purpose of the customer journey

The customer journey map and why it’s important

Digital transformation has been shifting customer journeys in ways we could never have envisioned, even a few years ago. Many marketing and sales programs aren’t connecting like they used to, largely because consumers have exponentially more choices than ever before. Marketing strategies that used to work for generating leads, nurturing them through the customer journey, and building customer relationships don’t work anymore.

A fresh customer journey map can help chart a course to better communication with clients by giving you a complete picture of the process they go through on their way to making a purchase. To help you more fully understand this vital aspect of marketing, we’ll explain customer journey maps, their benefits, and how to create them, as well as explore a few examples.

In this post, you’ll discover:

What is a customer journey map?

The customer journey mapping process, creating a customer journey map, benefits of customer journey maps, customer journey map examples.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the contact points between a customer and a company throughout the entire relationship. This complete picture of the stages a customer will face helps marketers predict their behavior, anticipate their needs, and direct the company’s response.

A well-designed customer journey map is the best way for understanding your customers across their buying journey, including their emotions, pain points, and actions. It is a comprehensive plan for engaging with your clients and building a relationship that will last.

Before you begin taking your customer journey map apart and examining it for flaws, it’s important to understand the hows and whys. Examining the nuts and bolts of any processes involved can seem tedious at first, but we promise it’s worth the extra effort.

Customer journey maps collect data to understand how customers interact with your businesses at every stage. It also helps you identify drop-out points and bottlenecks. And don’t forget, customer journeys like to keep you on your toes by not always being linear.

To create a useful and effective customer journey map, you need to:

• Set a clear goal. While customer journey mapping typically falls to marketing, it's best to work cross-functionally to set a goal. Bring together data from across your organization for a complete picture of how your customers are interacting with your brand. For instance, sales can provide specific information on conversion rates, and product design might have UX studies that demonstrate what users need during onboarding.
• Create customer personas. You need to know who your customer is to fully understand their experience with your company. Create fictional characters by defining separate categories to segment your customers — whether that’s by how long they’ve been a customer, their specific pain points, or how much money they typically spend. Start with a few customer personas and build out more as needed.
• Identify target personas for a particular journey map. Conduct user research to identify the particular journey map a customer persona might embark on. You should be thorough and start from the beginning: how did they hear about your company? All the way to the end: what made them decide to become a returning customer?
• List touchpoints. When, where, and how will they interact with your business? Identify all the points of contact between you and your customers and where those contacts happen. You can then plot each of those touchpoints along the customer journey. A few examples to jumpstart your brainstorming: social media, email, website, and third-party review sites.
• Detail available and needed resources. After you take inventory of your touchpoints, it’ll be easier to see what resources you have and the ones you’ll need to improve. Perhaps you’ll need additional help through customer service tools.
• Go through the customer journey. Here’s the fun part. After carefully strategizing and researching, you can take the customer journey yourself. Follow the laid-out customer journey map for each of your customer personas and identify potential drop-off points.
• Make any necessary changes. Now that you have a much clearer picture of what is and isn’t working, you’ll be able to confidently make effective changes.

Now that you’ve done your due diligence to understand the purpose and process of customer journey maps, we can explore what goes into creating one.

Customer journey maps include:

• The buying process. You’ll want to gather data to chart the customer journey from beginning to end. Typically, those stages are awareness, consideration, and decision.
• User actions. What actions do a customer take at each stage of the buying process? Do they have to sign up? What’s the online shopping cart experience like? You’ll need to identify how customers move through the journey and how they behave at each stage.
• Emotions. Humans are emotional creatures. Prone to frustration if not fed, watered, and placed in direct sunlight, it’s best to understand their potential emotional state at each stage of their journey to help mitigate drop-off.
• Pain points. As mentioned above, slight inconveniences can deter your customer from following through on a purchase. Identify all potential pain points to help you determine why your customer may be experiencing a particular negative emotion. You can do this by simply asking customers directly or by checking in with your customer service team.
• Solutions. Look into ways to improve the buying process so customers experience fewer pain points throughout the journey.

We can’t overstate the benefits of a thorough customer journey map. The insights you gain, and then make available to the entire team, can become the foundation for a uniquely targeted marketing strategy.

Enable omnichannel marketing

A comprehensive customer journey map covers touchpoints on every channel, including email, social media, paid and organic site visits, and more, and allows you to get very strategic about omnichannel marketing. A good customer data platform will gather data from your audience on every channel, but effective omnichannel marketing is about knowing the best ways to get your brand to your audience on every channel.

For example, mapping your customer journey might reveal that most purchase cycles for a particular persona start with a web search. Representing that on your map is an insightful reminder to answer their top-of-funnel questions and needs as a key part of your SEO marketing plan .

Improve the customer experience

A customer journey map also demonstrates where there may be gaps in your marketing strategy that cause a bad customer experience. You should have a plan for meeting and engaging every persona at every stage of the journey, and a customer journey map can help identify where you might be missing your audience.

Compare your customer journey map to your content marketing plan by assigning journey stages to each piece of the content strategy. You will quickly identify which stages, if any, are underserved and create a gap in your user experience. Then look closer and see if your strategy is providing the right kind of content on the right channel at each stage of the journey.

Get a better understanding of your audience

When you’re able to see every step of your customers’ journeys, you develop an empathy for who they are, what they want, and how they make decisions. The customer journey map allows you to keep user personas and client profiles accurate and up to date.

Customer journey maps, buyer personas, and client profiles should always be reviewed and updated together, especially if your software doesn’t unify the data in real time. Refreshed customer journey maps will inform updates in personas and profiles.

Encourage a customer-centered culture

A customer journey map focuses your team’s attention on what the customer is doing and how to best prepare for and follow up on the audience’s concerns. When your team is attentive to the customer and dedicated to providing the services, products, and interaction the customer wants, the result is a truly customer-centric philosophy.

Keep the customer journey map visible and accessible so that it can inform marketing decisions. Ideas for new campaigns, messaging, tactics, and more can all be held up against the customer journey map. Ask if that idea serves the target audience appropriately at a stage of their buying cycle to help decide if it’s worth pursuing.

Optimize customer onboarding and turn personas into fans

A complete customer journey map doesn’t end with a purchase because that’s not where the relationship with the customer ends. It should also include a customer onboarding stage, brand advocate stage, and an upselling stage as needed.

Representing post-purchase stages on the customer journey map ensures that they don’t become an afterthought. There is still marketing and sales work to be done in onboarding and continuing to deepen customer relationships.

Not every customer journey map is the same. Depending on your business model, your approach may be quite different, and you should create a template that works for you.

Types of journey maps to consider include:

B2B customer journey map example

For B2B, the business-to-business or enterprise-level model, particular details must be applied to the template. For instance, during the research and awareness stage, clients may hear of your business through conferences or trade shows or through recommendations from colleagues. At the consideration stage, they may request proposals, compare different vendors, and seek demonstrations. Once they reach the purchase stage, they’ll be interacting with your company directly through negotiations, contract discussions, and finalizing the transaction. Then, at the support stage, they should be receiving regular check-ins from the account manager. Finally, at the renewal stage, you’ll renew contracts, upsell, and continue to manage the relationship.

Ecommerce customer journey map example

With ecommerce, which refers to the online shopping experience, the template skews digital. During the awareness stage, customers hear of your business through referrals, search engine results, and social media. Next, the consideration stage involves visiting your website, comparing prices, and reading product descriptions. For the purchase stage, you can expect them to add products to their shopping cart, continue to checkout, and finish the transaction. Finally, in the post-purchase stage, you’ll deal with order confirmations, shipping updates, and delivery notifications.

B2C customer journey map example

B2C, or the business-to-consumer business model, has the most touchpoints. During the awareness stage, customers discover your company through advertising, social media, and traditional marketing channels. At the consideration stage, they’ll read reviews, visit your brick-and-mortar location, and visit your website. Once they hit the purchase stage, customers browse products, add items to their cart, and complete the transaction. Lastly, the customer enters post-purchase, where they’re sent order confirmations, delivery notifications, and customer support touchpoints.

Retail customer journey map example

Retail refers to the online and offline customer journey map, now encompassing both B2C and third-party retailers. At the awareness stage, customers browse your physical and online stores, discover advertisements, and do initial research. Next, the consideration stage, they compare prices, read product descriptions, and familiarize themselves with reviews. For the purchase stage, customers buy via a checkout counter or an online shopping cart. Finally, during the post-purchase stage, customers receive order confirmations, shipment notifications, and delivery updates.

Doing more with customer journey maps

You can feel confident you’re meeting your customers’ needs and solving their problems when you create and follow a well-researched customer journey map. You’ll gain valuable insight into customers’ behaviors and experiences, allowing you to boost customer satisfaction and retention.

If you have an existing customer journey map, your first step is to identify all the gaps created by digital expansion. And if you’re starting from scratch, begin with a comprehensive assessment of your business goals to help determine the scope of your map.

When you’re ready to get started, decide what your goal should be for your next customer journey map. It could be anything from removing obstacles during the buying process to improving post-purchase customer service.

Adobe Journey Optimizer can help. Get real-time insights into customer behavior and immediately unify them with customer profiles. Modern omnichannel orchestration tools let you manage digital assets and put the power of artificial intelligence to work.

Meanwhile, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey, connecting cross-channel data to discover the context behind each customer action. And by giving everyone across the organization direct access to these insights teams can make faster, more efficient, and more effective decisions.

Ready to dig a little deeper? Take a tour of Journey Optimizer or watch a video on Journey Analytics.

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/customer-journey

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/create-customer-journey-maps

https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/adobe-customer-journey-analytics-powers-next-generation-data-flexibility

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

Updated: April 17, 2024

Published: May 04, 2023

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

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

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

Table of Contents

What is the customer journey?

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

• What’s included in a customer journey map?

The Customer Journey Mapping Process

Steps for creating a customer journey map.

• Types of Customer Journey Maps

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

• Customer Journey Design
• Customer Journey Map Examples

Free Customer Journey Map Templates

Free Customer Journey Template

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

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

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

Customer Journey vs. Buyer Journey

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

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

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

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

1. Use customer journey map templates.

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

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

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

2. Set clear objectives for the map.

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

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

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

3. Profile your personas and define their goals.

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

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

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

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

Some examples of good questions to ask are:

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

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

4. Highlight your target customer personas.

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

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

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

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

5. List out all touchpoints.

Begin by listing the touchpoints on your website.

What is a touchpoint in a customer journey map?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer Journey Map: What is Customer Journey Mapping & Why is it Important?

Learn how customer journey mapping helps businesses understand their buyers' journeys and create more personalised customer experiences.

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On the surface, customer journeys may seem simple – you offer a product and someone buys it. But look more closely and it’s easy to see that the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex.

Customers use messaging apps, email, phone calls, websites, and various other channels to communicate with businesses. All these touchpoints create increasingly complex customer journeys, making it more difficult to always ensure a great customer experience. But customer experience is more important than ever. According to 2020 global research from Salesforce,

• 80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.
• 69% of Gen X customers prioritise convenience over brand loyalty
• 91% of customers agree that a positive customer experience makes them more likely to purchase again

Customer expectations are undoubtedly undergoing a major transformation . How can brands meet these expectations and ensure every customer journey is smooth?

One excellent way to understand and optimise the customer experience is a process called customer journey mapping .

Approach your customers their way with a personalised customer journey

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Your customer’s journey – in pictures

A customer journey map is a visual picture of the customer or user journey. It helps you tell the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across social media, email, livechat, and any other channels they might use. 

Mapping the customer journey ensures that you are not missing out on the chance to interact with your customer at any stage.This process also helps business leaders gain insights into common customer pain points. With these insights, businesses can deliver more optimised and personalised customer experiences.

Creating a customer journey map

Customer journey mapping (also called user journey mapping) is the process of creating a customer journey map. Doing this helps businesses see things from the customer’s perspective and where they can improve. First, all the possible customer touchpoints are mapped out. Touchpoints include websites, social channels, or interactions with the marketing and sales teams.

User journeys are then created across these various touchpoints for each buyer persona. For example, a millennial buyer persona may typically become aware of a product on social media, research it on the mobile version of your site, and finally make a purchase on a laptop.

The customer experience at each touchpoint should be included in your customer journey map. This can include what action the customer needs to take and how your brand responds.

Why customer journey mapping matters

Customer journey mapping is important, because it is a strategic approach to better understand customer expectations. It is also crucial for optimising the customer experience. 

Customer journey mapping is just as important for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as it is for larger companies. Customer expectations are changing for all businesses, regardless of size. Customers demand an omni-channel approach to customer service, marketing, and sales.

One of the most important aspects of the customer experience is personalisation. Recent research found that 52% expect their offers to always be personalised . Customer journey mapping allows SMBs to create personalised experiences across all touchpoints – for every individual, across all channels.

Mapping the customer journey has a host of benefits such as:

• Allowing you to optimise the customer onboarding process
• Checking customer expectations against the experience they actually receive
• Understanding the differences in buyer personas as they move from prospect to conversion through the buying funnel
• Creating a logical order to your buyer journey

However, the biggest benefit of customer journey mapping is simply understanding your customers more. The better you understand their expectations, the more you can tailor the customer experience to their needs.

How does customer journey mapping enable omnichannel marketing and customer service?

Today’s consumers want a highly personalised experience and this includes your marketing and customer service efforts. This interconnected approach is called omni-channel marketing and omni-channel customer service.

In terms of marketing, customer journey mapping can target one prospect across multiple touchpoints. For example, a customer who browses a product on a website can be retargeted with a social media ad later on.

To offer the best possible customer experience, omni-channel marketing is often backed up by omni-channel customer service . This is where the customer can receive customer support across any channel, such as on social media, messenger apps , or live chat. Again, customer journey mapping can allow your customer service team to better understand the customer experience and improve their ability to resolve issues.

How can I optimise my customer journey map?

Mapping out many different customer journeys across many different buyer personas can be quite time-consuming. Once you have mapped them out, you still need a way to offer a personalised omni-channel customer experience.

If you’re serious about customer journey mapping, you need to invest in software that can help. Customer journey mapping tools are typically part of marketing automation software like Pardot . These allow you to easily create customised journeys and automate marketing actions. This takes your marketing automation efforts to the next level.

Check out a demo of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s powerful marketing automation software built on the world’s #1 CRM.

This post originally appeared in the U.K.-version of the Salesforce blog .

• What is a Customer Journey Map?

A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the end-to-end experience a customer has with a brand. It outlines touchpoints and interactions, helping businesses enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Explore Salesforce solutions for optimising your customer journey today.

• How do you create a customer journey map?

Here are the steps:

1) Identify customer touchpoints and interactions across their lifecycle. 

2) Gather data, analyse feedback, and collaborate cross-functionally. 

3) Leverage Salesforce’s tools to streamline the process and design effective journey maps for improved customer experiences.

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Customer journey

Key Takeaways:

• The customer journey describes the interactions that occur before, during, or after the customer experiences a product or service.
• The five customer journey stages include awareness, consideration, decision, adoption, and advocacy.
• Understanding the customer journey can benefit marketing, sales, customer support, and product development teams.

Table of Contents

What is a customer journey.

The customer journey, or customer lifecycle, describes the varying steps a customer goes through when interacting with a company, from the first touchpoint to the last. Discovering a product or service, researching it, purchasing, engaging with a brand on social media, using the product, and seeking support are all examples of interactions someone may have throughout a customer journey.

A customer journey differs from the customer experience, but the two concepts are closely related. The customer journey describes the interactions that occur before, during, or after the customer experiences a product or service, whereas customer experience is a customer's perception of those interactions. 

For example, if a customer finds a product or service easy to use or they have an emotional connection to it, these factors could positively impact how they feel about the company, which would be their customer experience. 

Customer journey vs. audience

A customer journey refers to the step-by-step process a customer goes through when interacting with a company. On the other hand, an audience is a specific group of people who share behavioral, demographic, or psychographic traits. 

Still, audiences and customer journeys are closely connected. Your target audience is the people most likely to purchase your products or services, so you should design your customer journey with their wants, needs, and struggles in mind. For example, if your audience values convenience, you should prioritize ease of use and accessibility throughout the customer journey. 

Your customer journey also affects your audience. If a customer has a great experience with your company, they might tell their network about it, helping you build awareness amongst your target audience. 

Customer journey vs. buyer journey

While the customer journey encompasses all customer interactions with a company, the buyer journey refers specifically to the purchasing phase of the process.

For example, the typical steps of a buyer journey are awareness, consideration, and decision. In contrast, a customer journey includes stages beyond the sale, such as retention and advocacy.

Who is involved with the customer journey?

Since the customer journey involves every interaction with a company, naturally, many teams are actively engaged in the process. 

• Marketing teams create awareness and build demand for a company's products or services 
• Sales teams convert those interested prospects into paying customers 
• Customer support teams help customers after they've made the purchase 

All these different teams must work well together to provide a positive and efficient customer experience. 

Customer journey stages

Each customer journey stage influences how consumers feel about your product or service and contributes to their overall experience with your brand. Here’s a brief breakdown of each step, from your customer’s first touchpoint to their last. 

During the awareness stage, a potential buyer becomes aware of your product or service and begins researching it. For example, a customer might see an ad for a new phone while scrolling through Instagram. 

Consideration

At this stage, potential customers evaluate their options and compare solutions. For instance, a customer considering a new phone might read reviews, compare prices, and ask for recommendations.

Finally, during the decision (or conversion) stage, the customer makes a purchase. At this point, they’ve evaluated all options and decided your product or service best fits their needs. For example, after researching different makes and models, the customer considering a new phone purchased the iPhone 15 Pro. This stage is where a lead or prospect becomes a paying customer.

Customers reach the adoption stage when they start using the product or service they purchased. This stage determines whether your customer will be satisfied with their purchase. For example, the customer who bought the new iPhone starts using it and learns how to navigate the features. 

The advocacy stage is when your customer becomes a loyal fan and recommends it to others. For example, the customer who bought the new iPhone may become an advocate if they love the phone so much that they recommend it to their friends and family. The customer may also leave positive reviews on your brand's website or social media pages. 

Because each customer journey stage contributes to the overall customer experience, it’s critical to have a positive experience at every touchpoint. Ultimately, this drives brand awareness, lead generation, conversions, and customer retention. 

How do customer journeys differ across industries?

Every industry has its type of touchpoints, customer expectations, and buying processes, which impact the customer journey. Factors such as customer behavior, mindset, and pain points also come into play.

For example, many retail customers still prefer to browse and physically touch products before purchasing. They also value speed and convenience . With these factors in mind, a retail customer journey may focus on creating a seamless and efficient shopping experience and involve touchpoints like browsing online and in-store, trying on or testing products, and talking to a sales associate.

In comparison, B2B customers often spend a lot of time researching before purchasing . They may have also needed help finding the information they need, slow customer service, confusing product or service offerings, unclear pricing or processes, and impersonal communication with other companies. As a result, a B2B customer journey will likely emphasize transparency and personalization, involving touchpoints like product demos, consultations, and negotiations.

Benefits of understanding the customer journey

Understanding the customer journey can benefit marketing, sales, customer support, and product development teams. Here are some of the critical advantages of knowing the customer journey.

Understand customer behavior

A customer journey will help you understand customer behavior and preferences to optimize your products, services, and marketing efforts. For example, monitoring customer interactions with your support team will reveal common concerns or questions. You can then use this information to develop more robust product pages or develop self-serve customer support resources that address their needs before they need to make a support request. 

Identify effective touchpoints

How do your customers prefer to engage with you? Via your website? Social channels? SMS text? You can pinpoint the highest-converting touchpoints with a customer journey and optimize them to increase sales.  

Diagnose product or service issues

A customer journey can help you see where customers are experiencing issues with your product or service and address them promptly, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, a website with a lot of traffic and a high bounce rate is a sign that you’re either attracting the wrong audience or your website messaging isn’t clear or compelling enough to hold your audience’s attention.

Support marketing efforts

Your marketing team can use customer journey insights to create targeted messaging and campaigns that resonate with customers and drive conversions. For example, if it typically takes your customers a month to move from the consideration to the decision phase, your marketing touchpoints and promotions should align with this timeline.

Increase customer engagement

The customer journey can help you anticipate customer needs and provide proactive support, increasing customer engagement, trust, and loyalty. Suppose customers who start using your product within 24 hours tend to have high retention and loyalty rates. In that case, you should develop an in-app tutorial or quick start guide to help get people up and running as quickly as possible.

Boost conversion rates

Fixing gaps in your customer journey can help you increase sales. Say you run an e-commerce store and notice a high drop-off at the consideration stage in the form of abandoned carts. To address this, you can boost conversions by simplifying your checkout process or providing multiple payment options.  

Increase return on investment (ROI)

Personalizing your paid ad campaigns and tailoring your messaging to your prospect’s customer journey stage will make your campaigns more engaging, helping you achieve more bang for your marketing buck . 

Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty

The advocacy stage of the customer journey is critical for driving customer satisfaction and loyalty, as it can help you build a community around your brand. 

For instance, you can foster brand advocacy by hosting customer appreciation events, creating special offers for brand advocates, and sending personalized thank-you messages. 

How do marketers use the customer journey?

Effective marketing is all about reaching the right people at the right time with the right messages — and the customer journey is an essential part of it. Understanding how customers interact with your business can help you tailor campaigns and messaging to their needs and preferences.

Here are a few specific ways marketers use the customer journey. 

Persona development

By studying the different stages of the customer journey, marketers can learn more about common customer pain points, motivations, and behaviors and, in turn, develop more in-depth customer personas . 

For example, after reading customer reviews, a beauty brand marketing team might discover that many of their buyers learned about the brand on TikTok while searching for natural and organic products. Based on these insights, they could create a targeted TikTok marketing campaign with messaging highlighting their products’ natural and organic ingredients. 

Content strategy

The customer journey can help marketers create content that addresses customer pain points and questions based on their journey stage. 

A marketer for a software company might create an awareness-stage blog post that educates potential customers about product benefits. They could then create a case study or demo video for consideration-stage prospects that showcases how their product solves a specific problem. This targeted content strategy helps move customers through the journey more efficiently and effectively.

Customer retention

Delighting customers at each journey stage can help boost customer retention rates. For instance, a subscription-based meal delivery service marketer might send a personalized email with recipe ideas and cooking tips to a customer in the adoption stage. This proactive approach helps improve product satisfaction with customers and their overall experience with the brand, increasing their chances of repurchasing.

Sales enablement

Marketers can support sales teams with tailored use case content that aligns with customers in the consideration stage of the journey. 

Suppose you’re a marketer for a B2B software company. In that case, you might create a sales enablement toolkit that includes case studies, whitepapers, and product demos to help sales reps support prospects in making an educated purchasing decision.

Cross-channel and omnichannel experiences

Customers today have many tools and platforms to research and engage with brands — online search, customer review sites, social media, and so on. As a result, most businesses need to invest in cross-channel (using multiple channels to reach customers) and omnichannel (creating a seamless experience across all channels) marketing to capture their audience’s attention and convert them into paying customers. 

For example, a clothing retailer may use email marketing, social media, and in-store promotions to reach customers. After reviewing the customer journey and marketing analytics, the retailer identifies that customers often click emails, browse online, and then visit the store to purchase. With this information, the store could send prospects coupons to redeem in-store or online based on products they’ve viewed online. Or, the team could trigger a post-purchase email with styling tips and care instructions for their specific item. 

Identifying pain points and gaps

Digging into the customer journey also helps marketers identify touchpoints where customers may have pain points or gaps in their experience. For example, capturing demographic and industry data at the adoption stage can inform your onboarding emails and allow you to tailor them to a customer’s specific use case. 

How to improve a customer journey

Keeping your customers happy and coming back for more is vital for any business. Here are some steps to ensure your customers have an incredible journey with your brand.

1. Start with a clear vision. Where are you now, and where do you want to be? How do you want your customers to feel while using your product or service, and what must you do to make it happen? These questions will help you spot weak points in your current customer experience.

‍ 2. Ask your prospects and customers. Want to know what your customers think about your brand? Just ask. Gathering feedback through surveys, forms, or interviews will teach you about their likes, dislikes, and expectations, which you can use to improve your customer journey and overall customer satisfaction. 

3. Blueprint the customer journey map. Create a map of your customer's interactions with your brand to visualize your customer experience from beginning to end. Depending on the size and complexity of your audience, you might consider making multiple customer journeys for different audience segments to see how they interact with your brand. More on customer journey maps below.

4. Identify areas for improvement. Check your customer journey map for areas for improvement. Are there content or messaging gaps you could fill to address customer questions in the consideration phase? Or, your map may show that your primary persona spends time on social media and you need to build more paid resources on those channels.  

A well-optimized customer journey should be seamless and frictionless, helping your buyers accomplish their goals effectively and efficiently.

What is the customer journey map?

A customer journey map visually represents a customer's interactions with a brand across various touchpoints — from the first point of contact through adoption and advocacy. A customer journey map includes:

• Customer personas
• Journey stages
• Touchpoints
• Customer actions
• Solutions or opportunities for improvement

The primary purpose of a customer journey map is to help businesses identify gaps in the journey and areas they can improve. Building a customer journey map involves gathering customer data, conducting customer interviews, and polling stakeholders on the journey process. Using that information, you can prioritize tasks that improve customer experiences, optimize customer interactions, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

What tools do I need to visualize the customer journey?

There are several tools you can use to visualize customer journeys. Here are some popular choices.

1. Customer journey mapping software. You can use tools like UXPressia, Smaply, and Touchpoint Dashboard to create a visual map of your customer's journey while interacting with the company. .

2. Website visit tracking tools. Software like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Mixpanel help you track and visualize customer journeys on your website. This tracking offers valuable insights into how customers use your website, from their initial visit to the final purchase.

3. CRM software. Customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce and HubSpot helps you monitor customer interactions across multiple channels, including social media, email, and phone. These tools provide a 360-degree view of your customers and help you tailor experiences to their preferences.

4. Survey tools. Use tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform to gather customer feedback at various customer journey stages to improve their experience and add personalization.

5. Whiteboard templates. The Business Model Canvas and the Lean UX Canvas are great tools for creating customer journey maps. The whiteboard format works well for team collaboration and visualizing the customer journey.

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Customer journey map: The key to understanding your customer

When you think of your customer, who comes to mind? 

Can you name their intentions, motivations, and pain points? Better yet, do you know why they are choosing your company among competitors? 

Defining customer needs, problems, and interactions with your company may seem overwhelming and at times, unnecessary. However, understanding every customer’s experience at each stage of the customer journey is crucial for turning business insights into long-term improvement strategies. 

Creating a customer journey map can help you and your company visualize how customers feel at all brand touchpoints so you can avoid potential issues ahead of time, increase customer retention , and discover key information to make the best decisions for your business.

In this post, we will cover: 

What is a customer journey map?

• How can customer journey maps improve customer experiences?
• Where do I start with my customer journey map?
• Why are surveys crucial for developing my customer journey map?

A customer journey map is a visual storyline of every engagement a customer has with a service, brand, or product. The customer journey mapping process puts the organization directly in the consumer’s mind to better understand the customer’s processes, needs, and perceptions.

A journey map lays out all touchpoints that your customer may have with your brand – from how they first heard of you through social media or brand advertising, to their direct interactions with your product, website, or support team – and includes all of the actions your customer takes to complete an objective across a period of time. 

A visual representation of the entire customer journey can provide valuable insights into the thoughts of your customers. This can then lay the groundwork for essential changes to your product or service, or overall customer experience, marketing, and business strategy.

Using a customer journey map to improve the customer experience

Outlining your current processes helps to visualize what the customer is experiencing in real time and may unveil common pain points that need to be addressed. 

Through this mapping process, you’ll also be able to connect with your buyer and in turn, influence your organization to prioritize the customer experience ( CX ) through shared understanding. 

Gaining a deeper understanding of your customer

“Experience maps look at a broader context of human behavior. They show how the organization fits into a person’s life.” -Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences

How does your customer feel when they can’t get in touch with customer service on an issue they’re experiencing? Or, if their package doesn’t arrive on time? 

You may be imagining a situation where those instances happened to you outside of the workplace and can remember feelings of frustration. You assume this customer may feel the same and can relate to their sentiment. 

The ability to establish empathy for your customers and identify how they’re feeling at every turn is what makes customer journey mapping, a powerful exercise.

A customer journey map – or customer experience map – expands that empathy on a broader level so you have a true understanding of their experience and can be meaningful in your organization’s customer experience improvement strategies. Utilizing this approach allows you to take your customer’s perspective and use it as an opportunity to find solutions to any problem they may face when interacting with your company.

Your map can help answer questions such as:

• Is my online interface user-friendly and matching customer expectations? Why is the user navigating away from the site so quickly? 
• How often is my customer reaching out to customer support and is the team able to address the issues in a timely manner?
• How is the customer interacting with my brand before they decide to make a purchase? How are they feeling at this stage?

Understanding the customer journey from an empathetic, bird’s eye view will give you deeper insight into customer needs at every touchpoint so you can take the steps to meet their expectations.

Creating a customer-centric company

Aligning towards the same company objectives is essential for strategic customer experience goal planning and success tracking. When you build a journey map, you have a customer-centered tool to refer to and distribute across the company. 

With your customer journey map, you can:

• Use your map to train team members on CX standards and best practices
• Present the visual diagram in company-wide meetings to map out customer-focused quarterly goals 
• Include the sales team in your map assessment to improve onboarding flows 
• Review the map with your customer service team to explore ways you can reduce obstacles throughout the customer lifecycle  

Using visual mapping to tell a story to your company not only sets a united standard for exceptional customer care, but also benefits customer experience and customer retention in the long run.

Customer journey map design

There’s no correct or incorrect way to create a customer journey map. However, before you begin, consider aligning your map with a chosen customer persona and think through which journeys and stages make the most sense for your business to measure. 

Creating a customer persona

A customer persona (or buyer persona ) is a fictional character that represents your average customer based on user and market research. Imagining this persona’s age, job function, personal goals, etc. can help you step into the customer’s shoes and thoroughly develop the customer journey story. 

Start by creating three personas at most to help in narrowing your character and design focus.

Deciding what to measure 

Next, you will need to decide what you want to measure and what goal you’re trying to achieve. 

Perhaps you want to revisit current customer success processes or take a closer look at your prospect’s experience through the selling timeline. Whatever you choose, your customer journey map is customizable and should evolve over time to meet your business needs. You may also create multiple journey maps in the future as new opportunities shift your curiosities and goals.

Organizing with touchpoints and stages 

As you begin your customer journey design, you may want to organize your map with touchpoints and stages: 

• Identify touchpoints : A touchpoint is any moment a customer interacts with your brand. From advertisements, to a thank you note they receive after a purchase, consider including these touchpoints within your map so you can collect feedback and identify patterns on how they’re feeling at each interaction. 
• Write out the stages : Every time your customer engages with your brand, there is a goal-driven action behind it. Break down the customer journey in stages (or phases) based on the customer’s need throughout their journey. 

Customer touchpoint mapping and journey mapping go hand in hand, but mapping out personas and defining specific customer touchpoints can seem time-consuming. Use Excel documents to organize your map or work from customer journey templates such as Qualtrics’ Journey Map Template to set a simple foundation for your diagram creation process. 

Using survey data to boost your customer journey map

Research is crucial to learn your customer’s motivations, roadblocks, continued pain points, and successes. If you don’t have the survey data to answer these questions, you could be building your map from assumptions, leaving room for misguided strategic planning down the line.

Consider using Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys to capture first-hand customer feedback to include within your customer journey map. Then, choose between a variety of surveying channels (Email, Web, Link, or SDK) to reach your audience wherever they are.  

Here are some question examples to include in your survey:

• [CSAT]: How satisfied were you with your onboarding experience? 
• [CSAT]: How satisfied were you with our checkout process? 
• [NPS]: How likely are you to recommend this solution to your peers? 
• [NPS]: How likely are you to recommend this store to your friends or family? 
• [CES]: The website made it easy for me to compare options
• [CES]: The support reps made it easy to get my questions answered

After you select your survey, question, and channel, specify when and how often surveys are triggered throughout the customer lifecycle. Before you know it, your customer journey map includes up-to-date feedback for you to start analyzing and acting on CX feedback regularly. 

TIP : To get greater context behind a customer experience at each journey stage, create customized follow-up questions after your initial survey question. From free response to multiple choice, craft up to 10 Additional Questions to ensure your journey map (and future state of customer experience) gets a boost with detailed verbatim feedback.

Delighted makes it easy to ask the right questions at the right time. Use Delighted’s customer experience solution to craft impactful, automated customer surveys or customize one of our survey templates .

Additional customer journey map resources

For additional resources, check out these articles on how to optimize your customer experience program , and the questions you can ask at each stage of the customer journey:

• 7 tips for an effective voice of the customer program  
• 52 popular customer satisfaction survey questions by customer journey  
• How to kickstart a customer experience program  
• Your ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

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Customer Experience

What is Customer Journey and Why Is It Important?

For many years, companies focused on customer touchpoints to gauge customer satisfaction. In recent years, companies have seen that touchpoints do not capture the whole picture.

Management consulting firm McKinsey makes the point that customer touchpoints only measure satisfaction at a single point in time. They don’t necessarily guarantee the customer is happy with their overall journey .

But what are customer touchpoints? These are specific moments when customers interact with the company, from first awareness to purchase to customer service and future sales.

For example, a customer receives excellent service during a call regarding a specific question.  After the fact, a touchpoint survey may indicate the customer was satisfied with the exchange at the moment. However, the survey may not capture the customer’s opinions about their overall experience with the company. They may be unhappy that they had to call in the first place.

Are you ready to deliver Friction-Free Customer Service? Capture your customer’s entire journey in a way a support ticket or traditional help desk never could. Discover Kayako Single View

What Is the Purpose of the Customer Journey?

As we’ve seen, satisfaction at a single touchpoint in time is not a guarantee of customer loyalty. The purpose of the customer journey is to increase customer loyalty by building trust via a series of touchpoints over time.

To strengthen loyalty, companies are now shifting their attention to customers’ overall experience with the product or service, in other words, their customer journey. Companies that optimize the customer journey see higher customer satisfaction, by a wide margin than those that focus on only touchpoints.

In fact, Salesforce reported that 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.

What Are the Stages of the Customer Journey?

The stages of the customer journey refer to the activities and mindset of the customer over time, engaging with a brand, product, or service. Stages may contain several touchpoints. Looking at the touchpoints as part of an overall journey helps create a better experience.

The basic stages are:

• Interest and awareness
• Experience after the sale with product or service

Mapping the customer’s journey through each stage can lead to valuable insights. Let’s look at some customer journey map considerations.

What Is a Customer Journey Map and Why Is It Important?

If we are leading our customers on a journey, we need a map, right?

A customer journey map is a great tool for several reasons.  It is a visual representation that helps us see the user experience from the customer’s point of view. It also helps everyone on a customer service team clearly see the context of a customer’s situation.

The customer journey map documents what the customer is experiencing at each stage of their journey. What stimulates their interest or awareness? How are they searching for more information? What will they find? What is the source of customer pain at each stage? What drives their purchase decision? What does their experience after the sale look like? How are they feeling throughout this whole process?

When teams come together to research and create a customer persona’s journey map, they uncover opportunities to enhance the customer’s experience, increase retention and extend customer lifetime value (CLV).

What Are the Steps to Map the Customer Journey?

A map is a great analogy for visualizing the customer journey. Just like planning a real trip, planning the best trip for your customers’ experience with your brand involves a step-by-step approach.

It includes the following variables that teams can change to suit any customer journey:

• A specific persona
• A series of steps to reach a goal or satisfy a need or desire
• Their experiences, thoughts, motivations, frustrations, triggers, and other feelings as they move toward the goal

The Basic Steps to Creating Customer Journey Maps

Different sources offer variations on the theme; you can customize your approach based on your industry, product, or service, and, of course, customer personas or segments.

• Step 1: Set your goal for a planning session. For a more complex customer journey, you can break the sessions down. Just like you wouldn’t drive from Texas to Alaska in a day, you can plan segments of your customer’s journey to ensure you aren’t missing any important side trips!
• Step 2: Define and refine your customer personas. Update their information if needed. Be sure to test drive the customer journey yourself.
• Step 3: Be clear about the behind-the-scenes part of their journey. Think about a successful restaurant – most of the work that makes customers happy takes place behind the scenes and before the customer even shows up. The kitchen setup, cooking staff skills, and employee training all add invisible value to the customer experience. What does your company need to do behind the scenes to prepare a seamless customer journey?
• Step 4: Optimize high-value touchpoints because they have the most influence in determining your customer’s journey and opinion.
• Step 5: Make a Plan and measure – measuring results against a plan leads to continuous improvement and motivates the team to see progress over time.
• Step 6: Review and improve – just like a real road trip, your customer journey will have unexpected twists and turns. Over time, you will learn and improve your map and the customer’s experience. 

How Does Customer Journey Mapping Improve Customer Experience?

Salesforce reports that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, and 82% expect retailers to be able to meet their expectations and be aware of their preferences.  

A customer journey map gives everyone in the company a visual tool to better understand customer needs, challenges and preferences. It also helps employees see customer expectations in the context of their entire journey, not just at single touchpoints.

When mapping your customer support journey, three of the most powerful ways companies can provide an outstanding customer journey are personalized experiences, proactive service, and frictionless interactions. 

Personalized Experiences

Your customer’s journey usually includes a variety of channels and devices, especially when communicating with customer service. To deliver a truly personalized experience, you need to be able to effortlessly communicate across many channels, including chat, email, and social media.

When customer service reps can see the whole history of the conversation over multiple channels, they can personalize their response to individual preferences. Kayako’s Single View interface serves as a compass for your customer’s journey, bringing all the different touchpoints together into a single view.

Proactive service

One of the best ways to build rapport with customers is to anticipate their needs , especially in customer service situations where customers are frustrated. We all know how tiresome it is to be on a call that starts with a chatbot asking you to type in your account number, then transfers you to a representative that asks again for the same number, and transfers you again to a supervisor, only to have to start all over again.

A helpdesk solution that provides a single view of the customer’s overall journey means the customer service agent enters the conversation fully informed, without the customer having to explain background details.

Companies may also send out proactive service alerts or more information that they know the customer will need at a certain stage, even before they are aware of the issue. A non-virtual example of this is when car dealers send out coupons for service based on the car’s age, mileage, or even the time of year.

Eliminate Friction

Friction in the customer journey is any point that produces delays or frustration for the customer. The main points of customer friction are how knowledgeable customer service agents are about their specific case, how long it takes to resolve their case, and how proactive the agent is in doing so.

Research suggests that customers are willing to pay more for less friction. Companies providing frictionless customer service can charge up to a 16% price premium on products and services. 43% of all consumers would pay more for convenience, and 42% will pay for a friendly, welcoming experience.

For example, a major friction area for customers is being on hold too long, or at all. If customers have to wait on hold for a simple request they could do themselves, 22% will not wait for more than 5 minutes, and 13% of customers have zero tolerance and will not wait on hold.

People like to help themselves. Self-service options can reduce friction and customer frustration. If a customer can quickly take care of a routine task without a service rep, it’s a win-win situation.

Just remember, companies need to test self-service options to ensure they don’t become a source of friction, too! Frustrating self-service options can be worse for the customer than being on hold. Solutions like Kayako’s Self-Service option help customers help themselves quickly and efficiently.

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Why mapping the customer journey is so important for improving CX

Today’s savvy, well-informed buyers want an excellent customer experience (CX) every single time they interact with your product and brand.

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) helps you deeply understand every aspect of your users’ experience to help you act on your insights to boost conversions, customer satisfaction and retention—and keep up with your competitors.

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Our comprehensive guide of the ten most important benefits of customer journey mapping will talk you through why mapping the buyer journey is so crucial, who should map out the customer journey, and which challenges to look out for. 

Want to understand how customers really interact with your site?

Hotjar’s PX insights tools let you experience the customer journey through their eyes. 

10 reasons you need to map your customer journey

A customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers interact with your brand, website, and product across different stages—from external touchpoints like social media, ads, and events, to internal touchpoints like website landing pages, CTAs, signup forms, and onboarding processes.  

To understand your users’ experiences, desires, and pain points, do customer journey map research by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from customer interviews, surveys, and product experience (PX) insights tools. A data-informed customer journey map helps you understand your users' jobs to be done as they engage with your site or product—and what they’re thinking and feeling as they navigate.

Let’s take a look at how customer journey mapping can benefit your company—and your customers. 

1. Walk in your customers’ shoes

Collecting real-world insights helps you dig deep into how customers interact with your brand, which makes it easier to empathize with their experience. A strong customer journey mapping process lets you challenge your assumptions—you’ll see customers don’t always act or think how you expect . 

Understanding where users struggle to complete actions, get frustrated, or drop off helps you prioritize website and product improvements to give them a smoother experience. Maybe that’s changing the position of CTAs, or adapting your navigation architecture so important information is easy to find. 

If you build a culture of putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, all stakeholders can see your brand from the customer perspective (outside-in) as well as the business perspective (inside-out) . 

A customer journey map enables you to observe sales experiences from the customer's perspective rather than the sales perspective. You can see why they chose your product or a different brand and understand their point of view more effectively.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings let you see exactly how customers navigate your site. Understand which areas they gravitate to, which they avoid, and where they get blocked or drop off.

Hotjar Session Recordings show you how users experience your page to improve low-performing touchpoints 

2. Identify unmet user needs

A strong understanding of customer needs across different interactions lets you identify gaps in the journey and offer additional touchpoints or improve existing ones, which means no more guesswork.  

Mapping out how customers navigate your site or app lets you pinpoint blockers, where they’re trying to engage but can’t, or where completing an action takes too much effort. 

Increase your awareness of customer needs to minimize frustrations by providing the right information and features at specific stages for a better user experience (UX). For example, if you see customers struggling with onboarding touchpoints, you can deliver an explanatory video or pop-up tooltip exactly when they need it. Or if they’re caught in an endless help-page loop, you can update your pages to provide the most relevant information at key points in the website journey.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Observe tools to see where user needs aren’t being met. Heatmaps show you whether key information, CTAs, and contact forms are optimally positioned so visitors can find them at the right point in their customer journey. If not, you can easily modify your layout for a better experience.

Heatmaps show you an intuitive aggregated view of which parts of your site are attracting attention and which aren’t to help you make changes that improve UX

3. Understand complex journeys across several customer touchpoints

The average customer uses multiple channels to research and interact with brands. This creates highly complex, non-linear journeys with several customer touchpoints .  

Touchpoints also vary by customer: maybe Gen Zers typically come to your website from social media and seek out video content, while Gen Xers might be more likely to arrive directly from Google searches and want written content and comparison charts before they buy.  

For B2B businesses, multiple decision-makers are also often involved—and they all have different ways of conducting research and choosing a solution.

This complexity makes creating an excellent customer experience across the board difficult. 

Customer journey mapping visualizes all these different experiences in one place—showing you exactly what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing at each stage so you can provide the right information at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channel.

4. Visualize emotions, not just actions

Buyer journeys are often emotional, but it’s hard to turn feelings into concrete data, and it’s even harder to imagine what your customers will actually feel when designing your product and site. 

A well-researched customer journey map helps you visualize what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing: the key to understanding their deepest needs and providing a better service. Gathering insights on customer emotions—and acting on them—helps customers feel you ‘get’ them and builds brand trust.

Pro tip: Hotjar Session Recordings go beyond tracking basic user behavior analytics to show you where users are ‘rage-clicking’ or u-turning because they’re not getting the response they expect when they click on site elements. You can even filter to see specific recordings of customers who told you they were dissatisfied/satisfied.

Hotjar's Ask tools— Surveys and Feedback widgets—also let you gather feedback on what customers are feeling as they take certain actions.

Hotjar’s tool stack gives you insights and user feedback ‘in the wild’

5. Create personalized experiences

Personalization is key to great customer experience, even with self-serve products, because customers value brands that understand their unique needs.

Mapping lets you dig deeper into user intent and interactions, allowing you to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints. 

For example: 

Create targeted landing pages with use cases for different customer segments

Show relevant social media ads to potential customers browsing online

Provide personalized support over multiple channels 

Improve onboarding by tailoring the process to each customer

Customize the post-onboarding experience so users can adapt your product to their exact needs, boosting adoption

6. Align cross-functional stakeholders

Mapping the customer journey works best with perspectives from UX, marketing, product, sales, customer service and success, shipping, management, and other teams. This can mean getting different roles physically in a room together, or collecting their feedback to understand how they interact with your customer. These diverse insights help speed up the process of solving customer journey issues—so users see improvements faster. 

This kind of cross-functional collaboration gets multiple teams on the same page and gives all stakeholders a holistic, coherent view of the customer experience.

Aligning different teams reduces politics and guesswork around what the customer wants and clarifies areas of ownership, accountability, and points of hand-off between teams. This makes it easier to keep tabs on where a customer is in their journey at any one time—and creates a smoother, more coherent interaction with your brand.

Behind every messed-up implementation is a fundamental mis- or non-alignment on customer journey outcomes. Mapping exposes gaps in customer-focused thinking, areas of functional misalignment, and organization change challenges…all of which traditional IT people are poor at, and IT vendors don't care about. The first step in resolution is realization. Mapping brings people together to a point where they understand the challenges.

7. Improve ROI and cost-effectiveness by creating satisfied customers

Between paid ads, marketing, and sales, customer acquisition is costly—so retaining customers is important to help boost your return on investment (ROI). 

Customer journey mapping provides you with opportunities to improve onboarding and features adoption, which increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and product advocacy.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar Heatmaps to spot technical issues that prevent users from signing up for a trial, or identify points when ecommerce customers abandon their shopping carts , which boosts conversions and revenue generation. 

8. Get a competitive edge 

Mapping tells you exactly how you can improve your customer experience to make your product stand out from the competition. CJMs also reveal product strategy opportunities to differentiate your brand by identifying new ways to provide customers with additional value.

These product experience and user insights help your brand stay relevant, adapt your product and business model as customer needs change, and gain a competitive edge in a moment where having a great product is no longer enough on its own. 

Crucially, mapping helps you identify your ‘halo’ customers—the group that, when you land them, makes everyone else sit up and take notice—as well as influencers and early adopters. That’s the first step in learning how to attract more of them.

More customer success for more customers is the most important outcome of strategy and the ROI from any investment in the business. If you can’t describe how this additional success will happen, or what will bring additional customers, I’d say your strategy is a bit light on specifics, risking its credibility and, ultimately, successful execution. Mapping at the value chain level helps bring coherency to a strategy.

9. Improve marketing and product-led growth

Many companies assume the customer journey starts when someone lands on their website or blog. In reality, it starts way before that—often with the customer searching for solutions or doing research in professional groups or community forums. 

Mapping the journey from start to finish helps you get to know your users, be a part of their conversations, and create content for all stages of the buyer journey that help convert visitors into paying customers. This process is particularly valuable for businesses with long, complex buyer journeys and high-value products, like the SaaS or B2B customer journey . 

Building a CJM also reduces guesswork and helps you validate ideas—from identifying the right channels, messaging, positioning, and content to building credibility and trust with customers.  

Use PX insights tools like Hotjar to see where users get blocked—and use the information you glean to make your product itself more intuitive, user-friendly, and well-positioned for growth. The goal here is to make your product (and the user journey within it) so good that it starts to act as its own marketing channel and practically sells itself, which is every team's dream.

10. Minimize future roadblocks

Customer journey mapping requires some time and effort up front, but it increases efficiency and saves resources later on. 

Conduct customer interviews and use PX insights tools to collect qualitative and quantitative data and minimize customer roadblocks further down the line, which ultimately helps reduce assumptions across your team and lets you anticipate challenges so you can prevent them.

Pro tip: use Hotjar's Ask tools—like Surveys and Feedback —to gather quantitative and qualitative insights relevant to specific pages on your site, as users are browsing them. This gives you voice-of-the-customer feedback as to why customers are dropping off in the buyer journey, which elements confuse them or get ignored, and what’s stopping them from continuing or converting. 

The Hotjar question bank makes it easy to create drag-and-drop surveys 

Who should map the customer journey? 

Every company, no matter its size or niche, can benefit from mapping the customer journey. Customer journey mapping is particularly useful for giving startups and SMEs a competitive edge. 

Aligning yourself more closely with your customers by getting to know and understand their needs and blockers will allow your company to give customers exactly what they want and differentiate you from the competition. 

If you don’t understand how and why your customers are choosing you, it’s going to be extremely difficult to attract and retain more customers.

What are the challenges of customer journey mapping? 

Customer journey mapping can be a quick and easy process—take a look at our guide to creating a CJM in 2.5 days —but it comes with some challenges: 

You need a strong understanding of all your customer profiles and user groups to avoid leaving anyone out. Don’t rely on assumptions: run customer interviews and collect user feedback to inform your user personas and map.

Multiple teams usually need to be involved, which isn’t always easy to organize: get everyone on the same page and share your product experience insights with Hotjar's Slack integration . To get executive teams on board, prepare a presentation outlining the benefits of customer journey mapping and how their involvement will help.   

It can be frustrating if you don’t have the resources and staffing to immediately act on the insights revealed by customer journey mapping. However, a strong customer journey map will help you see what to prioritize, and can even help you get buy-in for more resources to make changes.

It can be hard to collect enough data for a thorough CJM, but using Hotjar's PX insights tools makes customer journey map research easy by helping teams understand the online user journey on a granular level

Customer journey mapping is a continuous process 

Mapping the customer journey tells you exactly how users interact with your brand, website, and product at different touchpoints—and what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling at each stage. 

Your CJM is a living record. Refer back to it regularly during every stage of your product's design, testing, and launch to make sure you’re delivering what your customers really want and need. 

This crucial process will help you understand and improve the customer experience, creating customer delight , and boosting adoption and loyalty.

Frequently asked questions about customer journey mapping benefits

What is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping is the process of gathering user data and insights from surveys, interviews, and product experience (PX) insights tools. Teams then use their findings to create a visual representation of how customers interact with their brand, website, or product at different touchpoints. 

Why is customer journey mapping important?

Customer journey mapping is important to better understand your customers. By visualizing their actions, thoughts, emotions, and challenges, as they interact with your business, you can make changes to improve their experience. 

What are the steps in customer journey mapping?

The steps in customer journey mapping include:

Collecting customer feedback from surveys or interviews

Collecting insights from customer-facing teams 

Using product experience (PX) insights tools to understand how users interact with your website or digital product 

Creating an empathy map

Creating a customer journey map (CJM) that showcases all the above insights

Customer journey mapping (CJM) guide

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Customer Journey Mapping: What It Is, How To & Examples

If you’ve ever worked in a customer-facing role, then you’ve probably heard the line, “Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.”

Hold on, don’t click away just yet! While you’re here, take a second to think about it: Do you really know what your entire experience looks like from the customer’s side of things?

It can be easy to forget that your customers have no idea how your business is set up, how your teams are structured, or how often they talk to one another. But they do expect your marketing, sales, and customer teams to deliver one cohesive experience. Because, to them, it’s all one brand.

Just look at the numbers.

88% of customers say that the customer experience is as important as the product they’re purchasing… but 50% of businesses don’t even know the return on investment (ROI) of their customer experience.

Not enough companies are paying attention to their customer experience. But without investing in a customer experience that buyers want, it’s only a matter of time before you lose out on potential (and perhaps even current) customers. So, what can you do?

The answer? A customer journey map.

Here’s everything you need to know about building one yourself 👇

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual of the entire customer experience — every single touchpoint that a customer will have with a company, service, or product.

This means that a customer journey map goes beyond the sales cycle. It goes through every phase of the customer journey, from the first time a customer becomes aware of your brand all the way to expansion, retention, and advocacy.

With a customer journey map, you can truly see what your customer journey looks like for your customers. Since the customer journey can significantly vary based on who your buyer is, the key is to create a customer journey map for each individual persona. These visuals help your teams understand when and how your customers are hearing from you, which teams own which phases of the journey, as well as what gaps exist. Thus, a customer journey map allows you to optimize the customer journey and operationalize campaigns more effectively.

Why Is a Customer Journey Map Important?

A customer journey map is important because it contextualizes all of your customer-facing activities. No one team owns the entire buying process, so a customer journey map serves as a source of truth that allows every team to pinpoint where someone is in the customer journey.

Doing this exercise demonstrates how truly cross-functional your customer experience is. At Drift, when we brought together several cross-functional teams to rethink our experience, we found out that we were overcommunicating to one of our personas by sending two similar newsletters from different teams. Once we completed our customer journey map, we combined those newsletters.

Ultimately, the customer journey map enables you to put yourself in your customer’s shoes so you can design a more optimized and cohesive journey. After all, the less friction your experience has, the better.

Creating a Customer Journey Map: 5 Steps to Map the Customer Journey

When it comes to creating a customer journey map, the best approach is to bring together every customer-facing team and go through all your activities, one by one. While such deep, detailed work takes time, once your customer journey map is completed, it will accelerate all your day-to-day activities.

And one more thing to remember: A customer journey map isn’t one and done. You should plan on iterating and improving on your customer journey map on a recurring basis, and do a deeper dive on it every year.

Now, let’s get into the steps you need to follow to create your very own customer journey map.

1. Gather Your Stakeholders

Sometimes, this is the most challenging part of the entire project.

First, identify every team that interacts with the customer at any point in their journey. This could be people from marketing, sales, customer success, product, and more. In short, if they speak to a customer, they need to be a part of this project.

Once you know who should be involved, bring everyone together for a kickoff meeting. This is where you will decide who from each team will be responsible for their section of the map. During this meeting, you should also make sure to cover the following points:

• The why: Provide an overview of the project and talk about the purpose of your customer journey map
• The what: Go over goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• The who: Confirm which functions are involved as well as who will serve as directly responsible individuals
• The how: Review any frameworks and templates to be used
• Next steps and calls to action

2. Set Goals and KPIs

Before you start mapping, it’s important you know exactly what you are trying to improve.

There are multiple reasons why you might want to map a customer journey, and the map you create will look different depending on your goal (see the different types of maps below). Your goal may also require you to focus on a specific persona or stage of the customer journey.

Once you have that goal in mind, think about which KPIs you will measure at each stage of the customer journey. While CSAT and net promoter score (NPS) are important metrics to track for customer satisfaction, it’s your customers’ behavior that will actually tell you whether or not your efforts were successful. By pooling together your results for each buying stage, you will gain a holistic picture of your performance across the customer journey.

It’s also at this point that you should decide how frequently your teams will align on the customer journey map. Whether it’s once a month or once every quarter, how often you update your map will largely depend on the goals you’ve set out for yourself.

3. Identify the Persona to Map

Here’s where a customer journey map can start to get really, really complicated.

A good customer experience map should be as specific as possible. That means drilling down to the persona level. At Drift, we go a step further by looking at the customer journey from the seniority level, since people within each persona have a different experience. For example, a potential user will have a completely different experience from someone who is a VP or C-suite executive.

Keep in mind: You don’t have to do this all at once. But if you want to better communicate to all the different personas you sell to, then they will need their own map.

4. List Out All Communication to That Persona

Buckle up. This is the longest step.

This is where every team has to dig through all of their campaigns to list out the touchpoints that exist with that persona. Here, your communication efforts should be categorized by:

• Customer lifecycle stage
• Communication channel
• Whether it’s ongoing, automatic, or manual
• Outbound vs. inbound

You don’t need fancy software to do this. We use a simple spreadsheet to map everything out 👇

When you take a step back and look at all these communications as a whole, you can see what steps the customer takes at each stage, who they hear from, and how many times they hear from you. This creates a clear current state picture of what your customers actually experience.

5. Determine Gaps and Action Items

Once every piece of the customer journey is mapped out, evaluate gaps and opportunities.

A common gap is the onboarding process. In our survey on the B2B customer experience, 57% of respondents said their onboarding was only “somewhat effective.” In other words, after spending tons of time working a customer down the funnel, many teams basically say, “Thanks for purchasing. Good luck!”

With a complete customer journey map, you can conduct the kind of gap analysis that helps you increase your overall ROI. In these instances, you’ll want to look for:

• Duplicate efforts, especially in the same buying stage
• Where the ideal customer scenario differs from existing activities
• Opportunities for automation, especially through channels like email and chatbots
• Time lags during team handoffs
• The most effective communication channels
• Which team is best suited for a specific touchpoint at a specific stage
• How the customer feels at each phase, especially friction points

Though you may end up with a customer journey map that looks really complicated, take this as an opportunity to examine those touchpoints, simplify them, and better personalize the experience. When in doubt, simplify.

Customer Journey Map Types & Examples

The map we shared above isn’t the only kind of customer journey map you can create. There are four main types of customer journey maps: current state, future state, day in the life, and a service blueprint.

1. Current State

What do your customer-facing activities look like today? Think of this as a map of everything you’re currently doing, so you can start to identify gaps and make changes.

Here is an example of a customer journey map that charts out the steps a person has to go through to switch their mobile plan.

2. Future State

Unlike the current state map, this map reflects what you want your activities to look like in the future. Here, you want to map out everything you wish you could be doing which will be helpful for future planning.

This Starbucks experience map, created by students at the Savannah College of Art and Design, shows what a customer journey could look like with the addition of new technology in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

3. Day in the Life

Ever wondered what your customer does during a typical day? This is a map that helps you visualize how your products or services fit into your customer’s workday, as well as how they interact with other tasks, problems, or products.

This map from LEGO shows the experience a customer goes through flying to and from New York City.

4. Service Blueprint

What systems exist at your company to move the customer forward? The service blueprint is a map of your company’s internal mechanisms — all the behind-the-scenes actions you need to take (hiring, technology, policies, and so on) to make the magic happen.

This example from Bright Vessel does a great job of showing who is responsible for each piece of the customer journey.

While we’ve outlined a few customer journey maps to choose from, we recommend starting with the current state map before diving into any of the others. That way, you have a baseline that will help you understand what your current activities are, what’s working, and what to improve.

And, as a reminder, you’ll want to tweak your customer journey map over time, based on any new goals that emerge.

Use Drift to Level Up Your Customer Journeys

Once you have a customer journey map in hand and you’ve identified the friction points in your experience, all that’s left to do is to fill those gaps.

And is there a better way to do that than to give your customers what they want, exactly when they want it?

Drift Conversation Cloud empowers you to meet your customers where they are in the customer journey by using chatbots and live chat to hold real-time conversations on your website. Our platform drives conversations across the entire customer lifecycle, so you can break down the silos between your teams and provide a consistent, personalized experience to all customers.

Ready to turn your customer experience into every customer’s dream? Let’s chat.

Related stories.

What is the Customer Journey? Definition, Stages, Examples

In the world of business, understanding the customer journey is crucial for success. By knowing what customers are thinking at each stage of their journey with your business, you can create more relevant and targeted marketing messages, develop better products and services, and provide a more seamless and enjoyable customer experience. 

But what even is a customer journey? In this article, we're delving deep into the meaning of the customer journey, exploring its various stages and providing real-world examples from different industries. 

What is the customer journey? Definition

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through to purchase and use a product or service. It begins with the customer becoming aware of your brand and ends with them becoming a loyal customer or advocate.

The customer journey is not always linear, and customers may move back and forth between stages as they learn more about your product or service and make their purchase decisions.

It also depends heavily on the industry you’re working in and the product or service you’re offering, since this can impact the way the customer interacts with your brand and your product. 

Why is the customer journey important?

Understanding the customer journey is important for businesses because it can help them improve the customer experience and increase sales.

By mapping and understanding the customer journey, businesses can engage with their customers at the right time and with the right message, making interactions more relevant and meaningful.

A happy customer is more likely to make a purchase and become a loyal customer, and having a solid grasp of the customer journey and improving the customer experience helps you improve brand loyalty and grow your customer base. 

The stages of the customer journey

The customer journey is not a one-size-fits-all model; it varies from industry to industry and from one customer segment to another. However, a standard journey can be divided into five main stages:

• Awareness –  this is the stage where the customer becomes aware of your brand and its products or services. This can happen through various channels, such as advertising, social media, search engines, or word-of-mouth.
• Consideration –  once the customer is aware of your brand, they will begin to consider whether or not it is the right choice for them. This is where they will compare your products or services to those of your competitors and read reviews from other customers.
• Decision –  this is the stage where the customer makes the decision to purchase your product or service. This decision is often influenced by a variety of factors, such as price, features, benefits, and the customer's overall experience with your brand.
• Post-purchase –  once the customer has purchased your product or service, they will use it and evaluate their experience. This is where they will form an opinion about your brand and decide whether or not to purchase from you again in the future.
• Advocacy –  if the customer is happy with their experience, they may become a brand advocate and recommend your products or services to others. This can happen through word-of-mouth, social media, or online reviews.

Examples of customer journeys

Understanding the theoretical framework of the customer journey is essential, but seeing it in action through real-world examples can provide deeper insights into how different businesses and industries leverage this concept.

Example 1: E-Commerce - Amazon

• Awareness:  A customer browsing the internet encounters Amazon ads while searching for various products online.
• Consideration:  The customer clicks on Amazon's link, explores product listings, reads customer reviews, and adds products to their shopping cart.
• Decision:  After comparing prices and reading reviews, the customer decides to purchase a laptop.
• Post-Purchase:  The laptop arrives on time, and the customer enjoys a seamless experience. In case of any issues, Amazon's customer support provides quick solutions.
• Advocacy:  Pleased with their experience, the customer leaves a positive review, recommends Amazon to friends, and may join the Amazon Prime program for additional benefits.

Example 2: Hospitality - Marriott Hotels

• Awareness:  A traveller researching accommodations for an upcoming trip comes across Marriott's website or mobile app.
• Consideration:  The traveller explores different Marriott properties, reviews amenities, checks prices, and reads guest reviews.
• Decision:  Impressed with the reviews and amenities, the traveller books a room at a Marriott hotel.
• Post-Purchase:  During their stay, the traveller enjoys a comfortable room, excellent service, and various amenities. The hotel staff is attentive to any requests or concerns.
• Advocacy:  Delighted with the experience, the traveller leaves a glowing review on a travel website, shares photos on social media, and recommends Marriott to fellow travellers.

Example 3: Software - Microsoft Office 365

• Awareness: A small business owner hears about Microsoft Office 365 from a colleague.
• Consideration: The business owner researches Office 365 online, watches demo videos, and reads case studies about other businesses benefiting from the software.
• Decision: Convinced of the benefits, the business owner subscribes to Office 365 for their company.
• Post-Purchase: Microsoft offers excellent customer support and resources to help the business owner get the most out of Office 365. Any issues or questions are addressed promptly.
• Advocacy: Satisfied with the software and Microsoft's support, the business owner recommends Office 365 to other business owners, becoming an advocate for the product.

These examples illustrate how the customer journey varies across industries and customer segments. In each case, the customer's path involves distinct stages, and the brand's ability to cater to the customer's needs at each stage significantly impacts the overall experience.

Creating a customer journey map

To effectively leverage the concept of the customer journey, businesses must map it out. Mapping the customer journey involves creating visual representations of the stages and touchpoints, which can help identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where personalization is most critical. Here's how to create a customer journey map:

• Identify Customer Personas.  Start by understanding the different customer segments or personas your business serves. These are distinct groups of customers with different needs and behaviours.
• List Key Touchpoints.  Identify all the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand. This includes your website, social media, email, phone calls, physical stores, and any other relevant channels.
• Map the Stages.  Create a visual representation of the customer journey, beginning with awareness and ending with advocacy. For each stage, detail the customer's goals, emotions, and actions.
• Highlight Pain Points.  As you map out the journey, identify pain points where customers may encounter challenges or frustrations. This can include slow website loading times, unclear product information, or poor customer service.
• Optimise the Journey.  With a clear map in hand, prioritize areas for improvement. These improvements might involve website enhancements, better customer service training, or more personalized marketing campaigns.

Challenges of mapping the customer journey

While optimising the customer journey is crucial for businesses, there are common challenges that companies may encounter along the way. You need to be aware of these challenges and develop strategies to overcome them:

• Lack of Data.  Insufficient customer data can hinder personalization efforts. To address this, businesses should invest in data collection and analysis.
• Inconsistent Customer Experience.  Inconsistent experiences across different touchpoints can be frustrating for customers. Maintaining brand consistency is vital.
• Overwhelming Options.  Too many options during the consideration stage can overwhelm customers. Businesses should guide customers with relevant information and recommendations.
• Inadequate Post-Purchase Support.  Neglecting the post-purchase stage can lead to customer churn. Offering excellent post-purchase support is essential.
• Ignoring Negative Feedback . Negative feedback is an opportunity for improvement. Ignoring it can damage a brand's reputation.
• Failure to Adapt.  Customer preferences and behaviour change over time. Businesses must adapt and update their customer journey strategies accordingly.

Final thoughts

The customer journey is not just a concept; it's a strategic framework for building lasting relationships with customers. By defining the stages, mapping the journey, and leveraging technology, businesses can create exceptional experiences that lead to customer 

Remember that the customer journey is not static; it evolves as customer preferences change and technology advances. By defining the stages, mapping the journey, and leveraging technology, businesses can create exceptional experiences that lead to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

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What is the customer journey, also why is it essential? The customer journey is the process that customers go through when interacting with your business. It’s essential to understand and track the customer journey so that you can improve your interactions and boost your bottom line.

This blog post will explain “ what is the purpose of a customer journey map and its four main elements? ” and how you can optimize it for your business . Read on to learn more.

Table of Contents

What Does Customer Journey Mapping Mean?

A customer journey map displays what your customers do when they interact with your business. It shows how they move from awareness to purchase and can be used to identify areas where the customer’s experience can be improved.

Making a customer journey map can help you to:

• Understand what your customers want and need.
• Identify customer’s specific problem and areas for improvement.
• Improve the customer experience.
• Boost your bottom line.

Why Is Customer Journey Mapping Important?

Customer journey mapping is essential because it can help you to improve the customer experience. When you understand how your customers interact with your business, you can identify areas where you can make changes to improve their experience. In turn, this can result in more customers and more sales.

In addition, customer journey mapping can help you to identify areas where your business is losing customers. You can make changes to improve retention by understanding why customers are leaving.

There are several different ways to create a customer journey map. You can use online tools or create one yourself using a whiteboard or piece of paper. No matter what procedure you prefer, it is important to take the time to understand your customers and their needs.

Once you’ve created your customer journey map, you can use it to track your customers’ progress and make changes to improve their experience. Customer journey mapping is valuable for enhancing customer experience and increasing your bottom line. If you haven’t created a customer journey map for your business, now is the time to do so.

What Are All the Elements of a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visualization of your customers’ steps to complete a task, purchase a product, or reach a goal. It helps you understand what they do, why they do it, and how you can help them.

There are four main elements of a customer journey map:

• The customer’s goal.
• The customer’s steps.
• The customer’s feelings.
• The customer’s touchpoints.

The Customer’s Goal

The customer’s goal is the most vital element of a customer journey map. Why are they coming to your website or product? What are they looking to achieve? Figure out what the customer wants to accomplish, and you’ll be able to design a much better experience.

The customer’s goal tells you what they’re trying to do, and it’s the starting point for your map. It’s also the foundation for everything else you’ll include in your map. With the customer’s goal in mind, you can determine what steps they need to take to achieve it, what challenges they might face along the way, and what resources they’ll need.

The customer’s goal is the key to designing a great customer experience, so make sure you understand it before you start mapping out their journey.

The Customer’s Steps

The customer’s steps are the core of the customer journey map. Each touchpoint is a possibility for the company to make a positive impression and keep the customer moving forward.

The first step is “awareness,” where the customer becomes aware of a problem or need. The second step is “interest,” where the customer learns about possible solutions. The third step is “evaluation,” where the customer compares different options and decides which is best for them. The fourth step is the “purchase,” where the customer makes a decision and buys a product or service. The fifth and final step is “loyalty,” where the customer continues to use the product or service and may become an advocate for it.

By understanding these steps, companies can create a map that guides customers through their journey and helps them achieve their goals.

The Customer’s Feelings

The customer’s feelings are an essential part of the customer journey map. Understanding how your customers feel at each stage of their journey can help you design better experiences for them. The way a customer feels can affect their decision-making, so it’s significant to take it into account. Are they feeling confused? Anxious? Excited?

Understanding how your customers feel at every stage of their journey will help you create a better overall experience. Studies have shown that happy customers are more likely to return and recommend a product or service, so making sure your customers have a positive journey should be a top priority. Creating a customer journey map is the first step to understanding your customer’s needs and designing an experience that meets (and hopefully exceeds) their expectations.

There are four primary emotions that customers feel during their journey:

Joy: Customers feel joy when they have a positive experience with your product or service. This could be anything from finding what they’re looking for easily on your website to having a positive interaction with customer service.

Frustration: Customers feel frustrated when they have a negative experience with your product or service. This could be anything from not being able to find what they’re looking for on your website to a negative interaction with customer service.

Surprise: Customers feel surprised when they encounter something unexpected. This could be a positive surprise, like finding a hidden gem on your website, or a negative surprise, like being charged hidden fees.

Confusion: Customers feel confused when they don’t understand something. This might be anything from the way your website is laid out to the language you use in your marketing materials.

The Customer’s Touchpoints

The customer’s touchpoints are the components of the customer journey map. They are the interactions that the customer has with the company, product, or service.

The customer’s touchpoints can be divided into three categories:

Pre-purchase touchpoints: These are the customer’s interactions with the company, product, or service before they make a purchase. They can include things like online research, visiting a store, or talking to customer service.

Purchase touchpoints: These are the customer’s interactions with the company, product, or service at the time of purchase. They can include things like filling out a purchase form, entering a credit card number, or clicking the checkout button.

Post-purchase touchpoints: These are the customer’s interactions with the company, product, or service after they make a purchase. They can include things like using the product, talking to customer service, or leaving a review.

The customer’s touchpoints are the foundation of the customer journey map. By understanding the customer’s touchpoints, companies can identify areas where the customer experience can be improved.

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How to Create a Customer Journey Map

As the customer experience becomes increasingly important, businesses are turning to customer journey maps to visualize and understand the customer’s experience. A customer journey map is a graphic depiction of the steps your customer takes as they interact with your company, from awareness all the way to purchase and beyond.

Creating a customer journey map can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a few steps that you can follow to create a map that helps you understand your customers more clearly.

• Set your goals, and then start.
• Do persona research.
• Customer touchpoints must be defined.
• Find customer pain points.
• Examine the results.
• Make whatever adjustments are required.

Set Your Goals and Then Start

As businesses progressively focus on the customer experience , it is vital to understand customers’ journeys clearly. A customer journey map is a method for mapping out a user’s journey and discovering opportunities for improvement.

When setting goals for a customer journey map, it is essential to consider the business’s overall objectives. For instance, if the goal is to increase sales, then the customer journey map should focus on the steps that guide a purchase.

Alternatively, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction, then the map should highlight touchpoints where customers are likely to encounter problems. By taking a strategic approach to goal-setting, businesses can ensure that their customer journey maps are aligned with their overall objectives.

Do Persona Research

In order to create an effective customer journey map, it is important to conduct persona research. This involves understanding your target customers’ needs, motivations, and challenges. Only by understanding your customer’s journey can you hope to create a map that will be both useful and actionable.

There are a number of various ways to collect this information, including interviews, surveys, and focus groups. Once you have brought together the required data, you can begin plotting out the key touchpoints in your customer’s journey. By taking the time to comprehend your customers, you can create a journey map that will help guide them towards a successful purchase.

Customer Touchpoints Must Be Defined

A customer touchpoint is any point at which a customer comes into contact with a brand or product. This can include everything from seeing an advertisement to using the product itself. Touchpoints can be physical, such as a store display, or digital, such as a website or social media campaign.

Every customer journey is different, and each touchpoint has the potential to influence the customer’s perceptions and behavior. For this reason, it is significant for businesses to consider each touchpoint carefully and how it can be used to create a positive experience.

When designing a customer journey map, businesses should identify all the potential touchpoints and consider how they can be used to meet the customer’s needs. By doing so, businesses can ensure that each touchpoint is optimized to create a positive customer experience.

Find Customer Pain Points

Identifying customer pain points is an essential step in improving the customer journey. By bringing together all your data and looking at the big picture, you can identify potential roadblocks and areas where customers are struggling. This support you to focus your efforts on making the journey smoother and more enjoyable for your customers.

There are a number of different methods to identify customer pain points, so picking the method that best suits your needs is important. Once you’ve recognized the pain points, you can start working on solutions to make the journey smoother for your customers.

Examine the Results

A customer journey map is a precious tool for businesses as it provides insights into how customers interact with a company. By tracking the various touchpoints along the customer journey, businesses can identify areas where the customer experience can be improved. Furthermore, analyzing the results of a customer journey map can help businesses to understand the needs and expectations of their customers.

This, in turn, can lead to more targeted marketing and product development efforts. Ultimately, a customer journey map aims to help businesses create a more seamless and satisfying experience for their customers. By understanding the customer journey, companies can make the necessary improvements to achieve this goal.

Make Whatever Adjustments Are Required

In order to ensure that your customers have the best possible experience, regularly review your customer journey map and make necessary changes. Your goal is to identify any potential pain points and remove them from the journey. Also, regularly add new features and functionality based on customer feedback.

By constantly improving the customer journey, you can ensure that your customers have a positive experience from start to finish. By making an analysis of these factors, you can ensure that your customer journey map is accurate and effective.

Discover More: Webinars are an excellent opportunity for businesses to reach their target audience and gather feedback. Here’s a collection of the most engaging webinar PPT slides . You can use these presentation templates to make them more memorable.

Common Customer Journey Map Types

There are a few common types of customer journey maps that businesses use to visualize the customer experience.

Here are some of the most popular:

• Current state journey maps.
• Future state journey maps.
• Day in the life journey maps.

Current State Journey Maps

State journey mapping is an excellent way to understand what your customers feel during each stage of their interaction with you. For example, if they visit the website and leave without doing anything else, then this would be considered as dissatisfaction because no further steps have been taken towards conversion-whether intentional on behalf of you or not.

This type prevents potential issues before they arise by monitoring how long someone spends browsing through pages compared to other sites – ultimately ensuring satisfaction throughout every step along the process.

Future State Journey Maps

Future state journey maps are less common than current state ones, despite the fact that they go hand-in-hand. As the name suggests, future state journey maps focus more on how customers might act under certain adapted circumstances. It is designed to predict and create an ideal process for your customers that benefits the customers and, consequently, the business.

Nevertheless, this does not mean current state journey maps are any less important. In fact, they provide insights that may be essential when constructing the ideal customer journey. While current state journey maps tend to highlight problem areas, future state journey maps provide possible solutions to these issues. As a result, both types of journey maps are essential in providing a complete picture of the customer’s experience.

Day in the Life Journey Maps

Day-in-the-life journey maps are frequently created to boost the sales process and figure out customer requirements. They focus on the statistics of your typical buyer, establishing a clear picture of their behavior in relation to your products and services. They are also suitable for improving after-sales care and communication, which makes them a helpful tool for customer retention.

Journey maps can help you to understand your customers better and identify opportunities to improve the customer experience. When used accurately, they can be a powerful tool in helping you to boost sales and retain customers.

A customer journey map is a prominent tool that can help businesses to understand the needs and wants of their customers, as well as the different touchpoints that customers have with a company. By creating a customer journey map, businesses can improve their customer experience and build stronger relationships with their target audience.

Applying what you learn from your customer journey map can help improve your marketing strategy and increase sales. Have you established a customer journey map for your business? If not, consider doing so – it could be one of the most valuable tools in your marketing arsenal.

The 5 Phases of the Customer Journey

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In honor of military appreciation month: a veteran's journey of purpose and leadership - transitioning from military service to customer service.

EIGHTY FOUR, Pa. , May 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- May is National Military Appreciation Month and according to many companies like  84 Lumber,  the nation's largest privately held supplier of building materials, one way to honor veterans is to hire them.

Roughly 200,000 military members retire or separate from the armed services every year,  according to the Department of Labor . Veterans returning to the workforce after military service face a variety of challenges and, oftentimes, finding and vying for civilian positions can be challenging for transitioning veterans.

Translating Military Skills to Civilian Employment

The journey from military service to civilian employment is not just about finding a job – it's about discovering a new sense of purpose and leveraging past experiences to thrive once back home, said Army veteran Zac Elenchin .  

Born and raised in Coudersport, Pennsylvania , Elenchin's journey began with a passion for service and a deep-rooted military tradition in his family.

"My father was in the Army, as was one of my older brothers. My uncle, and both my grandfathers, served. I have cousins in both the Army and law enforcement, so you can say it's in my DNA," said Elenchin.

After a year of college, Elenchin enlisted in the Army in 2015 and became a combat medic. After completing basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma , Elenchin was stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky where he attended air assault school, earned the expert field medical badge, and received an air assault patch. While Elenchin was at Fort Campbell , he was deployed to Kuwait and did a nine-month rotation at Camp Arifjan in support of Operation Spartan Shield from 2017-2018. After returning from Kuwait, Elenchin was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, Texas where he completed an expeditionary combat medic course and graduated, becoming an ECM. After graduating, Elenchin was given a PCS, or permanent change of station, to Fort Bliss, Texas , where he then deployed to Afghanistan in 2019 in support of Operation Freedom's sentinel. Elenchin was based out of Bagram Airfield and traveled around northern Afghanistan during his deployment. Elenchin returned stateside in November 2019 . Months later, the COVID pandemic left the world at a standstill by March 2020 . Elenchin was his battalion's COVID response senior medic. After years of service, he made the major decision to leave the military.

"The military lifestyle can wear you down physically and mentally," he reflected. Medically retired in 2022, Elenchin faced uncertainty about his future. "I felt like I was starting over."

Elenchin emphasized the importance of having a plan and staying engaged.

"An idle mind is the devil's paradise," he quipped, advising against complacency. Importantly, he said that returning home from the military doesn't mean leaving that life behind. "Not only do those experiences shape who you are, they give us former soldiers a lot to work with. It's working through the good with the bad that is key."

"Instead of trying to shed the Army from you, embrace what it taught you and use that to your advantage," said Elenchin. "You know, you served this country, whether it was three or 30 years. Use what the Army taught you to do well in the civilian world. The worst thing you can do is just stay at home."

Enter 84 Lumber. Passing by the company's premises in Cresson, Pennsylvania , Elenchin's curiosity was piqued. He joined as a Manager Trainee (MT) in March 2022 , marking the beginning of an unexpected, yet rewarding journey. "I never thought that two years later, I'd have the keys to my own store," he admitted.

For Elenchin, the transition was both a period of adaptation and discovery.

The move from military to civilian life, Elenchin noted, revealed surprising parallels. Leadership, camaraderie, and a sense of purpose mirrored his experiences in the Army.

"The art of leadership is universal," he asserted, crediting mentors like Dave Fisher , 84 Lumber Central Area Manager, for offering support and guidance. "He would check in on me to make sure I was doing all right -- he would check on everybody. I appreciated his style of leadership."

The nurturing environment at 84 Lumber is something he thinks other companies recruiting veterans should learn from.

Companies, he added, can support veterans by fostering compassion and understanding in the workplace. Something he credits his 84 Lumber mentors with.

"I would say that a lot of people see guys that come out of the Army as, like, really just rough and tough and can handle anything – but we're human too. If companies acknowledge and support their veterans, then they can get the world back," said Elenchin. "Veterans are the hardest workers in the room. They're very coachable and they're willing to adapt. I mean, I adapted to selling wood. I've never even built anything in my life, and now I run a store."

"Veterans bring very competitive skills to civilian jobs, along with core values military service cultivates like dedication, teamwork, and pride," said Joe Jena, director of talent acquisition at 84 Lumber. "At 84 Lumber, we know that solid careers are built from the ground up and that you don't have to have a background in construction to prosper in this rapidly growing industry. We have opportunities across the company and the nation. We've found that 84 Lumber aligns very well with the values of military veterans. When someone retires from the military, they're typically used to a very structured, hard-working environment where they can grow and move up the ranks. That's why veterans tend to thrive at 84 Lumber and become some of our most successful associates," explained Jena. "On the other hand, 84 Lumber benefits from the hard-working values that our military has learned."

Re-training in a new job can provide a sense of purpose and community but it's not the only thing veterans need to move forward. Continued support outside of 84 Lumber was key to Elenchin's reintegration into civilian life.

Specifically, Elenchin said, veterans should seek out any programs offered, and for him it was at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"The V.A. has been a tremendous help. The V.A. has really impressed me with how they helped me out with all my appointments and all the care I need. They're very communicative. They're very responsive."

Career Two Years In

Reflecting on his time at 84 Lumber, Elenchin finds fulfillment in the honest work and sense of accomplishment it offers.

"Every day, it's been an honest day's work," said Elenchin. "I never have a problem falling asleep at night because I'm that exhausted."

Of course, it's not just about the paycheck or keeping busy. The supportive environment, the daily challenges, the hard work, and the opportunity for growth are all ideal for returning service members, said Elenchin.

"I would say the opportunities for vets at 84 Lumber are boundless. There's a really big population of warriors coming out of the service.  I would encourage all of them to come to 84 Lumber," said Elenchin.

Elenchin's journey from combat medic to store manager is a testament to the resilience, adaptability, and determination of military veterans. Returning home after military service is never as simple as finding a job. For soldiers, said Elenchin, a job is the thing that keeps you moving when you need it most.

"If you just sit at home, and you're trying to get by with the least amount of work, or effort possible, it's not going to go well, it's a trap that a lot of guys will fall into, including myself at first," said Elenchin. "I was just sitting at home and it's not fun, it's not fulfilling, and it doesn't pay well."

To watch Elenchin's interview about life at 84 Lumber after the military, click here .

RECRUITMENT CALL CENTER

84 Lumber's Recruitment Call Center will be open on Fridays in May from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. EST , beginning on May 3, 2024 .  Those interested in careers with 84 Lumber can call 724-228-1885. This adds a personal touch for potential associates to ask questions and learn about opportunities throughout the 84 Lumber network without having to travel to a specific location. Callers will have an opportunity to speak with 84 Lumber recruiters about career opportunities and available positions.

ABOUT 84 LUMBER Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Eighty Four, Pennsylvania , 84 Lumber Co. is the nation's largest privately held supplier of building materials, manufactured components, and industry-leading services for single and multifamily residences and commercial buildings. The company operates 320 facilities which include stores, component manufacturing plants, custom door shops, and engineered wood product centers in 33 states. 84 Lumber also offers turnkey installation services for a variety of products, including framing, insulation, siding, windows, roofing, decking, and drywall. A certified national women's business enterprise owned by Maggie Hardy , 84 Lumber was named as one of the Most Trustworthy Companies in America 2024 by Newsweek, and one of America's Largest Private Companies in 2023 by Forbes. The company also made the Inc. 5000 list of America's Fastest-Growing Companies in 2023. For more information, visit 84lumber.com  and join us at Facebook , Instagram ,  or LinkedIn .

View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/in-honor-of-military-appreciation-month-a-veterans-journey-of-purpose-and-leadership--transitioning-from-military-service-to-customer-service-302133651.html

SOURCE 84 Lumber

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