service meet customer expectations?

4. List out touchpoints and channels.

The term “customer touchpoint” refers to a point of interaction between a user and a product or business. Typical customer touchpoints occur across many different business channels, including websites, social media platforms, apps, ads, or face-to-face communications. Create an inventory of all the customer touchpoints and channels involved in the scenario you’ve previously defined.

5. Map the journey stages.

You’ve gathered the data you need to populate your map, so now it’s time to visualize this information with a customer journey map template. This is where you can get creative. Your map could be as simple as a timeline or as complex as a storyboard that shows visually what happens in each of the journey phases. You could take a low-tech approach with sticky notes on a whiteboard, or go digital with Google Sheets or customer journey mapping tools.

Many common UX tools, including Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD, offer journey mapping capabilities. You’ll also find a range of dedicated journey mapping tools, such as UXPressia, Smaply, Custellence, or Visual Paradigm. UX research and consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group offers a free template that could also help you get started. 

6. Validate and refine the map.

User journey mapping is only as strong as it is truthful. Validate the map by moving through the user journey yourself. Usability testing, analytics, and reviews from real customers can also help validate that your map reflects the average customer reality. Continue to refine the map as you discover discrepancies.

Other types of UX mapping

The user journey map is among many types of mapping tools UX designers might use throughout the design process. Let’s take a brief look at some of the others that can be used on their own or alongside your journey map.

Service blueprint

A journey map illustrates the customer experience. A service blueprint maps out what goes on behind the scenes to deliver that experience. The former is customer focused, the latter organization focused.

A user flow maps out the path taken by a generic user through a website or app to a successful outcome. These often take the form of a flow chart and are not focused on specific personas. 

Empathy map

This tool helps you gain a deeper understanding of customer actions by mapping out what these users say, think, feel, and do. You may find it helpful to create an empathy map as part of Steps Two and Three above. 

Experience map

This visualization tracks the entire experience of a generic user as they seek to achieve a goal or satisfy a need. These maps typically look at a larger context to evaluate how potential customers solve their problems with or without your product.

Create your user journey map

User journey mapping is an essential part of the UX design process. Enhance your skills with these popular courses on Coursera:

Create a user journey map with a two-hour guided project. Create a User Journey Map in Miro is a hands-on course where you'll build a user journey map for a UX design project that documents the user's actions, emotions, and thoughts while using a product so you can identify opportunities for improvement.

Learn where and how user journey mapping is used in the design process with Google's course Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate . You'll craft user stories, develop user journey maps, and more, in 21 hours or less.

Build your UX design knowledge with Google's UX Design Professional Certificate. The popular series includes the class mentioned above, and is aimed at developing the skills you'll need for an entry-level UX design role. Learn how to empathize with users and design a delightful experience. Once completed, you'll earn a shareable certificate and gain access to exclusive career resources such as resume review and interview prep.

Keep reading

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This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

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How to design a customer journey map (A step-by-step guide)

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. Learn how to create a customer journey map in this practical step-by-step guide.

The State of UX Hiring Report 2024

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Successful UX design is rooted in empathy. The best designers are able to step into their users’ shoes and imagine what they think, feel, and experience as they interact with a product or service. 

One of the most effective ways to foster user empathy and consider different perspectives is to create customer journey maps—otherwise known as customer journey maps.

If you’re new to journey mapping, look no further than this guide. We’ll explain:

• What is a customer journey map?

Why create customer journey maps?

When to create customer journey maps, what are the elements of a customer journey map, how to create a customer journey map (step-by-step).

If you want to skip straight to the how-to guide, just use the clickable menu to jump ahead. Otherwise, let’s begin with a definition. 

[GET CERTIFIED IN UX]

What is a customer journey map? 

A customer journey map (otherwise known as a user journey map) is a visual representation of how a user or customer interacts with your product. It maps out the steps they go through to complete a specific task or to achieve a particular goal—for example, purchasing a product from an e-commerce website or creating a profile on a dating app. 

Where does their journey begin? What’s their first point of interaction with the product? What actions and steps do they take to reach their end goal? How do they feel at each stage? 

You can answer all of those questions with a user journey map.

A user journey map template from Miro . 

Creating customer journey maps helps to:

• Centre the end user and foster empathy. Creating a user/customer journey map requires you to step into the end user’s shoes and experience the product from their perspective. This reminds you to consider the user at all times and fosters empathy.
• Expose pain-points in the user experience. By viewing the product from the user’s perspective, you quickly become aware of pain-points or stumbling blocks within the user experience. Based on this insight, you can improve the product accordingly.
• Uncover design opportunities. User journey maps don’t just highlight pain-points; they can also inspire new ideas and opportunities. As you walk in your end user’s shoes, you might think “Ah! An [X] feature would be great here!”
• Get all key stakeholders aligned. User journey maps are both visual and concise, making them an effective communication tool. Anybody can look at a user journey map and instantly understand how the user interacts with the product. This helps to create a shared understanding of the user experience, building alignment among multiple stakeholders. 

Ultimately, user journey maps are a great way to focus on the end user and understand how they experience your product. This helps you to create better user experiences that meet your users’ needs. 

User journey maps can be useful at different stages of the product design process. 

Perhaps you’ve got a fully-fledged product that you want to review and optimise, or completely redesign. You can create journey maps to visualise how your users currently interact with the product, helping you to identify pain-points and inform the next iteration of the product. 

You can also create user journey maps at the ideation stage. Before developing new ideas, you might want to visualise them in action, mapping out potential user journeys to test their validity. 

And, once you’ve created user journey maps, you can use them to guide you in the creation of wireframes and prototypes . Based on the steps mapped out in the user journey, you can see what touchpoints need to be included in the product and where. 

No two user journey maps are the same—you can adapt the structure and content of your maps to suit your needs. But, as a rule, user journey maps should include the following: 

• A user persona. Each user journey map represents the perspective of just one user persona. Ideally, you’ll base your journey maps on UX personas that have been created using real user research data.
• A specific scenario. This describes the goal or task the journey map is conveying—in other words, the scenario in which the user finds themselves. For example, finding a language exchange partner on an app or returning a pair of shoes to an e-commerce company.
• User expectations. The goal of a user journey map is to see things from your end user’s perspective, so it’s useful to define what their expectations are as they complete the task you’re depicting.
• High-level stages or phases. You’ll divide the user journey into all the broad, high-level stages a user goes through. Imagine you’re creating a user journey map for the task of booking a hotel via your website. The stages in the user’s journey might be: Discover (the user discovers your website), Research (the user browses different hotel options), Compare (the user weighs up different options), Purchase (the user books a hotel).
• Touchpoints. Within each high-level phase, you’ll note down all the touchpoints the user comes across and interacts with. For example: the website homepage, a customer service agent, the checkout page.
• Actions. For each stage, you’ll also map out the individual actions the user takes. This includes things like applying filters, filling out user details, and submitting payment information.
• Thoughts. What is the user thinking at each stage? What questions do they have? For example: “I wonder if I can get a student discount” or “Why can’t I filter by location?”
• Emotions. How does the user feel at each stage? What emotions do they go through? This includes things like frustration, confusion, uncertainty, excitement, and joy.
• Pain-points. A brief note on any hurdles and points of friction the user encounters at each stage.
• Opportunities. Based on everything you’ve captured in your user journey map so far, what opportunities for improvement have you uncovered? How can you act upon your insights and who is responsible for leading those changes? The “opportunities” section turns your user journey map into something actionable. 

Here’s how to create a user journey map in 6 steps:

• Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)
• Define your persona and scenario
• Outline key stages, touchpoints, and actions 
• Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points
• Identify opportunities 
• Define action points and next steps

Let’s take a closer look.

[GET CERTIFIED IN UI DESIGN]

1. Choose a user journey map template (or create your own)

The easiest way to create a user journey map is to fill in a ready-made template. Tools like Miro , Lucidchart , and Canva all offer user/customer journey map templates that you can fill in directly or customise to make your own. 

Here’s an example of a user journey map template from Canva:

2. Define your persona and scenario

Each user journey map you create should represent a specific user journey from the perspective of a specific user persona. So: determine which UX persona will feature in your journey map, and what scenario they’re in. In other words, what goal or task are they trying to complete?

Add details of your persona and scenario at the top of your user journey map. 

3. Outline key stages, actions, and touchpoints

Now it’s time to flesh out the user journey itself. First, consider the user scenario you’re conveying and think about how you can divide it into high-level phases. 

Within each phase, identify the actions the user takes and the touchpoints they interact with. 

Take, for example, the scenario of signing up for a dating app. You might divide the process into the following key phases: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Service, and Advocacy . 

Within the Awareness phase, possible user actions might be: Hears about the dating app from friends, Sees an Instagram advert for the app, Looks for blog articles and reviews online. 

4. Fill in the user’s thoughts, emotions, and pain-points

Next, step even further into your user’s shoes to imagine what they may be thinking and feeling at each stage, as well as what pain-points might get in their way. 

To continue with our dating app example, the user’s thoughts during the Awareness phase might be: “ I’ve never used online dating before but maybe I should give this app a try…”

As they’re new to online dating, they may be feeling both interested and hesitant. 

While looking for blog articles and reviews, the user struggles to find anything helpful or credible. This can be added to your user journey map under “pain-points”. 

5. Identify opportunities

Now it’s time to turn your user pain-points into opportunities. In our dating app example, we identified that the user wanted to learn more about the app before signing up but couldn’t find any useful articles or reviews online.

How could you turn this into an opportunity? You might start to feature more dating app success stories on the company blog. 

Frame your opportunities as action points and state who will be responsible for implementing them.  

Here we’ve started to fill out the user journey map template for our dating app scenario:

Repeat the process for each phase in the user journey until your map is complete.

6. Define action points and next steps 

User journey maps are great for building empathy and getting you to see things from your user’s perspective. They’re also an excellent tool for communicating with stakeholders and creating a shared understanding around how different users experience your product. 

Once your user journey map is complete, be sure to share it with all key stakeholders and talk them through the most relevant insights. 

And, most importantly, turn those insights into clear action points. Which opportunities will you tap into and who will be involved? How will your user journey maps inform the evolution of your product? What are your next steps? 

Customer journey maps in UX: the takeaway

That’s a wrap for user journey maps! With a user journey map template and our step-by-step guide, you can easily create your own maps and use them to inspire and inform your product design process. 

For more how-to guides, check out:

• The Ultimate Guide to Storyboarding in UX
• How to Design Effective User Surveys for UX Research
• How to Conduct User Interviews

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What is a Customer Journey Map? [Free Templates]

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

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

What is a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits of using customer journey maps

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

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

Improved customer support

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

Effective marketing tactics

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

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

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

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

Product advancements or service improvements

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

A more enjoyable and efficient user experience

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

A customer-focused mindset

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

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

How to create a customer journey map

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

Step 1. Set your focus

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

Step 2. Choose your buyer personas

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Perform user research

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

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

Get a free Heyday demo

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

Step 4. List customer touchpoints

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

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

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

Step 5. Build your customer journey map

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

Step 6. Analyze your customer journey map

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

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

Types of customer journey maps

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

Current state

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

Future state

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

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

Day-in-the-life

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

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

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

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

Empathy maps

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

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

Customer journey map templates

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

Customer journey map template for the current state:

The future state customer journey mapping template:

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

An empathy map template:

A customer journey map example

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

Buyer Persona:

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

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

What are their struggles?

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

What tasks do they have?

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

Opportunities:

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

Action Plan:

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

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

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

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The Analytics Black Hole or The Bottleneck: What’s Stopping you from Solving Your Users’ Pain? + Grab our FREE User Journey Template!

13 min read

In the mission to solve your users’ most significant pain points, a user journey template can be your greatest asset.

Sure, user personas are helpful. But they don’t answer where the sources of friction are coming from as your users explore your product.

Nor are they fluid enough to accurately capture their journey.

Unfortunately, user journey mapping can be a long and arduous process that requires support from all of your stakeholders – meaning multiple meetings and perhaps a workshop ( long sigh ).

Then, when you finally put together your user journey map and want to optimize your touchpoints and eliminate bad experiences, you can face two barriers:

• The Analytics Black Hole – Can’t see the forest before the trees . You can’t get the right information at the right time to segment accordingly.
• The Bottleneck -Your software developer who is too busy to take on every experiment you want to run.

But wait! Despite the depressing picture we just painted, there is hope.

With the right template and approach, you can map your user journey relatively quickly regardless of your product’s stage.

You can then optimize your journey with no-code in-app experiences to solve their pain points and show them your product’s value.

In this article, we will cover what a user journey template is and why it is essential. We will explain how to create a quick user journey map and test to see if you have captured the right one.

Finally, we will go over how to bump your users into seeing your product’s value and how to use a user journey template for your SaaS business.

So, you can avoid this at all costs:

Source: Imgflip.com

Also known as:

• A user journey is the various steps, touchpoints, pain points, and emotions that a user will experience as they explore your product.
• A customer journey is very high-touch and happens through multiple channels. The user journey is relatively low-touch and is based mostly on their interactions with your product.
• Mapping your user journey is important because it helps you identify what your users’ pain points are. You can then implement solutions that improve their experience, convert them into customers and retain them.
• You can map your user journey relatively quickly with your data analytics and session recordings based on their stage. It doesn’t require the same investment in time as customer journey mapping. Interviewing your users provides even more insight.
• Optimize your user journey by first identifying their pain points in the sign-up and onboarding phase. Based on your observations, you can experiment with no-code in-app experiences to address their pain and quickly demonstrate your product’s value.
• You can track your experiment’s success by setting goals for each stage of the user journey.
• A user journey template for your SaaS can be filled out using qualitative and quantitative research. It is normally a five-by-five grid covering the goals a user wants to complete and then their touchpoints, pain points, tasks, questions, and emotions.

What Is a User Journey?

Before we start talking about mapping and templates, we first must understand the basic concept of a user journey.

In fact, a user journey is very similar to a customer journey.

It is the steps that a user will take, the various touchpoints of your product that they hit, and their emotions as they attempt to achieve a goal.

The major difference is that a customer journey includes all their interactions with your company after they have already bought a subscription. It is very high-touch, and various departments, from customer success to sales, get involved.

A user journey is generally low-touch, and most interactions will happen inside the product as the main goal is to convert them into customers.

A typical user journey in SaaS will look something like this:

Source: Userpilot – Identify the pain points in each of your user’s journeys with advanced segmentation analytics. Take action on the gaps with in-app experiences . No coding is required!

However, no user journey is the same, so the steps will differ depending on the business. They may also vary depending on the particular use case for which a person signs up for a product.

It is the story of your archetypal user’s journey, not 100% accurate, but beneficial.

The information that you gather about the user along their journey is the most critical element:

• What the user feels/thinks
• The touchpoints/events that are created
• Objections/friction
• Weaknesses or moments for churn
• Pain points

Now that we know what a user journey is, we can see why it is important to map, and then we can go over to create your own user journey template. Hint: It has nothing to do with buried treasure.

Why Is it Important to Map Your User Journey?

If you were lost in the middle of the woods and had a map that showed you the way out, would you throw it away?

Of course not!

The same goes for software. Most companies wander in a forest of similar solutions until they find a product-market fit.

The way out of that struggle is to provide an unmatched user experience . One that quickly provides value to your users to hit your activation points and convert them into customers.

Then, continue to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to your product, acquire new ones, and dramatically grow your revenue.

By how much?

In a study by Toptal , they found focusing on customer retention can increase revenue over an 18-24 months period by as much as 80%+, reduce customer acquisition costs by 30%+, and increase total customers by 1.5x.

Source: PointNineCapital

However, improving user experience requires deep empathy with the user’s pain points/problems.

Hence, why you need a map to prioritize which problems are the most important to your users along their journey and the scope of the solutions to implement.

A user journey map can also show you:

• Show where to allocate the budget. By looking at the journey map, you can see the points of churn and where to invest time and resources.
• Define the projects you want to launch. Put your product experiences into the context of each step of the journey.
• Identify opportunities to change the journey. Simplify complicated steps or eliminate steps that can make the experience better.
• Drive alignment across your team. Everyone is on the same page where pain points fit in the grand scheme of things.

Now that we know the benefits of mapping your user journey, let’s see how you can create a user journey template regardless of the product stage!

How to Create a User Journey Map

Since mapping user journeys is so dependent on your product and business, we decided to ask a couple of product experts about their methods for drawing up user journey maps.

Depending on your artistic ability, you can either draw up one with good ol’ fashion paper and pencil and even include post-it notes or use a dedicated tool.

So we can all agree that knowing your user journey is critical to growing your product. But what if you are just launching a product and figuring out the stages and activation points for the first time? How can you create an accurate user journey map quickly that will last you in the long run?

“ The answer is, you don’t always have to ” – says Katy Magrane, a Digital product Specialist with her own consulting agency .

“You don’t need to know the whole journey. You just need to guess the first step. Then you can put that first step out there and test it!”

Source: Miro.com

What type of product are you mapping for? Which part of the process? Discovery of the product, onboarding, or use of the product once the user has been acquired?

Let’s say you are in the onboarding phase, and you’ve proven you can drive sign-ups.

The users who’ve signed up have the capacity and willingness to pay (or otherwise contribute to monetization), you’re in the perfect position to:

• Know what prompted the customer to sign up . You can then figure out where they see the product’s value and what they have a burning desire to do next/first!
• Place as little resistance as possible between them and that priority task.
• Generate a prototype of your user journey template to illustrate the next steps you think represent that path of least resistance to test it before committing to code.

Using Proto-Personas

So now that we understand the fastest way to start mapping your user journey, we also wanted to know how to incorporate research in a simplified manner.

People often get caught up in making an accurate journey, and it gets way too complicated.

We asked our product manager, Andy Shamah, to look back at one of the first user journey maps at Userpilot.

“We started by developing a hypothesis for the different types of personas (I love to name them proto-personas) that would have interest in using our product.”

• After going through various iterations because of similar pain points, I’d develop several working proto-personas.
• I would then draw a customer journey map for each one of them (This is just as a reference).
• I would then use a user-analytics tool like Full-Story and watch users go through their journey, monitor each reaction, and take notes.
• Based on my observations, I got a more granular view of my personas – i.e., what jobs they need to do, my product pillars, what pain points I solve for them, the focus touchpoints, and what are the opportunities.
• I will then craft the most ideal user journey that includes the various touchpoints, stages of accomplishments, and user emotions for each stage.

Source: Userpilot-Map your user journey and get the tools to increase adoption rates and user retention.

Speaking of product adoption:

Many companies will go through a customer mapping process that demands rigorous research and a detailed customer understanding.

Since your user journey exists mainly through one channel, you can utilize your product analytics software, session replays, and segmentation to map it in a meaningful way -without spending time in various meetings.

You now know some techniques for mapping your user journey and the benefits. Let’s look at how to test them and track them for optimization.

Optimizing Your User Journey

Step 1-identify pain points.

The first step to optimizing your user journey and creating your user journey template starts in your trial version.

Here you can distinguish the most common paths to activation among your users and establish your baseline metrics.

Source: Funnelventures.com

Next, you will want to identify any friction points that may occur while watching your users go through the sign-up and onboarding phases.

They may never click your email verification link. Some users get at the first screen they are shown inside your product, stay for a couple of seconds, and quickly close their browsers. There will always be some users who don’t come close to your activation point.

They can be:

• Promising signals
• Concerning signals
• Activation signals

The point is to record the interactions and track the events. Then hypothesize reasons for those frictions in your user journey.

Why is your product so painful to use?

Come up with a couple of reasons why users aren’t seeing your product’s value and write them down.

Now design a couple of experiments to see if you can bridge the gap between what your user expects from your product and the value received or perceived.

Can’t think of any to implement? Or maybe you don’t have any time off of your product roadmap. Don’t worry, we got you covered.

Step 2 – Bump Users to Activation: Welcome Screens and Showing Journey in Checklists

One of the many reasons you see a user not completing their onboarding is that they never got a proper introduction.

If as soon as a user signs up and all they see is an empty dashboard, you could be throwing your users into a situation where they feel overwhelmed. They might not know where to start.

You could also have some experienced users with products like yours and want to just jump right in.

To fix both of their journeys, you could fill an empty state or present the new user with an interactive welcome screen that lets the user decide where they want to go.

Source: Marketmuse.com

You give the user the power to meet their own expectations based on how they want to use your product. You are also getting more information about their use case to tailor their path to the activation point.

For example, for the users not familiar with your product, should get a checklist covering how to use the main features that will bring them to the ‘AHA! Moment’.

Source: Userpilot- Start creating checklists like this and give your new inexperienced users an interactive tour that will leave a lasting impression.

For more experienced users, you could give them a much simpler checklist. One that covers your first activation point and then shows them the advanced, new, or secondary features.

Source: Userpilot-Personalize your checklists to fit each user’s unique journey .

The next experiment covers bringing pointing your user’s attention in the right direction to optimize your user journey template.

Step 3 Bump Users to Paying Customers: Tooltips, and Driven actions

Once you have shown your users their way to the activation point, you will want to watch their behavior as they engage with your product.

What are the core features that your most active users engage with? Are there any patterns between segments? What are your disengaged users missing?

Source: Userpilot- Start discovering which users you want to focus on to optimize your user journey.

Asking these questions will help you determine what to implement to address the users’ pain points at different stages of their user journey .

You can design product experiences for your most active segments that show them quick tips to get even more value out of your core features.

Source: Userpilot-Increase your conversion rates by introducing your active users to your secondary features. Time feature announcements and show off your product. Book a free consultation today!

You can also design experiences for disengaged users to capture their interest again.

Try A/B testing whether tooltips make more sense for the feel of your product.

Or – if your users need a bit more hand-holding to get to the ‘AHA!’ moment – you can use driven actions to show them exactly what to do:

If you are unsure where to start, another option is the first-click test.

Show the user a screen and highlight two options. This test is so useful because a user has close to an 87% chance of completing an action correctly if their first click is done right. If they make a mistake with their first click, they’ve only got a 46% chance of accurately completing the task.

Source: Userpilot. Experiment with what bridges the value gap for your users with slideouts, checklists, modals, tooltips and more. See the various possibilities for doubling your activation and conversion rates

With your experiments implemented, you are ready to track their success.

Step 4: Setting up goals and confirming the success

You certainly could manually track your user journey through session recording as they advance from activated to paying.

However, this can be somewhat time-consuming to set up all the variables and triggers to know which stage of the journey your entire user base is at.

A quicker way to track your user journey solutions’ impact is to set goals for what success looks like on your user journey map. It might be a high NPS score .

Source: Userpilot

It might be engaging with a particularly key feature or completing the onboarding checklist.

Source: Userpilot -Define your product’s success with goal tracking and advanced user segmentation! See all the analytics possibilities through a quick call with a product specialist.

Each journey is unique so setting up multiple goals for several different personas is an excellent idea to see where your users stand.

Once you find out which experiences move the needle further, you can stick with those as part of your engagement strategy .

You are then ready to do the whole thing over again and continue to optimize your user journey template. In other words, rinse and repeat.

Free User Journey Template

Click the link above for your own free user journey template!

Source: upboard.io

How to Use a User Journey Template for Your SaaS

• Identify your most active users (or the users that you would like to attract). Make sure you thoroughly understand them by building a user persona.
• It is best practice to interview these user segments about their journeys to ensure that you understand their motivations, goals, activity habits, and pain points. This will help you create an empathy map.
• When filling out the template, make each column or journey stage your users’ primary goals they are trying to achieve. Don’t make the steps reflect your own internal processes.
• Next, use your qualitative and quantitative research to fill out the rows. These include touchpoints for each stage, pain points, emotions, weaknesses, influences, questions, and user tasks.
• Start with your touchpoints and tasks as these are the easiest to identify, and then go into pain points and emotions from your empathy map. This will make it easier to know where the weakness and questions are.
• Above all else, keep it simple.
• The final step is to outline opportunities for improvements and decide what experiments you will run.

Wrapping Things Up

Remember, the user journey template is the way to spot the pain points, not the solutions. If the template doesn’t result in actions being taken, it has been a waste of time.

Take your time to study your user persona, and understand their emotions and reactions to your product experience. Figure out precisely the task they are trying to complete and design a journey that helps them solve it the quickest way possible.

This leads to a better user experience and retention to augment your product growth. Start experimenting today without the analytics black hole or developer bottleneck, and you will see how little it takes to bump users in the right direction.

Want to improve your user journey and create product experiences code-free? Get a Userpilot demo to get started! 

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

4. You can improve your customer retention rate.

When you have a complete view of the customer journey, it’s easier to identify areas for improvement. 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.

Customer 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. That’s because each department has varying goals, meaning they might not prioritize customer needs — they might focus 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 every step of the customer journey, from initial attraction to post-purchase support. And, yes, this concerns marketing, sales, and service.

Now that we’ve discussed the customer journey and the benefits of mapping it, let’s review the specific stages that comprise it.

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to Create Effective Journey Maps: Learnings from the IxDF Course

A low conversion rate (below 2%) usually means a website struggles to keep visitors interested. Journey mapping helps identify why visitors leave quickly and tracks every step of a user's interaction with a website. The goal is simple: to create a smooth, enjoyable journey to make users return. Learn the secrets of journey maps with the IxDF course, Journey mapping . This course shows you how to pinpoint improvement areas effectively and how to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty.

Have you ever found yourself lost on a website, unsure where to click next? Frustrating digital experiences make us want to give up and leave. This is why journey mapping is so important. It's a strategic approach in UX design that lays out a user's path through a product or service. When you understand each step a user takes, you can create more intuitive and enjoyable experiences. 

In journey mapping, you plot a course to guide users from one point to another. This method reveals the pain points and moments of delight in a user's product interaction. When you smooth out these critical junctures, you can craft solutions that meet and exceed user expectations. 

“ Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”    - Joe Sparano 

Journey mapping equips us with the insights needed to refine the user experience and create first encounters with your product, both positive and memorable. Since 94% of first impressions relate to a website's design, it’s critical to make an excellent first impression through a well-mapped user journey. A solid understanding of journey mapping principles can transform a confusing or mediocre user experience into one that’s engaging and seamless.  

To create seamless user journeys, you must understand the journey mapping process in detail. Look at the fundamental aspects you should explore to craft better digital experiences. 

Journey Mapping: The Essentials

Journey mapping enables teams to visualize the user's experience from initial contact through various interactions to the final goal. Let’s run through the basics.  

What is Journey Mapping?

Journey mapping creates a detailed visualization of a user's experience with a product or service. It maps out each step a user takes. It highlights their feelings, motivations and challenges. This process helps you identify pain points and opportunities to enhance the user experience. 

Watch Matt Snyder, Head of Product & Design at Hivewire, discuss journey mapping in UX. 

• Transcript loading…

Why Journey Mapping Matters

Journey mapping matters because it shows where users face struggles and frustrations. If you understand these issues, you can make your websites or services better. This means happier customers who are more likely to return and recommend the product/service to others. 

Consider the process users follow to book a flight online. The user's journey begins with the search for flights. Here, they might encounter their first obstacle: a confusing interface. This moment could lead to frustration. It may push them towards a competitor's website. Journey mapping would reveal this pain point and allow you to simplify the search process. 

Next, the user selects a flight. If the site bombards them with too many upsell options, like seat upgrades or extra baggage, it might overwhelm them. A well-designed journey map would highlight this issue. It may suggest a more streamlined and helpful upsell process, not pushy. 

Finally, the user reaches the payment section. A complex checkout process with unclear pricing and surprise charges can deter them from completing the purchase. Journey mapping pinpoints this critical moment. You may have to recommend a clearer, more concise checkout flow. 

If you map out this journey, your design team can: 

Simplify the flight search interface to reduce initial frustration. 

Streamline the upsell process to enhance the user experience without overwhelming them. 

Revise the checkout process for clarity and ease. You must encourage the completion of the purchase. 

Watch this quick video that explains the power of mapping. 

How Journey Mapping Improves UX

Journey mapping provides a clear framework to analyze and optimize each touchpoint in the user's journey. It allows you to: 

Identify and eliminate barriers that cause frustration or abandonment. 

Enhance features that users find valuable. 

Design with a holistic understanding of the user's experience. 

Journey Mapping Variations

Journey mapping comes in different forms. Each one offers unique insights into the user experience. These variations can help you apply the right approach to your UX challenges. You’ll learn about these variations in detail in our journey mapping course.  

Experience Maps

Experience maps are the broadest form of journey maps. They map out the overall human experience in different situations. You can use these maps for more than product or service interactions. Their goal is to get a broad understanding of human behaviors and feelings.  

For example, consider mapping the common experience of commuting. This could include various methods like walking or biking to public transport. Experience maps can help you spot common issues and chances for improvement. They prepare you for more detailed studies. 

Example of an Experience map for ordering a car through an app. It shows the actions, problems, emotions, quotes and opportunities that relate to the user.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps narrow the focus. They focus on how a person interacts with a specific product or service. These maps help us understand a customer's experience with a business. 

A customer journey map includes the following elements.  

Customer persona : This defines a typical customer. You create a character that represents a part of your customer base. 

Phases : Stages of the customer journey. It typically includes Awareness, Research, Consideration, Purchase and Support. 

Touchpoints : These are all interaction points between the customer and your brand across different phases. This interaction may happen through marketing materials, digital presence, staff interactions, purchase process and post-purchase follow-up. 

Customer thoughts, actions and emotions : Detail what customers think, do and feel at each touchpoint. Use surveys and direct feedback for accuracy. 

Opportunities : You list the chances to improve the customer's experience, solve any issues they face and make their journey smoother. 

For instance, with a music streaming app like Spotify, a customer journey map would show how a user finds, chooses and uses the app. It would point out their main steps and where they might have problems. 

An example of a customer journey map for a music streaming app. It tracks interactions from the initial visit to the response. It also highlights emotions and thoughts at each stage.

© Draft.io, Fair Use

Service Blueprints

Service blueprints build on what we learn from customer journey maps . Unlike journey maps, which focus on the customer's experience, service blueprints give us a peek into how the service works behind the scenes. They show how different parts of the service work together to support the customer's journey. 

The anatomy of a service blueprint showing all the key processes in different phases. (described below)

A service blueprint maps out five key areas: 

Physical evidence: This is anything the customer can see, touch or interact with, like a website or a product. It includes all the physical parts of the service. 

Customer's actions: These are the steps customers take when they use the service. The service needs these actions to meet the customer's needs. 

Frontstage: This area is all about what the customer interacts with directly. It's the part of the service the customer sees and uses. 

Backstage: These are the parts of the service that happen out of the customer's view. They support the frontstage but remain hidden to the customer. 

Supporting actions: These are the behind-the-scenes processes that make sure the service operates smoothly.    

The Role of Research in Effective Journey Mapping

You need comprehensive data—both qualitative and quantitative—to create an accurate and useful journey map. This process involves understanding the problems your users face and the potential solutions. Here’s an overview of key steps to collect the necessary information. 

Research Problems and Solutions

Identify the problems and opportunities within the user experience. You must look at the issue from two angles: the problem space and the solution space.  

In the problem space, you aim to understand the user's challenges, needs and pain points. You typically do this through qualitative user research , such as user observation and interviews. Quantitative methods like surveys can also contribute. You don’t need to consider the existing solutions.  

A straightforward perspective grid for a person aiming to become an expert drummer. This individual needs a clear path, access to drums and some instruction. 

In the solution space, you ideate potential solutions to problems you identified. This shift requires a creative approach. You aim to explore various ideas that effectively address users’ needs and evaluate those in usability sessions or A/B testing. 

A simple perspective grid for a Rhythm Road customer. This customer is between coaching sessions. They need help from Rhythm Road to remember to practice. 

Organize Your Research

A perspective grid helps you organize and synthesize the data collected from your research. You can use it to ensure the remainder of the journey mapping process proceeds smoothly. It allows you to categorize insights based on different user perspectives or personas . This step helps you understand the experiences and expectations of your user base. 

To create a perspective grid, list your user personas along one axis and the stages of their journey along the other. Fill in each cell with the Gaps/Barriers/Pain/Risks relevant to that persona at each stage. This visualization helps you identify commonalities and differences across the journey.  

How to Create Journey Map Variations

Each journey map variation helps you achieve specific goals. Let's explore how to create experience maps, customer journey maps and service design blueprints. 

How to Create an Experience Map

An Experience Map involves a five-step approach.  

Plan your experience map : Determine the scope. Decide who needs to participate in the workshop. Consider a cross-disciplinary team for better insights. 

Customer research : Gather factual data along with user stories and analytics. This step helps you fill knowledge gaps. 

Run the workshop : An all-day event where diverse voices collaborate. You must plan the event for productive outcomes. 

Create your experience map : Turn the workshop findings into a visual map. This map should outline general common experiences related to your field. 

Use your experience map : Apply what you learned to make decisions and improvements in your organization. 

How to Create a Customer Journey Map

Follow these seven steps to map out the detailed interactions users have with your organization: 

Define your objectives : Determine what you aim to achieve with the map. 

Gather Information : Understand your customers’ behaviors, needs and how they interact with your product. 

Identify customer touchpoints : Note how customers interact with your product. Then, understand how these touchpoints affect their experience. 

Outline key stages of customer experience : From the customer's perspective, map the sequence of events. Document all events from initial contact to post-purchase support. 

Start mapping : Use diagrams or digital tools to visualize the journey. Include touchpoints, emotional responses and any other relevant factors. 

Validate your results : Get feedback from customers and internal teams to ensure accuracy. 

Analyze your map : Compare it against your goals to see if it meets customer expectations. 

How to Create a Service Design Blueprint

Service design focuses on the internal workings of a service. It outlines frontstage and backstage actions. Here’s how to develop a Service Design Blueprint:

Find support : Assemble a cross-disciplinary team and secure stakeholder buy-in. 

Define the goal : Set a clear scope and business objective for the blueprint. 

Gather research : Unlike customer journey mapping, a blueprint requires more internal research. It includes direct observations and employee interviews. 

Map the blueprint : Organize a workshop to determine the five elements encountered throughout the service delivery. 

Refine and distribute : Enhance the blueprint with contextual details. Then, distribute it to stakeholders to communicate the internal processes.  

The Role of a Journey Mapping Workshop (and How to Do It Right)

The effectiveness of journey mapping hinges on a detailed and well-organized journey mapping workshop. This is when teams work together to understand and improve customer experiences.

Here’s how to navigate the pre-workshop preparation and conduct the workshop. 

Before the Journey -Mapping Workshop

Preparation is key. Assemble a diverse team to bring a wide range of views. Prioritize the customer personas and scenarios you'll focus on to maintain a clear focus. Share existing research with all participants to get everyone on the same page. They should understand the journey's context. 

Build a Collaborative Team

Journey mapping thrives on collaboration. Include people from various departments to ensure a holistic view of the customer journey. Don’t forget to invite stakeholders who will decide on the final approach. This team will help you create the map and implement its findings. 

Prioritize Actors and Scenarios

Focus on specific customer personas and how they interact with your service. It helps you create a more targeted and actionable journey map. If you cover multiple personas or scenarios, plan how to manage this complexity. 

Share and Analyze Existing Research

Compile and review all data related to the journey. This may include user experience studies, marketing analysis and customer feedback. Share information before the workshop to help everyone understand the starting point. 

Assign Pre-Workshop Tasks

Assign homework to make the participants well-prepared. It includes background reading and key questions related to the journey. This pre-engagement makes the workshop more effective.  

During the Journey-Mapping Workshop

The workshop should be an active and engaging process. It starts with building a basic understanding. Then, you map the customer's experience and brainstorm ways to improve it. 

Establish the Foundation

You bring everyone on the same page to begin. Everyone should understand journey mapping principles, existing research and input methods. Use engaging activities like trivia to refresh key concepts and energize the group. 

Map the Current State

The team would create an assumption-based map of the current journey. This should reflect the team’s collective understanding. Offer attendees a template to identify pain points with ease: 

"   requires ______ to achieve ______." 

"   requires ______, allowing them to ______." 

For instance: "Bob requires an easier method to compare choices, allowing him to avoid feeling swamped."  

Note : It’s important to avoid using the first person , like "As a I want...". This format can be repetitive and time-consuming in documents full of user stories. It also shifts important information into sentences that make them harder to scan and understand. More importantly, you must not assume the user's perspective as that can lead developers to project their own experiences and biases onto users. 

Make the map open to revisions. Use customer interviews for this phase to validate assumptions and gain fresh insights. 

Vision the Future State

Use the identified pain points to brainstorm ideas to improve the customer journey. Encourage teams to think big and use metaphors in their ideas. This prevents them from focusing too early on specific solutions, like features. Sketch and critique potential future interactions to translate these ideas into tangible designs. 

You need the positive aspects on green sticky notes. You can mark areas for improvement on yellow ones. The critiques help refine the ideas.  

Now, merge the best elements from these individual sketches into a unified future-state flow. You can then share this consolidated journey with the whole workshop team. It will help you paint a picture of what the improved customer experience could look like. 

After the Journey -Mapping Workshop

The work doesn’t end when the workshop does. Quickly share the outcomes and next steps to maintain momentum. Further test and refine the ideas generated during the workshop. It’ll bring meaningful changes to the customer journey. 

Share Workshop Insights

Document and distribute the workshop's findings to all participants and stakeholders. This includes:  

The journey maps created 

Identified pain points 

Future state designs 

Keep everyone informed for continued engagement and support in implementing changes. 

Bring Ideas to Life

Translate the workshop's conceptual ideas into prototypes for user testing . This iterative design and feedback process helps refine the solutions into actionable improvements to the customer journey. 

Continuously Refine the Process

With each workshop, gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t to improve future sessions. This continuous improvement ensures that journey mapping remains a productive and insightful tool for your organization. 

This might seem like a lot, but if you want to learn about how to set up workshops, the journey mapping course can help you. You’ll learn how to:  

Increase understanding 

Create visions 

Guide evaluations 

Plan experiments 

Build a workshop plan 

About the Journey Mapping Course

Journey mapping is a 7-week course that will help you solve complex design problems with simple, user-friendly solutions. You’ll learn the right journey-mapping process for your goals and master data collection and analysis with a perspective grid. Create key journey maps: experience maps, customer journey maps and service blueprints. Gain skills to run a journey mapping workshop and turn insights into real solutions. 

This course will help you if you want to design smooth shopping experiences, easy signup flows or engaging apps. Start with journey mapping basics. Understand its power and role in UX design. Learn to identify, read and use various journey maps. Gain data gathering and analysis skills. Then, finish with the ability to create journey maps and lead workshops. 

Make sure to benefit from practical techniques and downloadable templates. Participate in three hands-on exercises in the " Build Your Portfolio: Journey Mapping Project. " These activities solidify your learning. They also offer an option to create a case study for your portfolio. 

Learn from four industry experts: 

Indi Young , founder of Adaptive Path, brings her deep understanding of data gathering in journey mapping. She wrote two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models . 

Kai Wang shares insights from his experiences at CarMax and CapitalOne. She emphasizes journey mapping's organizational impact. 

Head of Product & Design at Hivewire , Matt Snyder, presents journey mapping as an effective product development tool. He teaches the application of a perspective grid for smoother data-rich processes. 

Christian Briggs , Senior Product Designer and Design Educator, guides you through this course with his extensive experience in digital product design and journey mapping.  

This course caters to budding and intermediate designers eager to refine complex user experiences. It's ideal for:  

Aspiring UX/ UI designers seeking foundational design skills. 

Junior to mid-level designers aiming for advanced challenges and strategic team roles. 

Product managers focused on crafting intricate experiences. 

Join a global design community that shares knowledge. Collaborate, learn and grow with peers to enhance your design skills and career prospects. 

Course Overview 

Weekly lessons : We release each week with no deadlines. 

Learning time : Approximately 9 hours and 54 minutes over the span of 7 weeks. 

Where to Learn More

Enrollment for the Journey Mapping course is now open. It’s included in an  IxDF membership. 

To become a member, sign up here . 

Read our article Customer Journey Maps — Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes . 

Learn more about website conversion rates .  

Read web design statistics from WebFX . 

Journey Mapping

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Customer Journey Pain Points, How to Find Them, & How to Fix Them

In this article, you will learn what customer journey pain points are, the different types of pain points that customers can experience, and how to identify them.

By addressing these pain points, you can improve the overall customer experience and build a loyal customer base.

So, let's dive in and explore the world of customer journey pain points together.

What Are Customer Journey Pain Points?

Customer journey pain points refer to the specific moments in a customer's experience with a company where they experience frustration, confusion, or dissatisfaction.

These pain points can occur at any stage of the customer journey, from initial research to post-purchase support, and can significantly impact customer satisfaction.

Types of Customer Journey Pain Points

1. support pain points.

Support pain points can significantly impact the customer experience. For instance, a frustrated customer had to wait on hold for over an hour to speak with a representative and ultimately received unhelpful guidance.

When customers encounter support pain points, it can lead to a negative perception of the entire customer journey.

This is because support agents are often the primary point of contact for customers when they encounter issues or problems. If support agents are unable to effectively address customer problems or are difficult to reach, it can undermine the entire user experience and lead to frustration.

Also Read: Customer Loyalty Analytics

To avoid support pain points, companies should prioritize efficient and effective communication channels, such as live chat and email, in addition to traditional phone support.

Additionally, companies can train their support agents to be knowledgeable and empathetic, ensuring that they have the tools and resources necessary to resolve customer issues quickly and effectively.

By addressing support pain points, companies can improve the overall customer journey and build positive relationships with their customers.

2. Productivity Pain Points

Feeling overwhelmed and bogged down by tasks that eat up your time and energy can be frustrating, but with the right tools and strategies, you can tackle productivity pain points and streamline your workflow.

To start, take a closer look at your customer journey map and identify any process pain points that are hindering your productivity. Here are some customer journey map examples you can refer to.

Some common productivity pain points include:

• Manual data entry
• Repetitive tasks
• Lack of automation
• Inefficient communication channels
• Inadequate access to customer data

Once you've identified these pain points, work on developing solutions to streamline your workflow.

This could involve implementing automation tools, creating templates for repetitive tasks, or investing in software that allows for more efficient communication and data management.

3. Financial Pain Points

You're no stranger to the frustration of financial roadblocks, like hitting a pothole on a smooth road. Financial pain points are a common aspect of the customer journey, and addressing them is crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To do so effectively, it's essential to understand the customer's needs and how they relate to their financial situation. Market and qualitative research can help identify these pain points and provide insights into how to address them.

Also Read: Benefits Of Customer Journey Mapping

One of the most common financial pain points for customers is the difficulty of managing their finances. This may include issues like budgeting, saving, and investing, all of which can be daunting tasks for those who are not financially literate.

Other financial pain points may include high-interest rates on loans and credit cards, unexpected fees, and insufficient access to credit.

Also Read: Retail Customer Journey

By addressing these pain points, companies can not only improve customer satisfaction but also build a reputation as a reliable and trustworthy financial partner.

4. Process Pain Points

These are the obstacles and inefficiencies that customers encounter when trying to navigate a company's internal processes. Process pain points can occur at any stage of the customer journey, from initial research to post-purchase support.

They can include confusing website navigation, lengthy wait times for customer service, and convoluted return processes.

How To Identify Customer Journey Pain Points

To identify the pain points in your customer journey, you need to study customer feedback thoroughly.

Take customer interviews to understand their experiences and pain points during the journey. Opt for journey mapping to visualize the customer journey and analyze the customer behavior.

Additionally, analyze customer support interactions to identify common pain points and improve the overall experience.

Study Customer Feedback

One effective way to gather customer feedback is through user research, such as surveys or focus groups. These methods allow businesses to ask specific questions about each point in the customer journey.

Additionally, businesses can gather feedback from their sales and customer support teams. They interact with customers on a regular basis and can provide valuable insights based on their experiences.

Take Customer Interviews

When you sit down with your clients and chat with them about their experiences, you'll gain a better understanding of their needs and preferences.

To conduct effective customer interviews, start by preparing a list of open-ended questions that encourage your customers to share their experiences and feedback openly. Be sure to actively listen to their responses, taking notes of their pain points, frustrations, and emotional reactions.

This will help you identify any recurring themes and patterns that may indicate a larger issue.

It's essential to be empathetic and understanding of their experiences, as this will help build trust and rapport with your customers.

Opt For Journey Mapping

Mapping out the full experience of a consumer can reveal insights into their emotions, needs, and behaviors, allowing businesses to make informed decisions on how to improve their overall customer experience. This is where journey mapping comes in.

Journey mapping is the process of visually representing the entire customer journey, from the moment a prospective customer becomes aware of your brand to the point where they become a loyal customer.

This process helps businesses identify pain points along the way, such as touchpoints where the customer may feel frustrated or confused.

Analyze Customer Support Interactions

When a customer reaches out to customer support, they're likely experiencing a pain point in their customer journey.

Here are a few ways to analyze customer support interactions:

Look for patterns: Are customers consistently calling with the same issue? This could indicate a problem with your product or service that needs to be addressed.

Measure response time: How long does it take for your customer support team to respond to inquiries? If response times are consistently long, it may be time to add more support staff.

Monitor customer satisfaction: After a customer support interaction, send a survey to measure how satisfied the customer was with the experience. This can help you identify areas for improvement.

Train your support team: Make sure your customer support team is well-trained and knowledgeable about your product or service. This can help them provide better support and resolve issues more quickly.

Customer Surveys

To make the most of customer surveys, it's important to ask the right questions.

Use a table to organize your survey questions into categories such as "Ease of Use," "Product Quality," and "Customer Service". Include open-ended questions to allow customers to provide more detailed feedback.

By analyzing your survey results, you can identify the areas where you need to make improvements and take action to improve your customers' experience.

Analyze Customer Churn

By analyzing customer churn, you can gain valuable insights into the areas of your business that may be causing frustration for your customers. This could include anything from poor customer service to product issues or a confusing website.

B2B customer journey touchpoints can vary from business to business, so taking the time to analyze your specific audience is key.

You’ll need good customer journey analytics to segment your customer churn cohorts - we recommend Woopra. ;)

Check Social Media

Take a moment to check social media to see what your customers are saying about your business. Social media has become a powerful tool for customers to voice their opinions, both good and bad, about their experiences with companies.

Here are five key reasons why checking social media can help you identify and address customer journey pain points:

• It allows you to see what customers are saying about your business in real-time.
• You can quickly spot common pain points that multiple customers are experiencing.
• Social media gives you an opportunity to respond and address their concerns directly and publicly.
• It informs product improvements and other changes to better serve your customers.
• Monitoring social media allows you to address issues as they arise, rather than waiting for them to become bigger problems.

By regularly checking social media, you can identify and address customer journey pain points, ultimately improving the overall customer experience and increasing customer loyalty.

Look For Employee Insights

Now that you've checked social media, it's time to dig deeper into employee insights.

Your employees are the ones who interact with customers on a daily basis, and they can provide firsthand knowledge about the pain points that customers experience.

Sometimes things that management are oblivious of are obvious to the rank-and-file employees. So listen up!

5 Customer Journey Pain Points That Every Business May Face

Common pain points often include a lack of responsiveness, poor product and service quality, personal disconnection, complex buying process, and inadequate customer support.

Lack Of Responsiveness

When visiting a website, if it takes too long to load or the links are unresponsive, it can create a frustrating experience for the customer. This lack of responsiveness is a common customer journey pain point that can lead to a high bounce rate and lost revenue for the company.

Customers want a seamless experience when interacting with a website, but when they face broken or slow webpages, they quickly lose interest and move on to a competitor's website.

To avoid this issue, make sure your website is optimized for speed and functionality. Here are three ways to improve the page loading speed of your website:

• Optimize images and videos for faster load times
• Implement a caching system to reduce server response times
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute content across multiple servers and improve load times for customers in different locations.

Poor Product & Service Quality

Customers expect businesses to provide high-quality products and services, and when they fail to meet these expectations, customers become dissatisfied.

Poor product quality results in product returns, negative reviews, and decreased trust in the brand. Similarly, poor service quality leads to frustrated customers, negative word-of-mouth, and ultimately, lost revenue.

On the back end, businesses may have to invest significant resources in addressing quality issues, such as product recalls or service retraining. That’s why prioritizing product and service quality is essential.

Poor Customer Support

Nothing frustrates customers more than receiving inadequate support when they're in need. As a customer, you expect to receive top-notch service when you reach out to a company for assistance.

This pain point can be attributed to a lack of training for sales reps and customer service representatives, an absence of clear communication channels, and an unwillingness to prioritize customer needs.

When customers encounter issues or have questions about a product or service, they want to be able to reach out to a company and receive timely and effective support.

However, poor customer support can leave customers feeling undervalued, frustrated, and dissatisfied. This negative experience can then lead to a loss of trust and loyalty, which can ultimately impact a business's bottom line.

Lack of Personal Touch or Human Connection

If you're on a customer journey, you expect a certain level of human connection or personal touch from the company you're interacting with. Unfortunately, the lack of this can be one of the most frustrating pain points for customers.

Being treated like just another number or transaction can make you feel undervalued and unimportant. This lack of personal touch can manifest in different ways, such as generic automated responses or uninterested support agents.

When you feel like the company you're interacting with doesn't care about you as an individual, it can be difficult to build trust and loyalty towards them. As a customer, you want to feel like you matter to the company and that they're invested in your success.

A lack of human connection can leave you feeling disappointed and disengaged, ultimately leading to a lost opportunity for the company to build a long-lasting relationship with you.

Complex Buying Process

It's common to feel overwhelmed when faced with a long and complicated buying journey. You may be bombarded with too much information or encounter confusing terms and procedures. All these can create pain points that can hinder you from completing the purchasing process.

As a customer, you want to feel empowered and informed when making a purchase. Providing a simplified and streamlined buying journey can make your experience more enjoyable and less stressful.

By breaking down the process into smaller steps and explaining each one clearly, you can feel confident in your purchase and avoid any confusion or frustration.

So, you've now learned about customer journey pain points and their impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. You've also gained insights into the types of pain points that customers may encounter and how to identify them.

But what's next? Well, the next step is to take action. Don't let your customers suffer through frustrating experiences that can damage your business's reputation and bottom line. Use the information you've learned to identify and address the pain points in your customers' journey.

By providing a seamless and positive experience, you'll not only retain loyal customers, but also attract new ones. So, go ahead and take that step - your customers will thank you for it!

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• March 8, 2021

Understand the types of pain B2B customers experience at every stage, and how this analysis is a critical step in journey mapping to ultimately retain customers.

In a crowded B2B market where many product offerings are commoditized, a company’s customer experience is often its only differentiator. Any negative feeling or unpleasant interaction between your customers and your company increases the likelihood that these customers may not want to continue doing business with you. This pain is the friction or obstacles customers hit during their journey with your product or service.

The best way to do this customer pain point analysis is through journey mapping. The best customer journey maps don’t just track the steps customers take at each stage. They also call out how painful those steps are for customers to take.

To improve customer experience, it’s important to conduct this pain point analysis. The first step in that process in understanding the types of pain B2B customers experience and how this pain changes loyalty to your brand.

Types of Customer Pain Points

1. Minor, One-time 

This is like stubbing your toe. A sharp sudden, unexpected pain that customers typically endure if it’s resolved quickly. A one-time shipping delay or an interaction with your team that was awkward or unusual. The pain is felt, and then it’s gone; the customer quickly moves on. When journey mapping, this is pain that may come up from detailed customer feedback – an anecdote unsupported by empirical data but fits an existing internal narrative about what needs to be resolved. Ask yourself what evidence you have that your most valuable customers have this experience.

2. Major, One-time 

Think of something sudden and extremely painful – like breaking an arm. The pain in this case is so extreme, you’re going to see a doctor quickly. In the case of customer pain, they’ll quickly seek resolution. As an example, think of the product arriving damaged or a delivery delay where the impact has a cascading effect on manufacturing schedules.

3. Minor, Chronic 

These are those aches and pains that are noticeable, but don’t have us rushing to the doctor for help. Seasonal allergies or the knee that always hurts after a long walk. It’s manageable in your mind. But over time that knee pain might get worse or overcompensating might lead to other injuries. That’s like the minor annoyance that might not cause customers to leave right away, but builds frustration overtime. A clunky ordering process or manual billing processes that creates time and attention burden. Particularly with long-term customers, it’s easy to take these things for granted. If those chronic issues stay hidden until they worsen, they’re likely to cause customer churn. You’re vulnerable when a competitor promises to fix the problem or offers a better experience.

4. Major, Chronic Customer Pain Point

These are the significant risks to your business that cause the biggest problems. Think of chronic back pain or an injury that keeps someone you know from doing what they want. It’s frustrating, depressing, and makes the person experiencing it seek a solution. Customers immediately look for relief when they feel this pain. Angry customers boiling over as they wait on hold for hours to billing issues or befuddled buyers who can’t figure out complex online ordering and discover there’s no way to talk to a real person to resolve it.

To find what the type of B2B pain your customers are experiencing, start looking at data from customer surveys. Look for data that doesn’t make sense: if customer satisfaction is high, why is there so much turnover?

To Properly Diagnose Customer Pain, Go Beyond the Survey

If possible, talk to customers directly and have them tell you about the most painful part of doing business with your company. You can start with conducting a survey, but we find the most telling way is to get a group of customers together and take them through the journey mapping process.

Surveys are great for understanding the severity of known problems—issues that customers have clearly articulated in the past. Surveys need to understand how widespread or how the issue has changed after solutions have been put in place.

If the problems are unknown, a customer journey workshop with customers results in deeper conversations and vulnerability from customers a survey can’t achieve. Asking them to work through their journey and design solutions gives you an authentic view of what your customer experience is really like.

When we conducted journey mapping with customers from a retirement benefits provider in four different cities, company officials went in expecting to hear requests for mobile phone apps and improvements to online benefits statements. Instead, customers said their real pain in making benefits decisions was navigating the fear and anxiety that comes with thinking about retirement and getting older. They assumed customers wanted technical solution when what they really needed was more resources and personal interaction with people who could help them make better decisions.

Tip: Don’t think of the journey map as a product. When collaborating with customers, have them select the most challenging pain point and work together to design an ideal solution. It will bring new insights to the problem you’re trying to solve .

Learn more about journey mapping in our Cx playbook, “ The B2B Journey Mapping Playbook .”

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The b2b journey mapping playbook.

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Understanding & Solving Customer Journey Pain Points

Your prospective customers are on a digital journey. From the moment they land on your page – you are their tour guide. Make their stay a comfortable one, and your organization will reap long-term benefits.

The story goes a little something like this: They find your website, browse your content, and sign up for a trial, convert to be a paying customer and return for years to come. It sounds so simple, yet at each turn, there’s a drop-off for potential customers to leave.

If you take the time to understand what happened at each drop-off, what the customer journey pain point was, you can increase conversions and reduce churn. Consider this your cheat sheet to understanding customer journey pain points and how to solve them.

What are Pain Points?

A “pain point” describes a moment in a customer’s experience that causes frustration, emotional discomfort, irritation or hassle.

For example, imagine a prospective student browsing the web for institutions of higher education. They may become discouraged when they land on a page that is cluttered and confusing. Obtaining the information they sought becomes time consuming, or perhaps impossible. This causes a negative emotional reaction and will most likely result in abandoning the search.

A user who subscribes to a SaaS product and finds themselves unable to navigate the platform with ease might have a similar reaction. In the digital age, “back”  and “unsubscribe” are always in comfortable reach. It is your job to make sure your users don’t want to take that route.

Customer pain points can be detrimental to a business when left unattended. However, take the time to listen to your customers and understand your product’s shortcoming and you can turn these moments to your advantage. Identifying and mapping key intersections in the customer journey will help you better understand how your customers are experiencing your product.

Map your Customer’s Journey to Identify Pain Points

The best way to find a pain point is to map each step of a customer’s path — from their very first interaction with your brand. Start creating this map by noting significant customer  milestones in sequential order.

For example, one milestone might be “sign up for free trial.” Reaching this point requires the user to first gain a basic understanding of what your product/service does and how it can help them. Not being able to access, find or decipher this information constitutes a pain point. The resulting “map” offers a visual report of how your customers are interacting with your brand online and where they are having trouble.

Instantly boost conversions by using WalkMe’s on-screen guidance. Try it today.

Customer Pain Point Examples (and how to solve them)

1. finding information that resonates with them..

As we mentioned earlier, if you want visitors to your site to retain interest and convert to paying customers — they must be able to find value on your site. One of the biggest customer journey pain points for potential customers is failing to engage right off the bat. The material is right there, but searching for it is perceived as work. If you can find a way to reduce the burden of extracting useful information, it can do wonders for this customer pain point.

We performed an experiment that tested this hypothesis, using our very own Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to take visitors on the ultimate virtual “tour” of our website. The results were stunning. We saw a 907% increase in conversion rate just by guiding the user through general information. You can read all about how we did it here .  

2. Onboarding to your trial version

Once prospective customers have found your website valuable and expressed interest in your product, they will sign up for your free trial. This is prime customer pain point location. In order to reach the finish line, you must impress them enough to leave them wanting more. Fail to do this and customers will quickly click away.

Essentially, the free trial conversion comes down to effective onboarding. The learning curve is steep and you only have a short timeframe to make your point clear. Can you teach users to navigate your product in a limited amount of time? Remember, they aren’t married to you yet — so it better be engaging. Employ WalkMe’s help to guide your customers through the most sophisticated processes and show them the hidden features. That way they will get the most out of your trial with minimal effort.

3. Maximizing the value of your product

Congratulations! You now have a paying customer. Now it’s time to think about additional customer pain points that could potentially lead to churn.

Invest in robust analytics such as WalkMe’s Insights that allows you to see where user journeys are stalled or disrupted. This gives you the ability to easily fix these issues before they rack up a bill in support and churn costs. If WalkMe was part of the entire process, your customers will know to trust the launcher for fast and reliable self-service.

Try WalkMe today for free to guide your customers step-by-step.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Three levels of pain points in customer experience.

May 16, 2021 2021-05-16

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UX professionals aim to create end-to-end customer experiences that serve the user goals as effectively as possible. To that end, we conduct user research to understand our users, their needs, and the hurdles they may encounter as they are trying to address those needs.  We usually refer to these hurdles as pain points — problems in the customer experience with a product or service. 

The phrase ‘customer experience’ is crucial in the definition of a pain point. Elsewhere we’ve defined customer experience as encompassing three levels: the interaction level, the journey level, and the relationship level. A pain point can be an issue at any of these three levels — it could be related to a particular interaction with an interface (in which case it is usually called a usability issue ), to a journey as the customer is trying to accomplish a goal, or to the longitudinal experience that a customer has with a company.

Let’s first look at a few examples of pain points at the three levels:

1. Interaction-level pain point : A user is passed from support person to support person.

We’ve all been there — we call customer support, say what we need, only to be passed to another department who “will be able to handle that request.” Not only is time wasted, but we have to explain our issue over again. Even more, there are often discrepancies in the information we are told. This type of interaction causes wasted time and confusion. 

2. Journey-level pain point: A user places an order and does not receive it for months. 

I recently purchased a Peloton bike. After ordering it, I was alerted that the bike would be delivered 3 months from my order date. While this wait time was disappointing, it was somewhat expected given the high demand for the bikes during COVID-19. However, after the 3-month wait, I received a call that the bike would be delivered while I was scheduled to speak at a NN/g UX Conference. Upon calling customer support to reschedule, I was given the choice to take the assigned appointment or reschedule my delivery appointment to another 3 months from then. The pain point in this journey was the long duration between the beginning of the journey (the bike purchase) and the completion of the journey (taking my first ride on the bike). Additional point points included the lack of upfront communication about wait times, the need to call customer support to reschedule delivery, and the lack of flexibility in appointment times.

3. Relationship-level pain point: A user pays for a service but still has to watch ads. 

I pay for a subscription to Hulu to stream TV shows. However, I still have to watch advertisements periodically. This is an anomaly compared to other streaming services (Netflix and HBO Max, for example) and does not meet my user expectations or industry norms. These advertisements are a pain point in my overall relationship with Hulu — my trust in the company is diminished due to the financial commitment I’ve made, without equal reward.  Not only that, but the ads have prompted me to waste time reading forums and contacting Hulu support to solve this problem with no success.  

Pain points are diverse; they can be broad or specific, severe or relatively insignificant, and obvious or hidden. Identifying pain points is a first step to creating solutions that address users’ real needs.  

In This Article:

Pain points vs. usability issues , the effects of pain points on users, how we identify and prioritize pain points.

In the UX world, terminology is thrown around and inflated. This article is not meant to create yet another word for traditional usability issues, but rather define a concept that is broader than that of usability issue. In the same way in which customer experience needs to be defined as broader than usability or interaction-level user experience, pain points need to be defined as all-encompassing issues that go beyond traditional usability problems. 

Remember, pain points include usability issues (those are pain points at the interaction level), but can also include other, higher- level issues in the customer journey or in the overall relationship between customers and organizations.

All pain points incur a cost to users — whether it’s time and extra steps that they need to take or actual money that they lose. Some pain points translate in increased interaction cost and cognitive load . This is often the case with usability issues. For example, complicated workflows that are error-prone can result in increased interaction cost — the user will have to take additional steps to fix the error. Or, the interface may be so complicated that the user may need to call for assistance (and thus experience an increase in interaction cost).  

Other pain points will incur a time cost — for instance, if the user needs to wait for a long time for a process to complete. 

Occasionally, there is also a financial cost to the user. For example, if an internet provider has frequent outages,  users may be forced to use their cellphones as hotspots and incur extra data costs.

Last but not least, a less tangible effect of pain points on users is loss of trust and confidence. A nonsatisfactory interaction with a company often leaves users with a sense of having been betrayed; over time, these experiences erode the overall trust in the company and may cause users to terminate their relationship with the organization. 

We can identify each type of pain point using various UX research methods, then prioritize them based on contextually appropriate criteria. 

Interaction Level 

Identify: Interaction-level pain points (i.e., usability issues), can be detected through user research such as   usability testing. Most of UX has been concerned with identifying these types of issues.

Prioritize: Traditionally, usability issues are classified according to their severity , which can be based on the issue’s impact on the user and on the popularity of the product, how often the problem occurs, and also if a user is likely to encounter it more than once.

Journey Level 

Identify:  Pain points at the journey level are found through a combination of exploratory research such as user interviews, diary and field studies and customer-journey mapping. This approach allows us to collect various data points across the entire journey and assess how successfully interactions come together to help users reach their goals.

Prioritize: Journey-level pain points often need pervasive organizational restructuring and internal process changes; they may even require a CX transformation. When prioritizing journey-level pain points, consider factors such as: 

• The  impact  of the pain point across the journey: How much of the journey is negatively affected by this pain point? Is it contained to a single phase or widespread across multiple journey phases?  
• The feasibility of solving the pain point: To what degree will your company or organization realistically be able to successfully remedy the pain point? 

Relationship Level 

Identify: Relationship-level pain points are uncovered over long periods of time. Our goal is to assess the lifetime experience that a person has with an organization and their cumulative pain points as a patron of that organization. We identify pain points at this level via benchmarking surveys (measuring brand loyalty, likelihood to recommend, and overall customer satisfaction), analytics data, or technical infrastructure that tracks and manages data of individual customers. This kind of technical infrastructure requires that customer-behavior data from across the entire journey is integrated into a single source to create a single view of the customer that includes details about individual users’ relationship with the company and their behaviors over time.

Prioritize: Relationship-level pain points are the most complex and difficult to prioritize. They require many business units collaborating to enact long-term change — internal and external to the company.  To priorize these pain points, consider:

• The  impact  of the pain point across several journeys: How many of the journeys are negatively affected by this pain point? Is it contained to a single journey or widespread across multiple journeys?  
• The churn rate caused by a pain point: How many customers abandon your company because of this pain point? 
• The brand loyalty lost as a consequence of the pain point: Are customers likely to use your product less? Will they be less likely to recommend it to others? Will they choose a competitor in the future? 

Identifying and fixing pain points, and better yet, preventing them, is core to what we do as UX professionals. They give purpose to our work and help us focus our time and resources. Pain points, more than random feature requests, should be a driver for design changes. Pain points center the discussion around the customers. 

While pain points are never ideal, it is not cost-efficient to solve all of them. Tradeoffs must sometimes be made, and UX resources should be strategically applied. Once uncovering your users’ pain points and prioritizing them, explore potential solutions and plot the work into a future roadmap . 

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Understanding customer journey touchpoints.

9 min read When you’re looking to improve sales and build your brand, it’s important to think like your customer: to understand and be mindful of them at every step of their journey with you. Here’s how to get a better understanding of customer journey touchpoints.

What is a customer journey touchpoint?

Customer touchpoints are the various moments at which a customer will directly, or indirectly, come into contact with your brand. These touchpoints make up the customer journey, and are key to influencing the customer experience .

What is a customer journey?

A customer journey describes all the customer touchpoints a potential customer has before, during, and after their purchase.

They include those aspects of the journey directly influenced by your organization as well as those influenced or controlled by third parties. This is an important distinction as, while you may not be responsible for a particular part of the journey, it still affects the experience your customer has.

Why is understanding customer touchpoints important?

It’s impossible to improve the customer experience if you don’t know the moments that they go through to make that experience. These moments – the touchpoints in which the customer interacts with the brand – define the experience that customers have.

Multiple touchpoints create a journey. If brands are to successfully influence the customer – to buy, renew or recommend to a family, friend or coworker – then the experience in the moments that matter needs to meet their needs.

By knowing and understanding how customers feel during these touchpoints, brands can focus on improving certain, and often small, aspects to the experience, rather than having to rethink the journey as a whole.

This helps brands to create a tailored approach, instead of having to adopt a one-size-fits-all mindset.

Identifying your customer touchpoints

Before  – how did they find out about you? Your customer may find out about you through adverts, billboards, social media, online reviews , or good old-fashioned word of mouth.

During – which channels and what did they do? This is your point of sale (POS). It could be your website, branch, store, or delivery. Customers may interact with sales assistants and call centers .

After – what happens after the sale? These include invoicing, queries, returns, product support, product or service lifetime, newsletters, and customer feedback surveys

Once you understand and map every touchpoint in your customer journey and collect feedback from each, you will be able to spot ‘pain points’ along the way or areas that need improving.

Examples of customer touchpoints

Customer touchpoints, as mentioned above, are the moments in which a customer will come into contact, or engage, with a brand. This might be before, during, or after completing a purchase or using a service.

These examples include direct contact – where the brand is involved in this interaction, and indirect – where it involves third parties.

Examples include :

• Advertising (inc. digital, out of home, print)
• Social media
• Welcome/thank you emails
• Physical stores
• Customer service (cashier, contact center, sales rep)
• Product reviews
• Subscription renewals
• Influencer recommendations
• Peer reviews
• Point of sale
• Customer onboarding
• Physical and digital events

How customer touchpoints work

Let’s take an example here – a customer looking to take out a mortgage. The customer touchpoints in our example below.

Your customer has seen an advert for an attractive interest rate and their brother recommended your mortgage.

Your online mortgage calculator said the repayments were affordable, so the customer has a helpful face-to-face meeting in a branch, and goes home to fill out the online application form.

They instantly receive an email with a decision in principle, telling them it has been accepted, inviting them to complete the full application.

The customer takes a few days to fill out the application and receives an ‘application received’ message.

Some of the information was missing, so a contact center agent calls them to explain what information they need to provide.

Finally, the mortgage is agreed and the customer receives a letter with a binding mortgage offer.

Once the customer has then gone through the house buying process, had their surveys carried out and confirmed their exchange date, they receive final confirmation of the mortgage including direct debit details, terms and conditions, etc. The process is now complete.

So that’s a total of 11 touchpoints – and for many home buyers there will be much more back and forth too – up to the point of purchase.

Following completion, there may be more, like annual or monthly statements or interactions with the customer if they want to increase or decrease how much they pay each month.

Turning your touchpoints into a journey

Customer touchpoints, together, form a journey. This is the process, or order, in which a customer might directly or indirectly interact with your brand. Customers take multiple different journeys with a brand, influenced in different ways.

There is not a single linear journey that every customer will take.

After all, this is why integrated marketing campaigns exist, to meet the needs of different target audiences . However, understanding these different journeys is important in order to be able to improve the experience of each journey, and of each target audience.

This is called customer journey mapping . It provides an overview of every way in which a customer might interact with your brand. It covers how they:

• Research the product/service/brand
• Use the product
• Seek customer service support
• Express their displeasure
• Recommend the product

Then, when something isn’t working or could be improved then it’s possible to look at the process visually and come up with solutions to make it better for customers.

Get started with the ultimate course in customer journey management & improvement. 

What to fix and where?

On the face of it, you might have a satisfied customer . They may give high NPS or CSAT scores as they now have their mortgage and a lovely new home.

But how many other customers started the application form, gave up filling it in because it was too complicated and went to another provider? Or received a mortgage in principle only for the full application to be rejected?

This is where journey mapping is essential. By gathering feedback at each touchpoint, you can start to understand how each one contributes to the overall experience. Was there a stage that was particularly difficult? Where did the service they received fail to match up to their expectations?

Being able to pinpoint specific pain points along the customer journey means that you can step in and make improvements at the moments that matter.

Using customer experience data and mapping it back to specific touchpoints is how you start to understand the key moments that influence customer behavior.

By analyzing this feedback side by side with your core CX metrics , you’re able to identify the improvements that will have the biggest impact on your customers and their overall experience as well as the impact on organization metrics like win rates, sales, and customer lifetime value .

An action-orientated approach to customer touchpoints

Understanding how your customers interact with your brand throughout the customer journey is vital, but it will only prove effective if you take action on the insights that you uncover. For example, if it becomes clear that the onboarding process is damaging the customer experience, then action needs to be taken to rectify that.

See how Customer Journey Mapping can Boost your Customer Experience

Related resources

Customer Journey

B2B Customer Journey 13 min read

Customer interactions 11 min read, consumer decision journey 14 min read, customer journey orchestration 12 min read, customer journey management 14 min read, customer journey stages 12 min read, buyer's journey 16 min read, request demo.

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